ISAAC HAYES
Aug. 20, 1942–Aug. 10, 2008
By Robert ''RZA'' Diggs
Isaac Hayes is an icon. His music has inspired generations. One Isaac Hayes song has made over 20 hip-hop songs. Look at ''Walk On By.'' It's a nice three-minute song by Dionne Warwick, but when Isaac got a hold of it, it became a soulful, pimp-daddy, ride-in-your-car, lean-back, 10-minute song, restructured with organs and a flute. Very few artists can put out classic full-length albums with only four or five songs. Plus, his voice was known to melt the ladies. It was a deep old voice that had magnetism. You're still attracted to it when you hear it. That's what made him a sex god.
First, on a music level, Isaac's music has influenced three generations straight through. He came out in the '60s with the Stax sound and was part of the David Porter writing team. They made music that made hits for a whole slew of artists on that label. But then when he finally broke out into his own solo artistry he became an iconic platinum selling artist, admired and loved by artists of all types. Then when he started scoring movies, he scored the movie Shaft and changed the whole sound of scores. Me and Isaac had a lot of time to talk together because we were buddies, and he told me that when he did Shaft he was nominated for an Oscar that year. And even though he lost to the song ''Windmills In My Mind,'' which is a great song, of course, he said he just felt that his achievement in music was at such a high level because many other sounds started to emulate his music. You'd hear the ''whakuh-whakuh'' sound and ''Shut your mouth, you bad...'' — that’s been done in almost every kind of pop media from commercials to cartoons to other songs. And some people would even say the movie Shaft — no disrespect to Richard Roundtree — wasn't a great film without the music.
And then you look at hip-hop, which comes out years later, and look at how many different artists have sampled his music and emulated the sound over and over. Some artists didn't have a hit record until they sampled Isaac Hayes. One of Wu-Tang Clan's early hits was a song called ''C.R.E.A.M.'' I remember that being the first song to take us to the gold level [of sales] on the Billboard charts. And it was an Isaac Hayes sample of a beat he made for the Charmels. And it's funny because it was the sample in that song that got me a chance to meet him and I remember talking to him about it and I was like, ''Yeah, I sampled your song for the Charmels.'' Once I kinda gave him a little note of what it was, he just knew the whole musical piece of it and started showing it to me. So, to have such a body of work like that and also to be in tune with your body of work, just shows his great musicianship.
He also took it to the acting level with movies like Truck Turner, which he was the lead actor in, combined with other blaxploitation films, of course. Then he came back with I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. He made it as a voiceover on South Park. And even up until the final year of him being on the planet with us, he appeared in the movie Soul Men. He just kept his legacy going.
Hayes, 65, died of a stroke in Memphis.
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