A sample is audacious when it steals in daylight and still makes a new song. These ten did not hide the theft.
10MC Hammer – “U Can’t Touch This” In 1990 Hammer looped Rick James’s Super Freak until the riff was the hit. James was paid, eventually, and still furious. The audacity is the cheerfulness. He did not bury the sample. He danced on it.
9Vanilla Ice – “Ice Ice Baby” The 1990 single lifts Queen and Bowie’s Under Pressure bass and, at first, pretends the extra note makes it original. The lie collapsed. The record remains the cautionary tale: if the line is mythic, the courtroom will hum it too.
8The Verve – “Bitter Sweet Symphony” Richard Ashcroft built the 1997 hit on Andrew Loog Oldham’s orchestral version of the Stones’ The Last Time. Allen Klein’s company took the publishing. For years the Verve’s song was not legally theirs. In 2019 Jagger and Richards returned the credit. The sample had won, late.
7M.I.A. – “Paper Planes” The 2007 single takes The Clash’s Straight to Hell and turns the guitar into a gunshot hook about immigration and cash. It is political and sticky. Sampling a protest song to make another protest song is a risk. This one paid off on the radio.
6Kanye West – “Through the Wire” West recorded the 2003 track with his jaw wired shut after a car crash, rapping through his teeth over Chaka Khan’s Through the Fire. The sample is the metaphor. Audacity here is physical: a voice that should not have been working, working anyway.
5Beyoncé – “Crazy in Love” The 2003 hit opens on the Chi-Lites’ Are You My Woman (Tell Me So), a horn blast that Jay-Z and Rich Harrison turned into a new century’s fanfare. The sample lasts seconds. It owns the song. That is the theft done right.
4Jay-Z – “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” In 1998 he took the orphans’ chorus from the musical Annie and set it under a street report. Broadway in a rap verse should have been a joke. It became an anthem. The children sing. The block answers. The distance between the two is the point.
3Afrika Bambaataa – “Planet Rock” Arthur Baker and Bambaataa, 1982, bolted Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express and Numbers to a Bronx party. German machines became a Black American future without asking permission in the way publishers later would. Electro starts in that collision.
2The Avalanches – “Frontier Psychiatrist” The 2000 single is a collage so dense the song is the sampling. Dozens of voices, a comedy record, a guitar, none of them invited to behave. Since I Left You was built from thousands of pieces. This track is the audacity you can quote in a kitchen.
1Danger Mouse – “The Grey Album” In 2004 Danger Mouse laid Jay-Z’s The Black Album over the Beatles’ White Album. EMI sent cease-and-desist letters. Grey Tuesday answered with a day of online protest. No official release, and still the most famous illegal record of the decade. The sample was the whole argument.
