Eye Know

Next fall, I’m teaching a class on musical copyright, ownership and borrowing at the New School. I will for sure be talking about De La Soul’s creative use of samples, including a deep dive into “Eye Know” from 3 Feet High and Rising.

This magnificent groove was stitched together from five different records. I list them here in their order of appearance in “Eye Know.”

Mad Lads – “Make This Young Lady Mine” (1969)

The samples are right at the beginning: first the guitar chords, then the horn riff. After the intro, the song becomes intricate and unpredictable. There are a lot of nice moments in it, but nothing with the sunshine-y clarity of the first four bars.

Lee Dorsey – “Get Out Of My Life Woman” (1966)

Once again, the sample is right up front. I wish I knew who this drummer was; I can’t find any information. If you are going to start a song with such a killer breakbeat, you should naturally expect that it will be irresistible to rap producers. My two favorite usages other than “Eye Know” are “Just A Friend” by Biz Markie and “Hits From The Bong” by Cypress Hill.

Sly & the Family Stone – “Sing A Simple Song” (1968)

As if that Lee Dorsey beat wasn’t enough, De La layered in another massive drum loop on top of it. The iconic “Sing A Simple Song” break comes at 2:11 after the end of the second chorus. But wait, aren’t there horns in there? The trick is that the horns are hard-panned left, while the drums are hard-panned right. If you sample only the right stereo channel, you get the drums with just a faint echo of the horns. This break has also been sampled a million times, for example in “The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground.

Steely Dan – “Peg” (1977)

Now we come to the real producer-ly magic. Posdnuos says that he and Dave worked in a mall where they heard “Peg” a lot, and they thought it would make a good sample. They ended up using three different sections of the song.

• The loop that runs under Pos and Dave’s verses comes from 0:21. It must have been tricky to capture; to avoid the vocals, you have to sample from the “and” of three in measure 11 to the “and” of three in measure 12.
• The line “I know I love you better” comes from 1:00 at the end of verse two, from the second beat of measure 30 to the second beat of measure 31.
• Finally, there’s Tom Scott’s Lyricon riff from 0:45 in the second verse. This one must have been really tricky to extricate from the vocals on either side of it and to chop up. “Eye Know” doesn’t have a chorus; that flipped Lyricon sample is kind of the main hook. It’s enough!

Otis Redding – “Sittin’ On The Dock Of The Bay” (1968)

Whenever I play “Eye Know” for my music tech students, Otis’ whistling is the sample they identify most easily. The specific phrase comes at 2:23. De La were able to isolate it from most of the other instruments by sampling the left stereo channel only.

I made a megamix of all these songs combining the samples in their original context and in the De La context, enjoy:

Also, here’s my best shot at a transcription:

By the way, some online sources say that the first beat in “Eye Know” comes not from Lee Dorsey, but from “Remind Me” by Patrice Rushen. I have no idea why people believe this. Pos confirms in the interview linked above that the beat comes from Lee Dorsey.

When De La was making 3 Feet High and Rising, they were about twenty years old, and they either didn’t know the copyright rules or didn’t care. Their label, Tommy Boy, was expecting 3 Feet High to be an underground success at best, and didn’t expend much effort on sample clearances. De La’s albums only recently became available on streaming services after many years of working out sample clearance deals (and replacing the samples they couldn’t license). Otis Redding’s estate in particular took some convincing, which is why the song is now credited to De La Soul featuring Otis Redding. I’m glad they were able to work it out.

Hip-hop history is worth learning for its own sake, but beyond that, why should my students care about any of this? I think the significance of De La’s sampling techniques extends far beyond golden age hip-hop. Even if you never end up producing sample-based tracks yourself, just knowing that it’s possible changes your relationship to recorded music. Rather than thinking of yourself as a passive consumer of mass culture, sampling is an invitation to participate in it as a producer, to speak back to it. We have been all been stuck in a mall (or somewhere similar) listening to a Steely Dan song (or something similar). It changes the experience profoundly once you realize that you can dream up alternative musical uses for whatever you are listening to.