I don’t know about you but I LOVE hip-hop and one of my reasons is that I can trace Ice Cube’s “Good Day” to the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark.” I’m nerdy like that…I can hear Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers and more in the samples hip-hop producers use and it makes me smile. But what really makes me happy is crate digging – finding a new musician buried in a song that I already enjoy. And this week, my dude is Dexter Wansel.

I was interviewing the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, a three-member team who produced Rick Ross’ “Maybach Music” and the remix, featuring Wayne, Kanye and T-Pain, that’s swarming the web, and they told me the redux used a Wansel sample. So I YouTubed Wansel and found out 1) I really like his weird synthy galatical keys 2) his “Life on Mars” was also the sample for Lupe Fiasco’s “The Cool,” which I really like. So…I figured I’d share!

Compare the tracks and hear the samples after the jump! What’s your favorite musical discovery?

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