Music has been around since before the "Modern Era". It started off as a way for people to both communicate and entertain themselves in an otherwise barren and boring existence. As we; the human race evolved, so did our music. We developed instruments, as we broke off into different regions and developed our own cultures, we did the same with music. Now, in 2023, we have a plethora of music genres, and genres within those genres. But, for some reason, artists still seem to be stuck in the past.`
One of the first things people look for when deciding whether they like a song is the beat. A beat that is both unique and one people can vibe with is the foundation of a "good" song. For example, Lola Brooke's "Don't Play With It" has a very distinctive beat, as does Fivio Foreign, Queen Naija, and Coi Leray's "What's My Name". The difference between the two is that the latter samples a well known and loved Destiny's Child song, "Say My Name". While this worked for Fivio, sampling songs can be a very dangerous game for artists, especially when the song sampled is one that many people know and love.
When I listen to music from my playlist with my mom, one of her favorite things to say is that the artists I listen to are, "unoriginal" because they sample songs that she used to listen to when she was my age. She swears that no one will be able to measure up to the people who made the songs in her generation. She doesn't see sampling as paying homage but more as artists taking the easy way out by using songs that have already been made.
In this day and age, it seems like every time a new song comes on, one of the first things we hear is a piece of an older song being sampled into the beat. Artists sample songs from all genres, including musical theater (i.e.; Flo Milli's "Roaring 20s"). Some samples are less known, and some, like Khia's "My Neck, My Back", are timeless bops that artists sample all the time (i.e.; City Girls' "Fu*k Dat Ni**a", Chinese Kitty's "LIT BITCH", etc.).
In my opinion, what determines if a sampled song is going to be good, is the nature of the sample and how the artist interacts with it. If the artist(s) takes the sample, and does the song over with nothing unique of their own, of course, the song is going to be trash and it's going to flop. But, artists that take their samples and use them to elevate the song rather than relying on it to make the song good, are the ones who are most successful.
So the next time you say "I'm so tired of all these samples" or "today's artists are so unoriginal", consider that it may not be the fact that the artist is using a sample, but how the sample is used and interacted with. Below are some examples of some of the sampled tracks I mentioned.
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