While the Lil Bub album smacks slightly of a traffic chasing marketing campaign, and Meow the Jewels is a gesture of goodwill (donations to its Kickstarter go to victims of police brutality and neglected animals), previously samples of animals in song have been used for their atmospheric, musical value. The sound of an animal can be symbolic, more evocative or expressive than that of a human’s voice. Take the distant murmurs on Kate Bush’s Moving – 15 seconds of whale song sampled from Songs of the Humpback Whale. In an interview with Sounds, Bush said: “Whales say everything about ‘moving’. It’s huge and beautiful, intelligent, soft inside a tough body.”
It can also be a handy scene-setting device: the nostalgic sound of seagulls squarking through Gruff Rhy’s Shark Ridden Waters, Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You – its tweeting birds replicating a bucolic idyll and the first flutters of fancy, or the clip clop and whinny of reindeer on Sleigh Ride by the Ronnettes. No mention of animal sampling symbolism would be complete without the salacious honk of an elephant on Missy Elliott’s Work It.
It’s not always used as a pleasant reminder of mother nature’s creations. Matthew Herbert’s One Pig – an album that documents a pig’s 20-week life, from birth to brutal slaughter – used the samples for a stark look at the meat industry. It’s a terrifying tool for music’s more malevolent, too – the sound of a predator snarling at the start and end of Butthole Surfers’ Mark Says Alright or HateBeak’s Feral Parrot. The world of EDM offers some savage sampling, too – such as Deadmau5’s use of rattlesnakes, or Raff Riley borrowing the sounds of febrile barking dogs.
The sampling of animals can even have its textural qualities, adding layers that an instrument may not – the cooing pigeons on Panda Bear’s Bro’s, or the quiet chatter of birds flitting throughout Radiohead’s The King of Limbs – during the introduction to Give Up the Ghost, the fade out of Codex, and layered under the flugelhorn (yes, flugelhorn) on Bloom.
