A reliable method of discovering the music of past eras

March 26, 2025 1:53 AM

The Most Iconic Electronic Music Sample of Every Year (1990–2024) and The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023) [Open Culture]
posted by chavenet (20 comments total)

The editing on these videos is so so good.

I'm glad they credited Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon for Call On Me. Here's a deep dive: How Eric Prydz stole "Call on Me" (but someone else stole it first) [cw: butts]
posted by Klipspringer at 3:15 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Popcorn (the cover version by Hot Butter) was the first electronic music song I remember hearing back in 1972. It was pretty ear-opening at the time! The original Popcorn was on Gershon Kingsley's groundbreaking 1969 album Music to Moog By.
posted by fairmettle at 4:21 AM on March 26 [5 favorites]

Yes, i love the information design of how they layer the visuals!

There's a fascinating playlist on Spotify that someone made of the original tracks from famous samples. They don't include the songs that used the sample however, thus flipping the whole "Where do I know this from?" question on its head.
posted by jeremias at 5:10 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

This is great! The visual interpretation illustrates this well. Some of the samples are so tiny and cut that it seems like it would have been easier to just use a keyboard. Thanks for these links. Such a wide variety of samples.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:50 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Some of the samples are so tiny and cut that it seems like it would have been easier to just use a keyboard

Yeah, sampling AC/DC’s worst album just to get one super-crunchy power chord seems extravagant.
posted by Lemkin at 6:28 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Does it? The people who put these samples together seemed to know what they were doing. Maybe they couldn’t replicate it any other way and this was the sound that they wanted to make their song. Seems reasonable to me.
posted by ashbury at 6:33 AM on March 26 [3 favorites]

Popcorn is familiar to me though I couldn't say when or where from, if you'd told me it was Jean-Michel Jarre I'd have believed you. In the early 70s there was plenty of electronic music. I personally had bought Pierre Henry's Messe pour le temps présent and Tonto's expanding headband while at school. I'm sure they could have found electronic music samples prior to 1990.
posted by epo at 6:55 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

These videos are amazing, chavenet. As said above, the visuals are perfect at explaining what’s going on and in particular I enjoyed the left or right headphone that would sometime show up at the top of the screen to indicate the channel.

Chopped up, slowed down, speeded up, reversed, reused; some of these are really complex and as usual when I see the talent and vision involved I feel so humbled. People are amazing!

I would love to see how the process and equipment for doing this has evolved.
posted by ashbury at 6:55 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

The original Popcorn was on Gershon Kingsley's groundbreaking 1969 album Music to Moog By

I first heard Popcorn in the 80s, playing Digger on our first home PC
posted by Kabanos at 7:21 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

Often with sample-driven keyboards, the timing is the opposite of what you think - those sounds show up after these songs because they’re such a hit. There’s no natural reason orchestra hits have to be on every $25 Casio. Hip hop put them there.
posted by q*ben at 7:53 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

The ones where they showed the sample, and then that it was reversed in the final product blew my mind. Amazing stuff. Thank you for posting this!
posted by jquinby at 8:31 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

Maybe they couldn’t replicate it any other way and this was the sound that they wanted to make their song.

I have no clue about samplers, but I wonder if they'd feel it was a bit of a failure to resort to keyboard.
posted by Klipspringer at 10:38 AM on March 26 [1 favorite]

There’s no natural reason orchestra hits have to be on every $25 Casio

You need something classy to balance out the dog barks.
posted by mittens at 10:46 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

I have no clue about samplers, but I wonder if they'd feel it was a bit of a failure to resort to keyboard.

I've personally never done any sampling,but my thought is why would you want to plug in a guitar (keyboard is maybe simpler?) when you have a ton of songs to sample from, and you don't have to waste time sound leveling, recording, and getting the perfect tone - you are just listening to songs and clicking buttons. That is the fun part to someone interested in sampling. Person probably listened to 50 rock guitar tracks before settling on the AC/DC one.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:02 AM on March 26 [2 favorites]

I have no clue about samplers, but I wonder if they'd feel it was a bit of a failure to resort to keyboard.

For a lot of “back in the day” sample-based music, a sampler and a turntable was basically all they had. That’s kinda the whole deal with the era of E-mu, Akai, Ensoniq et al. - for the first time one semi-affordable box was all you needed.

And for more recent hardcore sample-chopping stuff, working within that ethos is the game.
posted by atoxyl at 11:38 AM on March 26 [4 favorites]

Very cool, thanks for sharing!
posted by star gentle uterus at 12:57 PM on March 26 [1 favorite]

This was so impressively produced that I'm not going to criticize them for leaving out Frontier Psychiatrist (2000) and They by JEM (2004).
posted by mmoncur at 10:07 PM on March 26 [1 favorite]

For a lot of sample driven music, the sampling is an art form in and of itself just like turntablism. The Beastie Boys didn't make Paul's Boutique because they couldn't play instruments, they made it because it was the album they wanted to make.
posted by Candleman at 3:38 PM on March 27

Great links, this was a lot of fun!
posted by obfuscation at 6:21 AM on March 29

The animated visualizations were really clever, I bet this took a lot of effort. What amazes me the most is the gradual decrease in sophistication of the samples and their arranging. It starts off with obscure tracks sampled and processed into new timbres and textures, and then devolves into a single, simple sample in the front with little technical rework. In in several cases, the samples are samples of sampled songs from the same year. If these examples are the "best", then it is like the excitement of exploring sampling wore off after a decade.
posted by peter.j.torelli at 10:02 AM on March 29