Sampling - more ethical than playing/programming?

This applies to really blatant rips only! Even more objectionable than playing/programming your own meaningless noises are those people who pride themselves on using loads of 'altered, unrecognisable' samples - that way, they can conveniently wrap themselves in the banner of revolutionaries while comfortably retreating into the lie of the bogus soundworld. (Which is why DJ Shadow and his rancid ilk will be laughed at in the future as the bourgeoise liberal spare- pricks-at-the-wedding they are).

DJ Shadow and his "rancid ilk" ... he may not be to everyone's taste... but he is still a talented artist.

The world is just too full of hate these days. Chill out.

*sigh*

i haf yeztrday ripped off that trrrvsn song but replaced 'whale and dolphins' wiv speak and spell saying 'volvos and donkeys' - 2.48 and v. drunk - woohah!

Talented Artist Taking Sides - DJ Shadow vs. Leni Riefenstahl

Dave does have a point -- why sample if you don't SAMPLE? Why not just use instruments, then? Cf. the "record scratch" sound used outside of records being scratched. Better than sampling tho is "interpolation" because then you can change the words.

What a crock of shit.

multiplicity of meanings=good disseminative text=good single hammered-down meaning=bad worrying about authorial intention=bad endless interpretative strategies=good war on ambiguity=bad "I am vast, I contain multitudes" =good "Damn you Ezra Pound there can be but the one seraglio" =bad Stones Throw=good So So Def=bad

Hope this clears things up

I still think there's something to be said for the notion of 'pure sound', regardless of context or any kind of intellectual discourse.

The intro to The Beach Boys' You Still Believe In Me is a moment in music which never fails to tingle my spine. It's an abstract sound, it could "mean anything". But the point is, it means a lot *to me*.

It gives me a feeling of physical pleasure. It makes me feel better than I would not listening to it. Does it need to be justified? Does there need to be 'something more'?

Ha ha - so by this logic people who only sample themselves are the pits of the earth? I think not.

Thanks for your sermon on the virtues of prescrptive, respectful sampling, Dave. Seriously, though, it's a funny idea at least, though I scarcely agree. That's like saying "Why play guitar if you aren't gonna SHRED?" The sampler is an instrument, not a quotation device - that's just it's most obvious use, and one I'd wager a lot of people are maybe a little sick of. My favorite sorts of samples are ones that conjure something recognizable but aren't just specifically "ripping off" another song. (See 'Discovery' for good examples of this.)

Stones Throw=good So So Def=bad

mentalist alert.

So So Def is vast, it contains multitudes. "That's What I'm Looking For" and "Jumpin Jumpin"!!!! "That's What I'm Looking For" has got one of the best detuned guitar samples I've ever heard. It's not from any recognizable source; for all I know JD Ratface himself plucked it out while drunk, but it connotes something very subtle and hard to pin down. Something that the guitar line of "Where the Party At" - much more obviously "played live" by a studio musician - made totally explicit.

I would make the bold claim that someone who samples things may be an artist, but they're not really a musician. Being a musician means creating sound and music from your head, and sampling things is more like making a collage. Even programming is more like being a musician, because there you're "playing" the instrument, manipulating it to make sounds that come out of your head. Sampling still allows space to be creative and artistic, but it's not strictly musical.

I would make the bold claim that someone who samples things may be an artist, but they're not really a musician.

My response to that -- if you can hear something that make you dance or make you sing or make you hum along or captures your attention with its flow and unwinding out, it's music. :-)

People who want to make this value-neutral 'music' exclusively out of samples (ie: "make" jazz out of altered jazz samples) probably need to rethink what they are doing. I do believe that sampling should be SAMPLING with exposed deliberate reference points and whatnot. Dynamism is also key.

The catch is, that in this day and age... there isn't really any "unrecognizable" sound. We can make trumpets sound like glitches or whatever, but we've heard so many textural musical possibilities, that, no matter how many FX and filters used, nothing's really surprising. So altering a sound could obscure a sample's original sonic quality, but it'd still be a point A to point B thing rather than some sprawl into the unknown.

So really... ANY samplist is essentially building the whole 'clarifying your stand' type of model. It's just that some know where their assets lie while other types muck around in bogus soundworlds or whatever.

I use my sampler for mellotron sounds.

If you use a sampler it's a good idea TO KNOW a little about music, so that you can get the right key or whatever when you pitch it up or down. Saying that having no knowledge of music would eradicate about 70%of most music made by people today. It's like everything else really, if you sample try and be a bit original just as if you play the guitar try not to rip off other peoples stuff. The difference being in rock copying is "influenced by..." In sampling culture copying is just copying

Avalanches - Since I left you. Case in point. Great CD!!!!

Reading all of the above responses actually takes me back to the perspective I had as a teenager: The rock audience just doesn’t understand sampling. The difference in the climate then and now is the rock audience used to just dismiss it, now they try to make cerebral math of it. To understand sampling, we have to follow the evolution of both the artists and the technology of it. With Hip-Hop being the primary champion of it, we have to start there. The first “Hip-Hop” DJ was a Jamaican immigrant by the name of Kool Herc, who brought the concept of the “sound-system” to the Bronx. Whereas he probably cpould have been no inspiration or competition to Sir Coxsone, he was an inspiration to the young upstart Grandmaster Flash. By the time Flash started doing it, 2 turntables replaced 1 so there’d be no reason to talk or “toast”) between records as you would with 1. Eventually, Flash noticed that the hardcore dancers would let loose more during the “break” (bridge) of the songs being played (thus, breakdancing). He decided to isolate the break and repeat them using 2 copies of the same song…the context of sampling was born. Of course we all understand that when the sampling keyboard was invented, it was to able a keyboard player to have multiple keyboards in one by customizing it themselves. The same for the later developed “percussion samplers” style drum machines. When sampling was done in Hip-Hop in the early ‘80’s, it was almost a way to replace the “Jamaster J” type DJ who could add snippets to a song on the spot. The rules and context of sampling changed when Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid In Full” album was released. Most notably, the song “I Know You Got Soul” showed that the drum machine could take a back seat to the sampler as the breakbeat filled all of the unused space left by a typical drum machine. Shortly after, E-Mu released the SP1200 drum machine styled sampler that allowed more sampling time, allowing people to emulate this type of sampling philosophy. This is best demonstrated by the 2nd & 3rd Public Enemy albums (which even out of the Hip-Hop context are sonically astounding if one can get beyond the obstacle of “melody & harmony” needed to make a song). Eventually, between this era and the mid-90’s, it did become a language to insiders in the same way that Jazz riffs are a diplay of witty dialog between other Jazz musicians. As rap spread in general, it’s sampling language obviously was to obtain dialects in each small community. In Miami Bass for instance, it’s a given that the amount of songs that sample Kraftwerk’s Numbers or Cybertron’s Clear are nearly immeasurable. But where they get no respect for recycling grooves, we can return to Jamaican music’s “Dancehall” genre that goes so far as to recycle complete instrumental between artists. It’s a given that this is done as a challenge…sort of to say “I can rock this beat better than you”. It’s the same in sub genres of Hip-Hop where some samples become standard. Sampling became something different in the hands of Puff Daddy. That is obviously blatantly ripping things off. And for the “art” of disguised samples, that’s just the industries way of wiggling out of paying for samples. The old way of sampling has pretty much died.

From the May 2002 Wired cover story on Moby: "Before he began work on '18,' Moby hired friends of friends to scour thrift stores in New York, LA, and London for records he could mine for samples. 'Anything,' he says of the kind of music he was looking for. 'French. Malaysian. American. I didn't care. I just wanted voices.'"

Don't know about 'more ethical' ... in light of the success of "Play" and the racial issues implicit, seems fodder for a lefty's argument about the effects of late-stage capitalism on art and culture. Technology trumps ethics, who wins?

I always wondered, when people talk about "late-stage capitalism," are they implying that capitalism is on its last legs? Seems a little unlikely to be the case (capitalism going away soon, I mean). Anyway, sometimes sampling an obscure source can create a mood, one that's meant to reference a time period more than a specific song. Look at the early 90s, when hip-hop's penchance for sampling obscurities spun out of control. When they included a beat or a snippet from some impossibly rare soul or funk song, they just wanted to give an "old" flavor to the song. I don't think that the lister is expected to know exactly which Galt MacDermot song or whatever is being referenced.

A late stage doesn't necessarily signal structural weakness, just a period in development further than the initial phase. In the type of cultural crit/economic theory I was referencing, you start with the premise that as a result of monetary exchange systems, every thing in society is assigned an intrinsic value and consumability relative to each other product, expressed in a ratio of dollars. Thus everything in a capitalist market system eventually becomes exchangeable and commofified: not just goods and services but personal relationships, values, ethics, etc.

I've never understood equating sampling with covering
or musically quoting - I mean, it's impossible to _exactly_
reproduce a piece of recorded music, although some have
come close. Sampling is an _exact_ reproduction so is in
another category, in my mind.

tonight i heard the orig-orchestral-cover-of-the-stones-song-that-was-ripped-off-for bittersweet-symphony again—i think still on my drive as a result of a well-timed link from jody beth rosen—there's something bittersweet itself about the legal story behind this gorgeous universal tune, and that it was absolutely bitten from start to finish; it's like thank god someone looked right, looked left, threw some lyrics on top and ca$hed in, otherwise we'd never have heard it

stetsasonic has an awesome 'classic new-school' track, "talking all that jazz" - "tell the truth james brown was old / till eric and rak came out with 'i got soul' / rap brings back old R and B / and if we had not people would have forgot"

(didn't eric b and rakim came out with "i know you got soul", i don't know why they get the name of the song wrong. i guess it flows better, i mean i know what they're talking about so whatever, move on, nothing to see here *pedant rants out-of-focus in background with audio turned down*) but despite what the above quote might imply to you in relation to the question posed in the thread, they duck the sampling criticism - "Well here's how it started / Heard you on the radio / Talkin' 'bout rap / Sayin' all that crap about how we sample / Give an example! / Think we'll let you get away with that? / You criticize our method / of how we make records / you said it wasn't art, so now we're gonna rip you apart" Stetsasonic's famous for actually being a band, they play all live instruments, like the Roots but better and like 10 years earlier, and they run back to them like a life-raft in a sea of doubts and aspersions about their genre's legitimacy. "Stop, check it out my man / This is the music of a hip-hop band." But the track on the ALBUM is totally sampled! Probably from tapes of them playing. Maybe. Anyway it's annoying, i hate how they implicitly agree with the criticism.

jody i just checked and the link doesn't work any more :-(

Stetsasonic were simply saying that in their view you could create new music out of sampling...especially by choosing the 'right' samples - which with Lonnie Liston SMith's 'Expansions' they actually did very well although I'm not sure just how conscious that choice was based on the messages in that original song (standard 'expand your mind' schtick)

i'm so glad I didnt post on ILM 18 months ago - the angry ripostes i wouldve felt i had to keep making to dave q's posts re sampling and dance music wouldve caused my huge embarassment down the line probably, which reminds me i must go download that 'Diminishing Returns' thing tonight...

Yea right...

Is the Lonnie Liston Smith song the one they sampled for "All That Jazz", stevem? I like the idea of samples in a performance, or sampling yourself, people playing around with recognizable shards in a live context, like optimo sampling the crowd singing along to "push it" and playing it back to them almost immediately, or the to-me still gobsmacking fact that Terminator X played all the backing tracks to "Nation of Millions" live - doing the drum machines, samplers, turntables in one take basically.

however you make your music whoever you are whether you are my favourite death metal band or some bunch of belgian trancers with an arpeggiator going or an arch cut & paste plundrphonics practicioner. IT IS ALL POINTLESS VAINGLORIOUS "ME TOO" FAECAL SMEARAGE and / or pissmarking of territory. maybe you too can get your picture in "heat" magazine! no i don't want to feel your pain and i am not interested in how clever you might think you are or how you might like to describe that to me. sampling is just as shit as all other music.

ha they have gotten quite a bit of play for that move, and deservedly so, it sounds genius