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sampling: art or theft?

© Steve Juon

There's only so many rehashings of 80's songs by Matt Wilder, Sting, and David Bowie that you can take before you want to smack Puff Daddy upside the head and say, "Get an original idea you lazy ass fuck!" Sometimes Puff Daddy seems to SINGULARLY be the argument against sampling. He even admitted in a rap lyric that he "takes hits from the 80's" and makes them into rap songs because a seemingly mindless public buys up anything it already knows.

At the same time though, not all sampling is a bad thing. How many people would know who Clyde Stubblefield was if James Brown was not the most sampled R&B artist of all time? Would Bob James, Miles Davis, and Donald Byrd be appreciated as jazz virtuosos were it not for their sweet soulful sounds that have been sampled by the likes of DJ Premier and Pete Rock?

Everytime I'm almost convinced Pete Rock is a genius, I hear an old funk record and think "oh, that's so and so - anybody could have sampled that." THEN AGAIN the whole point is that he DID think of sampling it, and made it fat too. Usually the good producers don't just take a sample and loop it a la Puffy-esque rap songs; they actually meld four or five different sounds together into an audio collage; sometimes even re-interpreting the songs on a keyboard or the loops on a drum machine or live studio drummer for the sound that they seek. You can always say "I know X sampled that from that" but the good producers take the original and make something old new all over again - which has always been the greatest argument FOR sampling in my mind. Not only is it an art in itself but it inspires interest in older classics that otherwise would go unheard.

In closing though, some samples just NEED to be retired. There's only so much more than can be down with Between the Sheets, Funky Drummer, or Substitution. Give it a REST.

Peace, Flash

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