FEATURE:
Reelin’ in the Years
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Back to the Vinyl Crates: The Joys of Sampling
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THINKING about the title of this feature….
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and I reckon Steely Dan’s Reelin’ in the Years’ guitar solo (with a lead by Elliott Randall) would make for a great sample! I am not sure whether it has been used much, but here is a group whose rich music begs for crate-diving which can lead to some great samples making their way into music. This feature is not related to anything particular but, as Hip Hop’s golden era was still in full swing thirty years ago, it has got me looking back at the years between 1986 and 1991 and some of the great sample-heavy albums. Of course, sampling continues to this day. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, albums from the likes of Beck (Odelay!) and The Avalanches (Since I Left You) were released. In fact, The Avalanches’ debut album was released twenty years ago next month (27th) - and that album is packed with samples from a variety of records! I think it has become harder to get clearance to use samples, and that is a real shame! Everyone who loves a bit of sampling will have their favourite album filled with great snatches of popular songs, but I really love it when an album catches you by surprise in terms of its samples. Some artists have used a lot of samples on an album to create this unique sound, whereas other artists put in one or two samples and it can really add to a song. Some argue that the more samples the better, whereas others feel that a slight peppering is more effective.
I started to listen to Hip Hop as a child and I was really interested, not only by the breadth of the genre, but how groups used samples and how effective they were. Whether it was Public Enemy sampling everyone from James Brown to Lyn Collins on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, or De La Soul sampling Steely Dan on 3 Feet High and Rising, I was getting this musical education. I was learning so much about politics and the state of the world – particularly black rights in the U.S. -, but I was being introduced to artists I may not have otherwise heard. The beginnings and development of sampling is an interesting one. Udiscovermusic provided a brief history of sampling in 2018 – and I want to bring in a few extracts:
“Hip-hop’s unlikely heroes are The Shadows: a British instro combo led by bespectacled guitarist Hank Marvin, and best known for backing Cliff Richard. Their 1960 chart-topper ‘Apache’ was covered by The Incredible Bongo Band on their 1973 album, Bongo Rock, and it’s this latter version that soon found its way into the arsenal of every block-party DJ of the 70s, the mix-masters keeping its distinctive drumbeat going ad infinitum for breakdancers (or B-boys and B-girls) to bust a move to. So important is the song in hip-hop’s history that it’s been claimed as the genre’s “national anthem” and, in 1981, Sugar Hill Gang, the group who first took hip-hop into the charts with ‘Rapper’s Delight’, recorded a tribute, ‘Apache’, capturing the spirit of those early block parties.
Arguably the only challenger to James Brown’s status as hip-hop’s go-to source was George Clinton, whose P-Funk empire has long been part of hip-hop’s DNA, appearing in everything from goofy classics such as Digital Underground’s ‘Humpty Dance’ (built around Parliament’s ‘Let’s Play House’) to gangsta rap landmarks. Indeed, the Parliafunkadelicment Thang even lent its P-Funk epithet to the G-Funk music that Dr Dre helped spearhead, a stand-out example of which is Snoop Dogg’s Dre-produced ‘Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)’, which refashioned Clinton’s solo outing ‘Atomic Dog’ into Snoop’s theme tune.
Beastie Boys released a high-water mark of the Golden Age, Paul’s Boutique. Though their soul and funk samples were de rigueur, the Beasties, along with production duo The Dust Brothers, cast as wide a net as anyone had up to that point, looking to everyone from country icon Johnny Cash to The Beatles for source material, and coming up with masterpieces such as ‘The Sounds Of Science’, a dazzling patchwork that included various snippets from ‘Back In The USSR’, ‘The End’, ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (both the main track and its reprise) and ‘When I’m 64’ – and that’s just the Beatles samples.
It took someone with bags of confidence to revisit well-worn tracks in the 21st Century… someone like Kanye West, who made a name for himself doing just that. In his early days, in particular, West super-charged classic soul cuts, making them more bombastic than ever before while bringing these important recordings to a new audience. By the time he turned to Ray Charles’ ‘I Got A Woman’, he had the trick down to a fine art, making that song a central component to his all-conquering ‘Gold Digger’ single of 2005. When he sampled Nina Simone’s cover of Billie Holiday’s iconic civil-rights anthem ‘Strange Fruit’ on 2013’s ‘Blood On The Leaves’ he almost made it sound more chilling than the original.
For Kanye – as for the best hip-hop artists – there are no boundaries. As West grew in statue, so did his ambitions, and, for his 2010 masterpiece, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he starting looking to prog rock for music that could match his outsized ideas, lighting upon Mike Oldfield’s ‘In High Places’ for ‘Dark Fantasy’. And though prog is not often the go-to source for hip-hop’s guiding lights, OutKast’s subtle use of Camel’s 1976 recording ‘Spirit Of The Water’ on their 1998 track ‘Da Art Of Storytellin’ (Part 2)’ remains a testament to the creativity of both”.
One of the biggest problems for artists now is that they cannot afford to sample. There are guides as to how to clear samples, but if you are taking from big-catalogue artists, then the price of samples is insane! It is a shame that so many potentially brilliant albums are lacking because artists are fearful of legal difficulties if they do not clear samples. It is fair to artists and estates that people get permission, but there is often such a high fee or long process to get that approval that many artists are not bothering at all. There are some who say sampling is lazy and it devalues the songs that are being sampled; others feel that artists who do not get clearance for samples are stealing from artists, but there is a big argument as to why sampling in the past and now is a good thing. In terms of modern-day sampling, with a technology boom, it is easier to mix samples into artists’ songs, and many do so without prior permission.
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There is that debate to whether it is theft, but if artists follow the law and get clearance, I think it can lead to wonderful things. It can make an album so much richer. I love the classic Hip Hop records, and I think many of the songs on them (that use samples) would be weaker and less effective if they stripped away those layers. In terms of musical discovery, sampling can lead people to records that they are new to. As I said, I have listened to some great albums with sampled songs, and I have gone away and investigated the artists involved. I also think that samples can boost sales for the artists who are sampled. A Forbes article from 2013 backs this up:
"Fair Use, Girl Talk, and Digital Sampling: An Empirical Study of Music Sampling's Effect on the Market for Copyrighted Works," by W. Michael Schuster, a Texas Judicial law clerk, shows that the potential economic benefits of fair use should be factored into future court decisions. Schuster argues that Girl Talk's 2010 album All Day (available free here), is the perfect test case for this effect. The album contains 350 samples of well known pop and hip hop songs. WIth the exception of some electronic drum beats, the album is wholly composed of other people's music. And yet, anyone who has seen a Girl Talk show and experienced the intense performance style of DJ Gregg Gillis (whom I have interviewed in these pages) understands that he has made this music his own through his great love and respect for the music of others.
Schuster found that "to a 92.5% degree of statistical significance — the copyrighted songs sold better in the year after being sampled relative to the year before." Further, the length of the samples did not seem to have any correlation on the sales of the songs. Schuster concludes that, "this study sets the ground work for an objective financial review of fair use and market effect, which would yield needed predictability and stability to the fair use doctrine (at least, with regard to digital sampling)".
One reason why we do not have a Hip Hop scene as varied and strong as in the 1980s and 1990s is because of the difficultly in getting samples. There are other reasons, but I think so many of the classic albums are defined by the use of samples, and we hear fewer of them today. Artists are turning to electronic samples and sound effects rather than original recordings, but it is always nice to see a modern album or song come out that utilises other tracks. Reading exerts from Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola with Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson (2011), and it seems though groups like Public Enemy felt liberated when sampling; the main intention was to create something new by combining so many disparate sounds. Chuck D (Public Enemy) conflates Public Enemy mixing sounds to the way visual artists mix colours to come up with new colours.
I want to finish by quoting from an interview The Atlantic conducted with Kembrew McLeod, co-author of Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling, in 2011. He talked about how sampling can bring back memories and has a cultural importance – specifically during the period of 1987-1992:
“In the recording industry, and in some consumers' minds, sampling is "stealing." But what are some of the aesthetic or conceptual reasons why sampling is important?
Sounds can bring back memories. Some samples remind the listener of a particular era, or connect a song with a particular moment in time. Artists want to transport themselves, and the listener, for nostalgic reasons—or to provide historical resonance. Sampling can function like an audio time machine.
But there are also certain sounds that can only be accessed through appropriation or quotation. The sonic qualities of vintage, analog equipment or a crackly vinyl record can't truly be recreated through digital plugins and audio filters. You can invoke these textures, but you don't get the same sound from a rerecording of a sample as you do from accessing that particular sound source.
In Creative License, you write that sampling's golden age took place roughly between 1987 and 1992. What was it about that era that made sonic appropriation so creative and dynamic?
Record companies still thought hip-hop was a fad, so they didn't pay attention to what these artists were doing. This gave hip-hop artists the creative elbow room to run wild with this new technology and make music in whatever way they wanted without worrying about a lawyer looking over their shoulder”.
I mentioned how many artists cannot afford to sample heavily today, and there is an argument that informed consent and permission holds back creativity – as artists are priced out and have to reign in their ambitions. I can appreciate how those who create songs do not want their music used illegally and making other artists money – if they get nothing, then that doesn’t sound fair. There needs to be a middle-ground between what we had in the 1980s and 1990s – where artists often used samples without permission – and the rigidity of today. McLeod alluded to this:
“You suggest two influential hip hop releases—the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique and Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet—would be financially and bureaucratically impossible to release today, due to their heavy sampling.
Right. This is something people have been saying for a long time. My co-author Peter DiCola and I were able to do some economic modeling to test the hypothesis.
We figured out—song by song, sample by sample—how much it would cost to release each record. Sticking with the example of Paul's Boutique: there are about 2.5 million units sold of that record. Incidentally, a lot of the samples on Paul's Boutique actually were cleared—but they were cleared at a time, 1989, when the industry didn't really see the value of sampling yet, so the rates for copyright clearances were much lower. Today, the rates they'd have to pay would make it impossible. Based on the number and type of samples in that record, Peter figured out that Capitol Records would lose 20 million dollars on a record that sold 2.5 million units. Fear of a Black Planet is similar.
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It is important for musician and estates to allow others a bit of freedom when it comes to sampling, in order to progress music as a whole and so we can encourage the hugely important and inspiring Hip Hop (and other genres) albums we saw in years past. McLeod was asked about how things need to change this century:
“How do you think copyright law should change in the 21st century?
I think that if songwriter writes a song, they should have the right to continue to make money when it gets played on the radio, say, or used in an advertisement. But when it comes to transformative sampling, we need to acknowledge that musicians have always copied each other, and have always transformed previously existing compositions and recordings. There needs to be a balance”.
The laws and moral arguments are going to continue, and I hope there are new laws and breakthroughs in the coming years that would allow for more sampling at a reasonable cost without there being too much intellectual theft. I have been listening back to a lot of my favourite albums that rely on samples and they have opened my musical perspective and helped me discovered so many different artists from all corners of the musical landscape. There are few things finer than digging through crates for records and, although it can be arduous when artists sample and try to find the perfect sounds, they would be the first to admit that joining together a world of sounds to create something new is…
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AN absolute joy!