Some have suggested that getting a hit song by sampling a previous hit some and backpacking on its awesomeness just feels like… cheating. To them, it seems as if the success is less pure – a “sloppy seconds” experience, if you will, however indiscernible said sloppiness may be.

The problem is this ignores the history of, well, music. If Mozart and Beethoven had tape recorders and turntables, I have no doubt they would have skipped piano lessons for the studio. Great composers have “borrowed” melodies from others since the term “composer” existed. That’s the way we learn music. Nobody had a problem when Gustav Mahler sampled folk songs for his early symphonic works – it was a populist, revolutionary way to construct orchestral music. And Bela Bartok? Fuggedaboutit! He would have been all over this shit.

So when I heard Cali Swag District’s excellent “Where You Are,” which heavily samples the Jackson Five’s 1972 hit “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” at first I thought it was a cop out. I came around on about the third play-through, though. The group fused their own flows and the sample fantastically:

Cali Swag District – Where You Are by keepthuggin

In any case they’re perfectly capable of creating their own beats. “Kickback,” the title track of their upcoming first LP, while inevitably not as catchy as the Michael Jackson original, is worthy of mention:

Cali Swag District – Kick Back by signalman453

Personally, I encourage anything that creates something worth listening to. You’d be surprised what’s a sample and what’s not. Diplo and MIA’s “Paper Planes,” for example, uses a distorted sample of The Clash’s hit, “Straight to Hell.” So don’t give the DJ who mixed “Paper Planes” with Cali Swag District’s recently released song, “Teach Me How To Dougie” a hard time. He’s just following suit.
Paper Dougies (Cali Swag District x M.I.A.) by Cake Effect