Norman Cook – the artist better known as Fatboy Slim – is one of musical history's most gifted samplists: his influential '90s releases bridged underground club culture and mainstream pop music through the masterful slicing and dicing of classic funk, soul and hip-hop samples.
In a recent interview with DJ Mag, Cook shed some light on the story behind the many samples that feature in one of his best-known tunes, The Rockafeller Skank. While the total number of samples in the track is up for debate – Wikipedia says eight, but WhoSampled lists 13 – its most recognizable element is surely the vocal line: "funk soul brother, right about now".
The first piece of the puzzle in the song's creation, Cook's sample chops were inspired by Natural Born Chillers' Rock the Funky Beat. "I was ripping off a record that I was severely impressed by," Cook admits. "It's so clever, because they'd taken Chuck D from a Public Enemy live thing, and he just said 'if you really want to rock the funky beats'. Then somebody had chopped it into syllables and had each syllable on a keyboard."
Cook applied this technique to a spoken introduction to Vinyl Dogs Vibe, a 1997 instrumental hip-hop track from Vinyl Dogs and Lord Finesse. Lifting a few choice phrases from the 20-second prologue and laying down the syllables on his keyboard, he crafted the iconic hook that made The Rockafeller Skank a certified '90s classic, propelling the song to Platinum status in the UK.
While Cook says it "wasn't difficult" to clear most of the track's samples, it was rapper and producer Lord Finesse's vocal that presented a challenge. "The only difficulty was Lord Finesse, because it was a bootleg," Cook recalls. "We went and cleared it with what we thought was the owner, and then Lord Finesse came and said, 'Are you going to pay me for that sample, by the way?' We said, 'Oh, we already paid you', and he went, 'Oh, no... you paid somebody else, and they didn't give me the money.'"
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Cook says that he eventually reached an agreement with Lord Finesse, but the rapper has since expressed regret over how the sample was cleared. In a 2019 interview with 247HH, Lord Finesse recounted a different version of events, claiming that he hadn't even heard the song before signing off the sample and accepting a deal that offered him little in the way of compensation.
"It started from me getting a fax saying 'look man, we'd like to clear this record for this artist, Fatboy Slim, and we used your voice in the hook'," Lord Finesse recalls. "Me being the dude I am, I'm thinking it's hip-hop. To make it worse, they didn't send the record where I could hear the record and say 'oh, that's me!' They just sent that and me not understanding anything and not having an attorney looking at it, I just signed it off."
"That's a big mistake. Mistakes like that you don't usually recover from," he continues. "That record is a big record. That was in so many movies, so many commercials – that's retirement money."
It may offer Lord Finesse some consolation to learn that Cook himself ultimtely received no royalties from the track after signing off 100% of the rights to the numerous other artists that it sampled. "There was four different samples on it we had to clear, and they all wanted 40%, or 50%," Cook told Higher Frequency in 2007. "So we were like, 'you can all have 25%', and there was none left for me."
Earlier this month, Satisfaction Skank, Cook's notorious mash-up of The Rockafeller Skank and The Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction – a fan favourite bootleg that's been a staple of his DJ sets for 25 years – finally received an official release.
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