The Extremes of "Sampling"

Hip Hop has always involved a bit of thievery.

I'm not meaning to be insulting, it's just a fact of the genre. Only it's called "sampling" by those in the know. Simply put, it's the taking of a few bars of someone else's music, slapping a thicker sounding drum machine track behind it, a few little extras, then letting the rhymes flow. How much of that "someone else's music" that is used depends on the person behind the mixing board. With someone like the RZA, it's relatively minor, or in the instance of P Diddy, you might as well hand him the keys, because he's taking the whole damn song.

No plagiarism is ever called because these artists, out of respect and the occasional lawsuit, make a note to list what was borrowed and from whom. And so we all go about our lives comfortable in the knowledge that anyone who dabbles in Hip Hop will be investing in varying amounts of thievery. It's a product of the genre, and something that can occasionally yield a few moments of innovation. And as long as the creators of those backing tracks are happy to let this continue, I left it alone, figuring that there's no need for me to get involved.

But I think this whole thievery business just went too far.

Earlier today, A little unnecessary MTV yielded a track by The Game, entitled "Game's Pain." And it is the biggest piece of plagiarized crap I've heard yet. And what's worse, is that is has nothing to do with the music. Frankly, I can't tell whether the backing track was someone else's song or just randomly hitting a keyboard. Doesn't matter though, the real issue here are the lyrics. Call them rhymes, poems, whatever you want, they're bad. And it's not about capacity. This is not a question of Mr. Taylor's ability to end sentences with two words that sound alike. It's about content.

Roughly half of the words used in this song, were taken from other people. Either with incessant amounts of name-dropping of people he has listened to in his meteoritic rise to fame, or simply quoting lyrics from the songs of the people who's names he just dropped. Even with the limited amounts of rap and hip hop I digest these days, I was still able to pick out entire verses of word from Ice Cube, Nas, Wu-Tang, and Puff Daddy. There's probably a lot more in there, I'm just unwilling to listen to it again.

This isn't just four or so bars of a James Brown tune. And this isn't a brief reference to C.R.E.A.M either. This is a man doing absolutely no work in a type of music that requires limited amount of work to begin with. For as much as I appreciate Hip Hop's musical contributions and actually indulge in the work of a handful of artists, they do not have the burdens most of us do. They don't need to start with a completely clean musical slate if they don't want. Being melodic or even having your singing in tune aren't factors that cause the modern rap artists to lose sleep at night either. Hell, if someone wanted to put the glorious sounds of oxen humping as a backing track, it could probably be rapped over, as long as the beat was tight.

The basic job in Hip Hop is to take some well structured, occasionally meaningful sentences, and pair them with other well structured occasionally meaningful sentences. That's it! Expensive cars, tattoos, and gyrating asses are completely optional in this line of work. So there is absolutely no excuse for being lazy. If The Game was having a rough time getting the ideas flowing that day, maybe he should have gone for a walk. Hell, maybe he should've just packed it up and said "Nothing's happening today, let's try again tomorrow." If he needs some kind of inspiration, maybe he should try reading a fucking book from time to time! You'd be surprised how many good ideas those things are jam-packed with! But dear god man, don't put out a Best Of from the works of others and then try to make money off it. It's insulting, and it's a waste of everyone's time, including yours.

Be original man. Or at the very least, get back to singing about expensive cars, overpriced jewelery, and what a decent lay you are. Maybe then things can get back to normal around here.