Ladies and gentlemen, we have so arrived in a new era of sampling. Where we used to just sample music, we now sample full vocals and mix them up with other songs. Slap it onto a nice dance track and there you have a brand new song.
In my search for a blog topic, I turned to the UK charts and found this interesting title “The Girl Is Mine”, featuring Destiny’s Child and Brandy, by 99 Souls. I had to check that out and got exactly what I described above.
This dance track combines tracks by Destiny’s Child (“Girl”) and Brandy (“The Boy Is Mine”), by sampling vocals and switching things around.
I have to admit, that I might like this trend just a little bit more than people just covering a song. At least there is some creative cut-and-paste techniques used to create something completely new, by re-using the old.
At the same time, and I already mentioned this earlier in my blog about Sigala’s “Easy Love” (aka a chopped up version of The Jacksons’ “ABC”), you can’t help but think this is an easy way to get yourself in the charts in the first place. It’s kind of riding on the fame other people have worked for.
Still, “The Girl Is Mine” is incredibly catchy just listening to it.
Some describe this still as a mash up, but I still consider that to be putting vocals from one existing track onto the music from another existing track. I guess this could be a “sliced up original” or something.
When looking at the video, the song does disappear into the background and I hardly take notice of it, while automatically finding myself singing along to bits and pieces. But the video itself is intriguing and you do just keep watching to find out what it’s all about.
This is the first single for 99 Souls. Originally, they had released it in 2014, but ran into problems because of using the sampled vocals. Then, in 2015, they got the “OK” from Beyonce to re-release it. Brandy even went as far as to re-recorded her vocals for them. Can’t get better support than that.
On their YouTube channel, you can find more remixes of the track.
