Sampling Documentary

say someone recorded this sound so does that mean they own it if I go digital samplers allow you to take a snatch of a record sound or anything like that and turn that into a building block for a song we grab conga sounds trumpet sounds violin sounds drumbeat sounds and we manipulated and created our own music if you sample one note of a Sam recording it's copyright infringement Oh Oh you can't just have a record that's made up of everybody else's records does not pay them for it you people get to all you people PL you people anything else that you make us all with by ignoring the rules they came up with a whole new way of thinking about music this is actually taking sounds and meshing them together but the mall in time to come up with something totally different at the end of the day the court said not only is this copyright infringement but you see criminal prosecution in line for this one we never anticipated like getting someone to pay for James Brown going and that's it I didn't even know what sampling was and I didn't know anything about it till people say you're they're sampling your drums we live in a remix culture now and the laws have to change to be able to help that culture do what it has to do we're here in this in this record store in a lot of ways it's a repository it's an archive of what's come before I mean records literally their name records right you're encoding history into these grooves right so DJ's by taking these records and playing them back are giving us snatches of our history they're giving a reinterpretation of that history to us in the present day for me the most definitive sound in hip-hop is like the sound of a needle skipping over a scratchy record like the sampled sound I could appropriate to the sample it has good quality of its own and it has a strong reference that your focus of cultural resonance as well in sampling the way it's conventionally used you are supposed to be able to understand what you're listening to and that's because what you're listening to has its own qualities its own importance that's what's cool about sampling that it transports the listener if they're willing to move in that pathway back to a specific action so it's sort of like an archive of memories of real experiences Oh all of these layers of archeology audio archeology that are happening you can dig down to find out where you're actually being originated Oh the view on the traditional side was this is a very lazy way of songwriting and making records I've made records with a lot of people probably the most famous would be Nirvana Pixies Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin as a creative tool like for someone to use a sample of an existing piece of music - and then for their music I think I think it's extraordinarily lazy artistic choice it's much easier to take something that is already awesome and play it again with your name on it it's sort of like like a bad dance move or something like that you you you think the people doing it should be embarrassed for behaving this way you know or you you think the people doing it should be self-aware enough to understand that what they're doing is cheap and and and easy and everyone else can tell that it's cheap and easy rock'n roll was too lazy no three chord oh if I ever looked out on facing rock and roll where the people likes it that's not music pop pop and the argument that a sampler is no different from any other instrument is absurd it's absurd because no other instrument allows you simply and easily to take someone else's life's work and put your name on it perhaps it's a little easier to take a piece of music than it is to learn how to play guitar so true just like it's probably easier to snap a picture with that camera than it is to actually paint a picture but what the photographer is to the painter is what the modern producer and DJ and computer musician is to the instrumentalist the turntable is the newest instrument the turntables are more rhythmically complex than any other instrument based on the fact that know what you can do with a fader and your hand playing at the same time no guitar player or a horn player can play that fast okay so this is like like how the record would sound normally right so then - I guess - destroy it you would basically when I'm sampling I have all these artists there in my band and I'm sampling West Montgomery to play guitar he's in my band you know I got Art Blakey he's my drum that's tight you don't said I got all these legendary musicians that are in my band people who are suing or don't understand what what's so great about um sample-based music really need to like see it happen over the course of a year it's not you don't just go to a store grab one record put it down sample it bang it out and that's it you know like there's a process always buying records searching searching and like sometimes we find the old silver Apple you know records or something like that and listen one very short putt that bass line essentially what what they were all doing is they were beat miners you know I mean they were like mine and old records for those break sections like basically 70s funk records George Clinton is a major major funk icon he's the Maverick he's the person that through Parliament and Funkadelic and his own works later on created a lot of the foundation for what hip-hop will become focus the DNA in here five they were besties cute in most records so it left a lot of room the samplers put their own sound to it don't think they thought of it like that but it's just that raw sound seems to appeal to them you know the drums and guitar a lot of records back in time has a really good sound like James Brown the beats are just so fat James Brown's music was so useful I think to a lot of hip-hop heads because Clyde Stubblefield the epitome of the funk what I said I just thought man a beer something simple and everybody joined in and then Brown came in and put the lyrics to it and it was called funky drummer this thing I know all the rap artists was using it through a sampling I would okay why didn't they choose something else like a cold sweater I got the feeling or something you know but they chose that so basically what you're looking for is any toolbar or one bar snatch that that of of a drum beat that stats that's that's funky enough that that keeps some sort of a groove so that could be anywhere so you're looking for breaks from any record you know whether it's like stone Herman Kelley in life you know whether it's something that's in a cool in the gang record long as it was two bars it was just enough for DJ to catch it and it's a mellow sampling came out of the DJ culture you would have a drum beat and then we would scratch a horn hit on top of the drum boom was always a culture of borrow and take because it was a culture of that was founded upon a lack of resources the idea not having any instruments but having a turntable and saying well fine this is my instrument you know and you see it now with people with over eternity buckets and pots and pans we saw a dead witch sampling technology did was it basically mimic exactly what the process was for what the DJ's were doing in the parks and community centers in the nightclubs when you really start hearing digital sampling in hip-hop is around the mid-80s 86 and 87 well the second half of the 80s the freedoms of sampling came with the with the advent of technology companies that put together equipment when they got cheaper basically because a lot more people were able to use them that in combination with some of the other factors gave rise to explosion new music new ways of making music and new music the Golden Age of hip-hop was really defined by some seminal albums De La Soul with Goofy high and rising P Roth a little bit later with you know Mecca and the soul brother Tran Called Quest's you know Midnight Marauders the Eric B's where I can caris ones well back then the sample police didn't roll as thick as they do right I mean look at the Paul's Boutique record that was sample mastery right there you put something out like that these days and um you get lawyers calling you and a whole bunch of bull that goes with that Public Enemy were iconoclastic definitely never really heard anything I like Lee Teuk hey when you hear it for the first time back then the bomb squad was the Association of Chucky Hank Shockley and Keith chocolate and Eric Vietnam sapper those four individuals together were the bomb squad and they were the ones who put together the sound of Public Enemies music they've worked out an unbelievable method in which all of these different people that are in the group are bringing in different types of sounds and they're figuring out how to jam with the samples I want to do some things that were not musical in music what was my vision was was to have this this group be a production assembly line there's gonna be a time when we're gonna have a nice little groove where Keith is gonna be on something chuckling something wrong and I'm gonna like me hmm and so we're all together there's this one little moment that it all just meshes together in a nice vibration and that became the music - don't believe that I'm going through my media laughing Harry Allen I got a half Kim yo Harry your ride are we nuts I don't bully aside they will take parts give little small parts and have a whole 24-track full of samples that equal one a whole arrangement they did it artsy-fartsy I call it they made noise sound good wait Jimi Hendrix did with the feedback on the guitar and they named it perfectly on one of the songs about bring on the noise that's exactly what they did what was exciting about Public Enemy was the militancy of it like the way that Paris and Public Enemy were kind of taking Malcolm X and Black Panther speeches and recordings and sort of reanimating them here we will have about named wealth of our language we have our religion our culture our God and many of us by the way we act we even lost AMA what we want to create was that kind of like reality record you hear it out there on the streets and now that that which you've heard in the streets is now back in the record again I'm about there was a cultural issue in that it seemed like more or less an underground urban phenomenon and how is this going to translate to the you know to the big record business and you know at that time the big selling artists were Fleetwood Mac and Springsteen and things that are more traditional you could wrap your arms around and it turned out that all the traditional people who are so miffed by this way back in the early days quickly realized is a huge amount of money to be made here look nobody took hip-hop seriously until it started making a lot of money do puff promised a day take kids from the ADA but do it down so crazy when he personally is not in person I do work for me you do a work for you well I think that once people who held music copyrights got wise to how much money hip-hop was making then it became kind of a feasting principle two lawyers were getting involved and they were starting to be this lawsuit over sampling and it was an awareness that was arising about hey hey they're taking something that doesn't belong to them did this mine I got to get paid for but I'm giving it a new name what to have my piggy in the early 1990s there were a series of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits that made it very clear that the lawyers in the entertainment world were going to reign in this practice of unauthorized digital sampling I think everybody woke up after the de la Sol's three feet high and rising came out and they ended up losing like most of their uh you know their percentage of copyrights to I think the turtles for me I felt like wow we're popular now we're getting sued by someone I don't even know like a dog and it showed me I do exactly what you do how I fell in love with you always can get mushy oh so De La Soul was on an independent label called Tommy Boy that put out a lot of very very important records the most notable one was was de Lascelles first on which had so many samples I can't even remember how many it needs for each one you have to have a deal with the publisher and with the master you told me you didn't meet me you'd have french-language records you'd have the turtles you'd have Led Zeppelin you'd have challah notes you'd have all kinds of you know crazy things you know coming out of the mix and it sounded exactly like a lot of people heard pop culture at that particular moment in time we sampled something of theirs rightfully so you know it didn't get cleared for whatever reasons and three feet high rising they told us what what the samples were on the record we cleared them all they didn't tell us about the turtles one that's what usually happens is they oh it's not you know we changed the speed it's an unknown song it's only this amount those are the ones that get you up there there's something that we did sillyness we played there was actually a song I put together and like I said once we gave the information in the Tommy Boy Davis unfortunately just took it as well this is a skip why should we try to clear this yeah it happened with us but I think once it happened to bid is it really this markys sampling case was a case that was brought by a man named Gilbert O'Sullivan rather had a hit song of the 70s called alone again naturally and it was very ubiquitous was a sample you really could hear the song it was over and over again loose really so biz markie takes this Gilbert O'Sullivan song and makes a period of it you know called alone again and he sings in he doesn't really sing he warbles it in his funny Bismarck II type of voice right and it's a great joke everybody kind of laughs and you play at once and you're like oh cool that's kind of funny and stuff Gilbert O'Sullivan didn't really think it was that funny you know yeah you know it was it was a pretty aggressive sample of a song that Mr O'Sullivan you know it was his big hit so he had he was just a no-nonsense guy he didn't he didn't want this on rap version so he decides he's gonna make an example of this kid the files this huge lawsuit my mom alone again all alone again naturally and the judge pronounced it biblically incorrect our country is that how backwoods is that you know as somebody who totally is like oblivious to the speed of things happen shouldn't this monkey have an album out by now and you start hitting on man he's going through hell and then he comes out with an album like a year late August titled all samples cleared some of those first sampling cases or those early records whether it be De La Soul is marking he and others it wasn't that they were trying to be themes or trying not to get caught it was just like we kind of didn't know we always felt like you know when you're creating you create you know whatever you decide that you want to use you you know you used to create your own particular vibration year away and and and that to me was a kind of like an unwritten cold within the hip hot wall we kind of looked at music as as a semblance of sounds and we felt that you couldn't copyright a sound once people named Street got wind of the fact that the ports were not interested in listening to young black men described their creative processes they had no tolerance for that a new industry emerged the industry of sampling clearances that meant that groups like Public Enemy could no longer make their powerful sounds in the way they wish to you and record companies are beginning to put more pressure on the artists you know to disclose the samples from the very very beginning I think it was stakes is high where it was the first album encore when we sat down in the beginning about the record company made sure like you let's make sure we speak to our whoever you want the clear samples and they went through a list of like well George Clinton is in litigation with West Brown so don't mess with this stuff right now uh George Harrison no light rifle imagine like he actually had a list of people not to touch when you're going through a rights clearing process you really need to identify all the different people who owned all potential elements of that particular sample or musical element and make sure that they've agreed to what you want to do and that can be very time-consuming because there's a lot of people involved in making music to create requires the permission of somebody else and it's that transformation which has been radical and recent our Copyright Act was basically last rewritten in 1976 so we're operating with a lot of antiquated assumptions about what musical creativity is it is cheaper easier and more predictable if you want to cover somebody's song entirely then if you want to take three seconds of somebody's son that doesn't make any sense why should an entire song be easier and cheaper to do than three seconds of somebody's song you have the right to cover any weapons long as you don't change the words you could cover stairway to heaven but if you try to change the words and make it stairway to do it ins Island if someone tried to do Led Zeppelin will shut you down in some sense the main was already sailing man skipper breathe insure five passengers and sealed for three hour to three hours should an artist be able to say you can't take my stairway to heaven and make it stairway to Gilligan's Island or it or anything else or you can't use it under hip hop racket you know you can't use to take it out of context for anything else you can't we contextualize what I've done it has to stay true to the original just like you to relax my mind so I can be free if I go to somebody and I want a sample in Marvin Gaelic and I go to Marvin Gaye's escape I might have to pay like some people did Eric sermon I believe over $100,000 to sample one song in advance let's look at the factors that determine how much it's gonna be obviously a factor is gonna be what is the economic viability of the worker sampling is it something like the Beatles it is hugely viable in the economic stream or is it something it's pretty obscure you're taking some R&B song and recording that is lost in the in the vault and you've brought it back to life that's a whole nother level Records like it takes a nation of a pencil holders back three feet high and rising they're kind of like artifacts of an earlier time records that couldn't exist today they're just legally financially untenable in cats as I've been you know that's our style you know like right now you tell me that my Styles too expensive you know I think of what uh what started happening in trip-hop you know with our dislike tricky and Porter said in New York and what they started doing to their samples they'd play a guitar riff press it up record it press it up on vinyl and sample it off of the vinyl just to have the effect of it being sampled our thing about sampling was you know there's the confusion element in it because we know we had to be confusing because we didn't want people coming after us people started getting started to get pretty savvy about what they were sampling and then how they would mask it so we would make it a game for you to like try to figure it out okay try to figure out where this came from you can go all day long I know you won't find it like a chase just does the tone they can change they got some of this technology today they can speed to go up whatever they want to do with it and I won't even know it's me it is more difficult to make a record than it is to sample it no that's patently obvious I guess I'm more concerned with the 20 years or so that got the musician to the point where he could make the record that then is important to the listener because of what in his life has brought him to making that record I didn't know anything about sampling and two people come and say some some artist is using your jump and I go cool I'm Clyde Stubblefield the original funky drummer as they say I joined James Brown Band in 1965-66 five years 65 and I stayed with him until 1970 I played Oh give it up turn to lose uh uh I'm black and I'm proud of us um cold sweat that's cold sweat yeah about your bad I just don't play - pop - pop - [ __ ] you - dingbat boom boom ah the truth - and the bass player came in - did you do and then a good top player came in the rhythm was there well we James came in hurt said yeah I like that did he start Polly I don't care turned him then they did put the hole is it we had a song and I started it but we said okay cold sweat um that was mine he didn't give me what he didn't tell me what to play I asked me to but I play what I felt but he owned it so so you take a drummer like Clyde Stubblefield you know who plays the funky drummer and James is like you know take it Clyde and he goes ahead and takes his his break and that break ends up becoming you know one of the basis for a whole bunch of sample-based records I never got a thanks I never got a hello how you doing or anything from little rap artists or anything the only one I got a thinkin from was Melissa Melissa Etheridge his name never appears on any of those compositional credits his name is not part of the legal legacy of all of those great tunes he played on he doesn't get royalties he got paid for the time in the studio the producer or the publisher of that particular track is getting compensated for the use of that sample but the artists that originally played that drum break that got sampled is not necessarily getting any compensation for it so many groups and sample my stuff they say I'm the the world samplers number one samplers drummer so hey I haven't got a penny for it yet though but from the cpg police afraid of me people call me bottle and those who try to do that just knocks them out the box I can't be sure if that's my drum powder if it's a little bit so little snap I can't be sure but that's where I honestly come in a person could say yeah that is your drum pattern then we did we discuss things otherwise in that I cannot go to no one and say hey you using my drum pattern if it's just a little cutout top I don't know that was me you know now I'm the king of the swingers or the jungle it's real easy to to look at the big picture and say that the money doesn't always go to the people who do the most creative work I'd Stubblefield is still playing out today you know he has a regular gig in Madison on Mondays and he goes on tour he was on tour actually with DJ Kool Herc recently and you listen to him and he still got it all you know still playing give it up turn it loose with all the fire that she that he had back in 1971 Beaumont my music is my life my music is my breathing one of the things that sound thing is done is that it's revitalized a whole bunch of musicians careers at the time that a lot of hip-hop producers started sampling George Clinton his records weren't available commercially anymore so hip-hop literally reintroduce the world to George Clinton it really helped us a lot because it's actually people heard it and got to know who it wasn't anyone to hit a long version of the sample song change your every with James biggest record was by MC Hammer you know I mean there's many many examples of our original record being outsold by by the cover or the remake that use part of it okay touch this can't touch this even gangster's paradise did much more than pastime paradise by the Stevie Wonder like 10 times more and that was Stevie one who the hell is Coolio been spending most their lives living fast time so sampling usually is viewed as a musical thing right but if you look at the art world for example you have Andy Warhol taking photographs and painting them you have different photographers taking certain scenes and reconstructing them digitally it all implies a layer of collage and pulling together bits and pieces Mac just look at how any bit of culture is named look at how Shakespeare made culture look at out every great poet how Homer made culture it's about collage it's about taking bits and pieces of your influences and and forging them into something newer and stronger think about the way Walt Disney was created right all of Disney's greatest works we're taking other people's works and doing something different with them I've never really heard a completely original musical idea by anyone most musicians will say that the best musicians copy hey boy hey boy hey hey what you doing man hey what you go what you do that ATP's we supposed to play come on well I guess I better get on in here winner jazz musicians when they had lived and been happy to do a cover of somebody's record and they went into the ad 11 into their riff you know you kind of say that that riff for the ad-lib belongs to the musician --sykes that's me but alright you can also look at the blues and and for that matter you can look at anything I mean melodies have always been borrowed Oh let's go babe bloom here yes blue you mashups are an interesting case I mean they sort of demonstrate how simple it is to make music this way because virtually everyone has made a mash-up Danger Mouse is a hip-hop producer who created this thing called the gray album right he took jay-z's acapellas from the Black Album and he cut up the music from the Beatles White Album and put them on top of each other now you trying to see know how they chase with j+ i got a few dollars i could fight the case so i pulled over to the side of the road i heard the grey album came out there was i think it was just a limited edition thing that was in some promo form it was just supposed to be kind of fun and somehow it got out further than they expected came to the attention of the record label I believe EMI EMI sent out all these cease and desist letters to Danger Mouse and folks who were trading the album and really tried to squelch the album all together and kind of stamp it out of existence any attempts to sample the Beatles for example on the sound recording side are going to be very tricky to do and pretty much impossible to do the Beatles actually in Revolution number nine it's a whole nine minutes of them using a lot of stock sound recordings into this new work number nine well of course EMIs lawyers got wind of it EMI controls the sound recordings to the White Album and EMI decided that the grey album shall be no more what's interesting about the grey album is that the artist himself didn't seem to have any interest in trying to protest this or see it as a point of which to to struggle or resist it was really fans of the work it was other people who were cared about these issues that came in they took the work and started posting it up online everywhere Danger Mouse one EMI lost this album if it were actually for sale might have been one of the biggest hits of 2004 another of the absurdities of the music industry is that nobody made a dime nobody made a dime from one of the most successful albums of 2004 and it didn't have to be that way if we had a more rational system for dealing with Sam then perhaps somebody deserving would have been able to make a little bit of money off of this amazing phenomena but as it turned out we still got to dance to it and that was good the ability now to mash up and create new songs I guess has really been facilitated by digital technologies where it kind of democratized as that process you don't need to have a recording studio and lots of fancy equipment you can basically do it just on your computer and the privacy of your home with tools that are relatively easy to acquire sampling is the kind of technology that's really shifted the way that people consume a produce culture the consumers have become producers it came out of the studio's that professional recording studios and into the bedroom and that you know changed the music industry to a large extent and the reverberations of that still going on what we do is remix video musically we take videos music beats and mix them all together into something nice just like composing with like if you were to drum on pots and pans you know it's just finding out what sounds where and then play them you know so you can just arrange them on your timeline put them in the right place to make the right little rhythm or react anything that can be put onto audio and video together is fair game for us you know we'd have the backing of a label and so we're just out there in the world interacting pretty much directly with people the way we exist is on the internet and we operate almost immediate publishing what we're doing on the Internet then we've received no cease and desist and no person going how dare you touch my content it's never happened to make porn and what we do is so transparent that it's a remix you know we're literally moving the video with our hands we're dropping classical music over beats and the speed and the way we mix it continuously means you couldn't mistake it for anything else it is inevitably any any aesthetically I don't see like what we're doing is like stealing because when we're so obviously representing those acts the whole point of what we do is that we sample it's not some feature that we do it's all just totally illegal insanely illegal you know and impossible to click it would be impossible to release what we released if you did it through legal channels you know it can only exist on them and you've been depending mixtape for and it all Oh you see I think hip-hop producers you know have to be a lot more cautious than they were 25 years ago I think they understand fully that ultimately they're going to pay the bill right at the end of the data sample clearance is going to come out of their pocket you know so I think that that's changed the way that producers think about how they put music together why you started a song was by hers on the record that I liked I'm snatching it and then that I'm starting there um and but and now it's a little different now where I start is there's a little more cautious maybe I was wrong with sampling of a beat but my thing is that sometimes you can't put soul in the bottle you can't quantify soul by by a person that just got a briefcase and just sits down and thinks that everything soulful is actually exclusive as much as everyone else seems to have a problem with it we're still doing it we're still just getting on with it people bringing our technology to help us the whole time and now we work with the companies that make all the technology we use you know they invented the technology so that people like us to use it and have fun and make music and progress and move on wouldn't that be nice to just get on with it love it you have some killer bugs with two turntables who could be the musical Einstein has the genius idea for record that could do 50 million copies and change the world can't do it I think artists that sample that ignore copyright law are not in business I mean what what about if that artist has a hit song then somebody else is going to sample their song you know what goes around comes around there are rules of the game there's a copyright you have to get permission you know I can't go and walk on your bunion I can't walk in your house and just sit down on your couch and go to your refrigerator and take glass of milk there are rules I'm allowed to have an opinion on whether or not sampling is cool and as it turns out most of the time it isn't you know but I don't think we need to get the law involved you know I think the law is involved in way too many things already the other thing that you see happening is you know sampling going back underground way I'm again you know for a bunch of artists who you know feel like hey I'm gonna be outlaw about it you know because sampling law has created two classes you're either rich enough to afford the law or you're a complete outlaw if you can catch me and then my didn't do my job straight up it's my fault you know it's just something that we definitely have to think about because we're looking at it at a level where like man if we did get hit with something what do I have how the hell are we gonna afford to really deal with it you know if you're using little pieces and little hats from Jamie Brown whatever I think those should be like kind of like giveaways I prefer to get of my name on the record saying this is Clyde plan instead of the money is not the important thing just to get myself out in the world knowledgeable what my name is the more important I think ultimately is up to every artist if they're gonna borrow something from somebody to pay respects to the person that they borrowed it from that's how society moves forward it doesn't just invent new things it evolves through taking old things and changing you visit the independent lens website to learn more about music sampling and the people featured in the film connect with indie film bands and music lovers through your lens and share your thoughts and talk back online at pbs.org non year old Priscilla has passion and talent her single father Jesse dreams of stardom peace das Pro still could be multi-million dollars a family's journey through love fortune heartbreak and fame be so I can to keep damn P star rising on independent lens yeah I see more ice in a puck this program is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you thank you

Channel: hip hop realm

Views: 507,498

Rating: 4.9414515 out of 5

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Id: -HZOdRaeXmA

Length: 54min 31sec (3271 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2016