Weekend Vibes: Literary Samplings in Hip-Hop Songs
By Ayomipo Akorede
Sampling with respect to copyright is a common practice in the music industry anywhere in the world. But often times, it's limited to previously used beats, lines and tunes of popular songs by music legends and or reigning artistes.
In our clime here, lots of people have done the same to rise to fame. From Adekunle Gold's "Sade" to Tem's "Love Me Jeje" which eventually won her a Grammy and then Burna Boy's "Monsters You Made" from off his fifth studio album ("Twice as Tall", a fifteen-track album featuring contributions from A-list musicians like Chris Martin, Sam Smith, Stormzy, Naughty by Nature, Youssou N’Dour, Sauti Sol, and producers Mike Dean and Timbaland) in year 2020.The uniqueness of this sampling is the inculcation of the corresponding lines of a Ghanaian novelist, Ama Ata Aidoo that complement his commentary on the repressive powers of colonialism. Something he affirmed in an interview that the song came from a lot of anger and pain.
Dating to back to 1987 where in an interview, she frowned at colonial and post-colonial exploitation of the African continent by the West, she said:
...Since we met your people five hundred years ago
Look at us, we have given everything
You are still taking
In exchange for that, we have got nothing
Nothing
And you know it
But don’t you think this is over now?
Over where? Is it over?
At this point, can we infer that Burna Boy took a clue from Beyonce? In 2013, Beyonce sampled Chimamanda Adichie's lines, a perfect blend from off her TED Talk "We All Should Be Feminist" which she delivered at TedxEuston, in her "Flawless" track. Chimamanda said:
We teach girls to shrink themselves
To make themselves smaller
We say to girls
'You can have ambition
But not too much
You should aim to be successful
But not too successful
Otherwise you will threaten the man'
Because I am female
I am expected to aspire to marriage
I am expected to make my life choices
Always keeping in mind that
Marriage is the most important
Now marriage can be a source of
Joy and love and mutual support
But why do we teach to aspire to marriage
And we don’t teach boys the same?
We raise girls to see each other as competitors
Not for jobs or for accomplishments
But for the attention of men
We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings
In the way that boys are
Feminist – the person who believes in the social
Political, and economic equality of the sexes.
While African literature remains a go to for anyone seeking interconnectedness of purpose, it's particularly beautiful to see hip-hop artistes explore it for amplification.
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