The Artistic Merit of Sampling in Hip Hop
Enslaved Africans brought to America found themselves confronting the dilemma of how to express themselves and assert their humanity. With each new generation born into slavery, their kidnappers stripped away more and more of the religion and culture of their ancestors, making it increasingly difficult to turn to the past. Without a history to look back on, they had to use what they had, which in this case was the Bible.
Plantation owners and overseers were soon treated to what we refer to these days as the spirituals. Exodus 8:1 became “Come Down, Moses.” “When Israel was in Egypt’s land/Let my people go/Oppressed so hard they could not stand/Let my people go.” John 5:4 became “Wade in the Water.” Psalm 104:22 influenced “Steal Away to Jesus” and the Book of Ezekiel inspired “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel.” By singing of their connection to the downtrodden of Psalm and the oppressed of Exodus, slaves were not only proving their ability to interpret the world around them, but also the capacity for self-expression. It's harder to subjugate your property if it can feel and think like you can.
Modern times may be drastically different, but sampling in hip hop is the closest creative practice we have that continues the tradition of taking pre-existing art and literature and using it to express a new world view.
Let’s take Kanye West. We all loved making fun of Kanye in the early days of his career for his heavy use of sampling. Why, I don’t know, but we did. Let’s also take “Spaceship,” one of my favorite songs off of College Dropout. “Spaceship” is a song about being poor and black in America, but also about working a degrading job and getting hassled by morons while your dreams feel a million miles away. The song samples Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover,” about Gaye yearning for an ex-flame.
We can only speculate as to the connection Kanye felt to “Distant Lover,” and why he chose to sample that song for “Spaceship.” Maybe longing for someone who seems so far away reminded Kanye of when his dreams of music stardom seemed even further. Maybe the lyrics had nothing to do with it, and the melody of “Distant Lover” reminded Kanye of a certain feeling. Maybe any number of reasons, but whatever it may be, Kanye heard “Distant Lover,” rearranged it, added a different drum pattern, and rapped over it to express an entirely new idea.
Though Kanye himself produced “Spaceship,” the same sense of expression is still there even when the rapper didn’t make the beat. Producers makes beats based on samples that meant one thing to them, then a rapper hears it and they make a song. (The order in which these things occur could be vastly different depending on the artist and the producer, but you get my point.) The meaning of the sample to the producer could be the same as whoever’s rapping over the beat. Maybe the artist heard the producers beat, thought it meant something completely different, and decided to rap about something else. Both are still valid forms of expression.
The samples themselves can take on a life of their own as well. One of the most famous samples in hip hop history is the saxophone loop from Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y),” originally sampled from Tom Scott’s cover of “Today” by Jefferson Airplane. “They Reminisce Over You” holds incredible emotional weight in hip hop. As such, other artist use the same sax loop to a different effect. Little Brother lightly uses the sample in the very beginning of “The Listening” to remind you of a time when hip hop meant something, right before it reminds you that nowadays nobody cares about what you’re saying and nobody’s listening. While Little Brother used a light touch, Lupe Fiasco practically steals the whole beat on “Around My Way (Freedom Ain’t Free).” Though I'm not a fan of the song, and though it isn't subtle, if you want to talk about reality and reach the heart of a true hip hop fan, nothing does it faster than T.R.O.Y's sax sample.
Certain samples can even take on a new intertextual meaning for the audience. I remember in my junior year of high school, I heard the song “The Days of Old” by rapper Paris, which samples “Mysterious Vibes” by The Blackbyrds. While “Mysterious Vibes” is about the inexplicable feeling of love two people can share, “The Days of Old” finds Paris pining for the carefree days of his childhood before violence and drugs took over the city and the people he grew up with started killing each other. It’s a very forlorn song, and now I had certain feelings associated with the its sample. A few weeks later, I heard the same sample in Danny!’s “Wanderland,” a song about the feelings of hopelessness when your career isn’t taking off like it should.
I’m not trying to be a rapper myself, but I am an aspiring artist in an industry where it’s increasingly harder to succeed. The song and the sample resonate even more to me now than they already did. In fact, it’s almost too real.
Sampling can sometimes be seen as “less than” thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between technical skill and creative expression, as well as certain artists abusing sampling and undermining its potential. (By the way, chopping up a sample requires a ton of skill. Try it here.) David Guetta’s boring as fuck “Hey Mama,” for instance, samples a recording of an actual black chain gang singing a work song called “Rosie.” (We’ll be coming back to “Hey Mama” and “Rosie” soon enough in another article.) Sampling something because it sounds cool is, unfortunately, a valid expression. I may think David Guetta sampling black prisoners singing of their desire for freedom and using it in a track about Nicki Minaj's desire to be a mindless sexual vassal may be tasteless, but that doesn’t mean David Guetta can’t do what he pleases as an artist.
In the era when hip hop emerged, music classes were not readily available or affordable. The same is probably still true today. Centuries of institutionalized racism and segregation transformed the neighborhoods where the country’s black residents lived into the most crime ridden areas in the country. With the effects of the war on drugs started by Nixon and exasperated by the Reagan administration, the inner city’s black residents in the South Bronx found themselves confronting the dilemma of how to express themselves and assert their humanity.
This time, however, they had a past to turn to. Some inherited their musical knowledge from their family or somebody in their lives, but for a lot of people who wanted to express themselves with music, it meant plugging a sound system and some turntables into the streetlights in the park and bringing a crate of LPs to mix together. Some got lucky when lightning struck a power line, allowing ample opportunity to break into a store and steal a drum machine. (This is the rumored story of how the inventors of hip hop and EDM attained their first equipment) Either way, much like the slaves before them, they used what they had. The slaves had the Bible. The South Bronx had some 808s and some old records.
