Thanks! And yeah I understand where people have a problem with it I was just curious what people thought on mb. I obviously love sampling and have no problem with it, I love seeing the different ways people come up with to reuse old music and how different the results can sound.
Anyway, I covered Aurarian Dance and how this became an interest, so I'll be focusing on famous classic hip hop songs for the time being. To kick things off:
Gangstarr - You Know My Steez
Sampled
Joe Simon - Drowning in the Sea of Love
You Know My Steez has been a staple to most of my hip hop playlists for years now, and it's definitely up there near the top of my favorite hip hop songs. The lyrics are just Guru talking himself up, completely righteously so, and he's got some awesome rhymes in here - "I'm like the minister when I be lacing the wax I be bringin salvation through the way that I rap". Premier's beat is sick as well but you might not have expected it came from a pretty laid back blues/soul song. He really takes that short intro loop and turns into something new, chopping off bits and pieces of the notes here. He gets the feel of the song perfect as well, one of the things I love about his beats, keeping it pretty laid back and chill but just enough aggressiveness to fit Guru's rhymes. The Joe Simon song is definitely great as well. I do find his voice slightly offputting - he's got that deep gravelly voice but somehow it's a bit nasally at the same time, but it's just a minor annoyance. He makes a pretty good mix of blues, funk, and soul. The music in the verses is calm and chill with blues guitar riffs flitting around, plus those awesome horns. The chorus brings back in the soaring orchestral bits we all know from soul music, courtesy of MFSB. Lyrics are pretty depressing which makes an interesting sort of foil to the upbeat music of the chorus, lines like "All I do is cry, all I do is walk around and cry, but right now I'm drowning, oh I'm drowning in the sea of love". The song's been sampled by Ghostface Killah too on Not Your Average Girl ft. Shareefa which is good, and also by Da Beatminerz on Drama but to me the latter song just feels like a rip off of Gang Starr.
By the way, I have very little knowledge of what other people know about soul and jazz as I don't know many people that listen to it so sometimes I might say things that aren't well known facts and I apologize if that's the case. But MFSB, if anyone was wondering, was the house band for Philadelphia International Records and played on albums by big name groups like The Spinners, Teddy Pendergrass, and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes. MFSB defined that smooth funk sound of the label and if it sounds familiar you might recognize them from this little single that they released as a band:
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