Just for a minute, how do you think I feel about what's been going on?

October 21, 2009 1:21 PM

Looking for rap songs with repeating sped up vocal samples from almost an entire verse or multiple verses of a song. That don't involve Kanye West.

I'm looking for raps like these, where artists use a sped up sample (a couple of sentences or different spliced in verses from a song) early and often throughout a track, with great success.

-Royce 5'9 - Give up the guns employs entire verses from The Buoys - Give up your guns.
-Black Milk - Losing Out samples big chunks of verses from The Alan Parsons Project - Let's Talk About Me.
-Tanya Morgan - Stay Tuned uses a lot of sections from Barbra Steisand & Barry Gibb - Guilty again and again.

I love the recontextualizing, and I'm looking to make a mixtape of these. It's those rap songs where you listen to it so many times and its so well done that finally you have to find and listen to the song was sampled. Then playing the original song has some kind of audio stereoscopic effect where you hear the original in real life while the new creation plays along in your head. Then eventually you make playlists with the original followed by the recreation.

No Kanye please, I am familiar with his work.

posted by cashman to media & arts (18 comments total)

He's not a rap artist, but Girl Talk does this quite a bit in his mashups, which almost always involve rap/hip hop.
posted by mkultra at 1:23 PM on October 21

Anything by Quasimoto (e.g.)
posted by mhjb at 1:43 PM on October 21

"Ils Etaient une Fois" from the Saian Supa Crew album "X Raisons."
posted by mkb at 2:13 PM on October 21

Styles P - I Get High - samples I Get High (On Your Memory) - Freda Payne
Puff Daddy - I'll Be Missing You samples The Police - Every Breath You Take
Everything Jay Z/Linkin Park, although that's a direct collaboration rather than sampling.

First few that came to my head. I'll try to think of better ones.
posted by shoebox at 2:44 PM on October 21

M.O.P.'s 'Cold as Ice' samples Foreigner's 'Cold as Ice.'

How much speeding-up do you require?

Because Big Daddy Kane's 'Ain't No Half Steppin' samples Heatwave's 'Ain't No Half Steppin,' and Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock's 'It Takes Two' samples Lyn Collins' 'Think,' and Coolio's 'Fantastic Voyage' samples Lakeside's 'Fantastic Voyage,' and, well, this is really common in hip-hop music. So much so that there are whole websites dedicated to enumerating examples of it.
posted by box at 2:52 PM on October 21

You may want to look more into the producers on the type of tracks you like than the MC. The Quasimoto (aka MF Doom, aka Viktor Vaughn) track mhjb links to is produced by Madlib. He's the producer on the entire Madvillain album (a collaboration with MF Doom once again), so you may want to check that album out (I recommend you do independent of the context of your question, it's a good album).

RZA and Just Blaze spring to mind as producers known for sampling (and speed/pitch-shifting) soul samples in their beats.
posted by axiom at 2:52 PM on October 21

Quasimoto is Madlib, not Doom.

RZA and Just Blaze are good recommendations, though. Premo does it too, but probably not as frequently.
posted by box at 2:57 PM on October 21

Jaylib (Jay Dee/Madlib)'s "the red" samples Cris Williamson's "shine on, straight arrow".
posted by subtle-t at 3:01 PM on October 21

Quasimoto is Madlib, not Doom.

Indeed, my bad. I associate Madlib and Doom mentally because of Madvillainy, and confused the aliases.
posted by axiom at 3:28 PM on October 21

Things you can do, some can't be done
posted by timshel at 3:57 PM on October 21

Akon - "Lonely" & "Don't Let Up" from his album Trouble. I'd swear that Wyclef Jean used this in one of his albums, but which one is evading me and I don't have it loaded into iTunes.
posted by fiercekitten at 4:14 PM on October 21

Lil Wayne - Apologize (remix)
posted by azarbayejani at 4:47 PM on October 21

Cam'ron's 'Oh Boy' samples Rose Royce's 'I'm Going Down.'
posted by box at 7:00 PM on October 21

Thank you all for trying. I'm looking for whole sections of a song sampled. Not one lyric or 10 words. azarbayjani has it the way I'm looking for. I put my examples up there but should have written out what each one does, instead of pontificating further.

Losing out has samples of "Just for a minute, how do you think I feel about what's been going on, let's talk about me for a minute - no matter what you do, can't get it right." also "spend the night" and "Losing out - I'm the one losing out" and another part or two.

Give up the guns has whole sections - "when I woke up this morning, I found myself alone, I turned to touch her hair and she was gone, she was gone - and there beside my pillow, were her tears from the night before, she said give up your guns and face the law. I robbed a bank in tampa, and I thought I had it made, but the hounds picked up my trail...." and so on and son on.

Tanya Morgan's song is mislinked, but anyway, (the sunset version) has whole sections like "make it a crime to be lonely or sad", "gotta be illegal", "You've got a reason for living you've battled on, with the love you're living on, you gotta be mine, we take it away", and a bunch of other different parts from "Guilty".

I've known about the-breaks.com for ages, but that doesn't help me here, Box. Sampling is common, but what I'm talking about - sampling really large portions of songs, is not nearly as common.
posted by cashman at 5:45 AM on October 22

Yeah, after I realized who posted the question, I felt a little bit silly about talking about 'Ain't No Half Steppin'' and including a link to the-breaks.

After thinking about it a little more, I think it might be more common to, rather than sampling a whole verse, just have somebody sing it, sometimes with modified lyrics (as with, say, Method Man's 'All I Need' or 'Release Yo Delf,' or many Puffy productions, or that Wyclef/Kenny Rogers joint). Just a guess, but this might relate to sample clearance or royalty issues.
posted by box at 6:24 AM on October 22

(One more example: Chronic-era Dre does a ton of this too.)
posted by box at 6:26 AM on October 22

Thanks box. I appreciate the answers.
posted by cashman at 9:49 AM on October 22

Lil Wayne - I Feel Like Dying
posted by mhuckaba at 3:05 PM on October 22