The Diana Ross & Marvin Gaye Record That 50 Cent and Ja Rule Both Sampled

SAMPLE DNA · August 10, 2026

50 Cent and Ja Rule spent the better part of two decades as hip-hop's most public feud. Diss tracks, interviews, a rivalry that outlasted most beefs in the genre. And yet, at different points in their careers, both of them reached for the exact same soul record.

That record is Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)," the standout single off their 1973 Motown duets album, Diana & Marvin. It started life as a Stylistics song, written by Thom Bell and Linda Creed, but the Ross and Gaye version is the one that stuck around in crates and sample libraries for the next thirty years.

50 Cent's "Ghetto Qu'ran (Forgive Me)," produced by Poke & Tone of Trackmasters, sampled it directly, a street-level narrative track that became one of the most talked-about records of his pre-fame run for naming names from his old Southside Jamaica, Queens crew. Ja Rule and Ashanti's "Mesmerize," produced by Irv Gotti a few years later, interpolated the same melody into something built for radio, a duet aimed at the charts instead of the block.

Same source, two artists who spent years trading shots at each other publicly, two records that don't sound remotely alike. That's what a well-built soul record does: it outlives the rap careers that got built arguing over who flipped it better.

Diana & Marvin is worth knowing beyond the sample, too. Motown paired Ross and Gaye somewhat reluctantly, the sessions were famously tense enough that the two mostly recorded their vocal parts separately, and the finished album still sold over a million copies worldwide and went gold in the UK. It's a strange, compelling artifact: two of the label's biggest stars, pushed together by Berry Gordy, engineered into a duet neither of them was fully sold on making.

Marvin Gaye's catalog is live on Digging in the Sales Crates now, pulling listings across Discogs, eBay, and CDandLP in one search. We don't have a dedicated Diana Ross page yet, but her catalog searches just as easily: original pressings of Diana & Marvin, Gaye's Motown-era solo run, and Ross's own solo catalog are all searchable this minute.

If you're chasing the sample chain, start with the source. The beef, the chart runs, the movie placements: all of it got built on top of a record neither 50 Cent nor Ja Rule wrote.