Hello everyone and welcome to my latest creation. My name is Taylor. I am a 27-year-old from Michigan. I am currently a student studying environmental studies. I will be graduating in spring 2020 and will be the first in my family to earn a college degree! Anyways, the Original VS Sampled blog will be my 5th blog (omg). Is this too many blogs? I feel like this is too many blogs. So many topics, so little time.
Observernumber5 – born under the bridge
thuglifetilidie – a mix of love
taylorsgreenthumbprint – Garden Oasis
I got interested in music before I even knew I was into music. My mom is crazy about music. She is around 60 years old, but every era of music, she had picked her favorites (a good and funny example of this would be her loving Future, especially when the song Mask Off was released). When I was younger, she would blast music from our living room’s surround system, even on school nights. There are albums she’d play over and over. I would never have put the CD in myself and listen to the artist myself, but when a song played on the radio, I knew all the words to the songs because of her lol! My dad also listened to some real oldies, that I’d grow accustomed to hearing. We’d have shopping trips to Circuit City every time a favorite artist’s CD came out. Once I began listening to my own tunes, I was able to get anybody’s CD I wanted. This was around the age of 10. I liked R&B and loved gangsta rap. My mom is actually the reason my love for Bone Thugs started. I was raiding my bro’s CD and Tape collection and listening to his music at this point too. There was a lot of Eminem, Devin the Dude, Outkast, 50 Cent, and even Mike Jones – before he blew up.
At 11, I joined my junior high’s band, played Alto Sax for a year then switched to Clarinet the next and stuck with that until I graduated High School. Also at 11, My dad had brought me a guitar for Christmas after noticing my interest in playing instruments. Here I started listening to rock. At this point I had 2003 rock and what came before. I learned the early 2000s songs and 90s. Around this time, music downloads on LimeWire had taken off, and I could get anything I wanted. Ahh… the early 2000s, I loved all the music during this time, hence the imiss2005 blog that I terribly neglected, I’m ashamed, lol. Maybe I’ll start to build it, who knows.
Onto other things, it wasn’t until a couple years ago 2015 maybe? I began to hear a lot of songs, sampling old songs. Rap producers/ DJs did this a lot in the past, this is basically how hip hop originated. DJs would take old school records, especially funk, use the drums or entire beats and speed them up or slow them down to let rappers rap over the beat. Song sampling has become very noticeable within the last 10 years for me. During this time, I was (and still am) really heavy into playlist creation on iTunes (one of the very few things I like about Apple), and I had a brilliant idea! I need to comb through my entire music library and find out who has sampled who. I started with my favorite artists. I hear songs on the radio that are old songs that have been sampled and new songs on the radio that I recognize the samples. Samples are reused portions of original songs, or even movie audio, etc.,. A producer will take pieces, rhythms, melodies, drums, vocals, isolated sounds from original songs, and sometimes manipulate these portions to make their own creations. It’s awesome!
When I listen to music now, I always wonder, did they sample that? Then I run to the wonderful site Whosampled.com to see what they come up with. This has been my primary resource for discovering the original music of my favorite songs.
One of the first songs I realized that was sampled is Aretha Franklin’s “Call Me” that was is a featured single on her 1970s album This Girl’s in Love With You.
Franklin’s “Call me” piano melody was sampled by Slum Village in their song “Selfish,” coming from their 2004 album Detroit Deli (A Taste of Detroit). (Good old 2004, the early 2000s. Come back to me). “Selfish” features an awesome hook sang by John Legend and a phenomenal verse and production by Kanye West.
Both artists have significance to me since they both hail from and or got their start in my home town, the Dirty D. Detroit. We all should (and better) be familiar with the wonderful Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. She has influenced and contributed so much to the awesome R&B music we have today. Rest in Peace, Queen Aretha. As for Slum Village, I don’t think they are as popular as they should be, especially with this smooth song they have given us.
So, this is how it will be. I will try to do one of these posts everyday. I will post an original song, along with a few facts about it and the artists, followed by the song that has sampled the original song. I hope everyone enjoys this blog and also discovers some new music.
