Like all art, music has a history of referencing itself. Musical ideas in all different forms are recycled again and again, songs are copied, reworked and parodied. Bits of different songs are recombined to create new ones. One relatively recent example of this is sampling, the taking of parts of actual recordings and altering them to fit into a song, a technique made possible with the advent of recorded music and other new technologies. Another sort of category related to this phenomenon is the cover — when an artist performs a song someone else has written.
Vampire Weekend’s “Step” (2014) is a great example of this collective borrowing and building upon musical ideas, yet it does not fit neatly into any one category. “Step” does not contain a through-and-through sample, nor is it a cover of a song. Instead, it floats in the nebulous space between the two, borrowing a melody or lyric here and there, but never taking actual data from a record or borrowing enough of one song to be considered a cover.
“Step” is more of a re-working of one particular song — Bay Area rap group Souls of Mischief’s “Step to My Girl” (1998). In an interview with NPR, Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig described it as an “alternate song” based on the chorus of the Souls of Mischief song, “Every time I see you in the world, you always step to my girl.” Koenig also borrows a couple of lyrical ideas from the Souls of Mischief track. Koenig begins his song with “Back back way back I used to front like Angkor Wat,” mirroring Tajai’s opening lines on the Souls of Mischief track, “Back back, way back I used to fret that my honey.” The chorus melody in “Step,” namely the “Wisdom teeth are out” bit, is taken from the recurring saxophone line that lends the “Step to My Girl” beat its sense of sentimentality.
But the musical evolution of “Step” doesn’t end with Souls of Mischief. Given the myriad of references in “Step”’s lyrics, having a single musical influence for the song would just be disappointing. The melody Vampire Weekend uses in the chorus dates back to 1972, passing from artist to artist and song to song.
Souls of Mischief sampled the saxophone line in their beat from Grover Washington, Jr., a prominent soul jazz saxophonist and pioneer of the smooth jazz genre. That particular line is from his song “Aubrey” off the album “Soul Box” (1973). Similar to “Step,” “Aubrey” is not a cover in the traditional sense. Grover Washington, Jr. takes the chorus melody from another song — the 1972 “Aubrey” by the soft rock band Bread — and plays it a few times before launching into smooth improvisation.
In short, that Bread chorus turns into a saxophone line in a jazz song, part of which is then taken for a sample in the beat of a hip hop track. Finally, that sequence of notes returns as the chorus melody of another rock song. This progression loops back around yet again with the remix of “Step” on the “Unbelievers” (2013) EP. For the remix, Vampire Weekend invites three guest rappers, Danny Brown, Despot and Heems, who rap a literal interpretation of the phrase “step to my girl,” just like Souls of Mischief did in its track. In this way, the song becomes even more of a reference to the Souls of Mischief song, deliberately mimicking it without actually copying it wholesale.
Vampire Weekend stumbled on this musical family tree somewhat serendipitiously. At first, the band didn’t even realize the main hook they were borrowing was itself borrowed — sampled by Souls of Mischief from a YZ song.
“We had to go clear the samples, and we had to find out where Souls of Mischief gathered all their pieces from,” Koenig said in the NPR interview.
Despite finding this web of connections through luck, it is appropriate that such a range of music influences “Step” because the song itself is an ode to music. While the Souls of Mischief song is about a literal girl, Vampire Weekend uses the word “girl” to represent the music one loves. Souls of Mischief rap a lot about a simple idea, protecting someone you love from “jerks lurk[ing] constantly.” Koenig takes this concept and uses it to describe his relationship to the music that has shaped him as a musician and a person. As in the Souls of Mischief lyrics, the relationship takes on a possessive connotation. Both Souls of Mischief and Vampire Weekend don’t want you to step to their girl.
This notion of a possessive relationship to music is even embedded in the instrumentals on “Step.” In the NPR interview, Koenig describes Souls of Mischief as an influence on his relationship to music, saying he “associate[s] them with the first time that I really started [to] become a music fan as a young teenager.” By adopting their song into his as subtly as he does, he sort of takes possession of Souls of Mischief for himself. The group is his and no one’s going to step to them.
