His first major hit as a producer, Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” featured a sample of The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” The first major hit he rapped on, Twista’s “Slow Jamz,” featured this unforgettable sung-rhymed couplet: “She got a light-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson / Got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson.” His first solo hit, “Through the Wire,” a song about his near-fatal car accident, featured this parallel: “They thought I was burnt up like Pepsi did Michael.” On Keri Hilson’s recent hit, “Knock You Down,” West raps about a relationship saying, “This is bad, real bad, Michael Jackson / Now I'm mad, real mad, Joe Jackson.” Included in Hein’s map of artists who have sampled Jackson are “Good Life,” West’s collaboration with T-Pain that used “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop the Music,” which sampled “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and SWV’s “Right There,” a reworking of “Human Nature.” (The map focuses only on Jackson’s solo work, so Naughty By Nature’s “O.P.P. ,” a take on The Jackson 5’s “ABC,” possibly the biggest hit to use Jackson’s voice, is absent.) "I apparently barely scratched the surface" Hein said. “The rapper Rhymefest did an entire mixtape (“Man in the Mirror”) where he rapped over nothing by Michael Jackson samples.” Hein, who is also an electronic music artist, is writing “Cold Technology, Hot Beats: The Soul of Electronic Music,” a book to be published later this year. Full Article at The State