The five best Marvin Gaye samples in hip hop
Early funk and soul records are some of the first places that producers go digging for samples, and that makes Marvin Gaye a perfect source of inspiration.
Marvin Gaye has inspired rappers from Public Enemy to Jay-Z, with samples of his music used in some of hip hop’s biggest hits and smoothest deep cuts.
This includes both old school tracks and songs coming out to this day.
Here are some of the best Marvin Gaye samples in hip hop, ranging from the truly revolutionary to the timeless pieces that can blend into any setting.
The five best Marvin Gaye samples in hip-hop:
Erick Sermon – ‘Music’ (2001)
This track has one of the most prominent Marvin Gaye features in all of hip hop, so alive that it almost sounds like Gaye was next to Erick Sermon in the studio. Sermon even does a call-and-response at one point in the song: “Is that true, Marvin?/ Yeah!”
The track samples ‘Turn on Some Music’, from Gaye’s 1982 album Midnight Love (the last released during his lifetime), with Sermon stating in a Complex interview that the song was actually not supposed to see the light of day.
He said, “The rhymes I’m putting on there was just something for me to have to see how it sounds. But my friend Bernard stole the CD and brought it to LA, and next thing you know, it’s a hit record. That record wasn’t supposed to leave my house. That was just for me to listen to Marvin Gaye on a beat with me rhyming on it.”
The DOC – ‘The Formula’ (1989)
One of the foundational G-Funk tracks, produced by none other than Dr Dre, ‘The Formula’ was released as a single for The DOC’s debut album, No One Can Do It Better, with the sample pulled from ‘Inner City Blues’ off of Gaye’s What’s Going On.
Dr Dre amplifies the opening piano chord of ‘Inner City Blues’, adding a synth effect for some extra punch. While the verses loop this single chord over a bumping beat, the chorus introduces the song’s signature bass line. This is where that classic, smooth-riding G-Funk style comes to life, establishing a new genre of West Coast beats.
Kendrick Lamar – ‘The Heart Part 5’ (2022)
A recent instalment in Kendrick’s long-running ‘The Heart’ series, ‘The Heart Part 5’, was released as a promotional single for Mr Morale & The Big Steppers. This was his first musical release since Damn back in 2017. Both the song and the accompanying music video were nominated for Grammys in 2023, with the track winning ‘Best Rap Performance’ and ‘Best Rap Song’.
The beat is built from a sample of ‘I Want You’, from Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album of the same name. The producing trio, Beach Noise, created the beat (and went on to produce five other tracks on Mr Morale). One of the more remarkable aspects of the beat is that it hardly modifies the original song. If anything, ‘The Heart Part 5’ just rearranges and accents ‘I Want You’, leaving the track space to breathe and giving Kendrick room to lay down some of the sharpest verses of that year.
2. Common – ‘Love Is…’ (2005)
A list like this wouldn’t be right without a J Dilla beat. Dilla was responsible for some of hip hop’s most crisp and soulful beats, this one being no exception. This song is from Common’s landmark album, Be, and the sample comes from ‘God is Love’ on Marvin Gaye’s landmark album, What’s Going On.
As opposed to a sample like in ‘The Heart Part 5’ that mostly lets the original track run, J Dilla slows this sample down, uses his signature looping technique, and layers in new pieces of the song throughout. The result is that ‘Love Is…’ sounds notably different from ‘God Is Love’, though you can hear the sample moments if you compare the two back to back. The final product feels like a true collaboration between Marvin Gaye and J Dilla, each with their fingerprint on the song.
Method Man featuring Mary J Blige – ‘I’ll Be There For You’ (1995)
This sample does beautiful justice to the original while also taking the song in a new direction. The track is a remix of ‘All I Need’ off of Method Man’s first solo album, Tical, but rather than a direct sample, this song uses an interpolation, or a re-recording of a well-known melody. The lines sung by Mary J Blige throughout are interpolated from Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell’s ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’.
Both the original and the remix were produced by RZA from Wu-Tang Clan, though the ‘Puff Daddy Mix’ is often the one heard out in the world. However, the Diddy version does little to differentiate from RZA’s beat, aside from adding in some samples of Notorious BIG, so all credit to RZA.
Not only is this song often considered among the 100 greatest in hip hop history, but it’s often listed as one of the best hip hop love songs ever.