Musical Sampling Quotes

When you sample something, you're using the crutch of borrowing chords and melodies from a song that's already great, that's already stood the test of time, that's already special. When you're trying to do it all from scratch, you're writing something brand new that has to stand on its own.

I think people were genuinely addicted to hip hop in the 90s, addicted to the idea of empowerment. I think it came from [the fact that] the rappers in the 90s, their parents coming from the 70s, had such a rich variety of records to sample.

I'm not a great inventor from scratch. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians.

After all, in today's music scene every band seems to steal from other bands.

You have a wine tasting of different years, and we're sort of doing that with our music, giving them a taste of what Journey used to be like.

Oasis are not just influenced by the Beatles; they actually take stuff. Then they get praised.

We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other.

I've always, in some way, incorporated sampling into my work.