The music industry has changed drastically within the last 10-15 years. The rise of streaming radically altered what a hit song means and the ways you can listen to music. Go even further back, when artists like Ludacris were in their prime, the difference was even bigger. Radio still mattered, music video countdowns were foundational pieces of media, and print magazines still filled shelves and mailboxes.
None of this even accounts for the difference in the music itself. Nowadays, producers utilize samples the same way artists like Diddy did back during the height of Bad Boy. But for Luda, it’s this trend that ticks him off the most. In a 2023 conversation with Andre Gee for Rolling Stone, the Atlanta legend stressed that artists need to make their samples and remixes their own. He’s all about inspiring future generations to take something fresh from old classics. However, you aren’t fully paying homage by taking a record wholesale.
When people completely take a sample and don’t change anything about it,” Ludacris told the outlet. “Or they take some lyrics, and then they don’t switch it up. I would love to see a little more thought put into trying to flip something as opposed to [taking] it the way that it was in the exact same form and [redoing] it.
Ludacris Takes Issue With Lazy Sampling in Hip-Hop Today
The multi-hyphenate said that it’s possible to cover an artist or heavily rely on a sample and make it worthwhile. He uses an iconic example of such, where Whitney Houston covered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”. The difference is, there’s still a drastic difference in their voices and how they approached the records. But artists who don’t do anything for records, that’s where his issue lies. “As far as production, I don’t feel like people should take a beat that was made 20 years ago and not do anything to it, just literally,” Ludacris said.
Has anyone done a great example of that in recent memory? Luda shared one reggaeton artist who pulled off a sample from a song he was part of. “J Balvin did the ‘Yeah!’ [by Usher] record over, and I loved it. I loved what he did to it. I thought it was dope. And that’s probably my favorite flip right now,” Ludacris told the publication.
“Yeah!” wouldn’t have even become a hit to sample had Lil Jon not leaked it to the radio. The label sent a cease-and-desist letter, but the song already took off, and Hot 97 refused to stop playing such a smash hit. “The program director’s name was Tracy. She said, ‘Nope! This is a smash! We’re not going to stop playing this,’” Lil Jon told Jennifer Hudson in 2024. “She took the letter and framed it and put it on her wall. So she has that history.”
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