As country music gains more market share in the broader music landscape, it’s only natural that it adopts some of pop music’s trends and proclivities as well. We live in a time when formats are less siloed than ever before, and as long as country music retains a high standard of quality, a little genre cross-pollination can be a net positive overall.
Well… mostly.
In the last half-decade and change, the ancient 90s art of sampling has become wildly en vogue, especially amongst TikTok-based trend chasers and country radio D-listers craving some unmerited attention. Whether it’s “Georgia On My Mind,” “In Da Club,” or “Rebel Rebel,” it’s become abundantly clear as of late that no classic is safe, regardless of genre of origin.
These excerpts and lifted melodies have become a comfortable safety blanket for less melodically gifted artists and a dreadfully cheap way to garner clicks that would’ve been much harder to come by otherwise.
While popular music has decades of precedent for crafty, self-styled samples that build on the legacy of the original and enhance an otherwise clever song, today’s country artists clearly don’t have the same knack for it as Eminem or Biggie. Nay, music’s allowances for legal rip-offs have been a woeful net negative, stifling creativity and rewarding artists for doing the bare minimum in the studio.
If you, dear reader, would indulge me for a few minutes, I’ll make the most compelling case possible that the practice of sampling should be discouraged, mocked, and ultimately ostracized in country music. Simply put, I hope for better from my feel-good pop-country than a shameless bastardization of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely.”
Fans and artists alike may offer careless justifications like “it’s just a fun song, chill.” Such an argument is an insult to the generations of witty acts, past and present, who dare to give an ounce of effort to fun, lighthearted songcraft.
Today, we’ll defend those noble endeavors and launch our crusade against lazy, tasteless rip-offs, starting with a very basic opening salvo:
Country artists seemingly don’t know how to sample.
Lifting a well-known melody for the benefit of your underwritten ditty has to be a favorite utility of unmotivated D-listers like Dustin Lynch and Graham Barham for quite some time now. However, if you compare their efforts against their 1990s sampling forefathers, you might notice a glaring difference:
More often than not, modern pop-country samples reappropriate the melody of the original track rather than adding an older beat, bass groove, or other instrumental element to an existing song.
Few samples exist in the tradition of “Ice Ice Baby,” where it accentuates a mostly finished product. If you replaced the bass line from Queen’s “Under Pressure” with a completely different instrumental, the song might not have been as good, but it could still have stood alone without the sample. The same cannot be said for LOCASH’s “Isn’t She Country” or BRELAND’s “In My Truck.”
Without those original melodies, there’s just no song, full stop.
If you think about it, reworking classic instrumentals in a modern context could be a really fun practice. Sam Hunt did it with Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” a few years back, as did Zach Bryan with Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.” No matter how much you enjoy “Hard To Forget” or “Sandpaper,” it’s hard to argue that each artist used their respective source material creatively.
This is the dividing line between interpolating a classic beat or guitar riff and doing a dull rewrite of a time-honored pop staple.
Besides diluting the listening experience, melody-sampling is dangerously dishonest, camouflaging an artist’s true melodic talents. Shaboozey is probably the best example here. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” may well have been the catchiest country single in 2024 as a whole.
Ubiquitous with that year, you could scarcely walk down the street without hearing the viral single, and deservedly so. Bolstered by J-Kwon’s infectious hook, “Tipsy” had that intangible “it factor,” a magic combination of simple relatability and unbridled danceability that felt immediately destined for
However, it would seem from subsequent (still very popular!) releases like “Amen” or “Good News” that his more original output doesn’t quite live up to that lofty standard. Two years removed from his breakout hit, Shaboozey has released a lot of music, all of it in a similar, folksy spirit as his first smash, and none of it quite channeling the magic of that song. Rather, you hear a lot of Lumineers-y stomp-clap folk-pop, dressed in the same aesthetic as “Tipsy,” but just not in its orbit on vibes or impact.
And to be clear, we’re not just picking on Shaboozey here. Likewise, it’s not a coincidence that even though their stars have fallen precipitously in the 2020s, the likes of Cole Swindell and Chris Young have still enjoyed hit singles on the backs of classic melodies.
But beyond the cynical commercial angle, there’s an even deeper point to be made here: reappropriating old hooks is simply against the spirit of the format.
Country music is about sincerity at heart. There’s a deeply rooted “from the ground up” mentality about it, even if we’re talking about pop-country. Decade after decade, country music has reaffirmed an unspoken social contract to sell the audience something honest and true to life, whether that’s a bar song, a love song, a truck song, or any other time-honored trope you can name.
Sampling as flippantly as your LOCASHes and your Thomas Rhetts undeniably flies in the face of that contract, delivering a low-effort product, lacking both the sincerity of a single inspired creative or the wit of a Nashville writing collective.
There’s a reason why the trailer-trap artists and country DJs are often on the outside looking in of the creative scene. It’s not because those styles are inherently distant from the mainstream zeitgeist (they weren’t for a long time). It’s because they don’t engage with the format the way its traditions expect.
Interpolation has also come into vogue in a decade when it’s never been harder to define what country music is. For lack of any clear country sensibilities, it’s all too easy for young trend-chasers to rubber-stamp themselves as country music ball-knowers with a cheap sample, and therefore deserving to compete in the format without really giving it anything of value.
In short, artists ought to “ask not what your country music can do for you, but what you can do for your country music.”
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, sampling stifles creativity when it’s at an absolute premium.
For the better part of three decades, there’s been a strong copycat culture in this format where the more unproven acts leech on whatever sound is big at the moment. See the bro-country copycats of 2013, the boyfriend-country copycats of 2017, and more recently, the Zach Bryan copycats of 2023.
What worse way is there to disincentivize originality than to allow young acts the privilege of passing off someone else’s work as their own?
Since we’re currently a bit thin on modern “country classics,” we can’t afford for interpolations to take up space at the center of the conversation. If you’re going to make a good song, make it original. If you’re making a bad song, make it original. But be noticed on your own merit regardless.
But even so, there’s a time and a place to homage, and even adapt your influences in original output.
“Miami” aside, Morgan Wallen set a solid example here with “Everything I Love,” and even “Whatcha Know About That.” Even so, it’s become very obvious that the majority of performers are more likely to sample like they’re cheating off someone’s homework rather than working it in reverse to understand the answer.
For the continued well-being of the format, we as audiences ought to give no serious attention to these types of tracks, except to lampoon and repudiate them. The format deserves simply better, as do we as listeners.
