Why Labi Siffre resented the track that repopularised his work
The world of hip-hop would sound very different without the pioneering sounds of old-school funk and soul. From its earliest origins, hip-hop has used old and obscure soul records to provide samples and formulate beats to rap over. However, as the music developed, the lyrical content that permeated through much of the hip-hop scene began to betray the original ethos of the soul records that laid the foundations for the genre – much to the disappointment of artists like Labi Siffre.
Bursting onto the UK soul scene in 1970 with his eponymous debut, Labi Siffre is perhaps one of the most important and criminally underrated British songwriters of the 20th century. For decades, Siffre dedicated himself to creating innovative funk music with defiant lyricism laced with political messaging and social commentary. Frustratingly, Siffre’s efforts went largely unnoticed by the musical mainstream, though he did receive some hits by proxy after Madness covered his track ‘It Must Be Love’ and reached number four in the UK singles charts.
Siffre stopped creating music in 1998, after the release of The Last Songs as well as his spoken word album Monument. Despite his retirement from music, the early 2000s saw a resurgence in popularity for Siffre, based almost entirely on his 1975 track ‘I Got The…’. The incredible soul track has something of a timeless quality to it, but its resurgence is owed almost entirely to its use as a sample in the Eminem and Dr Dre track ‘My Name Is’.
For those of you who are familiar with that track, you are probably aware of the major role that Siffre’s sample plays in the composition of the song. In fact, the electronic piano riff and bassline lifted from ‘I Got The…’ form the basis of the entire beat and musical backing for ‘My Name Is’. Sampling is a contentious issue for many artists, usually resulting from a lack of permission given by the original artists or a lack of royalties paid to them, and Siffre was no exception here.
Dre and Eminem did actually ask Siffre’s permission to use the sample, but the soul star refused the pair. During the late 1990s, it was a common trope within hip-hop to use wildly misogynistic and homophobic lyrics – indeed, that practice continues to this day. This is where the problems arose, as Siffre is an openly gay artist who did not approve of the lyrics featured in ‘My Name Is’.
“Dissing the victims of bigotry – women as bitches, homosexuals as faggots – is lazy writing,” Siffre once told New Humanist, “Diss the bigots, not their victims. I denied sample rights till that lazy writing was removed”. To get around Siffre’s refusal of permission to use the sample, the team behind Eminem’s track sent the soul singer a ‘clean’ version of the song, which Siffre approved of. When he agreed to let them use the sample in the ‘clean’ version, Siffre unknowingly signed off permission for the original version of Eminem’s track, too.
“I should have stipulated ‘all versions’,” Siffre remembered, “but at that time, knew little about rap’s ‘clean’ and ‘explicit’ modes, so they managed to get the lazy lyric on versions other than the single and first album.” Following the release of ‘My Name Is’, Siffre experienced a rise in popularity for his original track, which got its first official release as a single in 2003 – nearly 30 years after it was originally recorded.
