Making Beats. Joseph G. Schloss
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break beat. Dubbed the “best part of a great record” by Grandmaster Flash, one of rap’s pioneering DJs, the break beat is a section where “the band breaks down, the rhythm section is isolated, basically where the bass guitar and drummer take solos.” … These break beats are points of rupture in their former contexts, points at which the thematic elements of a musical piece are suspended and the underlying rhythms are brought center stage. In the early stages of rap, these break beats formed the core of rap DJ’s mixing strategies. Playing the turntables like instruments, these DJs extended the most rhythmically compelling elements in a song, creating a new line composed only of the most climactic point in the “original.” The effect is a precursor to the way today’s rappers use the “looping” capacity on digital samplers. (Rose 1994: 74)
The development of elaborate deejaying techniques in the middle and late 1970s lead to an increased intellectual focus on “the break.” Deejays, who are acutely conscious of audience reaction, now realized that they could play a good break even if the song it came from was not considered worthy of listeners’ energy. Breaks—played in isolation—came to the fore. Songs, albums, groups, and even genres receded into the background as units of musical significance.
This, in turn, inspired deejays to cast an increasingly wide net when looking for useful breaks. Since they were only playing a few, often unrecognizable, seconds from each song, they were no longer bound by the more general constraints of genre or style; All that mattered was a good break. In fact, many deejays are known to have taken a special delight in getting audiences to dance to breaks that were taken from genres that they professed to hate.
Pioneering deejay Afrika Bambaataa made precisely this point to David Toop in 1984: “I’d throw on ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ —just that drum part. One, two, three, BAM—and they’d be screaming and partying. I’d throw on the Monkees, ‘Mary Mary’—just the beat part where they’d go ‘Mary, Mary, where are you going?’—and they’d start going crazy. I’d say, ‘You just danced to the Monkees.’ They’d say, ‘You liar. I didn’t dance to no Monkees.’ I’d like to catch people who categorise records” (Toop 1984: 66).
The breakbeat focus of the Bronx deejays set in motion a number of social trends that would give birth to the music now known as hip-hop. These included the development of a substantial body of knowledge about the nature and location of breakbeats, an oral tradition and culture to preserve this knowledge, a worldview that valorized the effort necessary to find breaks, and an aesthetic that took all of these concerns into account.
The looping aesthetic in particular (which I discuss more extensively in chapter 6) combined a traditional African American approach to composition with new technology to create a radically new way of making mu sic. As breaks are torn from their original context and repeated, they are reconceived—by performer and listener alike—as circular, even if their original harmonic or melodic purposes were linear. In other words, melodies become riffs. The end of a phrase is juxtaposed with the beginning in such a way that the listener begins to anticipate the return of the beginning as the end approaches. Theme and variation, rather than progressive development, become the order of the day. And, although it would be easy to overstate this aspect, there is clearly a political valence to the act of taking a record that was created according to European musical standards and, through the act of deejaying, physically forcing it to conform to an African American compositional aesthetic.
At some point in the late 1970s, the isolation of the break, along with other effects (such as “scratching,” “cutting,” and so on), began to be considered a musical form unto itself. In other words, hip-hop became a musical genre rather than a style of musical reproduction when the deejays and their audiences made the collective intellectual shift to perceive it as music. This is often portrayed as a natural evolutionary development, but, as Russell Potter (1995) points out, it requires a substantial philosophical leap, one whose implications could not have been foreseen even by those who were at its forefront. One important force in the shift from hip-hop-as-activity to hip-hop-as-musical-form was the incursion of the music industry, which introduced significant distortions:
Hip-hop’s remaking of consumption as production was the first thing lost in this translation; despite its appropriation of Caz’s rhymes, “Rapper’s Delight” [the first major rap hit] was first and foremost a thing to be consumed, not a practice in action; its relation to hip-hop actuality was like that of a “Live Aid” t-shirt to a concert: a souvenir, a metonymic token. Hip-hop was something goin’ down at 23 Park, 63 Park, or the Back Door on 169th Street; you could no more make a hip-hop record in 1979 than you could make a “basketball game” record or a “subway ride” record. (Potter 1995: 45–46)
Before sampling was invented—in the late 1970s and early 1980s—this de contextualization presented a very specific hurdle for the record industry: although playing a popular funk record at a hip-hop show made sense, playing a popular funk record on a record did not. It seemed strange (not to mention illegal) to release recordings that consisted primarily of other records. Early hip-hop labels, such as Sugar Hill, therefore, relied on live bands and drum machines to reproduce the sounds that were heard in Bronx parks and Harlem recreation centers. As Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc (bassist and drummer respectively in the Sugar Hill house band) recalled in 1987, there was a conscious attempt on the part of the record company to capture the essence of these performances:
Doug Wimbish: The reason you hear tunes [on Sugar Hill raps] and say, “Damn, I heard that tune before” is that you did hear it before….
Keith LeBlanc: Sylvia [Robinson, Sugar Hill president and producer] would be at Harlem World or Disco Fever, and she’d watch who was mixing what four bars off of what record. She’d get that record, and then she’d play us those four bars and have us go in and cut it better. (Leland and Stein 1987: 28)
But in the mid-1980s a new technology developed that was better suited to the needs of hip-hop musicians: digital sampling. In its earliest incarnation, sampling was seen as a strategy for expanding the tonal palette of the keyboard-based synthesizer, as in this definition from a 1986 issue of Electronic Musician magazine:
Sampling is like magnetic tape recording in that both technologies involve the capturing, storing and recreating of audio (sound) waves. In fact, many of the standard terms associated with this technique (e.g. loop, splice, crossfade, etc.) have been borrowed directly from the world of magnetic tape recording. Sampling is the digital equivalent of music concrete, wherein common sounds are manipulated (and sometimes integrated with traditional instruments) to produce musical compositions.
Sampling allows the musician to record sounds from other instruments, nature, or even non-musical sources, and transpose and play them chromatically on a standard piano or organ keyboard. This new and emerging technology greatly expands the creative horizons of the modern composer. (Tully 1986: 27–30)
Another use, however, soon began to emerge. With the SP-12 in 1986, E-mu Systems introduced the “sampling drum computer” (Oppenheimer 1986: 84). Unlike earlier samplers, which were intended to provide musicians with novel sounds for their keyboards, the SP-12 was created to allow a producer to build rhythm tracks from individual drum sounds that had been previously sampled. In order to facilitate this process, it boasted three separate functions: the ability to digitally record a live drum sound (“sampling”), the ability to manipulate the resultant snippet to the operator’s liking, and the ability to precisely organize many samples within a temporal framework (“sequencing”). Hip-hop artists would take the process two steps further. While the new technology was intended to shift the drum machine from synthesized, preloaded drum sounds to more realistic “live” sounds, hip-hop artists were soon using the machine to sample not their own drumming, but the sound of their favorite recorded drummers, such as Clyde Stubblefield from James Brown’s band, or Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters.
It wasn’t long, though, before hip-hop producers would go even further. They soon began to use the SP-12 not only to sample drum sounds from old records, but also to sample entire melodies. This technique would not have appealed to musicians from other genres, who wanted the freedom to create their own melodies and had no interest in digital recordings