"When I Get You Alone" by Robin Thicke from the album A Beautiful World. 2003.
Ignore the sultry cover, though the featured song has a bit of its own swagger. With this track, the evolution of music can experienced very compactly. Robin Thicke has sampled quite heavily the disco hit "A Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy, which itself is just Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony reworked for the Soul Era. 1808 to 1976 to 2003, and the end result of these adaptations is a classical groove with hip-hopped vocals belting over it all. It's all very unique, and it wouldn't surprise me if this final link in the chain one day gets sampled itself in the next generation of music.
Of course, huge genres and decades have been skipped over, but in its most basic roots, the tune touches upon popular music from the past 200 years. Disco and funk branched from rock, R&B often has its elements in rap and pop these days, and classical music is the chimpanzee of the evolutionary line, eventually having ragtime, blues, and jazz stem off to form the early rock 'n' roll beginnings. It's all in here, and once you get past the ridiculous uniqueness of it, you can come to appreciate the song for the tribute it represents. To what has been and what has yet to come.
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