90s rhetoric about the art of sampling - what's the verdict a decade on?

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Sampling was in many ways THE musical technique of the 90s and the underpinning of hip hop, drum and bass and most house in that period.

There was a lot of rhetoric about sampling, which I am too lazy to source and reference, mostly about how it wasn't simply 'stealing' but was recontextualising and changing the original and therefore a thoroughly postmodern means of making music.

A decade on and it's amazing, what with the changes in technology used, how little obvious sampling there is in those styles of music anymore. Hip hop is nearly always keyboard-driven and virtually no-one samples drum loops anymore because tastes have moved towards 'smaller' more precise drum sounds.

So is sampling a historical artefact or is it here to stay? And do people still believe it is as valid a technique as original composition?

― Jacob (Jacob), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 02:25 (twenty years ago)

Haven't there been a lot of recent court decisions that have made sampling much more expensive?

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 02:33 (twenty years ago)

That's right, Hurting. In fact, a U.S. district court in Nashville certainly struck the right chord about the force of copyright law with a ruling that bits of a commercial recording may not be stolen for use in new music.

The ruling gets to the heart of copyright protection, which is of great importance to the music industry in Nashville.

A jury decided that the title track to late rapper Notorious B.I.G.'s album Ready To Die violates copyright law because it includes portions of a song by the Ohio Players without permission or paying royalties. The jury awarded $3.5 million in punitive damages on top of at least $733,000 in direct damages plus interest. Further, Judge Todd Campbell ruled that the 1994 album and individual song of the same name may not be played on the radio, sold in retail stores or downloaded. Campbell said such action was needed to bolster the integrity of the copyright law.

― gear (gear), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 02:48 (twenty years ago)

And I'd imagine those sampling royalty fees are especially steep for upstart rap labels (as opposed to, say, Kanye)

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 03:14 (twenty years ago)

If by "sampling" you mean the use of beats or melodies from older music that are then used as a creative element in new music, especially "rap", you're right. It is indeed a process that is subject to broad interpretation and debate.

― gear (gear), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 03:22 (twenty years ago)

in the broadest sense, it's still called 'sampling' no matter how small/precise the sounds are.

see the overwhelming dominance of mpcs, software samplers, romplers, etc... i haven't played an actual drum since like 1998.

but i guess that's not what we're talking about.

― friendship7, Wednesday, 29 March 2006 04:25 (twenty years ago)

thanks for the info, gear. you rock!

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 04:34 (twenty years ago)

Sample-driven songs currently in the US top 40:

Kanye West - "Gold Digger" (Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman")
Rihanna - "S.O.S." (Soft Cell's "Tainted Love")
Black Eyed Peas - "Pump It" (Dick Dale's "Miserlou")
Jamie Foxx - "Unpredctable" (New Birth's "WildFlower")
Busta Rhymes - "Touch It" (Daft Punk's "Technologic")
The Pussycat Dolls - "Beep" (Electric Light Orchestra's "Evil Woman")

― The Good Dr. Bill (The Good Dr. Bill), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 04:40 (twenty years ago)

thx gear!

― j blount (papa la bas), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 04:43 (twenty years ago)

np, guyz! : D

― gear (gear), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 04:46 (twenty years ago)

xpost to Dr Bill, it's not that it's disappeared, but you have to agree that it's nowhere near as omnipresent...

― Jacob (Jacob), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 06:17 (twenty years ago)

sampling's more an eighties thing than nineties surely (for obv reasons)

― j blount (papa la bas), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 06:29 (twenty years ago)

ihttp://www.popcomm.co.uk/events/sampling.jpeg

― timmy tannin (pompous), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 06:56 (twenty years ago)

I think if anything sampling has become less of a big deal and more of just another tool to create music. Songs that use samples now tend to use them in different ways than they once did as well.

― Period period period (Period period period), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 07:23 (twenty years ago)

sampling has become a kind of oneupmanship about who can get their record company to write the biggest check

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 07:26 (twenty years ago)

its potential is but a fraction tapped at this point in time

― jkl, Wednesday, 29 March 2006 08:00 (twenty years ago)

The most interesting smpling going on now is the uncleared stuff (People Like Us, John Oswald, Jason Forrest, Negativland) -- and the least interesting sampling going on now is the uncleared stuff (Tape Beatles, 18 bazillion self-annointed Freelance Hairdresser copycats).

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 08:52 (twenty years ago)

when did hip hop start moving away from obvious sampling? With G-Funk?

― splates (splates), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 09:08 (twenty years ago)

(a) when De La Soul couldn't get all the samples cleared for De La Soul Is Dead and subsequently released the Smiley Smile of hip hop.

(b) when Gilbert O'Sullivan beat Biz Markie in court.

(c) when Clinton made certain of his rhythm tracks available for sampling at a reasonable cost; thus G-Funk, in a lot of ways.

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 09:13 (twenty years ago)

Sampling is more prevalent than ever, and is the main source of making music. it's just that none of you can tell, because now it's called "digital recording".

― Yoo Doo Nut (donut), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 09:17 (twenty years ago)

Kanye Weest is all sampling, Beyonce, Timbaland, sampling melody / looping etc is still just as prevalanet in Hip-Hop.

Dance music..recent sample based tracks. hmm
Daft Punk - Robot Rock
Eric Prydz and any other inumerable awful prog house tracks over using a single lopo form some old MOR 80s pop...

― Savin All My Love 4 u (Savin 4ll my (heart) 4u), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 22:05 (twenty years ago)

That's right, Yoo DOo Nut. As a matter of fact in digital recording, the analog signal of a motion-picture/sound is converted into a stream of discrete numbers, representing the changes in air pressure (chroma and luminance values in case of video) through time; thus making an abstract template for the original sound or moving image.

― gear (gear), Wednesday, 29 March 2006 22:14 (twenty years ago)

That latest album by Jason Forrest "Shamelessly Exciting" is damn wonderful. Although it's pretty much 100% sampling in the 80's Coldcut style, it doesn't rely too much on the strengths of the original material to carry it.

― everything, Wednesday, 29 March 2006 22:18 (twenty years ago)

With G-Funk?

Absolutely not! The G-Funk genre was awash with samples from P-Funk (where it got its name from).

― Chewshabadoo (Chewshabadoo), Thursday, 30 March 2006 06:03 (twenty years ago)

gear otm

― j blount (papa la bas), Thursday, 30 March 2006 06:05 (twenty years ago)

I think technological progression and the movement toward the PC have put a damper on a lot of clear passage-lifting sampling. For a while, multi-bar sample collage was one of the main things the technology enabled. But then, with things moving increasingly toward PCs, we saw the rise of a lot of tools that have made sample collage seem old had -- software synthesizers mean you can more easily craft your own sound, digital signal processing means you can reshape your sound sources into unrecognizable states, and detailed sequencing means you can reshape both into your forms rather than working the samples themselves. So I think that accounts for some of the diminishing of traditional long "sampling" in certain genres.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 30 March 2006 17:58 (twenty years ago)

I mean, in something like undie hip-hop it's still ridiculous sample-heavy (guys like Madlib and DM), whereas in lots of electronic music people have ... well, they haven't given up on sampling, but now they're more interested in processing micro-samples into something else entirely.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 30 March 2006 18:00 (twenty years ago)

"processing micro-samples into something else entirely'

i think that this should be thought of as sampling though -- noone would call what todd edwards does NOT sampling, but it is certainly (and thankfully) worlds removed from looping a funky bassline or something, NAHMEAAN?

― hfjkds, Thursday, 30 March 2006 19:15 (twenty years ago)

Pop music right now has a woeful funky sampled bassline shortage.

― A Licky Boom Boom Down (R. J. Greene), Thursday, 30 March 2006 19:58 (twenty years ago)

Does anyone remember how in the 1950s, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released a song, "The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 and 2)", which featured samples of various then-popular songs, all taken out of context from their original material and used as answers to a wacky reporter's question about spaceships from another planet? Goodman would later make a career out of similar "break-in" or "snippet" records, including such recordings as "Mister Jaws" and "Energy Crisis '74," and is today considered one of the fathers of pop music sampling.

― gear (gear), Thursday, 30 March 2006 20:01 (twenty years ago)

the reason why samples are no longer used is caused by law suits and absurd pricing.

sample could be used with common sense, fair use, but the music industry is full of greedy bastards so...

― Marco Raaphorst, Saturday, 1 April 2006 17:36 (twenty years ago)

Gear and Blount are killing me on this thread.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 1 April 2006 17:45 (twenty years ago)

three years pass...

can anybody link or refer to some more popular articles/rhetoric on sampling etc. from this time period? transcripts would be much appreciated.

― Lowell N. Behold'n, Thursday, 3 September 2009 17:34 (sixteen years ago)

that negativland book re: U2 was full of articles/court docs etc... have they put the book online? (if someone else has, they probably wouldn't have a problem with it)

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 3 September 2009 17:35 (sixteen years ago)

there was a faber and faber book called Will Pop Eat Itself? that you should be able to get used on amazon for a buck.

― dan selzer, Thursday, 3 September 2009 17:40 (sixteen years ago)

http://www.negativland.com/news/?cat=6

A lot of its online.

― Alex in SF, Thursday, 3 September 2009 17:50 (sixteen years ago)

the thesis of 'Will Pop Eat Itself' was basically that American sampling was magpie theft out of necessity, not much creativity or thought going into the samples, while UK things like MARRS & Pop Will Eat Itself and the JAMS were brilliantly thoughtful, revolutionary & subversive. I get a little tired of that thesis, but it's still one of the bigger overviews from the early years, and there were some parts of this book that came back to me regarding the US / UK sampling divide when mashups hit

Wendy J Gordon's "Fair Use As Market Failure" from 1992, on the Betamax case, is the legal opinion from which many people built their Fair Use argument. It's very readable for legal writing, she knew she was clarifying an important case and wanted her idea to travel to the widest audience, and it did, catching fire 10 years later in the discussion on music sampling. anyone writing on this topic who wants to skip the subsequent layers of nonsensical interpretation (i.e. people like Girl Talk going off in interviews that what they do constitutes 'Fair Use'), it is worth a trip to the library to find yourself a copy (or maybe it's reprinted in Negativland's "Fair Use"? it's been 15 years since that thing shipped)

http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html
http://www.ccutler.com/ccutler/writing/plunderphonia.shtml
http://www.vergemusic.com/description.cfm/ProductID/1215/Title/Musicworks%25252D60%25252DMagazine%2525253A%25252DPlunderphonia%25252D%25252526%25252DVox/type/search/Search/john%252520cage
Resonance Issue 5.1: "The Sampler on Trial" Magazine / CD, 1996

― Milton Parker, Thursday, 3 September 2009 18:58 (sixteen years ago)

Decent list of law journal articles on the subject going back to the early 90's at the bottom of this page: http://www.superswell.com/samplelaw/lawyers.html

― dad a, Thursday, 3 September 2009 19:43 (sixteen years ago)

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