SAMPLING: CROSS AGE AND GENRE

- November 21, 2020

Sampling has always been used in music, but it’s only in recent years when people began to name this practice as sampling. The earliest sample I can think of is Saint Saens’s famous suite “Carnival of the Animals IV. Tortoises,” which used Offenbach’s “Galop infernal” (also more widely known as the Can-can) melody for the basis of the entire song. It’s been around for a long time in classical music, seen in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini or Casella’s Variations sur une Chaconne. Music has always been as much of a collaboration between other artists as it has been with the instruments and sounds that are used.

Sampling is when a portion of a sound recording is reused in another recording. Elements like rhythm, melody, speech can be used and layered, equalized, sped up/slowed down, repitched, looped or manipulated. Sampling is especially popular in the hip hop industry but has influenced almost all genres of music, most notably electronic music, pop, and house music. Some famous samples include Nine Inch Nail’s “34 Ghosts IV” on Old Town Road by Lil Nas X, Ponderosa Twins Plus One’s “Bound” on “A Boy is A Gun” by Tyler, the Creator and “Bound 2” by Kanye West, and Tommy Butler’s “Prison Song” on Mask Off by Future. Songs today also include something similar to sampling called interpolation, where a melody from a previously recorded song is rerecorded. Some famous interpolations is “99 Problems” by Jay-Z on Ariana Grande’s “Problems”, TLC’s “No Scrubs” on “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran, and King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” on “Power” by Kanye West.

So what’s the problem with sampling? For a time in the early 2000s, sampling in hip hop was frowned upon, seen as recycling or stealing music. In the beginning of his career, Kanye West actually got a lot of flack for his use of sped and pitched up soul samples, and many saw him as someone who profited off other people’s works. As he continued to get more popular and profit off of songs used with samples, these critics eventually saw the originality of how he utilized the samples, turning them into barely recognizable forms of their previous selves. This style in using samples is actually what inspired and created a whole new generation of hip hop sound that is still thriving to this day. But cross-genre, sampling is frown upon in the electronic music genre. In electronic music, a genre where artists are often criticized for sounding too similar or borrowing too much from others, sampling is seen as blatant stealing and a violation of the cultural norms of music-making. In the age of the Internet, where the possibility to get anything you can possibly need via the web, many producers became protective over their catalog and prevented samples from being cleared, snubbing samplers. This actually hurts young artists who don’t want to follow into the remix artist trap, making it difficult for them to get popular and closing off the community to them. Compared to genres like hip hop, pop, or even country, electronic music is a very cold genre, with many artists relying on themselves to get popular rather than collaborating to boost each other up.

Samples have been around for the longest time and only getting more and more popular by the moment. With music, an art form that is structured on 13 notes (I’m not touching the whole F# is different from Gb flat business, if I do that things will get waayyy too messy waayyy too quickly), there are only so many combinations of sounds that can be made before it sounds awful and dissonant. “[Music] is an indispensable human preoccupation, as important to us all—almost—as breathing. From the mythical campfire [song] to its explosion in the [streaming era], it dominates our lives. It behooves us then to try and understand it. Delacroix countered the fear of knowledge succinctly: “First learn to be a craftsman; it won’t keep you from being a genius.” In [music] throughout the ages there is one motif that continually recurs—the journey into [sound] to find the dark but life-giving secret within.”