If you don’t own a drum kit, but have access to a recording device, a turntable and your parent’s record collection, then you possess the basic toolkit required to become a hip hop producer. It was this equipment, and pioneering attitude of hip hop’s earliest proponents which helped the music of the black American inner city, grow to become one of the world’s strongest cultural forces.
Hip hop is a product of circumstance. Its founding fathers, who lacked expensive, state of the art studio equipment, developed rudimentary production techniques involving recording kick drums, snare drums and hi-hat cymbals from classic soul and disco records and then reassembling them at around 95 BPM. While technological advancement means that recording methods have evolved significantly, the sample itself remains the cornerstone of hip hop production. However, like in all creative endeavours, music allows no room for plagiarism, and so the music publishing industry protects recorded works from unpermitted reuse. This sits at slight loggerheads with hip hop’s desire to recycle, meaning its artists and labels have frequently been threatened with legal action over the last three decades. Using hip hop’s chronology as a framework for discussion allows us to analyse the sample alongside the concurrent technological and legal developments.
Firstly, it’s important to state that the legislation surrounding use of samples is fairly opaque and is still a work in progress. Precedent is that reusing a substantial section of a melody or the lyrics requires clearance from the original writer. The samples that formed the beats of early hip hop are so short that they’re barely recognisable, even to their original writers, meaning that sounds could be lifted from almost anywhere without fear of repercussion.
The first notable dispute arose at the end of the 1970s and concerned the instantly recognisable bass line from Chic’s “Good Times” which was used by The Sugarhill Gang on their seminal 1979 release “Rapper’s Delight”. Legend has it that Nile Rodgers (the song’s original writer) heard “Rapper’s Delight” when out in a New York night club and upon learning of the song’s release quickly threatened legal action. He now shares songwriting credit with Sugarhill Gang for the record.
The release of the Roland TR-808 drum machine in 1980 changed hip hop production forever. Its signature sounds laid the foundation for many 1980s hip hop tracks and meant that the use of sampled drums was no longer a necessity. Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”, released in 1990, is a collage of restored and re-imagined sound. The hip hop artists active during the 1980s, a period dubbed the genre’s ‘golden age’, had free reign to behave as archivists, with the notion of sample clearance still in an embryonic state.
However, by the mid-1990s, hip hop was an internationally renowned cultural power and sample clearance was high on the agenda of both labels and publishers. Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs found himself at the centre of the highest profile clearance case to date. Publishing Company Bridgeport Inc. had taken Comb’s label Badboy Records and its parent company Universal Music to court over the unlicensed use of Ohio Players “Singing in the Morning” on Notorious B.I.G’s track “Ready to Die”. Although the two excerpts at the centre of the dispute last a combined 20 seconds and are not straightforward in their usage, the eventual fine totalled almost $400,000. The case reached its conclusion in 2006 when an injunction was put into place prohibiting further sale of the album “Ready to Die”. The album has since been rereleased in edited form.
On the outskirts of 1990s and 2000s hip hop, the late J Dilla established himself as one of hip hop’s more creative samplers. Dilla’s trademark was using lengthier samples but often with the more a progressive approach afforded to him via his exploration using the MPC. There was an issue surrounding the material on “Champion Sound” his posthumous, collaborative project with Madlib: Jaylib, but in general I think it’s difficult to argue that Dilla’s sampling did not positively influence hip hop music. His warped, warm production style nodded to his predecessors while exploring new sonic territory.
The early solo work of Kanye West, currently the world’s largest pop-rap star and producer, made samples even more central to hip hop production. Using accelerated soul hooks West built his choruses around classic older tracks. While there’s no disputing West’s canniness or humour, his sampling method calls into question his musical innovation. In his defence, West usually pays big money for clearance but did slip up in 2011 over the unlicensed sample of Syl Johnson’s “Different Strokes” on “The Joy”: a track from “Watch The Thrown”, his project with fellow hip hop heavyweight Jay-Z, which will probably result in a costly settlement.
Last year, post-minimal producer Nicolas Jaar’s “I Got A” sampled Ray Charles’ “I Got A Woman”, the very track Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” borrows a chorus from. While Jaar lets the sample wallow in sludgy reverb and is less obviously traceable than West’s effort, Jaar’s label Circus Company failed to apply for clearance. After Charles’ camp caught wind, they managed to force the recall of Jaar’s debut album “Space Is Only Noise”. A later addition of Jaar’s album was subsequently released minus ‘I Got A’, so if you were quick to pick up an early edition, it’s now worth a fair bit of money.
At the time of writing this article, Frank Ocean is in combat with The Eagle’s record label Warner Music Group over his track “American Wedding”, which lifts enormous chunks from “Hotel California”. Speaking on MTV last year, Ocean stated that his popular mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra was unlikely to ever be granted an official full release due to the issue of clearing the featured samples, particularly those from The Eagles and Coldplay. Even more recently, Ocean claimed that the Eagle’s Don Henley had threatened to sue him if he performed “American Wedding” live again. Ocean has suggested that Henley was “intimidated” by his music, but Henley and his representatives were quick to deny that they’d said anything to that effect, nor anything on the issue whatsoever. However, Warner Music Group swiftly published a statement which read:
Frank Ocean did not merely “sample” a portion of the Eagles’ Hotel California; he took the whole master track, plus the song’s existing melody, and replaced the lyrics with his own. This is not creative, let alone “intimidating.” It’s illegal. For the record, Don Henley has not threatened or instituted any legal action against Frank Ocean, although the Eagles are now considering whether they should.
Listen to the track, and you’ll probably agree that Warner have made a fair point; Ocean is simply singing over a backing track! While singing live covers is generally considered expectable, Warner are challenging Ocean on the grounds of his failure to exhibit his own artistic endeavour.
The equipment used to sample has altered sampling’s nature over the past three decades, but has this had a negative effect on levels of musical originality? Is it worrying that Odd Future (the hip hop collective with whom Ocean is affiliated) have enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame and have been praised for injecting vitality into hip hop, off the back of their embroilment in one of the least innovative sampling cases?
If this is what sampling has become then cases are likely to become increasingly common, especially in conjunction with modern transmission techniques – the internet allows artists like Frank Ocean and Tyler, The Creator or even Nicolas Jaar to appear almost overnight and their music to become quickly accessible. Where small, independent artists would previously avoid the attention of major publishers, written off as insignificant, the democracy of the internet’s speedy information exchange means that an MP3 can end up on the desktop of a label head as quickly as it can be on your iTunes.
When hip hop was a fringe affair, major labels and artists expressed little concern over the use of samples. It wasn’t until the mid 90s, when hip hop become music more central to mainstream culture that sample-based cases became much more commonplace and clearance became a genuine issue. However, it would be facetious to suggest that record label executives and ageing artists suddenly attuned to a new era in music, had lawyers swarming like wasps around its makers immediately. Over time, the principles of originality and innovation, initially the genre’s bedrock, have gradually eroded. Hip hop sampling has become more about nostalgia than innovation.
More positively, house producer Theo Parrish made a battle cry when lecturing an audience at a CDR event in Berlin, Germany. He argued that production software such as Ableton and Logic pro had rendered modern dance music sterile and soulless and called for a return to the spirit of early hip hop; ripping drum sounds from wherever possible and including them in tracks, rather than the generic plug-in options provided by software companies. Where those at the vanguard of house appear to be learning from hip hop’s mistakes, hopefully hip hop itself will re-acknowledge it’s original, fertile roots and salvage itself through the creative sampling techniques that used to define the genre.
Illustration by Tom McClean.
Originally posted 2012-04-25 06:00:02.
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