Song Sample Response – Hope Mitchell

The song I looked up on whosampled.com was “Color of My Lips” by OMI and Busy Signal. The results showed that this song sampled “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by The Four Seasons. When I relistened, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” shows up in the tune/beat at the beginning of the OMI and Busy Signal song. As I further listened to “Color of My Lips,” I began hearing another song I recognized; “Blue Moon” (which has been covered various times, so much so that I am unsure who wrote/sang the original) appears throughout “Color of My Lips” in the tune/beat (in the instruments), although whosampled.com does not say “Blue Moon” was sampled. Overall, “Color of My Lips” is unique because of its original lyrics and the other instruments that were added overtop of the beats from the other two songs; this makes it more of a pop song than the other two more calming older songs. I think “Color of My Lips” uses samples particularly from “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Blue Moon” because they are from the 1960s and earlier, so they bring popular songs from older times back into new songs like “Color of My Lips” (2015); maybe this shows that “Color of My Lips” reaches a broader audience with relevance to all ages. In addition, I think “Color of My Lips” uses these two samples because they are popular, and OMI and Busy Signal likely liked those samples, so they probably assumed that if they were popular, then “Color of My Lips” will be too. Other than that, OMI and Busy Signal might have chosen to use a sample in general because it allows for less work to be done in coming up with their own beat/tune while also letting them create something new out of old material.