Billy Squier's "The Big Beat" is one of the most sampled recordings in hip-hop history. Its monstrous, John Bonham-esque drums, performed by the late
Bobby Chouinard (whom Squier dubbed "Mr. Big Feet"), are embedded in rap classics spanning from UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne" to Jay-Z's "99 Problems," additionally crossing over to the pop charts via Britney Spears' "Oops! I Did It Again,"
Alicia Keys' "Girl on Fire" and many others.
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Squier wrote "The Big Beat" for his 1980 debut solo album The Tale of the Tape. The album earned little notice from Squier's target arena-rock audience, but "The Big Beat" captured the attention and imagination of hip-hop pioneers like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run-D.M.C. and Big Daddy Kane, all of whom sampled Chouinard's performance (overdubbed with the sound of Squier's hands pounding the side of a trap case) on seminal rap recordings. You can isolate Chouinard's drums here in KORD to hear them in their native habitat: producer Eddy Offord's remote studio in Woodstock, N.Y.
At the time of publication in September 2023, "The Big Beat" has been sampled on close to 325 different releases, per WhoSampled. "[Squier's] definitely someone who helped mold and shape hip-hop with his music," Big Daddy Kane told The New York Post in 2013. "I would put him in the category of James Brown, the Honeydrippers and Chic. He gave the B-boys and B-girls a track to dance to. But it would only be a DJ or an MC who knows who Billy Squier is."
Squier –– who followed "The Big Beat" with another much-sampled hit, "The Stroke" –– is sanguine about the record's unique place in music history. "I'd always envisioned ‘The Big Beat' leading off The Tale of the Tape with the BIGGEST drumbeat the rock world had ever heard," Squier wrote on his website in 2013. "I knew I had something good… but I had no idea just how good."
