Here at Tidings of Magpies, we love almost everything about Hip Hop. We love words, we love wordplay, we love poetry. We love a world in which being good with words is valued and bragworthy. We love eloquence and quick-wittedness as much as we lack them ourselves. We love the collaborative spirit of hip hop and we like to imagine all these people working together to create something good, and how it must feel to listen to the final product.

We like the beautiful patchwork quilt quality that goes into crafting a Hip Hop track. Because we love the magpie art of sampling — the art of finding beautiful bits and pieces of music and making them into something else, as a tribute and as a way to share something precious that others might find so, too. We love the idea of “digging through the crates” literally or metaphorically and finding that one moment of a song that resonates, and then building something entirely new by weaving it with other moments of other songs that resonate. And it’s often not the obvious moments, it’s often the in-between moments you might not even notice when you listen to the original song. And because we love connections, when a sample strikes us, we enjoy tracing it back to the original. In fact, we have discovered many precious things that way, and that is what we are sharing now. Songs we have discovered because they were sampled by other songs we like, one good thing leading to another.