Just a sample

June 11, 2015 News Room

HIP-HOP artistes have never hidden their respect for Jamaican music and culture. Some of the genre’s biggest acts have sampled or covered dancehall/reggae songs.

The LargeUp.com website revisits many of these moments on the recently released mixtape, Double Barrel-Barrel: Reggae Samples and Hip Hop Classics.

The 34 songs were compiled by DJ Gravy (Dave Susser), DJ Corey Chase and Jesse Serwer, a senior writer/editor at LargeUp.com.

Chase told the Jamaica Observer by e-mail that Serwer came up with the idea three years ago. Being big fans of dancehall/reggae, he and DJ Gravy endorsed it.

“That was the beauty of how it all came together. Jesse hit me up and introduced the idea, and I had already been working on a bunch of edits that I could play out when I DJ, so it was a no-brainer,” said Chase. “I was bred on roots and reggae music; I discovered hip hop on my own, and it’s been a love affair ever since, toggling between Native Tongues and The Gladiators or Gong Marley,” he added. “Realising how many of hip hop’s greats are Jamaican, it just seemed like something that had to be showcased.”

Among the songs on Double-Barrel are Grace Jones’ My Jamaican Guy which LL Cool J sampled for his Doin It; Chase the Devil by Max Romeo which was sampled by Jay-Z on Lucifer; and Super Cat’s Dance Inna New York which inspired Nas’ The Don.

Serwer spoke about the project’s genesis.

“There have been some great hip-hop tracks over the years that sample reggae songs. We had highlighted a lot of these in a feature on LargeUp about five years ago, and that turned out to be one of our most popular stories at the time. It seemed like it would be a fun project to pull all these tracks together onto a mixtape,” he said.

Dancehall acts, especially from the 1980s, have found favour with the hip-hop community, including Junior Reid, Yami Bolo, Yellowman and Tenor Saw.

Songs by Reid (One Blood), Bolo (When a Man’s in Love) and Yellowman (Zungguzungguzungguzeng) are on Double Barrel which is being jointly marketed by LargeUp.com and Okayplayer, the website of Questlove, leader of hip-hop/neo-soul band, The Roots.

Susser, Serwer and Martei Korley started LargeUp.com six years ago. The site focuses on Caribbean lifestyle.