Vois sur Tom chemin (Les choristes)

In the era of the J Dilla, Kanye west,  DJ premiere and many more music producers who are celebrated for their samples and how they use them, most of the songs that come out are sampled. A good sample can give heart, context, and depth to your song. 

Just like a sample made ignoring the context can get you some backlash, i remember listening to a  negro spiritual and thinking I know this somewhere! 

I came to find it was the intro to “hey mama “by David Guetta and Nicky Minaj, I didn’t know how to feel since i already knew the song and had bopped my head to it a couple of times. 

On the other side, there is that feeling, when you hear a distinct sound from a song and connect the dots, with an older an old song and be like “you this is the song so and so sampled !”

It happened when I found out accidentally when I heard the beginning of burning and looting and was like that sounds like window shoppers by 50 cent!

That’s how I felt when I listened to inkuru by prime and Kinabeat, I was like “Vois sur ton chemin!” The beat was made by the illusionist. 

For some context, between 2005 and 2007, I watched numerously a film called  “Les choristes “ which is basically the story of two friends Pierre Morhonge and Pepinot recounting the life of Clément Mathieu their professor /Animateri, after his death. 

50 / 40 years earlier, Mathieu a failed musician, arrived at Fond de l'Étang ("Bottom of the Pond"),
 a French boarding school for troubled boys, to work as a supervisor and teacher.
The boys were really mischievous and had no interest in Class, their home situation wasn’t any better, although we see little of it in the movie. 

For instance, when he comes he finds Pepinot at the gate who was waiting for his parents to come and pick him up, we later find (spoiler alert! ) that they died in world war 2 as Nazis occupied Germany.

Through music and his child-like humor and personality, the teacher manages to slowly bond with the boys who were being over-punished by the headmaster.
He turns their mocking chant into a choir that sings perfectly, especially Morhange whose talent he discovers, pushes and later becomes a music composer. 

The film made an impact on me, I was almost the same age as most of the protagonists.

The soundtrack “Vois sur ton chemin” really stuck with me after I watched this film, more than 5 times I would say. 

It was the right summary of the film if you ask me and every time I heard it I remembered the goofy moments they had in class. 

If you listen to the lyrics, of "Vois sur ton chemin"it is about troubled youths needing guidance to go on the right path.  

When I heard the song sampled byThe illusionist and produced by Kinabeat & prime for his song inkuru which is about friendship and a reunion gone wrong, leading one of the friends down a path of jail for using a blunt to commemorate their lost time, my eyes lit up. The could easily be a sequel to the film, the theme is the same. 

The song stuck with me, I kept wondering if it was a good coincidence or if the producer knew it when they were sampling the song. It didn't matter tho because for once it felt like the sample and the song are talking to each other, i think that's what they should be 

Clearly not everyone will know the samples in a song, but most songs nowadays are sampled, only the popular ones get noticed like Dj Khaled’s wild thoughts or you name it. 

Samples can be a way of creating encounters making people discover artists they don’t know . 

Our memories are short and we have no time to hear every song ever produced, sampling when done right is a harmony between the old and the current,  

As for the few people who know how it feels, cheers to the freekin' weekend !

g3nz3rt