donkeydoo

Hey guys and gals!

(only other people's music as examples and a Mark Ronson Ted Talk linked below...I hope that doesn't count as advertising, I work for neither lol, just hoping to spark some conversation)

So I ranted a little while back to a bunch of my closer friends who are signed up to a music newsletter thing I do (not me just calling them up one by one and ranting lol) about sampling because I was fed up with the band purists being dismissive about what is essentially a tool. Anyway, maybe some other people will find it interesting...it's copied below and was written to accompany the following playlist to sample some of these samplers who sample

COOL THIEVES - A Sampling Of Samplers

Sampling gets a bad rep out in the wide world…a commonly held opinion is that it’s lazy… that's arguably lazier to arrive at than the actual sampling itself! Luckily Mark Ronson has articulated this much better than I could in a Ted talk on this very topic. I’ve transcribed the key extract below, but I would seriously recommend watching the whole thing here:


MARK RONSON TED TALK

“They weren’t sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music, they weren’t sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff. To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things, apart from a few notable exceptions we know about like Vanilla Ice. They were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them and they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. They heard it, they wanted to be part of it and they all of sudden found themselves with the access to the technology to do so. Not much unlike the way the Delta Blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton and they felt the need to co-opt that music with the tools of their day.”

Not only is sampling here to stay, but has in fact shaped the vast majority of music for the last 35 years. If you’re an instrument-purist, then just like Metallica on set for their 1988 video “One” after a lifetime vow to never film a music video, you’re going to have to abandon your outdated beliefs. The only alternative would be to research every song you hear to make sure you’re not letting in any sounds you consider ‘lazy’. The average person, even those familiar with vinyl underestimate the extent to which samples make up the fabric of modern music. While most would guess that hip-hop is sampling heavy, it extends to basically all of pop, RnB, alt rock as well as most kinds of electronic and dance music.

“But I only listen to rock music so all the artists I like are exempt from your criticism”. …well, let’s see, so Jet’s Are you Gonna Be My Girl is just a rework of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. Nirvana’s Come As You Are is just a rework of Killing Joke’s Eighties. Every instrumental in the above playlist transforms the source material in far more significant ways than these two examples. The question of originality/laziness gets even trickier. I concede that not all rock songs so obviously copy what came before but consider what genres are in general: there’s a rough template of sensibilities based on what came before and adjusted by what's come since. The argument being made is that the creativity of the artist is more important than the tools he or she may use. Taken to the extreme does that mean it's possible for say Thom Yorke to make a Mercury award winning album made only from fart noises? Sure (IMO).

A quick example - The song Ghostwriter by RJD2.

From Ghostwriter, below are the only few samples I could find sources for [from another website] so you can see that having the eye to combine these in the ways they have been is an extremely creative skill. At the least it’s comparable to playing an instrument…and if done to the quality RJD2 have achieved here, I’d argue more impressive.

A few seconds from the start of Paul Desmond’s A Taste of Honey

Drums from The Delfonic’s Ready of Not

The MmmmMMmms from right at the end of Cream’s Outside Woman Blues

The Ahhhhs Ahhhhs from Elliot Smith’s I Didn’t Understand

Right at the start of Betty Wright’s Secretery provides a drop

The turntablists like those on the above playlist have raided old and more obscure music, extracted multiple isolated instrumental sections from different songs, added their own drums/bass/other synths and weaved these together with the needles of their creativity to sow new and interesting sonic tapestries. Despite using samples, they have their own distinct sounds, from Pretty Lights’ bassy overlays to Emancipator’s ethereal soundscapes. From Nujabes’s love of jazz, to Bonobo’s textured intricate strings and Grammatik’s jivey pianos...like with all tools, if you know how to use it creatively, you can get a lot of interesting unique outcomes.