This week guest presenter Johnny I’Anson and I heard some Sampled Oldies! Sampling allows artists to build new recordings from fragments of existing ones, creating audible links across decades, genres, and technologies. The examples we explored demonstrate how musical ideas migrate from television themes and funk vamps to chart pop, hip-hop and contemporary viral hits.
The Munsters & George Michael
Jack Marshall composed The Munsters’ Theme for the 1960s sitcom The Munsters, a parody of American suburban life built around a family of benign “classic” monsters. The surf-rock-influenced instrumental, played in E minor with a distinctive guitar riff and baritone sax line, earned a Grammy nomination and became one of the most recognisable TV themes of the decade.
Fall Out Boy’s Uma Thurman, from American Beauty/American Psycho (2015), samples that riff and sax figure as its core hook. The band recontextualizes the theme within a contemporary pop-rock production, while the title references Uma Thurman’s dance scene in Pulp Fiction.
Recorded in 1969 and released in 1970, James Brown’s Funky Drummer is built on an extended groove by drummer Clyde Stubblefield. His eight-bar break, briefly isolated at the end of the track, has become one of the most sampled drum patterns in recorded music, appearing on thousands of later releases across hip-hop, pop, and television themes. Stubblefield, however, did not receive songwriting credit and therefore did not benefit financially from its reuse.
George Michael’s Freedom! ’90, from Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, is perhaps the most famous song to incorporate the ‘Funky Drummer break’ as its rhythmic foundation.
Can I Kick It?
Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson for the 1972 album Transformer, uses a double-tracked bass line by Herbie Flowers and a relaxed groove to frame portraits of figures from Andy Warhol’s Factory. The track became Reed’s signature song and a staple of 1970s FM radio.
A Tribe Called Quest’s Can I Kick It?, from People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990), samples the Walk on the Wild Side bass as its primary instrumental bed. The group layers this with additional samples, including drums from Lonnie Smith’s Spinning Wheel and steel-guitar textures from Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, creating a collage characteristic of early 1990s jazz-influenced hip-hop. Royalties from the Reed sample reportedly meant the group did not profit significantly from the single.
Barry White’s It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me, released in 1977, is a disco-soul track arranged by White and written by Ekundayo Paris and Nelson Pigford. It reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of his last major U.S. hits.
In 1985, Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick released La Di Da Di, a largely a cappella performance with beatboxing and narrative rap that went on to become one of hip-hop’s most frequently referenced recordings (it has been sampled and interpolated over 1200 times!).
Robbie Williams’ Rock DJ (2000) samples from the above, and as well as from A Tribe Called Quest: it samples the instrumental groove from It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me, interpolates A Tribe Called Quest’s Can I kick it?, and quotes Slick Rick’s line “when we rock the mic, we rock the mic right” from La Di Da Di. The result combines disco, hip-hop and pop sources into a single mainstream hit.
Edwin Birdsong to Doechii
Keyboardist Edwin Birdsong released Cola Bottle Baby in 1979 as part of his experimental funk/disco work. Although it did not chart significantly at the time, its synthesizer riff later became a valuable sample source for…
Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger from Discovery (2001) is built around a chopped and processed sample of the Cola Bottle Baby keyboard motif. The duo restructures the phrase, looping and filtering it to form both a harmonic and rhythmic framework. A live version of the track later won a Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording.
Kanye West’s Stronger, from his 2007 album Graduation, samples and reinterprets Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, incorporating both the French duo’s performance and, via that route, Birdsong’s original riff. Birdsong subsequently received credit from the master use. West’s track reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and received a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance.
Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know is built from a carefully assembled collage of live performance and mid-20th-century recordings, and two samples sit at the center of the song. The most prominent is Luiz Bonfá’s 1967 track Seville, whose delicate, melancholic guitar figure becomes the song’s main repeating motif. Alongside it, Gotye incorporates material from A Child’s Introduction to the Instruments of the Orchestra (Joseph Cooper & the Sinfonia of London, 1961), borrowing a xylophone line based on the melody of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. These sampled fragments, combined with his own multitracked acoustic parts, create the sparse, pointillistic texture that underpins the duet with Kimbra.
Doechii’s Anxiety repurposes this sound world wholesale, sampling Somebody That I Used to Know itself. The familiar Bonfá-derived motif becomes the harmonic and emotional foundation for a new narrative about self-interrogation, mental strain, and the pressures of visibility.
Samples Quiz
For our quiz this week, we played clips from famous songs that sample or interpolate other songs – guess the artist and song!
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. With a new show comes a new Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs featured on the show:
And you can still listen to our old mega-playlist here.
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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