Sample Friday
It all started a few days ago, listening to the Denz/Cyberworld/DBR podcast. A song came on and I thought it was the remix of a track by Black Moon. It’s one of my favorite hip hop tracks from the 90’s since it uses a sample from Barry White, one of my favorite soul singers. But after a few bars, instead of rap lyrics, I got some soulful baritone singing.
My first thought is that it was some sort of cheeky mashup, taking a different Barry White acapella and mixing it back over the hiphop instrumental that used a piece of his own song. But the words were too modern to be Barry.
Whoever it was, was good. Really good. I had to find out what the song was.
So the googling began. There was no tracklist to the show. I tried all sorts of combinations of snippets of the lyrics and “Barry White” and “nusoul” and “Black Moon”. And I couldn’t turn up a thing.
After about a day of obsessing, I suddenly realized I was doing a lot of my search queries based on the wrong song. If you listen to the Black Moon track (part 2 below), you’ll hear the words “Duck down” in the chorus. This got me confused and I thought the track was a different Black Moon song called “Buck’em Down”. And to confuse things, the remix of “Buck’em Down” also samples Barry White.
When I figured out that the instrumental was in fact, from “I Got Cha Opin”, it only took a little google kung-fu to ferret out that the track is actually by Miles Bonny, a trumpet player/singer/dj/hip-hopper from Kansas City. It’s called “Miles Gets Open”. A little more research and I find out it was released on a German record label on 7”. And a little more sleuthing, and that 7” is now on its way here. Yipee.
So following below is the timeline of the evolution of the sample from Barry to Miles. Enjoy.
