Jackin' for Beats

For all of you who know your hip hop history, you know that hip hop was born with samples. Hip hop started with DJs flipping back and forth between the "break" section of disco, funk, and soul records. Back then, hip hop was more mixing different music, and no one was calling it their own original work.

Eventually the samples became a little more subtle, and there were rhymes on top of them. DJs and producers would take small snippets of multiple songs and put them together to make their own musical arrangement. Sometimes the samples were recognizable, but often they weren't. I remember DJ Premier talking about using Jimi Hendrix in his production. He said taking a guitar riff would be too obvious, and instead, he would take an obscure drum beat and make it his own.

Of course, there is (and probably will always be) producers like Puffy (or P Diddy or Sean Combs or Diddy or whatever he is called today) who will take other people's music and use it unchanged, calling it his own.

The best producers will get you digging in the crates trying to figure out what they used to get a particular little piece of sound. There have been countless times I have been with Terence or Shawn or Jay and hear something on the radio. Our ears will perk up, and we'll be like, "Who used that?" If I can't figure it out right away, it will eat at me ... and eat at me ... and eat at me ... until I figure it out.

Anyway, I recently came across this article listing out what the author thinks are the 8 most over-used samples in hip hop. Before I read the article, I tried my guess at what I thought would be on the list. I only got James Brown's Funky President right. I thought that Apache would be on the list and am REALLY surprised that it's not.

What do you guys think?