Everything old new is new old again

There’s a certain joy in hearing an old song and recognising a sample that was used in a tune I’m more familiar with. Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) was a great recent discovery for me whilst revisiting Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, Eminem’s My Name Is has been usurped by Labi Siffre’s incredible I Got The¹, and I never expected to hear shades of De La Soul when listening to a Steely Dan album recommended to me by a friend last week.

On a recent Friday night ‘music nostalgia-fest for one’, I found a Spotify playlist for Hits 6, a compilation that my parents had bought on tape back in the day. Seeing the black-and-rainbow album cover art again triggered a torrent of happy memories. In the late 1980s I had listened to it over and over again, and even remember packing the bulky double cassete case in our hand luggage for listening to on my personal stereo, as well as in the hire car when we went on holiday. Hits was a rival compilation series to Now That’s What I Call Music (the excellent Super Deluxe Edition website recently reviewed Now 4 and the first Hits album side-by-side) and all of those albums from the late-80s period are special to me.

What I hadn’t expected when listening to Hits 6 was the completely new feeling of finding a song again that I once knew well, but recognised the hook from a completely different tune that I’d heard many years later. Strike had the genius idea of taking Donna Allen‘s Serious and sampling it for U Sure Do; the later song had earwormed itself into my brain in 1994 without making a connection to the original. Donna Allen’s is the more interesting tune, although I’m not convinced about either of the videos!