Dub Pistols alumni Jason O’Bryan teaches a course at London’s Abbey Road Institute on sampling, the gentle art of incorporating somebody else’s work (voice, sound effects, melodies, etc.) into your project.
The artist-turned-lecturer claims sampling took off with J Dilla in the early 2000s. Yet, even back then, acts took sampling to its logical extreme, where the only newness was the order of previous things. Australian group The Avalanches used around 3,500 samples on their 2000 album Since I Left You. That kind of sonic recycling would eventually become its genre: plunderphonics.
New Depths
Sampling has touched all things by now. There’s an especially strong link between sampling and movies. Halsey sampled the 2009 horror movie Jennifer’s Body on her track “Killing Boys”, for instance.
A distinctly modern pastime – online slot machines – use samples on their licensed properties to maintain authenticity. The casino slots at Paddy Power include two games dedicated to The Goonies, complete with soundbites – “Goonies never say die!” – and pictures of the original cast.
Guns N’ Roses got in early with a sample from Cool Hand Luke (1967) on “Civil War”, while industrial metal band Ministry borrowed from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) for their song “Thieves”.
The good news is that sampling’s star only seems to get brighter with age. Recent figures suggest that as many as half the songs that make the Billboard charts use the technique, although, its practitioners have found new depths to dredge for their samples.
One Vice writer’s favorite “weirdest” hip-hop samples includes Lil Wayne’s “Office Musik”, which uses exactly that – music from The Office TV show, and Charles Hamilton’s “Windows Media Player”. Hamilton’s song samples an old Windows start-up sound. It’s not quite a classic. Of course, we’ll never forget Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life”.
An Important Shift
The origin of samples moves with the years. Between 2022 and 2021, research from Tracklib revealed the number of snippets from the 2000s increased by 24%.
It’s an important shift. Tracklib claims that 2022 marked the first time the 2000s beat the 1990s for sampling dominance – and the arrival of Gen Z in the studio. Put another way, there’s been a change in what producers are growing up with.
Hiphop dropped its crown to R&B as the most sampled genre in 2022. Electronic music like dance got a boost. Overall, 17% of the songs on the Billboard Top 100 contained at least one sample, an increase of 14% from the previous year.
If we consider the album charts, the most recent data saw a push from 51% having samples to 54%. Tracklib notes that the latter figure hasn’t fallen below 50% in five years. Sadly, the previous source seems to have abandoned its research in 2022 and, with it, any collection of important sampling stats.
The BBC offered a different appraisal of sample usage in 2023, noting that 25% (one in four) of the songs in the UK’s Top 40 borrowed from another artist. This is a little higher than Tracklib’s 17% for 2022 – but still roughly consistent with previous figures.
Twenty-five years on from its heyday, the sampling spirit of J Dilla and co. lingers on.