In 1996 in an article by Hugh Davies on history of sampling that concentrated on its classical and avant-garde uses and had nothing about then-current upsurge in sampling by hip-hop artists, Davies wrote that: Since late 1970s term 'sampling' has been applied in music to method by which special musical instruments digitally 'record' external sounds for subsequent resynthesis.1 Davies was thinking primarily of development of technologies that have enabled sounds to be reproduced and inserted into newly composed pieces of music. Samples, then, can be anything-external sounds-that is, taken from elsewhere and integrated as an element in a composition. The limit cases are tracks that are completely composed of samples.Sampling has held an important place in evolution of hip-hop. Joseph Schloss provides this background:When hip-hop expanded to recorded contexts, both of these roles became more complex. MCs began to create increasingly involved narratives us- ing complex rhythms and cadences. And although DJs continued to make music with turntables when performing live, most also developed other strategies for use in studio, and these eventually came to include use of digital sampling.2Here sampling is understood as a practical answer to changes in hip-hop as it developed. However, Justin Williams suggests that sampling, or rather aesthetic that underpins practice of sampling, is central to generic form of hip-hop. Describing his book, he writes:Rhymin' and begins with a crucial premise: fundamental element of hip-hop culture and aesthetics is overt use of preexisting material to new ends. Whether it is taking an old dance move for a breakdancing battle, using spray paint to create street art, quoting from a famous speech or sampling a rapper or 1970s funk song, hip-hop aesthetics involve borrowing from past. these elements are appropriated and reappropriated, they become transformed into something new, something different, something hip-hop.3From this perspective sampling is integral to practice of hip-hop as an expression of hip-hop's way of relating to past. Such a position links sampling with African American culture and, indeed, Williams quotes Schloss writing that, the looping aesthetic . . . combined a traditional African-American approach to composition with new technology to create a radically new way of making music.4 Looping here refers to practice of taking an extract, a break, from one record and repeating it, originally live by using two copies of record on two turntables. The sampling technology that developed in 1980s, perhaps most importantly E-mu SP-1200, which came onto market in 1987, enabled this extraction to be achieved more easily and sample of break, often repeated many times, to be situated within a new composition.And yet, it is significant that title of Williams's book, and Stealin', is a quotation from title of a track off Beastie Boys' first album, Licensed to Ill, released in 1986. With its extensive use of rock samples album broke through to a mass, white, youth audience and over years has sold over ten million copies in United States alone. The Beastie Boys were Jewish and album was produced by their long-term friend and associate, Jewish Rick Rubin.5 On Rhymin' and Stealin' Beastie Boys sampled three pieces of music, Led Zeppelin's When The Levee Breaks, Black Sabbath's Sweet Leaf, and The Clash's version of I Fought The Law. As it happens, Beasties were not stealing in sense that use of samples had been cleared with rights holders, but they were stealing in that they were taking and reusing extracts from other pieces of music as a part of their own new composition, recombining those elements into a new, synthesized whole. Williams never comments on Jewishness of Beastie Boys. …
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