Whitenoise
:V
Opinions?
Sampling in rap.
- Thread starter Whitenoise
- Start date
T
TakeWalker
Guest
A detestable practice. Not just rappers, either: Janet Jackson's done it, she's in no way a rapper. These artists are simply riding the coattails of other, better artists to sell records. I'll point to Kanye West's "Stronger" and be done. It's of course far worse when they sample a song that you've come to know and enjoy.
Defender
the obvious identity
You already know how I feel about this. I think it's like a photo collage and I don't see any problem with it as long as the end product is something that isn't total ass. I support intelligent hip hop no matter what the backing track is, whether it's a live band or samples. It's an entrenched genre staple and it's also a way to pay tribute to the artists that inspired many of these rappers.
I really don't know where this WELL THEY'RE JUST RIDING ON THE COATTAILS OF OTHERS BY USING POPULAR STUFF when the most sampled song of all time is "Funky Drummer" by James Brown which 95% of the population wouldn't recognize if it was stabbing them in the face. If they're just robbing popular artists then I dare you to pick up any non-pop hip hop record (A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Aesop Rock, Del the Funkee Homosapien, etc) and tell me where the samples are from on the spot. Many samples are from old school jazz, funk and soul, genres that have been forgotten by the majority, and were precursors to rap in content and feel.
This is coming from somebody who studied music theory and has played various instruments for over half a decade and enjoys stuff from more or less every genre of music, by the way. I just am up in arms protecting rap because people like to take big wet dumps on it all the time after hearing some popular song they didn't like that sampled Daft Punk or Aerosmith and got the wrong idea about all of hip hop.
P.S. Daft Punk approved of and loved Kanye West's "Stronger."
I really don't know where this WELL THEY'RE JUST RIDING ON THE COATTAILS OF OTHERS BY USING POPULAR STUFF when the most sampled song of all time is "Funky Drummer" by James Brown which 95% of the population wouldn't recognize if it was stabbing them in the face. If they're just robbing popular artists then I dare you to pick up any non-pop hip hop record (A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy, Aesop Rock, Del the Funkee Homosapien, etc) and tell me where the samples are from on the spot. Many samples are from old school jazz, funk and soul, genres that have been forgotten by the majority, and were precursors to rap in content and feel.
This is coming from somebody who studied music theory and has played various instruments for over half a decade and enjoys stuff from more or less every genre of music, by the way. I just am up in arms protecting rap because people like to take big wet dumps on it all the time after hearing some popular song they didn't like that sampled Daft Punk or Aerosmith and got the wrong idea about all of hip hop.
P.S. Daft Punk approved of and loved Kanye West's "Stronger."
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Whitenoise
:V
I think the problem is that the pop hip hop seems to be doing the best so that's what most people who aren't into the genre get exposed to, and there is a lot of apparent coat tail riding on that front. That and the theft I mentioned in my last post in the Bass, yay or nay thread are my main problem with sampling. I hope I didn't come off as mean spirited or anything. Being a musician I have some strong opinions about the music industry, really the whole idea of music as a commercial commodity as opposed to a means of expression, and mainstream hip hop is one of the worst offenders on that front in my eyes. So much of it is so hedonistic and empty, not that other genres aren't, but in hip hop more than anywhere else it really seems to be celebrated. Seeing songs I love being butchered in the pursuit of easy money is the big frustration for me. The pile of shit they turned Ozzy's "Crazy Train" into a few years back comes to mind.
Defender
the obvious identity
Mainstream pop rap is really the scourge of the earth and absolutely criminal, but that's no excuse for people to go off on vendettas against hip hop as an entire genre because they didn't bother to dig into the cerebral stuff. :\
If all I heard of any rock was Linkin Park and Creed and I went around calling the entire genre crap then a lot of people would understandably be mad at me.
And sorry for flying off the handle about this stuff but there are only so many times you can have someone put down one of your favorite genres of music while they are admitting they only have heard the radio stuff before you just kind of start to get violently impatient.
Whitenoise
:V
I really didn't mean to come off like I was putting you down =( . That first post on the subject in the previous thread was a joke I never meant for it to sound like an attack. My issue is with mainstream hip hop, while I'll never be into the genre I won't attack anything I haven't experienced first hand, I really didn't mean to come off that way. I'm actually excited to be talking music with someone who is passionate about it and knows there shit, I don't want to come off as condescending. I'm very sorry if I did.
Defender
the obvious identity
No worries, dude, no harm no foul <3
I knew it was a joke but I was feeling barbaric. Sorry to make a wall of fire at you and stuff.
Whitenoise
:V
Oh no worries you didn't, I just get paranoid about coming off like a dick seeing as I do it accidentally now and then.
Baddwill
Beat Konducta
That's true in the sense of just taking a loop, and putting drums over it.
But what about chopping the song up to little pieces and re-arranging it to a whole new thing? Like this:
The Escorts "I can't stand to see you cry"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCf75hvaCCk
J-Dilla "Don't Cry"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqTmsKX0D1U
Baddwill
Beat Konducta
T
TakeWalker
Guest
This.
Oh, don't remind me. ;_; Kanye had nothing on these assholes.
Well, I didn't.
Well, it's what I hear. I'm not interested in the genre, and the mainstream stuff does not kindle in me a desire to dig into the more cerebral, less well-known artists. Besides, this isn't a diatribe against an entire genre, but against sampling. Why can't these artists come up with their own music? If all you need is a few beats to throw some lyrics onto, it can't be that hard.
Whitenoise
:V
Well Defender explained the origins of this practise in the Bass, yay or nay thread and that makes sense to me, but mainstream rappers aren't poor and lack the integrity of the genre's roots so not really justified there in my eyes. Also you're right, the style of composition I've generally seen in mainstream hip hop is very easy. Make a few compatible melodies and then mix and match overtop of a bass line, or else the standard rock verse chorus structure. This can be said of basically all mainstream music though, as these produce the catchiest music =P .
Defender
the obvious identity
I just like to pretend the hip hop on the radio doesn't even exist. I just realized that a lot of horrible crunk rap is a drum machine with a lot of really awful synths, so I guess that's an example of a rapper making their own tunes and failing hardcore.
Baddwill
Beat Konducta
My opinion is that it is an artform, It's something that I do almost daily, sample old records, use parts of a song, or even various songs, and combine them to make something new.
But when the xerox a beat from another hit song, that's when it sucks and it involves no creativity.
HyBroMcYenapants
STEVE HARVEY = HOMOSEXUAL
Rap is not music. It has no guitars! And solider boy!
Music is no Rap. Guitars!! And it has no solider boy
I'm gonna have to disagree, i feel that art is something that flows from the inside to create something new, not Frankenstein pieces of original art to create your own. No offense on my part, i just feel that what you do isn't exactely art. And it's not because i feel that it's not creating something new, i just think that it's not something that flows from inside. I mean...something that flows from inside (hate to sound elitist) is something that you've worked for, something that has giving you experience through hours of practice. I can throw any old few songs together, and pull them apart in pro-tools and sew them together again, but to know the mechanics of a drumset, and really love your set, and repair it and practice and practice and practice...that's true art.
Hackfox
502 Jump Squad
Rap is good to me (probably cause of where I live) and I do hate soulja boy he can eat a dick but listen to this song...
One of my faves
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOlAerP0L74
AND THIS YOU GOTTA LISTEN TOO my friend who only likes rock loves it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-rB6Wgb044
One of my faves
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOlAerP0L74
AND THIS YOU GOTTA LISTEN TOO my friend who only likes rock loves it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-rB6Wgb044
Defender
the obvious identity
Yeah, but they didn't even have ProTools until 1989, and most DJs mix music on turntables anyway, which isn't exactly some kind of simple and easy little thing.
kurreltheraven
Member
Yay a sampling discussion!
To me, sampling is the same practice as DJing, except on a much finer level. Some DJs will spin shite because they have no ear, and some have a repertoire of completely fresh material that gets you dancing and feeling good. By analogy, some producers will feed any old dross into their samplers and do nothing with it, and at the other end of the scale other better producers will take material and do something interesting and fresh with it.
So yeah, Kanye West stole the Daft Punk tune, but Daft Punk lifted the groove of "Better Harder Faster Stronger Tighter Buffer Frencher" from Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby" and chucked some robot voices over it. All they did was find and recontextualise that sample. Daft Punk are that brilliant at digging up old grooves, and no doubt if they could play instruments that's exactly the sound they'd be going for anyway.
Like all musical endeavours once you remove any physical talent with playing instruments from it, it's all about the ideas you put into your music through your own sensibilities. Every musician is borrowing or outright stealing their material, whether they lift it wholesale from actual recordings by other people, do cover versions of songs by other people, take production cues from albums recorded by other people (common practice when mastering), twist licks and chords they heard other people play into new shapes, read the theoretical discussions of other musicians and incorporate that into their own styles... it's a more blatant melting pot to the general public than before, but it's an old idea that's just more obvious with the way technology's gone.
It's not a question of originality for me - it's whether something's fresh, effective and just good, and that's entirely subjective.
To me, sampling is the same practice as DJing, except on a much finer level. Some DJs will spin shite because they have no ear, and some have a repertoire of completely fresh material that gets you dancing and feeling good. By analogy, some producers will feed any old dross into their samplers and do nothing with it, and at the other end of the scale other better producers will take material and do something interesting and fresh with it.
So yeah, Kanye West stole the Daft Punk tune, but Daft Punk lifted the groove of "Better Harder Faster Stronger Tighter Buffer Frencher" from Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby" and chucked some robot voices over it. All they did was find and recontextualise that sample. Daft Punk are that brilliant at digging up old grooves, and no doubt if they could play instruments that's exactly the sound they'd be going for anyway.
Like all musical endeavours once you remove any physical talent with playing instruments from it, it's all about the ideas you put into your music through your own sensibilities. Every musician is borrowing or outright stealing their material, whether they lift it wholesale from actual recordings by other people, do cover versions of songs by other people, take production cues from albums recorded by other people (common practice when mastering), twist licks and chords they heard other people play into new shapes, read the theoretical discussions of other musicians and incorporate that into their own styles... it's a more blatant melting pot to the general public than before, but it's an old idea that's just more obvious with the way technology's gone.
It's not a question of originality for me - it's whether something's fresh, effective and just good, and that's entirely subjective.
Defender
the obvious identity
Baddwill
Beat Konducta
nobuyuki
Member
I only skimmed this thread, so hopefully I won't be redundant, but let me give a few musings over why I really hate today's rap music (and why in hindsight I seem to appreciate the oldschool stuff more) when it comes to sampling:
Most people today don't understand the difference between 'good' sampling and 'bad' sampling, and the industry has gone a long way to nurture this ignorance. It's the audible equivalent of tracing vs. referencing. Good sampling creates a collage, like another poster said, from a small loop or riff of material -- often times, a good artist will add lots of original parts to it, or do something even more unique like changing the chord structure to his tune which the original sample didn't intend. Often times, multiple sample sources are used in order to create an entirely new song.
Bad sampling, on the other hand, is what you hear mostly nowadays with producers like Timbaland. In the aforementioned example, Daft Punk created a (somewhat) original piece from clips sampled from Edwin Birdsong, whereas Kayne West's producers sampled Daft Punk's vocoders and none of the original Birdsong tune. I give them both a bit of credit for making something slightly original (and props to Kanye for including daft punk in the video). However, it's one step away from what has to be an endemic of rap/r&b/hip-hop producers simply stealing entire songs thinking the original artist wouldn't notice, throwing compressed drum loops over the top, and having today's hot artists sing or rap over the top of it. Geeks started catching onto it after Timbaland stole music from a popular demoscene artist without so much as crediting him or the original artist seeing a red cent. Later it was discovered that he, and many other popular industry producers were stealing music left and right from artists in the middle east where legal recourse isn't so good for the artists.
The problem with the whole fiasco is that kids with these awful role models now want to believe they did nothing wrong, and now we have a whole new generation of people who don't understand what it means to be original. This sorta thing is more accepted, even if it's ethically dubious, and maybe that's why I think most of the music in the genre has gone downhill. That's my 2 cents over sampling in rap.
Edit: By the way, I don't think any of this stuff would have been so bad if proper credit and payment due was given to the artists who deserved it. If this had been the case over the past 15 years, we'd have a whole lot more people seeking out original music and broadening their horizons. Instead, excellent music from small artists is treated by heavy samplers and DJ's like it's some sort of hidden treasure, and they greedily try to obfuscate their sources in order to take as much credit as they can get for finding them and putting their own name on it. That doesn't just apply to rap, it also applies to all the club scrubs who use "white labels" too, to avoid disclosing where they got their music from so that other DJ's don't steal it, or that music aficionados have to go through their DJ as their effective "dealer" for the tunes they seek.
Most people today don't understand the difference between 'good' sampling and 'bad' sampling, and the industry has gone a long way to nurture this ignorance. It's the audible equivalent of tracing vs. referencing. Good sampling creates a collage, like another poster said, from a small loop or riff of material -- often times, a good artist will add lots of original parts to it, or do something even more unique like changing the chord structure to his tune which the original sample didn't intend. Often times, multiple sample sources are used in order to create an entirely new song.
Bad sampling, on the other hand, is what you hear mostly nowadays with producers like Timbaland. In the aforementioned example, Daft Punk created a (somewhat) original piece from clips sampled from Edwin Birdsong, whereas Kayne West's producers sampled Daft Punk's vocoders and none of the original Birdsong tune. I give them both a bit of credit for making something slightly original (and props to Kanye for including daft punk in the video). However, it's one step away from what has to be an endemic of rap/r&b/hip-hop producers simply stealing entire songs thinking the original artist wouldn't notice, throwing compressed drum loops over the top, and having today's hot artists sing or rap over the top of it. Geeks started catching onto it after Timbaland stole music from a popular demoscene artist without so much as crediting him or the original artist seeing a red cent. Later it was discovered that he, and many other popular industry producers were stealing music left and right from artists in the middle east where legal recourse isn't so good for the artists.
The problem with the whole fiasco is that kids with these awful role models now want to believe they did nothing wrong, and now we have a whole new generation of people who don't understand what it means to be original. This sorta thing is more accepted, even if it's ethically dubious, and maybe that's why I think most of the music in the genre has gone downhill. That's my 2 cents over sampling in rap.
Edit: By the way, I don't think any of this stuff would have been so bad if proper credit and payment due was given to the artists who deserved it. If this had been the case over the past 15 years, we'd have a whole lot more people seeking out original music and broadening their horizons. Instead, excellent music from small artists is treated by heavy samplers and DJ's like it's some sort of hidden treasure, and they greedily try to obfuscate their sources in order to take as much credit as they can get for finding them and putting their own name on it. That doesn't just apply to rap, it also applies to all the club scrubs who use "white labels" too, to avoid disclosing where they got their music from so that other DJ's don't steal it, or that music aficionados have to go through their DJ as their effective "dealer" for the tunes they seek.
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I have to disagree with you. I've been sitting on the cutting edge of drumming for a while. Yes, there's still a cutting edge, as we all saw when Johnny Raab started playing full Jungle/D&B grooves on an acoustic kit with only a set of sticks and a hand cymbal. (which is insane) I'm in an argument with a bunch of my drumming friends in which we disagree on weather a five-stroke roll into a flam is even a tangible idea in drumming, or just a muddled six-stroke. And those of us who agree that it is a tangible thing, still disagree if the roll is linked to the actual note, or to the grace note. Something as simple as that is being disagreed over. So, no, we still have our own ideas in drumming. The idea behind actual art is that your not only taking from the old, but adding a new idea and part to it, instead of just mixing together two different ideas.
I also take offense to the idea that you can create art with a machine (not referencing the quote, just a personal qualm) Art itself is not an idea. Art, is the physical expression of an idea. And when you put that idea through a machine, while it is still an idea, I find that it looses the heart behind the idea and it becomes what the machine dictates. Now, I can say that there are some DJs out there that spin some amazing mixes, but that is about 10% out of the entirety of DJing. Every drummer is an artist, because every drummer has his own style, his own take on grooves, no matter what the skill level.
10% of pogo-stick enthusiasts can pogo so good that it seems like an art form. They may be artists, but saying that hopping on a pogo-stick is art is completely missing the entire idea of what art is.
Of course, reality is subjective, so I leave it to you.
http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/johnnyrabb1.html (my favorite is vid 4)
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kurreltheraven
Member
I can see we are from very different worlds, and moreover that it's futile for a nerd like me to try to convince a luddite like you of anything.