Why do you play the guitar, and not the violin?
What’s the point of collage? Couldn’t those artists just pick up a paint brush and create the same picture?
What if… we had William S. Burroughs rapping over a backing track by Jim Morrison?
He mentions at one point that Marlene Dietrich taught him how to do it.
Seriously, Dio, you got no idea what you’re talking about. Just relax. You don’t have to know everything. That’s my job.
Exactly.
As **Grendel’s Father **said, done correctly, sampling is like creating a musical collage. Is the quality of any of these songs diminished because they used samples? Can you even recognize the sampled song:
Sample:
Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
(they are the two robot guys in the video. Also the video borrows heavily from the anime Akira.
Eminem - Stan
Sample:
Dido - Thank You
(Dido plays the girlfriend in the video. Eminem has also performed the song with Elton John singing Dido’s part. It has been recognized by many critics as one of the greatest rap songs as well as one of the greatest songs ever.
Notorious BIG - Juicy
Sample
Mtume - Juicy Fruit
Sample:
The Charmels - As Long as I’ve Got You
Sample:
Sweet - The Ballroom Blitz
Kurtis Blow - Party Time
Bar-Kays - Holy Ghost
Cameo - Shake Your Pants
P-Funk All Stars - Pumpin’ it Up
Kool & the Gang - Jungle Boogie
The Commodores - Machine Gun
Afrika Bambaataa - Jazzy Sensation
Fab 5 Freddy - Change Le Beat/B-Side
Jeanette “Lady” Day - Come Let Me Love You
Zapp & Roger - Dance Floor
Zapp & Roger - So Ruff, So Tuff
James Brown - Ain’t It Funky Now
James Brown - Funky President
Malcolm McLaren & the World Famous Supreme Team - Hey DJ
Crash Crew - High Power Rap
I agree. Fuck Led Zeppelin.
So, what year does your music collection pretty much stop at, Dio?
I ask because, being just three years your senior, many of my peers stopped listening to anything new at least 10 years ago. Most stopped learning anything new at all (like computers). It made them uncomfortable.
When we were growing up, music was dictated to us by radio stations. Do you still listen to the radio? Oldies? The world has moved on. If you blow that off and stay inside your comfort bubble you resign yourself to old age. At 44.
It took some effort on my part to expand my musical horizons. The radio isn’t going to do it. If you can’t make that effort, I understand, but you should be humble enough not to offer an opinion on such a deep and varied subject as rap and hip hop. The arguments you use were rejected 20 years ago.
“The unlived life is not worth examining.” True. Perhaps one should not examine what one has not lived.
No disrespect intended.
(ETA-I was composing this before Add99’s post, so it might seem I’m responding to his first question, but this post is independent of that.)
(Actually, I do quite like Led Zeppelin.)
My personal music collection skews to late-70s, early-80s punk/post punk, but I do enjoy quite a lot of rap, especially late 80s/early 90s Golden Age rap. The problem you’re having Dio, is you’re applying the standards of one musical genre to another, and rap goes against a lot of rock values. Rock music was subject to the same sort of criticism from classical listeners, and punk rock was subject to the same arguments from classic rock listeners. (“This is noise! This takes no talent. The guy can’t even sing, he’s just shouting! He’s just making noise on his guitar!” And on, and on, and on.)
It boggles my mind that thirty some years later, after rap and hip-hop have been well established into the sonic fabric of our society, people are still leveling the same old hackneyed complaints.
Rap is about rhythm and rhyme. The rhythm and sound of the lyrics is the analog to rock (and other form of pop) music’s melody, and I think it takes significant talent to pull off a rap. I was at a bar hosting a karaoke night, when somebody decided to perform “Baby Got Back” (which is not a particularly “difficult” rap, in my opinion.) Mid-way through the performance, I just turned to the table and said, “Anyone who thinks rapping takes no talent whatsoever, I present to you Exhibit A.” It’s not that he was getting the words wrong–the lyrics are easy enough. But the timing, the inflection, the accenting, everything was just a bit off. To me, it was every bit as bad as someone singing Four-Non Blondes “What’s Going On?” out of key. (Sorry to infect anyone with an earworm–it was the first karaoke song with sweeping vocals I could think of.)
Not attacking rap, but aren’t these two examples of songs where it’s really obvious whom the artists sampled? I don’t think Kanye West did anything really revolutionary with the Daft Punk song he used, in particular.
Yeah, I actually like Kanye here and there, but that Daft Punk song wasn’t really bringing anything new to the table, and the sample was just too obvious.
Personally, I think it’s fascinating, this idea of recontextualizing culture, whether it be art, music, video, or combinations thereof. The use of the actual original source material to piece together something new and “fresh” is more interesting to me (and has a different effect) than just reproducing it.
The last band I really got into was Nirvana. These days I pretty much only listen to the old, classic rock and metal stuff I listened to when I was in my 20’s. Nothing really past the mid-90’s. I’ve occasionally tried to get into something new, but it just isn’t the same to me as when I was 20 years old and voracious about music. A friend of mine who is a doctor told me over dinner a little while ago that he had read some cognitive research indicating that people tend to kind of freeze in way music affects them at a certain age. He gave a detailed explanation which I don’t remeber, but basically he was saying the brain doesn’t get the same gratification from hearing new music after a certain age and that’s why people get stuck on only liking the stuff from the prime of their youth (this was after we both admitted we were still listening to the same Metallica and Slayer CD’s we listened to 20 years ago, and couldn’t get into new stuff).
I also do like a lot of old jazz stuff, though, like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and others. I like instrumental virtuosos.
Oh, and when I listen to the radio, it’s only talk now. My exposure to new music at this point is pretty much confined to American Idol and the general, unavoidable media osmosis of stuff like Lady Gaga.
Honestly, I just don’t really get into music at all as intensly as I once did. I don’t lie on my back with the headphones anymore. I still really like to play an accoustic guitar and sing and write new stuff, but the excitement I once had for listening to music is all but gone.
The talent there lies in finding music samples that match in beat and rhythm, so in that style of rap the talent is in the producer. You can find any schmo who can rhyme and keep a beat to do the vocals.
Ok, I just don’t get the genre. I’ll cop to it. And I’ll admit I’ve made no effort to. I’ve just never found what I’ve heard very interesting. I think that part of that is because I’m very prejudiced in favor of instrumentalists and don’t like sampling or electronic music. I don’t like drum machines or synthesizers. I want to hear people playing instruments. The “collage” approach is just something that doesn’t appeal to me aesthetically, but that’s a matter of personal taste.
I like to compare sample-based music (which certainly encompasses more than rap) to quilting.
My wife makes beautiful quilts. She takes pieces of fabric from different places and uses a few techniques to combine them into a new and interesting piece of art. Some of these fabrics are new ones made for that purpose, while others were previously used for something else, but she has never actually designed a piece of fabric herself.
Some of the quilts are fairly simple, made up mostly of one interesting fabric pattern but doing something cool with it. Others use dozens of different fabrics. It can be especially cool when you see a piece of fabric in a quilt that you recognize as coming from somewhere else.
Your argument would be that there’s no artistry behind quilts because quiltmakers don’t design all the fabrics themselves.
The arts even have similar roots. Quilts started out as ways to make warm blankets out of scraps. Sampling comes from kids who didn’t have instruments but did have their parents’ turntables and record collections, and who wanted to do something more interesting with those records than just play them over and over. In both cases, the particular techniques involved ultimately became arts in their own rite.
Puff Daddy/P. Diddy/whatever set sample-based music back ten years with “I’ll Be Missing You”, as it will forever be the canonical example of sampling among those who dismiss it. It’s possible to make a great track based largely in a single source; “Can I Kick It?” by A Tribe Called Quest and “High Plains Drifter” by the Beastie Boys come to mind immediately. But Diddy made a lousy one that was unfortunately inescapable in the summer of 1997.
I did like his first single, Through the Wire, and the use of Chaka Khan’s Through the Fire. (Is that uncool to admit? Like, it’s so mainstream that people roll your eyes for admitting to liking it?) I have to admit, I liked a lot of the phrases and I liked the way he sped up the Chakha Khan track.
Like any other art, there really is no true explanation, other than the end result is sometimes beautiful or awe inspiring.
Take A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte. Nice enough painting on its own, but when you see it in person you see that it’s 1: freaking ENORMOUS and 2: made up entirely of teeny, tiny little dots just layered one after another. That blows you away. Sure, I guess the artist could have just done a regular sized painting the regular way- painted some people at the park. But what makes this painting exceptional is how mind blowing the amount of work in it is.
What Puly said. Also, fuck Daft Punk.
And that’s fine. My qualm is when people who should just admit to the above start spouting absolutes like rap takes no talent, building a rhythm track with samples is easy, etc. It’s not. I’ve played around a lot with samples and building music in this way, and it takes considerable skill to do it well, and to do it musically. I have a much easier time building music from the ground up with instruments than on the computer. (I also have a much easier time playing piano or organ than dealing with all the tonal and musical possibilities an analog synthesizer offers. Playing a synthesizer well is a somewhat different skillset than playing a conventional keyboard instrument.)
The origin of sampling:
Breaking is the essence of B-boy. The break was the best part to dance to, so the DJ would play it over and over, using two turntables to make a loop while people were BREAKdancing. Cool Herc started using multiple breaks and mashing them up into what he termed a Merry-Go-Round, packing people into the projects for rent parties (kids were scared to go outside and get shot). The dancehalls in Jamaica had been doing this long before, but Cool Herc is credited although no recordings of it exist. Scratching and sampling come from this. (a bit simplified)
Prodigy: The Dirtchamber Sessions Vol 1 is a fine example:
This exhibits huge knowledge and skill, far more than I thought Liam Howlett (the Prodigy) had in him. The most important point is that this is a tribute to the entire B-boy style and these artists in particular.
This one CD got me really interested in B-boy and hip hop, just trying to name all the songs he was mashing up. I highly recommend it.
So, while Public Enemy did rip off James Brown, it wasn’t initially done to steal or to make money off of someone’s work. It was, from the B-boy perspective, an honor to be sampled. But then came Vanilla Ice…
Unfortunately, after the mid-90s things got pushed really hard in the direction of using one or two samples extensively when “clearing” samples became a big deal. It would have taken a small army and a large fortune to clear every sample on Paul’s Boutique or Endtroducing…, so for years albums like that just weren’t feasible to make. That might finally be changing a little bit, since Girl Talk started making his collage masterpieces a few years ago and putting them out through back channels. The music biz seems to be leaving him alone for the most part, probably because they’re finally realizing that there’s money to be made down that road.
So I can understand why someone thinks “I’ll Be Missing You” is the model for sample-based hip hop if they’re not really paying attention. But it’s ultimately like dismissing all of rock and roll because of “Wild Thing” by The Troggs; it’s nothing but three chords banged out over and over, verses that don’t even try to rhyme, and stupid ocarina solos.