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.