9th Wonder Weighs In On The "Sampling Conversation" with IG Video (What Are Y'all thoughts?)

[Solomon Lurke]

Only one thing stands when it comes to music. There are no rules. You like it or you don’t. Can’t even say if it’s dope or not really, cause what’s not dope to one person may be fire to the next. Can’t use the lazy loop argument either, cause producers from all eras were just looping joints too. RZA is still one of my all time favorite producers but it blew my mind when I found out how many of those joints were straight loops as a youngin. Didn’t stop the fact that I loved it. Same way I was playing GeekaLeek in the whip which is nothing but a straight loop of Freek a Leek. It either sounds good to YOU or it doesn’t.

 

[Michael's Black Son]

Truth.

And I think older dudes like 9th are scared to call out younger generations because they don’t want to look old and bitter. But even if we go back to the 90's, dudes like Pete Rock and Large Professor were 17-18 years old making classic sh*t with legends, and they were barely out of high school. They took the time to master their craft and be creative with the art. Prince Paul was 18-19 years old working on 3 Feet High and Rising with De La.

So 9th is making it about age, out of fear. It's not about that. It's really about the lack of talent and creativity today. The laziness we see a lot now. A lot of the OG's have failed the culture by being too scared to speak on it because no one wants to be old unc complaining, but it still needs to be said.

Cats in Pete Rock and Large Professor’s era like Q Tip and Primo had VAST record collections, got inspiration but also chopped up samples with precision. Primo was damn near proficient at making something sound unrecognizable.

But right after them you had someone like Havoc who was cut from the same cloth when it came to production. He wasn’t giving you lazy ass loops. Where are the lazy Alchemist loops? These dudes took whatever time was necessary to craft a track.

9th is kinda sorta on point but off base at the same time because all of us who where kids back in the 90s/late 90s have a very finely tuned ear so we know wackness when we hear it. You can’t tell someone who lived the apex of hip hop, fashion, culture, style and vibes that they are being haters when the stuff coming out doesn’t pass the eye test.

And there’s dudes like Tyler putting in work but he is a dude who digs in the crates, plays his instruments and pushes the boundaries because his gen has all of this tech — so why not get crazy with it?

 

[Awesome Wells]

Cats in Pete Rock and Large Professor’s era like Q Tip and Primo had VAST record collections, got inspiration but also chopped up samples with precision. Primo was damn near proficient at making something sound unrecognizable.

But right after them you had someone like Havoc who was cut from the same cloth when it came to production. He wasn’t giving you lazy ass loops. Where are the lazy Alchemist loops? These dudes took whatever time was necessary to craft a track.

9th is kinda sorta on point but off base at the same time because all of us who where kids back in the 90s/late 90s have a very finely tuned ear so we know wackness when we hear it. You can’t tell someone who lived the apex of hip hop, fashion, culture, style and vibes that they are being haters when the stuff coming out doesn’t pass the eye test.

And there’s dudes like Tyler putting in work but he is a dude who digs in the crates, plays his instruments and pushes the boundaries because his gen has all of this tech — so why not get crazy with it?

Funny thing is, Alchemist said he hated the beat for "The Realest", because all he did was just loop that. And I think that's the difference between the legends and the dudes today. The push to be as creative as possible, is what drove the greats to make the music they made. Today, dudes like to brag about how they made a track in only 10 mins.

You're right about how we knew wackness when we heard it. Those same rules applied back in the day too. It's not just something that people have an issue with today. Dudes were killing Puff and the Hitmen for sampling Top 40 hits and not being creative. That was damn near 30 years ago. So it's not something about young producers today and how they sample. People just want better music. And the older dudes who've made classics should speak on that more, instead of being scared of looking like haters.

 

[Michael's Black Son]

Funny thing is, Alchemist said he hated the beat for "The Realest", because all he did was just loop that. And I think that's the difference between the legends and the dudes today. The push to be as creative as possible, is what drove the greats to make the music they made. Today, dudes like to brag about how they made a track in only 10 mins.

You're right about how we knew wackness when we heard it. Those same rules applied back in the day too. It's not just something that people have an issue with today. Dudes were killing Puff and the Hitmen for sampling Top 40 hits and not being creative. That was damn near 30 years ago. So it's not something about young producers today and how they sample. People just want better music. And the older dudes who've made classics should speak on that more, instead of being scared of looking like haters.

That whole jiggy shiny suit era/sound got clowned by the Roots, OGC and Jeri — to name a few. And the a lot of the CD buying public were in the same boat.

Dr Dre was a bit egregious with the loops but he also cranked out hits. Puff was too over the top with to and made his producers do it because we know he wasn’t behind the boards doing a damn thing. But at some point after you come off of a Mo Money, More Problems, do you really want goofy ass Mase over a Shalamar loop? Mans got away with the obvious loops on Mary’s “My Life” album because the writing was on point and you were sold a totally package that included her image — and her pain.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Yeah, it's not a particular "rule" that's the problem. The issue is just that so many current songs are lazy as fukk or uncreative no matter how they did it. And when you lack either skill or work ethic, then your only two choices are either to make something that sounds completely derivative or something that sounds like shyt.

I mean, how many times have we heard basically the same fukking "trap" beat with interchangeable lyrics rapped over it? 2500 times? 25,000 times? They don't know enough to make something interesting on their own, so they just repeat the same fukking formula over and over again.

 

[LevelUp]

Pete Rock was bytching about that shyt not too long ago.

Pete always mad about something

 

[DaveyDave]

Why should a producer today have to go back 40+ years when producers "back in the day" only went back 15-20? By the "older is better" rule, sampling Usher's U Don't Have to Call today(23 years later) would be better than sampling the Temptations' Papa Was a Rollin Stone in 1994(22 years later). If you don't like how "simple" some of these flips are, I hope you had that same energy for all those Bad Boy hits that straight up looped hit records from like 17 years prior. All that matters is if it sounds good and you did something to make it your own. Anything other than that is bullshyt gatekeeping

99.9% of Hip Hop heads at the time hated that Puff used those samples that's a bad comparison

 

[DaveyDave]

I have to listen to the whole thing later but he was talking about Largo Pro sampling Human Nature only being 12 years earlier. On the flip side Illmatic also had a beat that sampled a song from 1924 or something. I think if the kids were going back to the original sample and making their own version people would be less upset about it but because a lot of the time they are simply taking a beat from 2002 and literally just putting a different drum pattern under it that gives people the shyts, just like we didn’t like Puffy looping up 80s hits either.

 

[LevelUp]

@Art Barr
@clanarchy
@bigrodthe1 weigh in

 

[tuckgod]

Without knowing the context, my guess is people are annoyed that some of the modern producers are sampling 90's/00's songs many of which were samples themselves. Case in point:



At that point it's a sample of a sample. In biology clones of clones usually end up with a gang of mutations. And my thing is what are we really doing here? People can't even be bothered to dig through crates to find another song from back in the day,"back in the day" i.e. the 70's/80's to flip?

It’s 2024.

1996 was 28 years ago.

Crush on You was released in 1996 and sampled Rain Dance made in 1979.

18 years apart.

The problem with this lame and a lot of you nikkas is you still don’t realize just how old you are now.

Their “back in the day” is not your “back in the day.”

 

[KingsOfKings]

Subs

 

[African Peasant]

They are not sampling. The creativity, the complexity, the originality is dying.

This dude is encouraging laziness in order to be cool and edgy . Statement like this are killing the genre

 

[DaKidFromNoWhere]

Without knowing the context, my guess is people are annoyed that some of the modern producers are sampling 90's/00's songs many of which were samples themselves. Case in point:



At that point it's a sample of a sample. In biology clones of clones usually end up with a gang of mutations. And my thing is what are we really doing here? People can't even be bothered to dig through crates to find another song from back in the day,"back in the day" i.e. the 70's/80's to flip?

Digging requires something this new generation does not have...patience, they want it now.
I have speant hours digging for gems to sample, to me that's the fun part because you discover new shyt.

 

[I love Latina women]

Sampling is great, but it's about being creative with it.

 

[Piff Perkins]

He's right.

But I don’t think the argument is based in people sampling things that are too recent. I think it's more on the quality of the music being made today, and the lack of creativity. He brought up "It Ain't Hard to Tell", as an example. But Large Pro didn't just loop "Human Nature" and call it a day. His beats would be like 5-6 different samples and chops put together and arranged to sound like something completely new. He actually mastered the art of sampling.

So I don’t think the issue is sampling joints that are too new. It's about sampling and being lazy about it. Which was the same argument Showbiz and Diamond used to speak on in the 90's. Sampling is fine, but if you're not creative with how you're doing it and your sh*t is lazy and wack, it's going to show.

This is my view as well. I think it's clear these tracks aren't being sampled creatively, which isn't unique to this era (see: Bad Boy samples in the late 90s/early 00s). You can prob also compare the commercial intentions of producers now to Bad Boy era shyt (follow the trend, do it as quickly as possible, no real thought behind it, etc). So while I dislike the music I can't say this is a unique situation. We're kind of in a flat circle situation here where history is repeating.

One thing I will disagree with 9th on is that kids are not going back and learning the music due to samples. Media literacy is at an all time low right now. There are niches of young people that do research, sure. But overall I think there's a MAJOR problem with white and black Americans right now where art and culture isn't being passed down. We've got black and white kids exclusively listening to new rap/r&b or new pop/country pop. I don't sense the same cultural connections to past generations. I watched John Wayne movies with my grandparents, listened to Anita Baker with my mom and Luther Vandross with my dad. Today, Take Care (Drake) is too old for a lot of kids to fukk with. Anecdotally the oldest films my little cousins fukk with are Harry Potter and a couple Disney movies. This is bad...