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      9 Surprising Songs Sampled in Classic Hip-Hop Tracks

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      Hear where moments of Kraftwerk, Enya, Herb Alpert and more ended up in producers’ deft hands.Kraftwerk.Cyril Zingaro/Keystone, via Associated PressDear listeners,Today’s playlist is a celebration of a tried-and-true method of discovering new-to-you music: identifying the samples in hip-hop songs.In his recently released book “Hip-Hop Is History,” Questlove recalls a story from his childhood that speaks to this experience. When he couldn’t fall asleep, he’d listen to the radio in the middle of the night, when D.J.s were free to play the most outré sounds. “During those years,” he writes, “I heard a song that was bizarre synth music, completely compelling, pure hypnosis on the airwaves.” He tried to tape it but could never correctly anticipate when it would come on. Several years passed and he still hadn’t figured out what that elusive song was, but then one day he heard it — or something like it — at a roller rink birthday party. When he asked about it, the D.J. was so taken with his curiosity, he gifted him the 12-inch single. “It was ‘Planet Rock,’” he writes, referencing the legendary track by Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force. “It sampled the Kraftwerk song I had heard, which I learned was called ‘Trans-Europe Express.’ That party and that 12-inch made my day, my year and part of my life.”These days it’s much easier to track down the source of a sample, thanks to Google searches, apps like Shazam and websites like the invaluable database WhoSampled.com. But samples are still powerful portals between genres, cultures and music’s past and present. Sampling is the reason Dr. Dre is one degree of separation from the Scottish composer David McCallum, and why we know that Enya is a fan of the Fugees — and vice versa.There are so many great and unexpected samples in classic hip-hop songs that today’s playlist should be considered only a brief introduction. (Perhaps a sequel will arrive in a future Amplifier, too.) If you’re a true hip-hop head, listen to the playlist before reading the descriptions below and see how many tracks you can name from hearing the source material of their samples. And if you’re more familiar with the originals than the songs that sampled them, make sure you also check out the hip-hop classics linked in the descriptions below.We so tight that you get our styles tangled,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jerry Fuller, Writer of ‘Young Girl’ and Other Hit Songs, Dies at 85

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      He located a musical sweet spot between the romantic and the risqué for Ricky Nelson, Johnny Mathis and most famously Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.Jerry Fuller, a songwriter who helped give the sexual revolution a Top 40 soundtrack, died on July 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.The cause was complications of lung cancer, his wife, Annette Fuller, said.Mr. Fuller had a brief solo career as a crooner, starting in the late 1950s. Though he would become well known as a songwriter a decade later, his compositions retained some of the earnestness of this earlier period.Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had a hit with Mr. Fuller’s song “Young Girl” in 1968. In later decades the song would draw scorn for its upbeat treatment of an older man’s flirtation with an underage girl.Columbia RecordsHe specialized in love songs, and in songs about lustful desire that sounded like love songs. His first major hit was “Travelin’ Man,” about a globe-trotter who sings, “In every port I own the heart/Of at least one lovely girl.” Ricky Nelson took it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961.The song — which boasts of “a pretty señorita waiting for me down in old Mexico,” “my sweet fräulein down in Berlin town” and “my cute little eskimo” in Alaska — emphasizes the yearning behind each affair rather than conquest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy

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      A recent documentary has industry bigwigs telling a galling story about the file-sharing era: Everything worked out for the best.How do you disassemble a decades-long, multibillion-dollar industry in just a few short years? This was the question at the heart of this summer’s two-part Paramount+ documentary, “How Music Got Free,” which examines the greed and myopia of the music business in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when an assortment of otherwise feckless teenagers and tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to trade songs over the internet. Depending on your perspective, it is either a delightful yarn about the money-changers in the temple getting their due or a long, sad narrative about corporations and consumers banding together to deprive artists of a fair wage.Far from demonizing the innovators of online music piracy, “How Music Got Free” regards them as digital Robin Hood figures, visionaries whose passion for technology and music leveled the economic playing field. One montage contrasts the Croesus-like wealth of artists like Master P with the hardscrabble lives of residents of Shelby, N.C., as if seeking to justify piracy in one persuasive sweep of social-realist juxtaposition. Shelby is the home of Bennie Lydell Glover, a computer wizard and CD-manufacturing-plant employee who smuggled countless embargoed records onto the internet — a pipeline of prerelease material large enough to affect the sales of artists as big as Kanye West and 50 Cent. The documentary is also quick to point out the orgiastic profits reaped by record labels during the ’80s and ’90s, when CDs could be manufactured for around $2 and sold for $20, a practice that proved doubly lucrative as the new format induced consumers to buy their record collections all over again. The old expression goes: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. When the damage was done — from 2006 to 2016, CD sales dropped 84 percent — an entire generation had internalized the notion that they should never expect to pay anything for the music they cherished. The carnage could scarcely be calculated.“How Music Got Free” offers a sympathetic look back at the early days of this paradigm shift, but it’s worth remembering how music moguls and corporations actually responded to piracy at the time. Their reaction might best be described as a Keystone Kops-style combination of outrage, threats and litigation that mirrored the general stages of grief. Their indignant protests had a plaintive message: “You’re stealing from your favorite artists!” The unspoken second half of that was: “That’s our job!”This is worth remembering specifically because “How Music Got Free” was produced by Eminem, among others, and features a parade of industry bigwigs including Jimmy Iovine, 50 Cent, Timbaland and Marshall Mathers himself. Today the documentary treats the rise of online file-sharing services as first an astonishment, then a nuisance, then an existential threat and then, amazingly, a panacea. The original pirates are judged to be “pioneers” who lit the only clear path forward for the music industry. That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut. A highly weird coda praises the contemporary streaming economy as a populist breakthrough, wherein, per the documentary’s narration, “we are one step closer to an artist being able to chart their own course.” Also: “Fans can experience music in their own ways.” Also, per one Panglossian talking head: “If you like music, you have more opportunities.” Also: “The artists themselves are just having more direct relationships with the consumers,” which — what does this even mean?History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.All turned out well, and music was solved forever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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      in Music

      Mary Martin, Who Gave Many Music Stars Their Start, Dies at 85

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      Her loyalty to artists and her eye for talent made her a force in a male-dominated business. Among her accomplishments: introducing Bob Dylan to the Band.Mary Martin, a Grammy-winning talent scout, manager and record executive who helped start the careers of a long list of future legends, including Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell — and who introduced Bob Dylan to the Band — died on July 4 in Nashville. She was 85.Mikayla Lewis, a documentary filmmaker and close friend, said she died in a hospice from complications of cancer.Among the musicians whose work exists somewhere between rock, country, folk and Americana, Ms. Martin was a legend in her own right, widely respected for her fierce loyalty to artists and her keen eye for budding talent.“She saw the bumpkin in me, and she also saw something that was going to develop,” Mr. Crowell said in an interview. “She was one of those people who just said, ‘Shut up and let me show you something of the world that you may not have seen.’”Ms. Martin and Rodney Crowell in a scene from “Mary Martin: Music Maven,” a forthcoming documentary. Ms. Martin helped Mr. Crowell get his start. “She saw the bumpkin in me,” he said, “and she also saw something that was gonna develop.”Mikayla Lewis/ “Mary Martin: Music Maven”A chain smoker with a keen love of football, she seemed to know everyone, and she had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rob Stone, Master Marketer of Hip-Hop, Is Dead at 55

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      A founder of the influential music magazine The Fader, he also bridged the worlds of hip-hop and the Fortune 500 with his innovative marketing agency.Rob Stone, who as a founder of the music magazine The Fader and the brand-strategy firm Cornerstone Agency bridged the sounds of the streets and the corporate suites, giving early exposure to rappers like Kanye West and Drake while brokering lucrative endorsements at a time when corporate America was still resistant to hip-hop, died on June 24 in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 55.His longtime professional partner, Jon Cohen, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was lung cancer.Early in his music business career, first at SBK Records and later at Arista, Mr. Stone was charged with finding exposure and radio airplay for new artists. He began to establish himself as a hip-hop insider, working with performers like the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack, as well as with Sean Combs, whose label, Bad Boy Records, had entered into a joint venture with Arista.Before long Mr. Stone decided to set out on his own, and in 1996 he started Cornerstone with Steve Rifkind, the founder of the hip-hop label Loud Records. Mr. Rifkind left the agency after a year and a half and was replaced by Mr. Cohen, who had also worked at SBK and had been Mr. Stone’s best friend since middle school on Long Island.Mr. Stone and Mr. Cohen went on to create eye-opening campaigns for brands like Sprite, Converse and Johnnie Walker that leveraged their relationships with labels and with new artists, who in the early days were all too sensitive to charges of selling out.Mr. Stone, left, in an undated photo with the musician and producer Pharrell Williams and Jon Cohen, who founded The Fader with Mr. Stone.via Jon CohenWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift Bests K-Pop Band to Stay No. 1 for Seventh Week

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      Swift’s ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ held off Ateez’s ‘Golden Hour: Part.1.’ The singer-songwriter Shaboozey opened at No. 5.Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” is the No. 1 album once again, leading the Billboard 200 chart for a seventh straight time.Since it came out in April with historic numbers — breaking records for streaming and vinyl sales, and posting the biggest opening week of Swift’s career — “Tortured Poets” has been unstoppable, even as its performance has gradually cooled. In recent weeks it has held off challenges from Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa, and this week it blocks the latest from the K-pop boy band Ateez.In its latest week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 148,000 sales in the United States, including 157 million streams and 27,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. Since its release, the album has had the equivalent of about 4.3 million sales and just shy of 2.5 billion streams in the United States alone.Of the 14 albums that Swift has sent to No. 1 in her career — going back to “Fearless,” her second LP, back in 2008 — “Tortured Poets” has now had the longest consecutive stretch at the top, exceeding “Folklore,” which in 2020 spent its first six weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s flagship LP chart. (Several of Swift’s albums, including “Folklore,” have had more turns at No. 1 overall, but not in a row.)Also this week, Ateez’s “Golden Hour: Part.1,” a six-track “mini-album,” opens in second place with 131,000 equivalent sales, largely from its popularity on CD and vinyl. “Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going” by Shaboozey, a singer-songwriter who was featured on Beyoncé’s latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” opens at No. 5 with the equivalent of 50,000.Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” falls to No. 3 after spending its first two weeks in second place, and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 in its 67th week on the chart. More

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      Jean-Philippe Allard, Jazz Producer and Musicians’ Advocate, Dies at 67

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      He called himself a “professional listener,” and he tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with.Jean-Philippe Allard, a French record executive and producer who helped revive the careers of jazz greats who had been all but forgotten in the United States, and who earned a reputation for uncommonly fierce advocacy on behalf of musicians, died on May 17 in Paris. He was 67.The music producer Brian Bacchus, a close friend and frequent collaborator, said Mr. Allard died in a hospital from cancer, which had returned after a long remission.Artists ranging from Abbey Lincoln to Juliette Gréco to Kenny Barron all said they had never worked with a more musician-friendly producer.“Regarding my work, I would always consider it as co-producing with the artist,” Mr. Allard told the music journalist Willard Jenkins in an interview in March. “Some producers are musicians or arrangers, like Teo Maceo or Larry Klein; others are engineers; some are professional listeners. I would fall in this last category: listening to the artist before the session, listening to the music during the session, and listening to the mixing engineer.”He tended to develop lifelong relationships with the artists he worked with. “His ear was always open to the artist, and he was always concerned about what was best for the artist,” the vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater said in an interview. “He saw me. He embraced me. He wasn’t afraid of me. He encouraged my independence. He encouraged me speaking out.”Mr. Allard, right, in the studio with the bassist Charlie Haden, one of the many prominent jazz musicians he worked with.Cheung Ching Ming, via PolyGram/UniversalWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Luther Vandross, Pop Perfectionist, Didn’t Want You to Hear These Albums

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      Early records reveal that his sumptuous voice and longing lyrics were there from the start. Out of print since 1977, “This Close to You” will be available Friday.Nile Rodgers’s very first professional recording session, in the late 1970s, got off to a bumpy start. He wasn’t the only guitarist booked to work with Luther, a group fronted by Luther Vandross, but Rodgers was the youngest, making him an easy target when Paul Riser, the Motown veteran arranging the session, noted something he didn’t like.“He heard some things that were not correct on the chart,” Rodgers said, and “assumed it was me.” After an expletive-peppered exchange, Vandross stepped in and smoothed out the discord. From then on, Rodgers and Vandross were good friends and collaborators. (Rodgers said Vandross taught him everything he knows about “gang vocals,” the thrilling, unison shout-singing that made zesty singles like Chic’s “Everybody Dance” become enduring dance-floor staples.)The session yielded “This Close to You,” a long out-of-print album originally released in 1977, which will hit streaming services on Friday. Vandross’s short-lived group also cut the self-titled “Luther” (1976), which was rereleased in April. Both albums, made for Cotillion Records, are receiving new attention ahead of the 20th anniversary of his death.“Luther” includes the only known recording by Vandross of “Everybody Rejoice,” his composition for “The Wiz,” which returned to Broadway this year. JaQuel Knight, the choreographer of the revival, singled out the climactic number as one of the few songs that has a life of its own outside the context of the musical.“Besides ‘Ease on Down the Road,’ it’s probably the biggest song in the production,” he said, before singing some of the triumphant hook. A documentary about Vandross’s life premiered earlier this year at Sundance and will be released in 2025.But Vandross, an eight-time Grammy winner who worked his entire career to resolve the tensions between celebrity and privacy, between a desire for crossover pop success and a sublime ability for orchestrating in the background, may have preferred that the records never again saw the light of day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More