Dat Sample Tho: Jay Z – “Kingdom Come” x Rick James – “Superfreak”
We’re back! Digging in the vaults, taking note of some funkier bits of sampled music and their origins.
This time we take a look at a personal favorite. Just Blaze flips the supremely recognizable Rick James’ “Super Freak”. Despite the fact that MC Hammer had already made the sample into an international smash with “U Can’t Touch This”, Just Blaze was not deterred. He needed background music! Read below to get the full story of its origin on MySpace and how it ended up on Jay Z’s comeback record.
Jay – Z (prod by Just Blaze)- “Kingdom Come”
Rick James – “Super Freak”
There’s no point in noting where “the sample” appears. It’s literally everywhere. It’s pulling very liberally from the original and reconstructing the chops to build the new song. Listen to Just Blaze explain his approach below.
The lure behind this one, according to Just Blaze, goes back to the MySpace days, when he just wanted to make an intro to his profile page:
Just Blaze:
“There’s tons of fake Myspace pages for people out there. So [to show mine was legit] I was just gonna go talk and be like, “This is Just Blaze, blah, blah blah” and be out. And, while I was thinking about what I was gonna say, I said, maybe I should have a beat in the background. So I had the ‘Super Freak’ twelve-inch that I had bought a couple of months ago in Chicago. It was like $5. It was a 20-minute version which I never heard. A lot of times, once I hear a sample, I already have the beat done in my head before I touch the MP. This time I had no idea what I was gonna do. So I literally took every note on the record and put it on a separate pad. And broke it down to the minimum amount of beats you could. I started playing around with it and it began to fall together. So I was like, ‘I should rock it like this with no drums or nothing.’ Which I started to do and then I added drums.
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I think Peter Gunz might have been here. Peter actually has the video of me doing the drums, I think Corey was around and me and Pete are cool. He was recording something for a Corey Gunz DVD and he just started calling everybody to come into the room like, ‘Yo, you gotta hear this beat.’ I never really thought it was that crazy when I first made it. I thought the creativity behind it was cool, more so than the beat itself. I never thought anything of it; it was just for Myspace. I do it, put it up and then later that day, I saw it had 400 hits. That night, 3700 hits. I hadn’t even had the page up that long. Then I got a message from Myspace administration like “We don’t know what you just did with your page, but your traffic has just increased by like 10 million percent.” Then I get an email from ?uest and he’s like, ‘I don’t believe you did it, the beat on your page!’ I’m like, ‘Ohhhh.’ I literally made that beat in 30 seconds. I thought nothing of it. He said “Jay has to hear that beat, now.” Months go by and nothing. But the seed was planted. Ultimately Jay used it on his comeback album, Kingdom Come.”
Jay-Z:
“Ahmir from the Roots was like you got to get that Just track, you gotta get that ****, he flipped ‘Super Freak.’ Like, the genius in that record again is not me, really it’s the fact that he took one of the most commercial beats in hip-hop history and flipped it on some Premier ****. Like he made it like a real hip-hop record. It’s really weird how he did that ****.”
Source: The Voice, Feb 2010
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