D-Vine Intervention

“What a coincidence!” We’ve all heard it before in reference to a striking chance occurrence involving a couple of similar or seemingly related things. Well, my fellow music mate D-Vine is a player in a quite a coincidence that he discovered first and brought to the attention of Stress and myself. We all recognize this as chance and find it slightly humorous if anything with no bitter accusations involved or any foul play suspected (which may be obvious later).

Jay-Z. American Gangster. The album. Late 2007 I believe it was? Yeah. Prior to its release, D-Vine (who does not really keep up with contemporary hip-hop on a crazy level as far as getting leaks and catching everything that comes out and etc.) flipped the same sample that we’d eventually hear in “Sweet” by Jay-Z. D-Vine composed a faster version with heavier drums and it was a pretty dope number. I remember D-Vine using a basement boom box to make the comparison between what he created and that of Diddy, Sean C. and LV who produced Jay’s version. In situations like that, you just have to chuckle and conveniently embrace the phrase “Great minds think alike.” That was that. Same sample being flipped…happens all the time.

Fast forward from around that time to this 2009 summer. Our Box & Won crew is in the lab with D-Vine. We just finished meeting to map out our Allmanact / Box & Won set for an upcoming show and we were going through some beats to use for our project to end the night. D-Vine played something that caught Prince G.’s ear. Prince’s marquee “nod factor” kicked in, as it always does when he’s feeling an instrumental. Very concisely, everyone stated their feeling on the track on we moved on. One week later, The Blueprint 3 leaked. Yes. Jay-Z’s new album. The same sample that D-Vine used and caught Prince’s attention was the skeleton for one of my favorite tracks on The Blueprint 3 album: “Empire State of Mind.” While I thought D-Vine did a more favorable job with the first coincidental matching sample, I did enjoy the Al Shux composition better in this second instance. Still, I found it to be a bit of a trip that D-Vine would flip the same two samples used on two consecutive albums by the same artist who is widely accepted as the premiere hip-hop tastemaker and arguably the greatest hip-hop artist ever might I add. Perhaps Jay-Z should just cut the chase and give D-Vine a call when he starts working on his next album. Talk about “Third time’s a charm.”