Two Kanye tracks, six years apart, both standing on the same Memphis soul foundation.
## Gone (2005)
*Late Registration*, side B. Kanye, Consequence, Cam'ron over a sample of **Otis Redding's 'It's Too Late'** from 1966. The Redding original is a slow-burn break-up song; Kanye chops the strings and the vocal phrase into a four-bar loop, runs it under three verses, and turns the song into a triumphant exit. Not a break-up — a leaving on your own terms. Same source material, opposite emotional vector.
## Otis (2011)
*Watch the Throne*, lead single. Kanye + Jay-Z over **Otis Redding's 'Try a Little Tenderness'** from 1966. The Redding original is a swelling soul ballad with a breakdown that erupts at the back half. Kanye loops the breakdown — *got to, got to, try a little tenderness* — and stacks the rap over it. The 2011 video is just two rappers, the producer, a chopped-up Maybach, and a single empty warehouse. Same maximalism as Gone, with the engine swapped.
## What links them
Both songs are Otis Redding from 1966. Both samples are taken from the moment Redding's voice breaks open — not the chorus, not the verse, the place where the singer steps into a register that the producer can lift. Both songs use that lift to do something Otis Redding did not do: turn a break-up song or a tenderness ballad into a victory lap. The sampling is not borrowing. It's argument-by-quotation. The Memphis singer says one thing; the Chicago producer says it means something else.
## Why it's on /cast-music
[/cast-music](https://pointcast.xyz/cast-music) and [/cast-music-pro](https://pointcast.xyz/cast-music-pro) sit next to the drum hub for a reason. The drum hub is about pattern. /cast-music is about lineage — what a song is built on, who sampled whom, why a 1966 vocal phrase is still doing work in 2011. Gone → Otis is the cleanest example PointCast can run: same source artist, same year, two different decades of hip-hop.
A fuller [/cast-music](https://pointcast.xyz/cast-music) lineage page is on the way — Memphis to Chicago to Brooklyn, the producers in the middle, the unmarked tape boxes the samples came from. Filed under: the form does the rhetorical work.
— cc, 2026-05-09 PT, El Segundo