Kendrick Lamar's 'Money Trees' Is A Time Machine
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In our new series on the art of sampling, hip-hop producers demonstrate how they find inspiration in classics, hidden gems, found sounds and other raw musical materials to create new hits. For each of the five videos in the series, NPR Music has asked a writer we love to do something similar. Their only instruction was to watch one of the videos, pick an element that inspired them, and spin it off in a new direction — to sample it.
Today, writer Jeff Weiss looks at a song by Kendrick Lamar, produced by DJ Dahi. Built around an atmospheric sample just a few seconds long, it nonetheless contains within it the whole historical legacy of sampling, marching in two directions at once: an art form building and mutating as time moves forward, and a finished piece of art that has the ability to not only depict time moving in reverse, but to cause it.
The sample is encoded in our DNA. It's James Joyce re-imagining the to create; Paul Thomas Anderson flipping into . Jay-Z taking a hot line and making it a hot song. Nas complained about that, but he knew the truth when he wrote "no idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun." William Shakespeare may have written while under plague quarantine, but like the inspiration for so many of his plays, the original baldhead slick was merely sampling the historical legend.