After reading about the Amen Break and the ideas around that sampling and copyright ownership, I found a book called The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Which piqued my interest. I saw it had a few short essays that caught my attention. Here is the reflection and quotes.
An Oral history of sampling From turntables to mashups Kembrew Mcleod
Artists have traditionally borrowed from each other and have been directly inspired by the world that surrounds them.
I think this idea that someone can own an idea, a drum break or a melody is completely taking away from the facts of existence and knowledge sharing.
During the 1970s, hip hop Djs in the south bronx reimagined the record player or turntables as a device that could appropriate and create music, by manipulating vinyl records with their hands, rather than simply replaying complete songs.
This vinyl record manipulation really was the start of sampling, Djs found a perfect spot they loved or enjoyed and looped it up. They were remixing and recreating the song for the crowd.
Today it would simply be too expensive to clear copyright licenses for albums such as Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold Us Back—a record considered so culturally important that The New York Times included it on its list of the 25 “most significant albums for eh last century” and Fear of a Black Planet, which the library of congress included in its 2004 national recording registry.
It’s ironic to think such an important part of the culture within the entire world. Would not be viable to release at a professional industry level. Goes to show the importance within the music industry and society is not artistic endeavours but more so control and financial gain.
The end of an aura
Nostalgia, Memory, And the Haunting of Hip Hop
Mining for past samples and sounds, hip hop hacks technology for self-expression, and, like cyberpunk, hip hop has a global range, Both are part of a globalised network culture that decentralised the human subjects stability in space and time and in which the technologically mediated subject reforms and remixes idea of body normativity.
I think this idea of decentralising the human subjects’ stability in space and time is something I consider to be true. I think humans, ideas and our existence is not stable. To flip a record and sample it, take it and rehash it, we are playing with the ideas of fact and fiction, truth and lies, appropriation and development.
Sampling… is a uniquely post-modern twist, turning folk heritage into a living being, something that transfers more than just DNA. Through sampling, hip hop producers can literally borrow the song that influenced them, replay it, ruse it, rethink it, repeat it, re contextualise it.
This is it, we are making a sound or expression that was sampled from the past a collaborator, bringing it into a living breathing thing. Not a non-malleable listening experience.
McLuhan once declared that an individual is a “montage of loosely assembled parts,” and furthermore that when “you are on the phone or on the air you have no body.” Technology dismembers the body. Our media might be “extensions of ourselves in McLuhan’s terms, but they’re also prosthetics, amputating parts as they extend them.
media being a prosthetic is also interesting to the ideas of hip-hop. When sampling and creating the ideas become on longer human, and when creating and flipping records the tools and media become an extension of ourselves, these machines can become part of the representation of the creatives, such as J Dilla and his MPC 3000.
Weingarten draws a lengthy and effective analogy between records and the body, using samples as organ transplants. Tales of transplanted organs causing their recipients to adopt the tastes and behaviours of their dead donors read like the “meatspace” anxieties of cyberpunk: Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples?
So when we sample, are we being inspired by the motives, emotions and energies of the artist within the record. I THINK YES! what a great quote, completely true.