Craig Mack’s ‘Flava in Ya Ear’ Sample Found After 32 Years

For 32 years, one of hip-hop’s most famous sounds was a mystery. The two-note riff that drives Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear” — the 1994 debut single that launched Bad Boy Records and hit No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 — had never been traced to its source. Now sample hunters say they have finally found it.

The discovery comes from the Sample Sanctuary Discord community, whose findings have been shared by the YouTuber ShakerMaker. According to their work, producer Easy Mo Bee built that riff from two isolated guitar notes taken from the middle of a solo in jazz guitarist Melvin Sparks’ 1971 version of “Alone Together,” the 1932 Broadway standard. The notes were slowed down and washed in effects until they were completely unrecognizable.

Easy Mo Bee himself laid the trail years ago. In a 2014 interview he said he made the beat after waking up one morning, working from a stack of records he had bought the day before, and that the riff was a guitar with a huge throw of reverb — two notes that carried the whole song while everything else was built around them. Producers in that era worked hard to disguise their samples, which is why this one stayed hidden for more than three decades.

Mack, the Long Island rapper who passed away in 2018, left “Flava in Ya Ear” as his defining record — and its star-packed remix with The Notorious B.I.G., LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes and Rampage became a landmark of its era. Solving the sample behind it closes one of the great detective stories of 90s hip-hop production.

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Photo: Montclair Film Festival / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)