What is your sampling epiphany? (Massive Attack samples)

UK Guardian Music Blog

Check out the original post HERE for lots of embedded hyperlinks and media examples of the samples discussed.

What is your sampling epiphany?

An unofficial compilation of tracks sampled by Massive Attack showcases the group's aesthetic through the songs that informed it – and provides fans with the thrill of discovering the originals

Posted by Simon Reynolds Thursday 26 February 2009 16.43 GMT guardian.co.uk

Sampling is weird. We're so used to it, it's been such a commonplace part of pop music for so long (since the late 1980s), that it's easy to lose sight of what a peculiar thing it is. Although sampling is often compared with collage, I think there's a profound difference which relates to the added dimension of time that music inhabits. With recorded music, however much it's doctored and enhanced through studio techniques (multitracking, overdubs etc), there generally remains a kernel of life inside it; what you are hearing is a sequence of human actions happening in real-time. (I'm talking about played music here, as opposed to programmed music. But it is overwhelmingly the case that played music is what gets sampled – music of the 70s particularly, when analogue recording quality was at its peak but drum machines and sequencers had yet to replace tight rhythm sections.) To take a chunk of living time – which is what a sample is – and chain it into a loop isn't just appropriation, it's a form of enslavement. But to pluck several different segments of live playing from separate space-time contexts and force them into unholy congress with each other … that's sorcery.

When sampling first made waves in the mid-80s, most journalistic discussions focused on the legal aspect, typically framing the samplers in punk-like terms as renegade, naughty, larcenous, irreverent. Likewise, academic studies of sampling in pop over the ensuing decades have largely concerned themselves with copyright and corporate power, typically siding with "the streets" versus the entertainment-media complex. These are perennially interesting issues, for sure, especially when given a postcolonial inflection: not just pirating and bootlegging, but the fact that non-western or pre-capitalist folk cultures typically have much looser, more collective notions of authorship and originality. (A friend of mine who's both a DJ and a law student is currently doing dissertation research in Jamaica looking at the "fluid" – a euphemism – notion of copyright in dancehall culture.) None the less, there appears to other crucial dimensions to sampling – its aesthetics and its philosophical implications – that are relatively neglected. (I could be wrong here, of course, and if you know of really penetrating and provocative work in this area, please point me in its direction!)

What got me thinking about all this was the arrival several weeks ago of an advance CD called Protected: Massive Samples. It's the second in a series started by Rapster Records compiling the original tracks that a well-known group has sampled, in this case Massive Attack. The first volume, released a year ago, was Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples, which showcased raw material for all those hot hits by Daft Punk. These compilations have not been done as a collaboration with, or even with the blessing of, the group in question; the titles and packaging take great care not to use either band's full name at any point, presumably for legal reasons. And I wonder if Daft Punk or Massive Attack are happy about having their sources so clearly signposted.

The sample-source album isn't a brand new idea. When Kanye West was first blowing up circa The College Drop-out, I recall a vinyl bootleg LP in circulation that collated the tunes he'd sampled, such as Chaka Khan's Through the Fire – the basis for his Through the Wire (although "virtual entirety of" would be nearer the mark, give or take the drums and West's rhymes). I expect there have been other such unofficial compilations. I didn't buy the Kanye Samples record because I was reluctant to interfere with my enjoyment of his album. Similarly I was slightly nervous about playing Protected: Massive Samples the first time. Would I ever be able to listen to Blue Lines the same way again? Would knowing the extent of Massive's debts diminish my admiration, sabotage my sense of awe at their achievement?

This dilemma is unique to pop music of the post-sampling era. There's no counterpart in other artforms that I can think of. It's not like looking at the sketches for a painting, or the rushes for a movie, or even like seeing the original movie from which remake is based. It's sort of like a scenario where you venerate a particular painting and then get presented with tubes of the specific colors of oil paint the artist used on that work. Except not really, because the groove of Billy Cobham's Stratus simply is – in a direct and exact and supremely concrete way – the groove of Massive's Safe from Harm. So we're back to that idea of the sample as a living thing, a portion of time and energy wrested away from its original owners and put to service. Idea for a feature: track down the players on that Cobham session and find out what they really think and feel about being used in this manner. I assume Cobham, as composer of the tune, has at least been remunerated (he gets a credit on Safe from Harm) but quite possibly not the other players (Jan Hammer, Lee Sklar, Tommy Bolin). It's not just about the money, though, it's about having one's performance taken out of its context, severed from its original artistic intent. For what is interesting about comparing Stratus with Safe from Harm is how much all the stuff that clearly mattered to Cobham and crew (the noodly, improvised jazziness – there's a long abstract intro, for instance) gets jettisoned as Massive Attack, being typical B-boys, focus on the driving bass-and-drums groove. Indeed, they focus on the most linear, straightforward segment of the rhythm track, which gets looser and wilder at other points in the song.

I'd heard Stratus before and immediately spotted the Massive connection, so its appearance on Protected didn't surprise me. But I was slightly startled by how extensively Daydreaming – another killer tune from Blue Lines – is based on Mambo by Wally Badarou, a session keyboardist associated with Island Records's Compass Point studios in Nassau, who came to moderate renown in the 80s through his work with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru and others. Indeed, it makes me want to hunt down Badarou's solo albums to see what other gems are secreted there.

The overall effect of Protected: Massive Samples is less "gotcha" sample-spotting, though, and more like listening to one of those Back to Mine albums: it's a delectably consistent and mood-unified collection of plushly produced, mostly downtempo soul and reggae. Lowrell's Mellow Mellow – the gorgeous source for Blue Lines's Lately – defines the vibe precisely. Getting stoned to these tunes – as you can be sure the Massive boys did on many a Bristol afternoon in the 80s – must have been like lolling around on a gigantic sofa made of marshmallow. Protected also resembles the Under the Influence series: like a photographic negative of a Best Of compilation, it showcases the group's aesthetic through the listening that informed it.

Some self-consciously arty or iconoclastic exponents of sampling recall the appropriation artists of late 70s New York, figures like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, whose work involved gambits like copying famous pictures and appending your own signature, or rephotographing photographs (sometimes famous shots, sometimes iconic adverts) and then cropping or otherwise reframing them. That seems quite close to what the early Justified Ancients of Mu Mu did, or avant-pranksters like Plunderphonics and Negativland, where the whole point is sampling a group or song that is universally known and freighted with associations.

But the approach of Massive Attack, Daft Punk and their peers was not based on exploiting familiarity; only the real cratedigging headz ever knew the sources they were drawing on. If the Rapster series continues there's no shortage of potential candidates for this treatment: DJ Shadow, RZA, Chemical Brothers, J Dilla. Most likely the crate-diggers types have got there first and already pulled together unofficial sample-spotting compilations for these artists, and many others besides, for circulation on the web. Similarly, there's a whole site dedicated to identifying samples used in jungle, but for the moment it contents itself with simply citing the source, as opposed to offering MP3s or embedded YouTube audio streams.

Talking of jungle, I'm reminded of how sampling has created a unique and unprecedented form of pop rapture: the epiphany of suddenly, accidentally encountering the source track for a favourite tune. This happens all the time if you are a fan of jungle and hardcore rave. I vividly remember the thrill that ambushed me during a James Bond movie when suddenly I heard a portentous orchestral theme that I'd loved for years as a key element of Acen's 1992 rave classic Trip to the Moon. (The source in question: John Barry's Space March, from his score for You Only Live Twice, soundtracking the moment when a Soviet capsule in orbit is swallowed up by a mysterious shark-like spacecraft).

But probably my all-time favourite sample epiphany relates to a mystery tune, also from 1992, by an artist who trafficked under the period-evocative moniker E. I taped this track off a pirate radio show and have no idea if it ever saw proper release or what its title is. But it's a real lost classic, propelled by the most boombastic breakbeat loop and featuring a comic little vocal hook that coarsely roars "Oi!!!! I've got a little black disc wiv me tune on it!". But there's also an incongruously plangent guitar part and a slow fade where the groove drops away leaving just an aching guitar solo and a totally blissed raver gasping "I... I... I … luvvit!!!". Several years ago, idly channel surfing, I landed midway through The Wall and realised with a shock of delight that the lead guitar on E's tune was actually David Gilmour. But it was only a few months back, once again chancing upon Alan Parker's overripe farrago, that I realised the whole "little black disc" bit was a parody of Nobody Home, specifically the bit that goes "Oi! I've got a little black book with me poems in!"

The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the "sample stain". But that's a subject I'll return to in a future blogpost.

Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll

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culturebox
Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll
The shady one-man corporation that's destroying hip-hop.
By Tim Wu
Posted Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006, at 1:50 PM ET

Last week, a mysterious company, Bridgeport Music Inc., sued hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, accusing him of breaking the law when he recorded his 2003 single "Justify My Thug." The song is an obvious nod to Madonna's "Justify My Love," but she is not the plaintiff. Instead, Bridgeport is suing because Jay-Z did something that is normal in hip-hop: sampling. He took a few notes, looped them in the background, and produced the tune. Bridgeport claims to own those notes, and is demanding a fortune in damages and a permanent ban on the distribution of the song.

Bridgeport is an unwelcome addition to the music world: the "sample troll." Similar to its cousins the patent trolls, Bridgeport and companies like it hold portfolios of old rights (sometimes accumulated in dubious fashion) and use lawsuits to extort money from successful music artists for routine sampling, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable. The sample trolls have already leveraged their position into millions in settlements and court damages, but that's not the real problem. The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation. They are bad for everyone in the industry—including the major labels. The sample trolls need to be stopped, either by Congress or by court rulings that establish sampling as a boon, not a burden, to creativity.

Bridgeport is a one-man corporation formed in 1969 and owned by a former music producer named Armen Boladian. It has no employees and no reported assets other than copyrights. Technically, Bridgeport is a "catalog company." Most catalog companies are in the relatively quiet business of licensing rights for television commercials, cover songs, and selling sheet music to interested fans. But Bridgeport has figured out a far more lucrative business model—trolling for sampling cash.

George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician. In the 1970s, Boladian and Bridgeport managed to seize most of the copyrights to Clinton's songs. How exactly they did so is highly disputed. However, in at least a few cases, Boladian assigned the copyrights to Bridgeport by writing a contract and then faking Clinton's signature (as described here). As Clinton put it in this interview, "he just stole 'em."

Bridgeport, if a thief, stole the winning ticket. The Clinton sounds it acquired went on to be among the most widely sampled in the rap music of the 1980s and 1990s. Sampling is as elemental to the genre as beats, beefs, or bragging, and Clinton's sonic creations were a major part of Public Enemy's debut, and were also used heavily by N.W.A., Dr. Dre, Biggie Smalls, and other rap pioneers. Often the sampling is virtually impossible to detect—listen to this sample in this Public Enemy song.

The rise of rap presented a golden opportunity for Bridgeport. After years of demanding fees, in 2001, Bridgeport launched nearly 500 counts of copyright infringement against more than 800 artists and labels. The company, suing in Nashville, Tenn., located every sample of Clinton or other owned copyrights it could find. It took the legal position that any sampling of a sound recording, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable, is still a violation of federal law. Imagine that the copyright owner of The Lord of the Rings had sued every fantasy book or magazine that dared used the words elf, orc, or troll. That gives you an idea of the magnitude of Bridgeport's campaign.

Since 2001, Bridgeport's shotgun approach has led to many dismissals and settlements, but also two major victories. First, in 2005, Bridgeport convinced Nashville's federal appellate court to buy into its copyright theory. In that case, Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune "Get Off Your Ass and Jam," changed the pitch, and looped the sound in the background. (The result is almost completely unrecognizable—you can listen to it here). The Sixth Circuit created a rule: that any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

Then, in March of this year, Bridgeport cashed in. It convinced a court to enjoin the sales of the best-selling Notorious B.I.G. album Ready to Die for illegal sampling. A jury awarded Bridgeport more than $4 million in damages.

These troll lawsuits may sound unattractive. But is Bridgeport perhaps serving the goals of copyright—fostering creativity—in some less obvious way? One idea is that Bridgeport is more Robin Hood than troll, stealing from lazy, rich rappers like Jay-Z to channel money back to deserving artists like George Clinton. That argument would make some sense if making rap music were easy, or if Clinton or other artists were in some way the beneficiary of the lawsuits. But neither is true. Bridgeport and other trolls do take from the rich. But they keep the money.

If the benefits are abstract, the costs imposed are obvious. Sample trolls have already changed the face of hip-hop. Early rap, like Public Enemy, combined and mixed thousands of sounds in a single album. That makes sense musically, but it doesn't make sense legally. Thousands or even hundreds of samples, under the Bridgeport theory, mean thousands of copyright clearances and licenses. Today, Public Enemy's breakout album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, would cost millions to produce or, more likely, would never have been made at all.*

The kicker is that while sample trolls are bad for artists, they're also bad for mainstream record labels. Record labels want to get out new music at minimum cost. But if clearing rights in the Bridgeport world costs a fortune, production becomes that much more expensive, and innovative music that much riskier a bet.

What, if anything, can be done? In the big picture, copyright must continually work to ensure that the basic building blocks of creativity are available to artists and creators, especially as new forms of art emerge. We already know what this means for novelists: freedom to use facts, borrow stock characters (like Falstaff) and standard plots (the murder mystery). For filmmakers, it means the freedom to copy standard shots (like The Magnificent Seven's "establishment shot"). For rap music, it means the freedom to sample. Rap's constant reinvention and remixing of old sounds makes it what it is; now is the time for the copyright system to get that. Vibrant cultures borrow, remix and recast. Static cultures die.

Legal solutions to the sample-troll problem are relatively easy—much easier than fixing the patent-troll problem. First, there's only one appellate court, the 6th Circuit, that takes the ridiculous position that any sample, no matter how minimal, needs a license. Most copyright scholars think the decision is both activist and bogus—in the words of leading commentator William Patry, "Bridgeport is policy making wrapped up in a truncated view of law and economics." Other courts can easily counter Bridgeport. They just need to say that the infringement rules for sampling are the same rules that apply for the rest of copyright. Dumbledore may resemble Gandalf, but he's no infringement. Similarly, if you can't even recognize the original in a sample, it shouldn't violate federal law to use it.

Congress could also easily act against the sample trolls. All that is needed is a "sampling code": a single section of the law that declares the usage of some fixed amount of a sound recording, say, seven notes or less, to be no infringement of the copyright law. That would give artists a simple rule to live by, while still requiring licenses for big samples that would compete with the original. It's a win-win scenario. With a single line of code, Congress can make this problem go away.

In the end, it's probably wrong to suggest the sample trolls are evil or hate rap music. The trolls simply look for profit, like any business, and are rational and predictable, like the mold that grows on rotten meat. None of these problems would be quite so severe if artists actually controlled their own copyrights. George Clinton's copyrights end up blocking sampling, when he himself favors sampling. "When hip-hop came out," said Clinton in this interview with Rick Karr, "I was glad to hear it, especially when it was our songs—it was a way to get back on the radio."

Copyright is supposed to be the servant of artists, but today that is all too often just a pretense. The vast majority of the nation's valuable copyrights are owned not by creators, but by stockpilers of one kind or another, and Bridgeport is just a particularly pernicious example. We need better devices to keep the control of the most valuable of artist's rights with artists. For, to paraphrase Judge Learned Hand, copyright was born to protect and liberate musicians, but it all too often ends up enslaving them.

Click here to see the complaint in the Jay-Z case.

Correction, Nov. 16, 2006: The article originally and incorrectly stated that It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was Public Enemy's first album. In fact, it was the group's second. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2153961/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Classic Mellotron promo video

This has been making the rounds for a while, but it is too cool to resist. Behold, the nifty promo film for the Mellotron, circa mid-/late 1960s(?):