Introduction

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt. - Audre Lorde

Our culture is, and always has been, a culture that samples. The evolution of American music is certainly an example of this, as music before the advent of mass communication was passed on through oral tradition and changed and appropriated by the people who performed it. Historic blues musicians perhaps were the most famous for this, as most of their songs were born in folklore and oral tradition, and thus were shaped and personalized by the musician just as a story-teller adds their own embellishments to the story. African Americans created jazz by combining samples of island-based music and new ideas about meter and rhythm, this in turn was sampled by whites and turned into Big Band music since jazz was too salacious for the general public in the early 20^th century. America's most famous musical export, Rock and Roll, is hardly a “sample” at all, but a whiter version of the blues. However, it wasn't until the rise of Hip-Hop and Dance music in the early 1970's that sampling became the instrumental force that it is today. This blog is a testament to the art of sampling, an auditory and visual history of the music and video that it enabled, as well being its own palette of sampled material.

Fair Use

Fair Use is the exception for Copyright law that allows most of our digital culture to exist. It grants a multitude of exceptions for copyright scenarios in which a person does not have to contact the rights holders to request permission. These exceptions include parodies,  reviews and criticisms, news reporting, teaching and other scholarly activities. Brett Gaylor claims his film Rip! A Remix Manifesto as well as the music it contains could only be released because of Fair Use. Almost all youtube videos that use copyrighted works have remained up because they have a legitimate Fair Use argument.  

Fair Use existed in U.S common law for centuries, but it was incorporated into the Copyright Act of 1976. This provision provided four factors to be considered when determining if something constitutes Fair Use.

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.    

 

The Grey Album

The Grey Album is a musical mash-up by the artist Danger Mouse that combines songs from The Beatles' White Album and the vocal tracks from Jay-Z's The Black Album. The backing tracks from the White Album are cut up, sped up, and reconstructed to match the flow of Jay-Z's vocals, resulting in songs that sound very little like the originals despite being completely composed of samples from them. 

Here is The Beatles version of Helter Skelter

And here is Jay-Z's 99 Problems

And here is the Grey Album Version

The Grey Album created a fair amount of controversy when it was released due to the presence of the Beatles tracks. EMI, which owns the rights to The White Album, wrote cease and desist letters to stop any kind of distribution. This led to a day long protest where over a hundred websites encouraged people to download the album. 

From Wikipedia,

"Grey Tuesday was a day of coordinated electronic civil disobediance on February 24, 2004. Led by Downhill Battle, an activist group seeking to restructure the music industry, participating websites posted copies of Danger Mouse's The Grey Album for free download on its sites for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to prevent any distribution of this unlicensed work. This protest was provoked by the opinion that the sampling is fair use and that a statutory license should be provided in the same manner as if a song had been covered. Hundreds of web sites participated and roughly 170 hosted the album for download. Over 100,000 copies were downloaded on that day alone. The legal repercussions of the protest were minimal; a number of the participants received cease and desist letters from EMI, but no charges were filed in connection with the event."

We're talking about sampling...

Here are some great quotes from artists and producers on the role that sampling plays in their music...

"Cutting and pasting is the essence of what hip-hop culture is all about for me. It's about drawing from what's around you, and subverting it and de-contextualizing it." - DJ Shadow

"A lot of people still don't recognize the sampler as a musical instrument. I can see why. A lot of rap hits over the years used the sampler more like a Xerox machine. If you take four whole bars that are identifiable, you're just biting that shit. But I've always been into using the sampler more like a painter's palette than a Xerox. Then again, I might use it as a Xerox if I find rare beats that nobody had in their crates yet... But on every album I try to make sure that I only have 20 to 25 percent [of that kind of] sampling. Everything else is going to be me putting together a synthesis of sounds." - RZA, The Wu-Tang Manual

"[Samples have] a certain reality. It doesn't just take the sound, it takes the whole way it was recorded. The ambient sounds, the little bits of reverb left off crashes that happened a couple of bars ago. There's a lot of things in the sample, just like when you take a picture—it's got a lot more levels than say, the kick-drum or the drum machine, I think. Looking at a sampler the way it was used first—to try and simulate real instruments—you didn't have to get a session guitarist and you could just be like, 'Hey, I can have an orchestra in my track, and I can have a guitar, and it sounds real!' And I think that's the wrong way to use sampling. The right way is to get the guitar, and go, 'Right, that's a guitar. Let's make it into something that a guitar could never possibly be.' You know, take it away from the source and try to make it something else. Might as well just get a bloody guitarist if you want a guitarist. There's plenty of them." —Amon Tobin, Pitchfork Magazine

"Let's say I find a loop or something that I want to use—you attach yourself to a particular aspect or emotion that you find in it—part of it is looking for like-minded sounds and part of it is just laying things out in a way that kind of helps accomplish what you want. It's what you can hear in a particular sound." —RJD2, TheMilkFactory.com

"Sampling's not a lazy man's way. We learn a lot from sampling, it's like school for us. When we sample a portion of a song and repeat it over and over we can better understand the matrix of the song." —Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, Black Noise Magazine

"It's a context issue, because not every sample is a huge chunk of a song. We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other sounds on top of it. It's not even a recognizable sample at that point. Which is a lot different from taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that loop. An example that's often brought up in court when we get sued over sampling is a Biz Markie track where he more or less used a whole Gilbert O'Sullivan song. Because it was such an obvious sample, it's the example lawyers use when trying to prove that sampling is stealing. And that's really frustrating to us as artists who sample, because sampling can be a totally different thing than that." — Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, Wired Magazine

Rip! A Remix Manifesto

Rip! is a experimental documentary by Brett Gaylor that is a compelling example of convergence culture. The film argues that remixing is a necessity for building culture and that current copyright laws are stifling creativity, with the Fair Use exception being paramount to not completely snuffing it out. The unique thing about this film is that it is a remix itself, Gaylor allows anyone to edit and reshape the footage as they see fit. Part of the documentary revolves around the mash-up artist Girl Talk and his experiences with copyright law affecting both his musical and medical career, but one of the main themes of the film is it's assertion that culture always builds on the past. This clip from the film is an amazing example of artists "sampling" each other.

 

This clip shows the evolution of the song "The Last Time" from a traditional folk song to The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Not noted in the video is the fact that the song Bittersweet Symphony has been sampled by a number of artists, so the evolution continues. The entirety of the documentary can be found here:

Endtroducing...

In 1996 DJ Shadow released the first album comprised entirely of samples. The album was a critical success and increased the visibility of sampling as an art form, rather than a lazy way to make new music. One of the major reasons for this was Shadow's choice of samples - they tended to come from obscure LPs rather than popular ones, so most people had never heard any of them in their unsampled form. The coherency of the songs is amazing, its hard to believe that all of these individual samples  are then molded into an almost orchestral type score, but hearing is believing. 

Tools of the Trade

 

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In the early 1970's urban block parties became commonplace in New York. The Djs of these parites unknowingly created the roots of Hip-Hop by using two turntables at once and “mixing” the sounds. The dual turntable approach also allowed breaks such as the Funky Drummer break to be cut, extended or looped.

 Here is a modern day turntable set-up, with two turntables, a computer, a mixer and a microphone

Later on, digital samplers made this process much easier for artists, but early digital samplers were like early computers, massive and expensive.

From wikipedia:

“A Sampler is an electronic musical instrument similar in some respects to a synthesizer but, instead of generating sounds, it uses recordings (or "samples") of sounds that are loaded or recorded into it by the user and then played back by means of the sampler program itself, a keyboard, sequencer or other triggering device to perform or compose music.”

The first digital samplers that were affordable to a basic consumer was the Akai S900, which launched in 1985.

Because of the exponential growth of computer processing power, there are now software programs that can do anything a hardware based sampler can do. 

Here are some videos of Artists experimenting with samples

The Funky Drummer Break

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Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer for James Brown's band, laid the backbeat for early hip-hop with this song.

 Go to 5:35 for the break

 Because of the drum solo, or “break” it was the perfect isolated drum sounds for early Djs to use. Just look at the classic hip hop songs that use this sample...

Lyricist Chuck D even alludes to the sample saying, "1989 the number/another summer/sound of the funky drummer"

Despite being one of the most sampled drum breaks of all time, Clyde Stubblefield never saw any royalties for the track. The shout out from Chuck D was about it.

Other Hip-Hop Mashups

While the Grey Album is almost certainly the most famous Hip-Hop mash-up of all time, there are many others in circulation on the internet. Like the Grey Album, they take two artists that are from completely different genres and combine them to create something new. The resulting tracks often have a different tone and feel than the originals, while still being an homage to both artists. 

Here are some of my favorite Hip-Hop mashups:

Nas' The World is Yours combined with Modest Mouse's Float On

Notorious B.I.G.'s Everyday Struggle Combined with Frank Sinatra's A Day in the Life of a Fool

 And and entire album of Wu-Tang and the Beatles... 

Due to the legal issues involving sampling, none of these artists made any money from these mashups... and unlike Danger Mouse, they didn't benefit from the publicity... however, these mash-ups are still important examples of convergence culture in that these are really fan-made mash-ups... which perhaps makes them even more impressive. 

Found-Footage Sampling

Found footage sampling is the act of taking footage filmed by someone else and reconstructing it to make something new. A video hosting site such as youtube or vimeo provides a cornucopia of footage for anyone to take and remix in anyway they please. In one of my favorite examples of found footage sampling, the author of Mother of All Funk Chords managed to make a funk break from various different musical tutorials and random clips on youtube. This video samples both the musical notes and footage from a large number of youtube clips to create a collage of sound... check it out!

Another interesting use of found footage can be found in this clip. Using footage from the Iraqi and Afghanistan conflicts, the author of this video contrasts this footage with footage from George Bush's speeches that make it appear like he is singing John Lennon's Imagine. The result is a strikingly surreal video that is both a parody and political statement.

Modding - Remix Culture in Video Games

Video game mods are similar to musical samples in that they take a small part of a whole (the whole being the game)  and make something new. By editing or expanding the existing programming code of a video game, modders can make something that is completely different than the game they started with. The best example of this is the popular PC shooter Counter-Strike, which began it's life as a mod for the seminal PC game Half-Life. Half-Life was a purely single player game, but Counter-Strike used it's engine to create a multiplayer shooter that people could play online. Eventually, Valve (the publisher of Half-Life) bought the rights to Counter-Strike, and made it is own standalone game. Here is a video comparing Half-Life and its various incarnations with Counter-Strike...

Mods have become more and more prevalent over the years as gaming developers have become increasingly open to allowing amateurs to mod their games. Bethesda Softworks has become a leader in the mod community, and their latest title Skyrim has over one million mods hosted on sites like the Nexus, despite being out for little over a year. Shortly after Skyrim was released, Bethesda released software dubbed the Creation Kit that allows users to easily make their own mods. This kind of support has made the Skyrim mod library one of the most prolific in history.

Fan Made Trailers

Another popular remix in the Convergence era is the Fan made trailer. These videos take footage from movies and Television shows to make a short trailer advertising the movie. However, these trailers are often drastically different than officially licensed trailers because they are made specifically for fans of the show or movie. This means that they can include things that would normally be regarded as spoilers, and make reference to other movies and shows.

Here is a pretty straightforward trailer for Ferris Bueller...

Another popular fan trailer is the parody trailer. These trailers often take the official trailer and make minor modifications to put a humorous spin on it. In this trailer, the author provides a sort of a play by play for the shots in the trailer, literally describing what is happening. It's pretty funny...