20 Feb 18: Song of the Day

Song: Foreplay

Artist: Jalen Santoy

Album (Year): Charlie Eastern (2016)

Notable Lyric: I love you // The Thing That Cross My Mind When I'm By Myself // I hate you

One of my favourite things to do is get lost in a rabbit-hole of music. You know, when you find an artist or a song that grabs your attention and ignites an insatiable curiosity within. This song is a perfect example of one of those situations.

Music is constantly being reinvented. An artist or producer might hear a snippet of a song and become inspired to use that sample to create their own interpretation of it. The freedom and creativity to express how they experience a song is something I admire in musicians. Despite listening to rap and hip-hop for a long time I've never appreciated the sampling that goes into songs until Chiddy Bang's Opposite of Adults when it was really brought to my attention. There are now countless moments where I've heard a song and wondered why I recognised it until I hear the sample present in another song.

I didn't know until I started writing this post that the saxophone is a sample from Stanley Turrentine's rendition of Bobby Hebb's song Sunny. That lead me to discover Marvin Gaye's interpretation of Sunny; and scrolling through the comments lead me to countless more versions of the song by Cher, Ella Fitzgerald & Tom Jones, Stevie Wonder, Frank Sinatra - including one in Portuguese!

Some people aren't massive fans of sampling - someone last week called it "lazy" when I was speaking to them about Gold Digger by Kanye West. (On that note, I think everyone needs to take a moment to appreciate how good Kanye West is at sampling songs and turning them into his own). If anything, it makes me curious to listen to the original song and then discover - and often appreciate - that song in the first place! What's even more impressive is when they alter the original sample so it's more than a copy/paste job.

In Note To Self at the end of J. Cole's album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, he even says:

"And all the mothafuckin' samples that cleared, thank you, y'all be tryin' to give a nigga a hard time on the samples, man! [...] If you made the fuckin' music, and you made the art, and you put it into the world, I should be able to use it however the fuck I want. I'm a pay you, I'm a give you a percentage, but you shouldn't be able to tell me I can't use it. [...] You was inspired by the world allow the world to be inspired by your shit, and to use your shit."

Admittedly, he probably could have put it more eloquently than that but the message gets across (I appreciate that he was freestyling). What I love about music is that there isn't a set way to do something and you could go against the grain to create something that can change the entire industry. When a melody stands the test of time and continues to appeal to generation after generation then you've done something magical!

This song is simply an example of how lost I get in music - I'm sure you've experienced that too.