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Play It Again, Sampler

5 minute read
Guy D.Garcia

When you hear new songs on the radio these days, do they have a familiar ring? Listen more closely to what’s tickling your subconscious. In many cases you did hear that sound before, maybe long ago. It’s the James Brown beat that’s now in a rapper’s groove, or the recycled ’60s riff in a current dance- floor hit. It’s the steam heat of the early ’80s hit Under Pressure recycled in the vanilla-rap hit Ice Ice Baby, and the streak of the funk classic Super Freak revived for M.C. Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This.

That oldies echo in your ears is the result of a high-tech technique, digital sampling, that is turning pop music on its ear. Besides creating some unexpected new sounds, sampling is raising serious legal and ethical issues. “We’re talking here about the ultimate instrument,” says Mike Edwards, founder and lead singer of the British neopsychedelic group Jesus Jones. “I think that sampling’s effect on music cannot be calculated.”

The concept dates back to the late ’70s, when some enterprising disco deejay played a disembodied bit of an old record over and over again to give it a funky new spin. That technique took a quantum leap when the first electronic samplers were introduced around 1980. Unlike synthesizers, which generate tones artificially, samplers record real sounds. Anything audible is eligible: prerecorded music, drumbeats, human voices, even ordinary noise like a slamming door. Samplers transform these sounds into digital codes, which in turn can be manipulated to produce melodies, rhythm tracks and complicated webs of sounds.

Sampling enthusiasts range from the funk-and-roll bands Faith No More and Fishbone to the avant-garde gurus David Byrne and Brian Eno. On Fishbone’s acclaimed new album, The Reality of Our Surroundings, the band incorporates church bells and human screams. “We use sampling to enhance the integrity of our music,” says drummer Phillip Fisher. “Butif you put a collage together, you should give credit to the places you got your pieces from.”

Not everyone shares such scruples. Rap is rife with riffs sampled from other musicians without their consent, most notably James Brown. (The Godfather of Soul says he has counted 134 examples.) Producer-performer Lenny Kravitz borrowed a drum track from the rap group Public Enemy for the thrusting beat of Madonna’s hit Justify My Love.

In Europe sampling has created some controversial musical stews. The techno- rockers EMF have stirred up a fuss with their single Lies, in which they sample the voice of Mark David Chapman, the John Lennon assassin, reciting lyrics from Lennon’s last album. To create the disco hit Sadeness, Part I, Romanian-born producer Michael Cretu sampled Gregorian chants, juxtaposed them with whispered verses from the Marquis de Sade, and set them to a metronomic beat. Whether such sampling is artistry “depends on how you use it,” says Cretu. “If you are a really creative person, you use it as an instrument, you participate. I’m sure if Richard Wagner were alive today he would have the biggest sampler in the world.”

With millions of dollars in royalties at stake, sampling has become a legal quagmire. U.S. copyright law protects a composer from having his work duplicated by another musician. But what happens if the second party samples only a few seconds of a melody? Or just a fragment of drumbeat? “The latest copyright law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1978, and it was out of date pretty much the day it was passed,” observes Jeffrey Light, a Beverly Hills-based entertainment lawyer. “Sampling is just another instance of the law not keeping up with technology.”

Vanilla Ice ran into the problem when he was accused of lifting part of the 1981 song Under Pressure, written by David Bowie and Queen, for his No. 1 hit $ Ice Ice Baby. When Bowie and Queen threatened a lawsuit, the rapper eventually added them to the composer credits. Two years ago, the rap group De La Soul was slapped with a $1.7 million suit by the ’60s group the Turtles for using an uncredited bite of their 1969 song You Showed Me. M.C. Hammer avoided such problems by sharing credit with Rick James, who wrote Super Freak, before sampling the song for his platinum single, U Can’t Touch This.

Artists and music publishers are struggling to settle disputes out of court by devising elaborate formulas to divvy up royalties between samplers and samplees. “Everybody is going to go ahead doing it,” predicts Light, “except now they’re going to get their approvals before they make a record. If you go to somebody after you’ve got a hit and try to cut a deal, they’re going to take you to the cleaners.”

Not all unauthorized sampling ends in discord. Tom’s Diner, an a cappella tune by Suzanne Vega, had been known only to fans who owned her 1987 album, Solitude Standing. Then late last year a couple of audacious remix artists who call themselves DNA sampled Vega’s voice and grafted it onto a throbbing beat. Vega liked the new version so much that she asked her record company to release it. The resulting Top Five single was the surprise hit of 1990.

While that cut-and-paste approach to pop may not work for everyone, sampling may well be a permanent part of the musical landscape. And what’s wrong with that? The arts have a long tradition of allusion and quotation, often with resonant effects. In pop music the only danger of sampling is that performers will use it as a crutch for the imagination, rather than a tool to help liberate it.

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