There is an emerging “trend” for lack of a better word, a trend that has cropped up and is slowly eating up the creativity of our artists these days. This trend is the habit of sampling classics and previously done songs and releasing them as new music.
First of all, if the entire chorus is a sample from an old song, I do not think you are giving the audience new music. We have had those lyrics before, it doesn’t matter if the sound is different because lyrics and sound go together to make a song. Therefore, it is still an old song if the lyrics are like the ones I know from an R. Kelly – Biggie song.
This whole sampling habit then extends to the flow. I do not know if up to this point it is still called sampling, or this is downright lack of creativity. The flow is utterly “sampled” from an old song and the entire song sounds like a song I know but from a different artist.
It would be more justified to call it a “cover” of the original song by the artist who was creative enough to come up with it. Re-producing someone else’s sound and releasing it as new music is not entertainment justice for the fans. Most times we do not know the songs they sampled it from and that’s why a lot of these redone songs get away with it. But lately it is becoming too common and either am getting old or I listen to way too much music from different times, but nowadays I am able to tell.
I must commend the artists though for one thing; they give us modern and urban versions of these songs. Versions we can relate to and versions that are more of our time. This is a good thing but still not good enough to explain the lack of creativity.
Sampling old songs to me patently demonstrates sprouting laziness and lack of creativity in the industry. I believe it is fine to sample these classics, but when it becomes a trend it takes the fun out of hearing an old favorite song redone. It also questions one’s creativity especially for artists that have done it more than thrice and have had their careers spring up from this lack of creativity.
This sampling has landed a couple of musicians into legal trouble with the original owners of these songs. All this can be avoided if the industry embraced creativity and put their talented minds to work and also be able to create classics for the future generations.
This trend of sampling old songs and classics is depicting distressful lack of creativity from some of our favorite artists. Many of them are victims and the rate at which it is happening lately is somewhat ringing emergency alerts for the reduction in the creativity of these artists. And I believe with its slowly growing dominance, it is the demise of creativity in the music industry.