“Look at how every great poet made culture… It’s all about collage. It’s about taking the bits and pieces of your influences and forging them into something newer and stronger.” – Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian
“You could say that all humans are sampling machines. We all learn by taking in what we hear and see and trying to imitate it, and output it again. That’s how we learn to speak. That’s how we learn to paint and make music as well.” – Matt Black, co-founder, Coldcut
“Whatever interests me, whatever I love, I wish to make it my own.” – Igor Stravinsky, 20th century composer
The role of sampling in the myriad musical styles and genres it finds use, is one born purely of a creative methodology, a process to attain a desired creative outcome. As McLeod & DiCola (2011) assert “Sampling is a form of the fine arts practice of collage, but one that is done with audio tools rather than scissors and glue.” This creative practice has indeed become a medium within which musical styles and genres are based and cultural forms are developed. However, restrictions on creativity, of which sampling has become a key resister, are stifling the development of both individual and collective cultural forms and pose tangible implications for our broader cultural freedoms as we move further into the 21st Century.
Appropriation, aside from playing a central role in learning and psychological development, and the biological evolution of life more broadly, has found use in cultural and artistic mediums since the earliest human utterances. McLeod & DiCola (2011) note a multitude of documented historical examples in European classical music; in the works of Brahms and Mendelssohn appropriating elements of Beethoven’s work, Mendelssohn appropriating Wagner, Mahler from Brahms, and so on. Further examples of appropriation in performed music as present through to the 20th century. Woodie Guthrie’s I Ain’t Got No Home, a reworking of the Baptist hymn This World is Not My Home, is an example of how appropriation can be used as a creative act to rework compositions to affect the opposite social and political impact then intended from the appropriated composition, in this case better working conditions during the Great Depression in the US (McLeod & DiCola 2011).
The act of using pre-recorded sonic material to create new artistic forms began not long after the advent of recorded sound technologies, particularly phonograph technology. In 1920, Stefan Wolpe performed a playback of eight gramophones at varying speeds, paving the way for similar works throughout the 1920’s including works by the French composer Darius Milhaud (McLeod & DiCola 2011). These early experiments with sound collage would become central creative elements in the future of sonic art and music, evidenced in the emergence of the Musique Concrète movement of 1940’s and 50’s Europe, in which technologies such as magnetic tape (see Fig 1), developed with the assistance of experimental musicians such as Pierre Schaeffer, expanded upon the capability and accessibility of manipulating recorded sound (McLeod & DiCola 2011).
Fig 1: Pierre Schaeffer manipulating magnetic tape on the Phonogène, 1948 – Source: Wikipedia
Schaeffer’s 1948 work Étude aux chemins de fer, an assemblage and juxtaposition of magnetic tape recorded railway train sounds, created a self described “concert of noises” broadcast over French radio. The art historian Glen Watkins notes that the editing techniques of splicing and overlay were by definition akin to notions of collage investigated in painting, literature and other art forms (McLeod & DiCola 2011). Meanwhile in the US, phonograph technology was pushed to the extreme by John Cage, exemplified in his 1952 work Imaginary Landscape, in which he crafted a densely layered work assembled from a range of phonograph recordings performed on gramophones.
The experimentations of these early sound artists using recorded sound as a creative medium would grow to influence the use of sound in radio, film and television. However, the tangent which would lead ultimately to Instrumental hip hop began in the late 1950’s, when broadcasts from US radio disk jockeys began influencing dance party disk jockeys in Jamaica. One such DJ, Count Machuki, began ‘toasting’ over tracks he was playing – essentially chants, comedic banter, rhymed storytelling and other vocalisations – appropriating and expanding upon the vocalisations from US radio DJs. These Jamaican DJs soon found roles in dance party performance collectives known as ‘sound systems’ in Jamaica (also known as ‘mobile discotheques’) through the 1960’s and Jamaican sound engineers began producing backing tracks known as ‘versions’ that could be used by DJs for ‘toasting’ over within the sound systems (see Fig 2).
Fig 2: An example of disk jockeying and toasting in a sound system in Kingston, Jamaica, c late 1960’s early 1970’s – Source: Inity Weekly
The art of producing these ‘versions’, as pioneered by sound engineers such as King Tubby, Lee Perry and Scientist through the late 1960’s, grew to inform the musical genre Dub, an instrumental derivative of Reggae, signaling the genesis of the modern remix (McLeod & DiCola 2011). Here we see the first modern resemblance of Instrumental hip hop, something that would later provide the backbone of Hip hop music. The development of Beatmatching by Francis Grasso, with the aid of Alex Rosner’s pioneering headphone mix technology, further expanded the performative creative capabilities of DJs using duel-turntable setups.
Meanwhile, block parties were becoming increasingly popular in the US in the 1970’s, echoing 1960’s Jamaica, and techniques used by sound systems in Jamaican Dub were adapted to the increasingly disadvantaged and marginalised area of South Bronx, New York (see Fig 3). Disadvantaged youth were drawn to the sound systems, graffiti (see Fig 4) and b-boy/girl dance, empowered to move away from gang culture and into the creative world of sound systems and emerging hip hop culture by pioneering youth collectives such as Zulu Nation.
Jamaican immigrants such as DJ Kool Herc, pioneered the development of distinctive local New York styles from toasting over sampled “break” beats from 1960’s and 70’s funk recordings. These “breaks” – sections within individual tracks in which all instrumental elements would drop out leaving the rhythm section, often only the drum kit, to fill time until the rest of the instrumentation returned in a “break-in” – were continuously looped by DJs using two records on separate cassette decks or turntables (Katz 2004), creating the basis of the distinct rhythm of Hip hop music within the broader Hip hop culture in late 1970’s New York.
Fig 3 & 4: Scenes of South Bronx and Graffiti, an element of Hip hop culture, New York, late 1970’s early 1980’s – Source: Wild Style, 1982
As T La Rock explains of mixing two records back and forth in McLeod & DiCola (2011); “Once the break beat ended [on one record], we used what’s called a cross fader on the mixer to bring in the same beat [on the other record]… That’s how we extended the break beats and made a longer piece.” Aided by the increased accessibility of digital sampling machine technology, short samples of drum kit beats played during these “breaks”, known as “break beats”, could be more expansively copied, looped and replayed to form the basis of new artistic works. Specific break beats became popular recurring samples within Hip hop music by the early 1980’s, such as the “Amen break”, originally sampled from the track Amen Brother, recorded in 1969 by The Winstons, and the “Funky drummer” break, originally sampled from James Brown’s Funky Drummer released in 1970.
Throughout the 1980’s, Hip hop music grew more diverse and the use of sampling grew more complex with the advent of more sophisticated sampling machines, enabling many samples to be layered and allowing for more complex compositional structures. As McLeod & DiCola (2011) explain; “Whether it was cassette decks, turntables, or-later-digital samplers, Hip hop artists made their electronic equipment do things for which the equipment was not originally intended, opening up new creative possibilities in the process.” The original 6-second sample of the ‘Amen break’ and it’s derivatives would spawn an entire subgenre known unsurprisingly as Break beat, in which original break beats would be looped at an increased tempo, which in turn significantly influenced genres such as Jungle and Acid House.
Meanwhile through the 1980’s, artists such as Christian Marclay continued experimenting with physical mediums of recorded sound. Marclay’s work literally involving the physical splicing, cutting and reassembling of vinyl records for simultaneous playback, dissecting the relationship between sampling as process and medium. Almost all of the source material for Marclay’s vinyl splicing works were non-original and involved highly invasive processes of appropriation.
Instrumental hip hop itself, etymologically referencing the origins of its sampled break beats, baselines and production culture more than other compositional elements, developed from the works of DJs gaining notoriety as specifically instrumental in their own right. An example is found in the work of the production collaboration between Double Dee and Steinski, in which a series of Hip hop-derived, sample-based collages were produced; Lesson 1: The Payoff Mix (1983), Lesson 2: The James Brown Mix (1984), Lesson 3: The History of Hip Hop Mix (1985) and The Motorcade Sped On (1987). The series featured recorded sound samples from spoken word, radio broadcasts, films, popular music and television, set to a collage of popular Hip hop breaks. Though not widely commercially successful, this specifically ‘instrumental’ Hip hop series proved influential for artists such as DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist and Coldcut into the 1990’s.
The influence of sample-based rhythm-oriented works into the mid-late 1980’s and the geographic ties of Instrumental hip hop to the US west coast are evidenced in the production work of the Dust Brothers. Originally creating ‘instrumental’ sample-based Hip hop recordings popular in Los Angeles night clubs in the late 1980’s, their extensive and innovative use of sampling helped establish the method as an artistic medium itself (LeRoy 2006), contributing their unique densely-layered sampling technique to several productions including; Tone Lōc’s Lōc-ed Ater Dark, recorded 1987-88 and the Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique, recorded 1988-89, works defined by the Dust Brothers sampling methods (LeRoy 2006), paving the way for the popularisation of what we know of as Instrumental hop hop into the 1990’s.
Simultaneously to the Dust Brothers production contributions in the US, the distinctly ‘down-tempo’ nature of mid-1990’s Instrumental hip hop was being conceived in Jamaican dancehall and dub influenced sound systems in Bristol, UK in the mid 1980’s (see Fig 5 & 6). The Bristol sound systems had developed a taste for more ‘down tempo’ sample-based music. Bristol sound systems such as Wild Bunch, began developing unique local styles providing the genesis of the Trip Hop genre. This beat-driven, atmospherically layered, down-tempo style was popularised by successful commercial releases by artists Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, in turn further popularising the use of sample-based music into the mid 1990’s.
Fig 5 & 6: A block party in Bristol, UK, 1986 and a Bristol sound system, 1985 – Source: The Wire, 2007 (via Red Lines)
However, the term ‘Trip hop’, allegedly coined by a UK magazine in 1994, was initially used to describe Mo’ Wax records releases at the time, including the 12minute “In/Flux” single by DJ Shadow in 1993, in which sample-based music was used to gently layer samples of spoken word, instrumentation and mix tempos. However, the commercial success of artists such as Massive Attack usurped the application of the Trip hop term to Mo’ Wax releases and the works of artists in the style of DJ Shadow would later be described from within the US as ‘Instrumental hip hop’, perhaps an etymological reference to the origins of it’s sampled break beats, baselines and production culture. Though the terms ‘Instrumental hip hop’ and ‘Trip hop’ are often used interchangeably.
The application of Instrumental hip hop as a definable genre became widely known with the commercially successful release of Joshua Davis’ (aka DJ Shadow) full-length album Endtroducing….. in 1996. A self-proclaimed attempt at creating an album entirely from samples, Endtroducing….. acts as a temporal museum of the beats, timbres and spaces of western recorded sonic history, aligned to the pitch and rhythm of human history. In much the same fashion as Double Dee and Steinski’s Lessons series, samples of everything from film to spoken word are layered atop seamlessly spliced and looped down-tempo grooves (Rashid 2005), facilitated through the use of an AKAI MPC60 digital sampler/drum machine (see Fig 7) and a pair of turntables (Miller 2008).
Fig 7: The AKAI MPC60 digital sampler/drum machine, as used on DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., 1996 – Source: Wikipedia
If Endtroducing..… is a museum of sonic history, then the track The Number Song is an exhibit of funk drum breaks. 16 individual tracks were sampled to create The Number Song, a virtual tour of some of the most popular break beats in hip hop, referencing the funk beat-oriented sample-based work of Double Dee and Steinski in their 1987 release; Lesson 3: The History of Hip Hop Mix (Rashid 2005). Through the use of a diverse range of samples, Davis’ work, whilst remaining predominantly down-tempo and instrumental, interchangeably strays into genres reflecting this range of source material; jazz, electroacoustic, soul, metal, rock, funk, etc.
This tour through sonic history itself has direct physical links to the initial creative act. Davis’ source material is obtained through a process known as “digging”, the act of searching through record stores and recorded music caches for recorded sounds (see Fig 8), specifically vinyl (Rashid 2005). In the case of Endtroducing….., almost all of the source material was obtained from the basement vinyl collection of a single Californian record store. Here we find the artist analysing the explosion of modern music, reinterpreting it and expressing it in new creative forms. In the work of Davis, sampling became more than just a creative methodology; it was the sole creative medium.
Fig 8: DJ Shadow amongst the basement cache of recorded music in a record store in California, US – Source: Scratch, 2001
Throughout the late 1990’s and 2000’s the term Instrumental hip hop found application to the works of many artists who found moderate to widespread commercial success, such as; RJD2, MF Doom, Madlib, J Dilla/Jay Dee, Diplo, Alchemist, Cut Chemist, DJ Babu, Blockhead, Pete Rock, Premier, Danny!, Nujabes, Wax Tailor, Jake Uno and others. Many of these artists simultaneously produced both collaborative non-instrumental works and specifically instrumental works.
Artists increasingly incorporated samples into their works and the number of artists creating purely sample-based works exploded (Katz 2004). By 2000, many artists were releasing commercially successful recordings comprised of as many as 3,500 samples in the case of The Avalanches debut album “Since I Left You”. Thought source material for sampling isn’t always found in works or recordings to which the copyright is not owned by the artist employing its use, as evidences in various works by Portishead.
Sampling as a medium beyond a creative method has solidified in sonic culture today, as sonic artists reflect upon and reinterpret the history of recorded sound and its social, political and cultural contexts, many choosing to work within sampling as a medium itself, often grouped under terms such as Mashup and Plunderphonics (Miller 2008). However, the creative medium of sampling can be a dangerous one for artists to work within given current state restrictions on the use of intellectual and physical/digital cultural material (Lessig 2004). Modern copyright law implies to both artists and patrons that the art of sampling and the creative process behind it is in some way illegitimate or even illegal, in the absence of a licensing agreement.
Copyright law was introduced in the US in the 18th century to protect ownership of intellectual property, with the US constitution requiring the length of copyright law to be limited, so after a predetermined amount of time the work would fall into the public domain. However, after remaining virtually unchanged for around 150 years, the last forty years has seen the US Congress extend the scope of copyright law on no less than eleven occasions (Lessig 2001). Many such extensions have been granted after strong and sustained lobbying from wealthy and powerful copyright holders. As Lessig notes; “We have gone from a regime where a tiny part of creative content was controlled, to a regime where most of the most useful and valuable creative content is controlled for every significant use.” (p. 107, Lessig 2001)
The effects these increased restrictions had on the use of copyrighted source material in sample-based works is diverse, affecting everyone from the specific individual practicing artist to the broader cultural sphere more generally. One effect was the increase in licensing clearance fees; All 105 samples used on the Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique were cleared in 1989 for around $250,000. “Most of the samples used on Paul’s Boutique were cleared, easily and affordably, something that would be unthinkable in today’s litigious music industry.” (LeRoy 2006).
By the late 1990’s, it became increasingly difficult for artists, particularly those publishing works on smaller or independent record labels, to clear source material used in samples (Lessig 2004). This in turn led to the alteration of many artistic works, including Cut Chemist’s Lesson 6: The Lecture, released in 1997. The album the track appears on had to be re-released several occasions, each time to remove specific samples from the track deemed to have infringed copyright law for which licensing fees could not be burdened.
Fig 9: An explanation of various Creative Commons licenses available – Source: Master New Media
This increased imposition of state restrictions on creativity can be damaging to not only individual artists practices, but culture broadly. Helfer & Austin (2011) explored the notion that modern expansive copyright law may in fact infringe upon human rights. While others, such as Griffiths & Suthersanen (2005) in editing Copyright and free speech, explore how copyright is restricting free speech. Such impositions of state restrictions upon human rights and free speech restrict the freedom of culture to flourish within and enrich the affected populace.
Indeed through even the smallest of research in this area, one inevitably observes an irony, that it is the commercial music industry that fails in clearing the biggest copyright of all; the appropriation of artistic styles and techniques born of the struggle of cultural minorities in creating their own interpretations of their unique social, political and economic situations.
Restrictions on creativity may be threatening emerging cultural-sonic forms and entire genres, such as Mashup, however appropriation and sampling as creative methodologies are not experiencing a decline. In spite of legislative measures to monetise creativity and the collective and shared ideas of humanity, sampling is experiencing exponential growth (Rimmer 2007). The commercial market and popular demand for sonic styles within the Mashup genre alone are exemplified in the inclusion of artefacts of Girl Talk’s live performance in the US Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame (see Fig 10).
Fig 10: Girl Talk’s shoes and laptop in the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, US – Source: Wikipedia
As we move further into the 21st Century, Creative Commons, a copyright licensing mechanism enabling creators to communicate which rights they waive and which the reserve (Lessig 2004), has increasingly become a mechanism with which creators can break from the commercialisation of creativity, since it’s creation in 2001. Artists who approve of their work being sampled, or appropriated in other creative forms, can waive some of their rights under copyright law to enable the legal appropriation of creative forms.
However, Creative Commons still operates within the same legal framework as copyright and supports the option to retain private intellectual property rights (see Fig 9) – which in itself was created to monetise creativity, ideas and innovation for personal, individual profit (Lessig 2001). As Reagle (2010) observes in the culture of the world’s first global free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, cultural exchange is something we have a natural predisposition for. Perhaps the only future in which culture is truly free will be one in which sovereignty of cultural content, be it ideas or physical mediums, lies collectively with all people, for the enrichment of all people.
Bibliography…
Bidner, S & Feuerstein, T (hg./ed.) 2004, Sample minds: Materials on sampling culture, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
D. Gavin, M 2008, A work in progress: the prospects and potential of the world’s youth, International Debate Education Association, New York
Griffiths, J / Suthersanen, U (ed.) 2005, Copyright and free speech, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Helfer, L. R & Austin, G. W 2011, Human rights and intellectual property: Mapping the global interface, Cambridge University Press, New York
Katz, M 2004, Capturing sound: How technology has changed music, University of California (Berkeley) Press, Berkeley
LeRoy, D 2006, The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (33 1/3), Continuum International, London/New York
Lessig, L 2010, Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, Penguin Books, New York
Lessig, L 2004, Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, Penguin Press, New York
Lessig, L 2001, The future of ideas: The fate of commons in a connected world, Random House, New York/Toronto
McLeod, K & DiCola, P 2011, Creative license: The law and culture of digital sampling, Duke University Press, Durham and London
McLeod, K 2001, Owning culture: Authorship, ownership, and intellectual property, P. Lang, New York
Miller, P 2008, Sound unbound: Sampling digital music and culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Porsdam H, 2006, Copyright and other fairy tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the comodification of creativity, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham
Reagle, J 2010, Good faith collaboration: The culture of Wikipedia, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Rimmer, M 2007, Digital copyright and the consumer revolution, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham/Northhampton
Rashid, R 2005, Behind the beat: Hip hop home studios, Gingko Press, Berkeley
Sonvilla-Weiss, S 2010, Mashup cultures, Springer, Vienna, Austria
Unknown author 2012, Why instrumental hip hop doesn’t suck: A rebuttal, from ‘Flea Market Funk’ blog, February 23, 2012 <http://fleamarketfunk.com/2012/02/13/why-instrumental-hip-hop-doesnt-suck-a-rebuttal/> – Retrieved May 10, 2012
Wentz, B 2007, Hey, that’s my music! Music supervision, licensing and content acquisition, Hal Leonard, New York
Contextual framing:
Kalmar, S & Pies, D (ed.) 2010, Be nice, share everything, have fun: Kunstaverein München 2005-2009, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln
McGranahan, L 20
Money For Nothing: Behind the business of pop music – DVD ISBN: 1-893521-55-9, 2001 – 48min
Rip! A Remix Manifesto – Broadcast SBS1 5/1/10 – 87min
Scratch – Palm Pictures, 2001 – 92min
Wild Style – Wild Style Productions, New York 1982 – Rhino Home Video, DVD, 2002 – 82min
Various online documentaries
Audio examples of Instrumental hip hop:
DJ Shadow – Building Steam With a Grain of Salt, 1996
MF Doom – Eucalyptus, 2002
Cut Chemist – The Garden, 2006
being in orbit 