Thirty Three Jones | Desktop Site
Rap is an art you can't own no loops
It's how you hook em up and the rhyme style troop
So don't even think you could say someone bit
off your weak beat come on you need to quit
-Gangstarr, Take It Personal
In case you haven't seen it, the video for Jay-Z's new single Show Me What You Got was released this week. Watch the video here. I like the new video, but its more or less the same concept he used for the Money Ain't a Thing video, except he's replaced Jermaine Dupri with Danica Patrick (not a bad trade).
Perhaps its fitting that he reused an idea for the video, since the beat for the song itself has been reused more than once. As unkut.com and DifferentKitchen discussed last week, the Just Blaze-produced beat, built around a sample from 1973's Shaft in Africa, is nearly identical to the beat that K-Def produced for Diddy's new album. You can hear those songs at unkut.
The beat jacking doesn't stop there. The Chicago-based group Kidz in the Hall used the same beat, this time produced by Double-O, before Diddy or Jay-Z. The honor of being the first artist to sample Shaft in Africa this year, though, goes to former Artifacts member El Da Sensai. His independently-released Up In Da Spot came out on February 28th of this year. Going back even further, both Ras Kass and Ice Cream Tee used the sample for their own songs years ago.
Beat jacking is a time honored tradition in hip hop, but its rare that you see so many songs come out in the same year with almost no variation on the sample that is used. Suprisingly, it doesn't seem like there are a lot of hard feelings about the issue. Just Blaze and Double-O made a video together, joking about the situation. El Da Sensai has said he's not mad, though I do get the feeling he's a little heated that his name has been left out in most discussions on this topic. I haven't heard anything from K-Def on the situation, but I'd imagine any hard feelings he might have were relieved by the enormous paycheck that Diddy must have given him for the beat.
I'm putting up the El Da Sensai track as well as the original Shaft track, so you can hear where all of this began:
El - Up In Da Spot
Shaft In Africa (for copyright reasons, I've only put up a portion of this song)
10/19/2006 10:39:47 AM posted by Fresh