Sociology of Sampling

Music as Communication

Prof. Oliver-Cretara

Frantz Jerome

Social Impact of Sampling In Music

As sampling in music becomes more and more a global phenomenon, arguments about its authenticity and ingenuity rise in volume. Many listeners and critics do not value the art of sampling, saying it has no viable cultural history, no societal impact. This paper looks to validate sampling's cultural impact by revealing the social events that created the environments for sampling to come about, the global influence and use of sampling, and the social ramifications of sampling.

This paper will create a working definition of sampling types for the sake of clear communication of ideas. There are two types of music sampling: organic and digital. Organic sampling is the act of adopting or appropriating a style of music through physical instrumentation. Digital sampling is the act of adopting or appropriating a style of music via any piece of computerized technology.

Organic sampling has been in existence from the very beginning of recorded human history. Any time a band covers a song composed by someone else, a sampling of some kind is happening. In the case presented in the following passages this paper explores the social events that create the environment for sampling to come about. In 1963, after five years of college at the Trinity School of Music in London, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti returns to his native Nigeria. Nigeria had been under colonial rule since the 1800s, and the upon achieving independence in 1960, maintained the same type of corrupt, mismanaged, and self serving governmental practices. Military rule made Fela's Nigeria a very rigid and conservative country not just politically, but culturally as well, as radio stations played only what the government would allow.

"Music has an important role in bringing about behavioral conformity and in stimulating compliance with social norms…Music has the effect of homogenizing social behavior within groups…" (Brown, pg.4)

This dictatorship-like environment would be its own undoing. Fela was already a talented musician, and upon his return played trumpet in a few highlife (a popular west African jazz/funk fusion with an up-tempo synth-driven sound) and jazz bands. Much of the guitar playing borrowed from the styling of James Brown's band. In 1969, civil war broke out in Nigeria as its southern half sought to secede from the north. The madness that ensued inspired Fela to leave the country for the United States in order to gain international buzz for his band. While in Los Angeles Fela is exposed to the philosophy and doctrine of the Black Power movement and the culture surrounding it. This cultural sampling led to Fela developing a clear understanding of the links between all black peoples of the world. This idea inspired a musical epiphany that would combine all the music of black people: Afro-Beat. Afro-Beat would change Nigeria forever, in the same vein that reggae had changed Jamaica, and with much of the same culturally 'sampled' influence.

"The growing line of resistance in Jamaica reflected the poor's 'bold assertion of a black radical consciousness that challenged the political and moral leadership of the dominant classes. In Africa and Asia, national liberation movements challenged European control.'" (King, pg.27)

A complex fusion of (especially the music of James Brown), Ghanaian/Nigerian High-life, psychedelic, and traditional West African chants and rhythms. Afrobeat also borrows heavily from the native "tinker pan" African-style percussion that Kuti acquired while studying in Ghana with Hugh Masakela. Building a groove layer by layer with interlocking melodies and polyrhythm, highlighted by multiple baritone saxophones and bass guitars, creating a sound heard not only in his present day funk but also later in hip-hop (both recognized as African-influenced music). This organic sampling would infuse the Black Power ideology into his music making it a political weapon for the people of Nigeria. After his time in Los Angeles Fela understood more clearly what struggles faced the people of his native Nigeria, and wrote and recorded songs that spoke to the difficulty of their situation before returning. A piece that speaks to the organic sampling prowess of Fela and his band is the fifteen-minute "Upside Down".

"Music is an important device for creating group-level coordination and cooperation…when such coordination occurs in the context of group musical performance, it tends to create a feeling of equality and unity." (Brown, pg.5)

In hip-hop, digital music sampling is viewed as both a reason for a decline in creativity and also as a means to resurrect old text for exposure to younger generations of listeners. Sampling has made the careers of superstar Hip-Hop producers and DJ's alike. Grandmaster Flash, Kanye West, DJ Premier, and 9th Wonder to name a few. Most fascinating about this selection of musicians is the culture that binds them to their musical practice. Hip-hop is a culture born of struggle, and each of the artists named have all been poor or impoverished at one point in their youth. Evidence suggests that one of the prime factors of an environment that inspires sampling is the feeling of a lack of ownership and access to music. Furthermore, the presence of a looming and seeming insurmountable socioeconomic inequality that pushes an artist toward desperation to express oneself, by any means capable.

"The origins of [digital] sampling lie in club and street parties in the Bronx during the late '70s. DJs would cut back and forth between records on two turntables — excerpting a drum break here, a vocal bit there — as an accompaniment for dancers. The technique was not only cost-efficient for poor urban kids. It also allowed those without musical training (thanks to budget cutting at inner-city schools) to make their own music — folk art for a new generation. Sampling is now such an intrinsic part of black culture that objections to it can sometimes feel like veiled, if unintentional, racism." (David Browne, ew.com)

"This use of sampled sounds is largely motivated by economics rather than aesthetics - getting "good" sounds and the "right" performance from a machine is cheaper and easier than hiring musicians." (Goodwin, pg.270)

In its origins, digital sampling in hip-hop started with looping a break beat (the aforementioned 'cut back and forth between records on two turntables' by Browne). With the flighty and lighthearted disco dying out in The Bronx, a new sound looked to express the tense, pent-up energy in the borough. The instrumental breakdown that occurs during the bridge of most disco songs, and every up-tempo James Brown song, seemed to capture that perfectly. Paying homage to the classics while creating new ones.

"While James Brown often complained that rappers didn't pay him when they sampled his music, Del tha Funky Homosapien says the soul legend should have been grateful for the attention. “That brought him back, actually," Del tells Spinner. "There wasn't anybody thinking about James Brown. The fact that people sampled his music so much was more honor than anything.” Brown’s last Top 10 hit was in the mid '80s but he eventually became one of the most sampled artists in the world, with acts like Ice-T, Public Enemy, and the Fat Boys using pieces of his songs as a foundation for their own derivative works. Del, a frequent sampler himself, says the practice actually introduced Brown to new generations of music fans. "There's a whole time frame of hip-hop that's all based on James Brown," Del says, noting that hip-hop showed music listeners that Brown's music was superior to others." (Pemberton, spinner.com)

R&B super group En Vogue utilized a guitar sample from James Brown's "The Payback" in their 90s hit, "Never Gonna Get It"

In the case of 9th Wonder, (who went from unknown to well known after having two of his sample-heavy tracks asked for by Jay-Z) sampling has been his claim to expression from day one. In the following interview he reveals the context for the creation of his art, and at the end reveals the means for how he got started in the 'game', by downloading a music program illegally, and putting his music on the Internet for free. 9th Wonder went from a young person in his basement making beats for free, to selling beats to Def Jam records for thousands of dollars. This has created a massive influx of money hungry "beat makers" and "producers", whose intent to make beats of quantity over quality has forced law maker to develop copyright laws that limit the ability to sample considerably.

"People started abusing sampling, and it made people more aware of sampling," he says. "And then people got the bright idea that, 'We've got to get some money out of this somehow. There's got to be a law against this.'" (Pemberton, spinner.com)

"…Music copyright reform is needed and, perhaps, inevitable as technology continues to outpace and stress the law just as the law continues to stress and under-perform in balancing the rights/access continuum. Intellectual property should be most narrowly tailored when innovation in the field tends to be highly cumulative…Copyright law must be remixed to achieve an optimal balance between a copyright holder’s exclusive rights and the legal space a second generation innovator needs to build upon existing works in order to create new ones in cumulative creative genres like music." (Evans, pg.1)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

· ‘Sample and Hold’ in On Record Edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Routledge 1990)

· The Intangibility of Music in the Internet Age. Author: Styvén, Maria. Source: PopularMusic & Society, Volume 30, Number 1, February 2007

· Music & Manipulation/ Editors S. Brown & Vogsten, Berghahn Books, 2006

· Reggae, Rastafari, and the Rhetoric of Social Control. Author: By Stephen A. King, P. Renée Foster. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2007

· Contributors: Pat Pemberton for Spinner.com Del the Funky Homosapien Defends the Art of Sampling

Last Edited: 2010-07-05

· Contributors: Kevin Nottingham for kevinnottingham.com “9^th Wonder Defends The Art of Sampling”
Last Edited: 2009-4-28

· Contributors: David Browne for EW.com “No Free Samples?”
Last Edited: 1992-01-24

· http://www.fela.net/bio/

· http://worldmusiccentral.org/artists/artist_page.php?id=1067

· http://africanmusic.org/artists/felakuti.html

· https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ni.html

· Evans, Tonya M., Sampling, Looping, and Mashing … Oh My! How Hip Hop Music is Scratching More than the Surface of Copyright Law (September 9, 2010). Widener Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-26. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1674246

Music As Communication
Prof. Oliver-Cretara
Frantz Jerome

In Defense of Sampling

“They [dj’s, musicians, producers who sample] place authenticity and creativity in crisis, not just of the issue of theft, but through the increasingly automated nature of their mechanisms.” – Andrew Goodwin

Sampling is defined as, ”the selection of a suitable sample for study” by Merriam Webster’s dictionary. Musical sampling is better defined as, the act of taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song. This act has been hailed as the future of music and called theft in the same breath. Which is it? This paper seeks to find the art and romance in sampling in defense of its use and its transformative ability. Is sampling the Devil? No. Not by a long shot, and not by any means. Sampling is the result of ingenuity, appropriation, skill, and innovation working in an organic, collaborative process. In it’s purest forms and with its purest intent, sampling (despite utilizing already produced material) is, “…something new, the mass production of the aura.” (Goodwin, pg.259) This paper seeks to defend sampling by proving its relevance as an art form.

“Reproduction, pastiche, and quotation, instead of being forms of textual parasitism, become constitutive of textuality”- Peter Wollen (Goodwin, pg.258)

One of the main arguments against music sampling is that is it in fact theft of intellectual property. It would appear as though ‘sampling’ as a demonizing act applies only to the technological versions of the technique. If one can recall the musical styling of Chuck Berry, then one can also recall the appropriation of Berry’s sound (and extrapolation of his movements) by Elvis Presley. This is sampling in its simplest, and most easily legible form. In the case of Chuck Berry v. Elvis Presley, clearly sampling won the day, as fewer and fewer people know who Chuck Berry is. Imagine a world where Berry was ‘the King of Rock’. Now wake up. Whilst the Berry and Presley example might delve into cultural sampling, the idea of what sampling is and its effects on society at large still remain true. The inspiration for Berry’s music was experiential for him, and created such a palpable aura that is was used as a blueprint for Presley, but utilized none of Presley’s own intuition or skill. Still, Presley is lauded as the first name in rock & roll, and it has never come to collective consciousness that his whole career is a sample. Hence, it was never demonized collectively. This act of organic sampling proves that the reproduction of the aura requires the aforementioned ingenuity, appropriation, skill, and innovation in order to validate the reproduction. Listen closely to the comparison, and note what you can ‘feel’ from the ‘aura’ presented by the mash-up.




The case for sampling starts with a sample of a statement by Andrew Goodwin. “…New technologies are being used to deconstruct old texts.” (Goodwin, pg.259) This is the art of sampling. This construction of newly inspired texts rooted in the foundation of old texts. Kanye West samples “Through The Fire” by Chaka Khan to speak to the sentiment of surviving a horrific car accident and having his jaw wired shut, and produces “Through The Wire”. West has said that he was inspired by Chaka Khan’s music growing up, and utilized his experience to channel the aura of Khan’s track (about making it through a tough situation) to feed the aura of his track (a depiction of surviving a life-changing event). This digital sampling is the type under the most scrutiny. The sampling of someone’s work digitally allows for a high quality reproduction, essentially, the aura is copied wholly. This lies at the crux of the arguments for and against sampling, as the concern becomes whether listeners of the new material care for the aura of the sampled material. Note the below videos of Chaka Khan and Kanye West, listen for yourself and decide whether the aura of Khan’s lyrics and music are built upon by West, or deconstructed and reconstructed with the original intent forgotten about.




“In the age of mass production, Benjamin stated that the audience is no longer concerned with an original textual moment. In the age of digital reproduction the notion of the “aura” is further demystified by the fact that everyone may now purchase and “original”. (Goodwin, pg.259)

What can be gathered from the above statement is either that younger generations of listeners don’t care about aura, or that they care enough about the aura to take ownership of it. This paper presses that the latter outweighs the former. Proving this ownership aspect of sampling requires only citing how the music industry reacts to the shift in ownership as technology becomes more available to the public. “More radical still is the technology of DAT…It opens up the possibility that consumers will simply make their own perfect copies of CD’s…against which the music industry has mounted a huge and largely unsuccessful campaign.” (Goodwin, pg.259) Not only is the act of sampling artful in it’s intent, but it also aligns itself with a more radical socio-political element when regarding ownership.
The next level of owning the aura of others’ performances is to then sample them skillfully while maintaining artistic integrity. Anyone can take home some ‘aura’, but what can one do with it? It is here where the intent of the sampler is made evident through the technique by which they sample. It is here where the skill comes to play. The skill required when sampling is truly recognized when the musician/producer/DJ challenges the listener. “…The ‘recognition’ involved in knowing how to hear electronic music depends in part on understanding the associations to any given sound.” (Goodwin, pg.266) It’s this ‘understanding’ of how people listen to music that allows a musician sampling to pull specific emotional strings in the listener, with much of the same experiential inspiration that informed the sampled artist. The argument remains, that although all the artistic building blocks are there, where does the skill (often called ‘classical training’) come from? Again, we arrive at a place in the debate where the divide of ‘what skills are valued by whom?’ rears its head.

“We got the records and found a common denominator beat…laid down a beat at 114 b.p.m. [Beats per minute] and slowed down or speeded up the tracks I was going to use…the baseline is original, we’ve got a drum pattern around it…we sampled one not of wah-wah guitar and reconstructed it on keyboards. You wouldn’t be able to find that guitar pattern on any other record.” – Tim Simenon (Goodwin, pg. 267)

“Scratching is actually more creative than sampling. With sampling you are basically limited to a staccato effect whereas a good scratcher can really mess things up.” – Martin Young (Goodwin, pg. 267)

In what way is scratching not sampling? Listen to DJ Shadow’s “Walkie Talkie”, and note that the song is recorded as a take, scratching the whole way through, live. In what way is sampling not equal parts innovating and inspired? The Prodigy’s “The Way It Is” pulls samples, tweaked notes, and modernized bass lines from various sources using various techniques.







“We have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.” (Goodwin, pg.263)

The above statement couldn’t be more antiquated, and couldn’t be more incorrect. As humanity innovates new ideas and new technologies to solidify those ideas, all aspects of culture enter a technological sphere of influence. As we become more technological, as humanity digitizes, our musicians, storytellers, painters, photographers, and eventually our curators become computer programmers at heart. Cory Arcangel’s works sample the data contained in 16-bit video game cartridges, and are being recognized as movies, songs, and stories all at once. Arcangel is a programmer by trade, utilizing his skill in manipulating motherboards, sound, and video cards to make art that speaks to his experience.



There is no true “automation” in art as long as there is the inception of inspiration in said art’s creation. This is the organic process that humanity identifies with the most. It is responsible for our scientific classification apart from all other species. In light of this, it isn’t machines that are connected to funkiness, but the inherent knowledge of the emotional effect of the synth and drum sounds. As life imitates art, art illustrates life in another of DJ Shadow’s introspective pieces, “Building Steam With A Grain of Salt”, and “Devil’s Advocate”. The tracks speak to the effect of music on the emotion of the artist and of the listener, respectively. Sampling vocal material that predates the technology used to sample them by a few decades, the blending of organic humanism and inorganic aura usage speaks to the creator and the audience simultaneously.






In closing, let it be said that sampling has already made a name for itself as an art form. Has sampling communicated across the boundaries of time and space? Has it communicated authenticity across concepts of intellectual property and aura? What has it communicated, and to whom?

“…The majority of fans don’t go to see the artist but to be in the presence of the artist, to share space with the artist.” – Bill Graham (Goodwin, pg.269)

“…To consume the only truly original aura available in mass produced pop – the presence of the star(s). (Goodwin, pg.269)

This paper leaves you with “Pushing Buttons” by DJ Shadow, DJ NuMark, and Cut Chemist. An amazing piece of live sampling, orchestrated through MPC drum pads, mixers, and thirty years of musical history. Note how the machines are ‘played’ by the DJs, not the music itself, note the racial ambiguity of the DJ’s, note that above everything this is live, and there is nothing more authentic than live performance…right? (Best enjoyed viewed/listened from start to finish.)