Sample School: Isaac Hayes

The amazing thing about so much of modern music, from hip-hop and out beyond, is that you’re never really listening to just one album or just one track, you’re skimming the surface of musical history. Most hip-hop artists are as much archivists as they are musicians and if you look a little deeper you’ll find a mind-boggling back-catalog of genius staring back at you. Spend more than a few minutes on WhoSampled.com and you’ll quickly become entranced, digging out track after track to find out which 70s funk hooks, film score overtures and Malcolm X quotes built the flesh around the skeleton of the beat. The purpose of this feature is to give you an insight into a particular band or artist who helped to shape that world, an artist you’ve likely been listening to for years without even realising it.

To this day I maintain that one of the funniest moments in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (and there are many to choose from) was during the Vegas episode. Will almost gets married there and, being Will, opts for a Shaft themed wedding. After it falls through, he storms out, but not before turning to the minister and saying ‘your Isaac Hayes impression stinks!’ The minister shrugs and says ‘I thought it was pretty good.’ Thing is though, it actually was Isaac Hayes.

Say what you will about Hayes’s religious views or his patchy marital history, the man had a sense of humor about himself. He has also often been directly credited as one of the originators of hip-hop. His late 60s and early 70s work is heavily sampled across the genre and his compositions were instrumental in moving music further in the direction that would eventually lead it to the genre. His music was already being sampled as early as the 1970s when the culture was really first germinating. Ellie’s Theme (from the Shaft soundtrack) was sampled in an LP as early as 1975, only 4 years after it was first released (by The Pointer Sisters).

The soundtrack would be a huge talking point in and of itself. The award-winning score elevated the film from great to legendary and influenced basically every other action or blaxploitation film to be released in the 70s, even extending to composers like Lalo Schifrin. He moved into music after winning a talent show and formed a series of different soul groups around Memphis before standing in for Booker T, which lead him to start playing with Otis Redding in the mid 60s. Hayes was an outspoken civil rights activist even at an early age and like Gil Scott-Heron it seeped into his music and made him all the more iconic as he continued to rise to prominence. Hot Buttered Soul, his second record, was far ahead of its time. His career continued to boom throughout the 70s and after some crushing financial adversity in the 80s he still managed to release U Turn, one of his most interesting albums. In the 90s he transitioned towards acting (most notably in South Park) whilst doing significant amounts of activism work (much of it, sadly, for the Church of Scientology). His legacy in music is absolutely assured, he was an enourmously talented composer and he could map his skills to soul, jazz, funk and even hip-hop when the need arose. Here are 3 of his most iconic and iconically sampled tracks.

Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic – Hot Buttered Soul – 1969
Appears in Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos by Public Enemy

 The seminal track from the album that thrust Hayes from a struggling artist to the darling of his then-label Stax seems like it was almost made to be sampled by Public Enemy, with the rippling, almost Joe Walsh style rippling guitar and warm vocals. They fittingly decided to use it for their very own breakout second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, an album which was actually intended to be modelled after Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, which itself was almost definitely directly influenced by Hot Buttered Soul. The simple, but gorgeous piano solo just past the midway point and closes the track out is the one of my favourite moments in any Hayes track, with the dusty, echoing reverb, used to great effect by Public Enemy, as well as Ice Cube in I Gotta Say What Up, from his debut solo release (see, it’s all connected) Kill at Will. The track is just one of the in-song credit sequences oft-employed in hip-hop releases, but the sample compliments it perfectly.

 

Ike’s Mood I – …To Be Continued – 1970
Appears in One Love by Massive Attack

Between the Ike’s Mood and Ike’s Rap tracks released by Hayes across his 70s and 80s records, you can get a real sense of the way he moved and evolved as an artist, but for the me, the first remains the best. …To Be Continued was Hayes’ last release before he went on to do the Shaft score and it’s easy to tell from tracks like this why he landed the job. From the booming brass of the first opening seconds, this is a dramatic, evocative piece of music with an intoxicating beat. Small wonder that it’s been sampled in dozens of trip-hop, hip-hop and neo-soul tracks through the years with notable examples including Massive Attack, Mary J. Blige, Royce Da 5’9″, Pete Rock, Biz Markie and Foxy Brown. Interesting side-note, the drummer on much of this album was Willie Hall, who was the drummer for the Blues Brothers in the original film and the sequel.

 

 

Walk on By – Hot Buttered Soul – 1969
Appears in Warning by The Notorious B.I.G.

Famously, this track was sampled on the two strongest tracks on the two strongest albums by Biggie Smalls and Tupac (Ready to Die and Me Against the World, respectively). Originally recorded in 1964 by Dionne Warwick, it’s been covered more than a dozen times by artists as diverse as Average White Band, The Stranglers and Sybil. Seal even did his own version (it’s awful). Hayes’ version is a gorgeous 12 minute string led suite and for many it’s the definitive version of the track, it’s appeared in dozens of scenes in films and TV shows, most recently The Interview (though having not subjected myself to that film, I couldn’t tell you where it actually turns up). My favourite appearance though was in the ‘Vader Sessions‘ James Earl Jones mash-up (when the track turns up, you’ll lose your shit, I guarantee it). Biggie and Pac aside, the funky hook has also appeared in tracks by Ludacris, MF Doom (also as Viktor Vaughn and as Metal Fingers), Alicia Keys, Cypress Hill, Wale, Rasco, Compton’s Most Wanted and even The Jackson 5, way back in 1971. Wu-Tang even used it for a track that featured Hayes himself on guest vocals for their last truly great album, The W (which also had Gravel Pit on it, that was 15 fucking years ago, when did I get so old). Hayes stands out as one of the few major soul and funk recordists who wholeheartedly embraced the way sample culture adopted his work (second only to George Clinton, who we will return to in another edition), he was a wonderful performer, player and composer whose significance cannot be understated.