The Samples

The other day I posted an image of what I thought was the album cover of "3 Years, 5 Months, And 2 Days In The Life Of..." However, on further inspection there was some additional writing added to the cover: "Hip Hop Is Read Presents" and "The Samples." So clearly I am blind. I looked it up and came across this fantastic post on the Hip Hop Is Read blog: The Samples. The file at that site includes all of the songs that were sampled to create "3 Years" and should be a fascinating listen. A word of warning though, the download link was pretty slow this morning.....

The Prince song sampled here, "Alphabet Street," will have to settle for second on my favorite Prince sample list though- a few years ago I was listening to a Prince album and heard him screaming, I couldn't believe that I recognized the sound from House of Pain's "Jump Around." I thought it was some kind of whistle all of those years: House of Pain sample. Although now it's actually unclear if it was a saxophone sample or Prince- hard to tell, which actually makes it even more mind blowing. Pretty bizarre! I won't give away what exactly was sampled for "Tennessee" from "Alphabet Street" either, you'll have to listen for yourself. :)

(Note: I swore I posted this a while back on 9-26, but I was looking at something else and noticed this was still in "edit mode" and I don't see it anywhere on the site. So my apologies if this is a double post.)