Making Beats. Joseph G. Schloss
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commercials, and spoken-word records:
Joe: If you weren’t the first, you were one of the people that really popularized that idea of taking stuff….
Steinski: Oh, cut-and-paste shit? Yeah.
Joe: Were you the first person to really do that?
Steinski: I don’t think so.
Joe: OK, I guess “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”—
Steinski: Buchanan and Goodman. 1956. Did you ever hear the “Flying Saucer” records?
Joe: Oh, where they cut in—they ask the questions and they kinda … So you see that as an influence?
Steinski: Totally. More than an influence, it’s a direct line. Yeah. Absolutely, man. Those guys had pop hits with taking popular music, cutting it up, and putting it in this context. Totally. Yeah. Absolutely.13 (Steinski 2002)
If such influences are rarely seen in scholarly writing about hip-hop, it is largely because they do not answer the questions that scholars are interested in: What does hip-hop’s popularity say about American culture in the early twenty-first century? How does African American culture engage with the mass media? How does global capitalism affect artistic expression?
Although there have been several short works on the role of deejaying in live performance (White 1996, Allen 1997), there has been very little substantial work on sampling within a hip-hop context. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there have been only three widely published academic works that focus specifically on sample-based musical gestures (Krims 2000, Walser 1995, Gaunt 1995). All three of these works emerge from a similar disciplinary perspective: musicology informed by personal experience with hip-hop music. All three authors provide insightful, provocative, and—particularly in Walser’s case—politically engaged analysis. But because they are musicologists, they focus on the results of sampling rather than the process; they are, essentially, analyzing a text.14 Again, each of these works stands on its own, but there is a resounding silence when it comes to other perspectives on hip-hop sampling—particularly when one considers that hip-hop has been a major form of American popular music for almost thirty years.
There are two primary reasons for the lack of attention that the non-vocal aspects of recorded hip-hop have received from academia. First, the aesthetics of composition are determined by a complex set of ethical concerns and practical choices that can only be studied from within the community of hip-hop producers. Most researchers who have written about hip-hop have not sought or have not gained access to that community. Second, most of the scholars who have studied hip-hop have emerged from disciplines that are oriented toward the study of texts or social processes, rather than musical structures. Simply put, it is not the music that interests them in hip-hop. But such an approach—legitimate on its own terms—does reinforce the notion that the nonverbal aspects of hip-hop are not worthy of attention. For example, Potter, in an otherwise excellent book, dismisses the instrumental foundation of hip-hop almost out of hand, beginning a chapter with the pronouncement that “[w]hatever the role played by samples and breakbeats, for much of hip-hop’s core audience, it is without question the rhymes that come first” (Potter 1995: 81; emphasis in original). In some sense, this entire study is devoted precisely to questioning this conclusion.15
The study begins with a brief history of sampling, questioning some of the assumptions that scholars have made about this history, which have subsequently influenced the general tenor of the scholarship on sampling. Specifically, I have tried to problematize the relationship between general societal factors—culture, politics, and especially economics—and hip-hop music, arguing that individual artists often have more control over the way these issues affect their work than they are given credit for. In other words, I am not so much interested in the conditions themselves as I am interested in the way hip-hoppers, given those conditions, were able to create an activity that was socially, economically, and artistically rewarding. In most cases, my approach can be expressed in three related questions: What are the preexisting social, economic, and cultural conditions? Given those conditions, what did the individual choose to do? Why was the individual’s choice accepted by the larger community?
The practice of creating hip-hop music by using digital sampling to create sonic collages evolved from the practice of hip-hop deejaying. The nature and implications of these developments are discussed in chapter 2. Also discussed in that chapter is the way that this progression is largely recapitulated in the lives of individual producers as part of an educational process that intends to inculcate young producers in the hip-hop aesthetic. This process is ongoing throughout a producer’s career and may affect many facets of hip-hop expression. In chapter 3, I address hip-hop producers’ embrace of sampling by examining their rejection of the use of live instrumentation. I argue that sampling, rather than being the result of musical deprivation, is an aesthetic choice consistent with the history and values of the hip-hop community. Chapter 4 addresses the social and technical benefits of digging in the crates for samples. In addition to providing useful musical material, the practice also functions as a way of manifesting ties to hip-hop deejaying tradition, “paying dues,” and educating producers about various forms of music, as well as a form of socialization between producers. Chapter 5 describes the so-called producers’ ethics, a set of professional rules that guides the work of hip-hop beatmakers. These rules reinforce a sense of community by providing the parameters within which art can be judged, as well as by preempting disputes between producers. Chapter 6 looks at the aesthetic expectations that guide producers’ activities. By critically assessing the producers’ own discourse of artistic quality, I attempt to derive the underlying principles that they have created. In doing so I argue that to a great degree these principles reflect a traditional desire among people of African descent to assimilate and deploy cultural material from outside the community while demonstrating a subtle mastery of the context in which it operates. The hip-hop aesthetic is, in a sense, an African-derived managerial philosophy. Chapter 7 discusses the influences that come from outside the producers’ community that may affect producers’ conduct. Using the sociologist Howard Becker’s (1982) notion of an “art world,” I look at the immediate material and social forces that help to define the hip-hop world as a collective enterprise.
A significant portion of my discussion concerns the ways in which social, artistic, and ethical concerns work together to construct a sense of relative artistic quality and how this sense of quality circles back to affect individuals’ social and artistic praxis.
It is useful to visualize these various levels of subjective quality (as judged by the producers themselves) as concentric circles with the center being the core of, the theoretically “best” approach to, hip-hop sampling. The outermost circle—the decision to use digital sampling rather than live instruments in the first place—reflects the purism of hip-hop producers in defining their genre (chapter 3). Once that decision has been made, the next circle consists of following producers’ ethics, which define what may be sampled and how this sampling is to be done (chapter 5). Finally, the most valued status to be claimed by producers—the core—is that of one who, having done these things, is able to produce a creative work (chapter 6). Each circle represents both a level of artistic quality and the group of people who have attained that level. The smaller circles are seen as existing within the larger ones, so, for example, all people who adhere to producers’ ethics use digital sampling, but not all people who use digital sampling adhere to producers’ ethics.16
This entire configuration is itself contained within a larger social world, whose concerns deeply and necessarily affect a producer’s output, another series of concentric circles.17 Once again, while it is assumed that members of the inner circles abide by the outer, the reverse is not