Sampling Social Media

Music's 'new' go-to sample

Oct 04, 2022

A-Side

In the 80s and 90s, hip-hop producers were digging in crates, searching for the most obscure records to flip, sample, and interpolate on their songs. In 1994, for example, Poke (of the producing duo Trackmasters) and Diddy sampled Mtume’s 1983 song Juicy Fruit for Notorious B.I.G.’s classic, Juicy (even though Diddy ~allegedly, don’t sue me~ heard Pete Rock sample the song first).1 In 2021, rapper/producer IDK sampled The Stylistics’ Payback is a Dog (1973) on his song Peloton (produced by DJ Khalil, Obi Nwadije, IDK, CashMoneyAP, and YoungKio). Essentially, sampling is taking a song (or sound) that already exists and repurposing it within a new musical context.

Instead of sampling older songs, some artists today are opting to mine the internet for viral, pop culture ‘artifacts’ to repurpose in their songs. These viral videos, usually funny and absurd, and sometimes surprisingly relatable, have found a form IRL, not only being referenced conversationally, but also in popular music.

From Kanye sampling a little girl praying on Ultralight Beam, and N.E.R.D pulling the line “mad ethnic right now” from Retch’s video, to other examples like Megan Thee Stallion’s Hood Rat Shit sampling the boy who crashed his grandmother’s car, and Rico Nasty & Kenny Beats’ 2019 Cheat Code borrowing a popular "Love and Hip Hop" audio clip from 2014, artists and their producers have clipped viral videos from their original context, and applied them to their own songs.

Viral videos and audio memes aren’t just fluff for the internet; they’ve become music’s newest sample as online culture and mainstream culture intersect with each other. This musical shift is indicative of the fact that artists and their producers are not creating music in a vacuum; they are tapped into internet culture and they expect their listeners/fans to be tapped in too.