Made an icon by Dave Chappelle, the legacy of Rick James is a very dark one. Despite starting off life in a rock and roll band with Neil Young called The Mynah Birds, Rick James would become a fundamental pillar in the growth of R&B as we know it. Across a range of songs, he delivered a sultry and sexy vision of a new decade and turned disco into something far more accessible. Though his artistic legacy has long been plagued by his personal issues and, in some cases, atrocities, you can still hear his work in modern songs.
Much of that is down to sampling. One of the foundational stones of hip hop, sampling has become one of the vital components of most modern songs. Whether it’s Doja Cat or Jay-Z, almost every hip hop artist today knows how and what to sample. Taking chunks of classic songs and turning them into something brand new is a serious technique that is now an art form in its own right.
One of the most famous cases of sampling came when Run DMC took Aerosmith’s 1975 single ‘Walk This Way’ into the hip hop realm 11 years after its release. Turning the track into something completely singular, it would become one of the hits of the 1980s and set hip hop on its path to glory. Another significant player in that game was MC Hammer whose landmark single ‘U Can’t Touch This’ became an anthem of the 1990s and used a sample from Rick James’ smash hit ‘Super Freak’.
James he told Musician magazine in 1983 of the track: “I wanted to write a silly song. I was in the studio and everything else for the album (Street Songs) was done. I just put ‘Super Freak’ together really quickly. I wanted a silly song that had a bit of new wave texture to it. So I just came up with this silly little lick and expounded on it. I came up with the bass part first. Then I put a guitar on it and keyboards, doing the ‘ehh ehh,’ silly keyboard part. Then I found a tuning on my Oberheim OB-Xa that I’d been wanting to use for a long time – it sounds like ghosts. And I put a very operatic vocal structure on it ’cause I’m really into opera and classical music. You probably hear a lot of that in my music. So I put (sings in a deep voice) ‘She’s all right’; very operatic, sort of funny, stuff.”
The James song largely depends on a gigantic opening riff and it is this set of notes that MC Hammer picked up for his own production. Using the opening bars to create one of the highest-grossing singles of the decade was always guaranteed to generate some anger and as James was struggling with personal issues in and out of court, he decided to sue MC Hammer for copyright infringement, a suit he eventually won when Hammer credited James as a songwriter.
James was often adamant that his song not be sampled by rap stars but that didn’t stop Hammer and, later, it wouldn’t stop Jay-Z and Gucci Mane who have both since sampled the song for their own tracks ‘Kingdom Come’ and ‘Freaky Gurl’ respectively. Of course, Jay’s title track from his worst album may not live long in the memory, and Gucci Mane’s song a simple filler piece, there can be no doubt that ‘Super freak’ will live forever within MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’.
Listen to both songs below.
