I. Sampling Is…World-Building
“A big part of…sampling is you’re showing who you are. You’re showing what your influences are. You’re almost showing how you grew up.” – Earl Sweatshirt
It starts with a high-pitched wail and some thumping drums. No notice, no warning, just a soulful beat that hits you as hard as an anime truck.
When you hear a song like “GHOST”, you can almost picture the specks of dust falling off the milk crate as you admire a vinyl previously lost to time. You can imagine yourself sitting right next to the producer in question, sharing in their excitement as they discover a new influence to wear upon their sleeve.
Sampling is world-building. It’s a housewarming invitation to a mansion of melodies. The beauty of sampling is the impression it creates, a sonic tapestry that threads together different strands of music and draws you in with each note.
When you hear a Griselda record, you can picture yourself as a xennial kid, overhearing your mom’s Sunday cleaning soundtrack as you watch wrestlers engage in gladiatorial combat on TV and dream about the finer things in life. Go back a bit further in time and you can do the same thing with a group of men raised on Stax Records and Shaw Brothers flicks. Sampling is an exercise in sharing nostalgia.
II. Sampling Is…Time Traveling
It was all meant to end 25 years ago, everybody unsure of what the new millennium would bring. Everybody except one crew…
Call them the Swing Mob, Da Bassment Cru or a bunch of Superfriends but the creative combination of Missy Elliott, Timbaland, Aaliyah, Ginuwine and several others envisioned a better future that we failed to live up to.
The future was meant to be cool, the future was meant to be sexy but all we got left with was a bunch of crazy. Nevertheless, those inspired by this group’s legacy studied their blueprint and continue to build upon it.
Take Sonder. When you hear their songs, you understand what Rust Cohle meant by calling time “a flat circle”. Grooves created more than thirty years ago, come back around with a different filter and drum pattern.
Sampling is time traveling, an infinite feedback loop of inspiration and adaptation, generating something new with each iteration. It is the vessel that carries us down an eternal stream of music. A stream where the sacred becomes profane, where the cardinal becomes carnal – a liminal space where what was once declared ‘dead’ will truly never die.
III. Sampling Is…Alchemy
Atoms. Break them apart and you have a nuclear reaction. Crash them together and you get a universe.
In her essay entitled ‘The Women Artists Who Find Freedom In Collage’, writer and art curator Sara Knelman says that “making poetry out of collisions has long been the purview of collage: to forge from familiar elements something strange, to hide and reveal, deconstruct and reconstruct, eradicate and conjure”. The same thing can be said about sampling.
Look no further than the career of Mariah Carey, the gloriously glittered godmother of the remix. In her hands, a raunchy, misogynistic party anthem transforms into a bouncy, G-Funk record for heartbroken women looking for payback. In her hands, a song shouting out the coldest gangsters and killers becomes an ode to temporary lovers and stolen moments. In her hands, a dazzling demonstration of pop fantasy becomes a bridge to hypnotic hip-hop reality.
Sampling is alchemy, a gluttonous gumbo of genres blended together in a way that stirs both body and soul, a stunning symphony of sounds fashioned from the fragments of audio anarchy, a collage for the ears, poetry in the form of organized noise.
Further Reading
[1] Lauren Du Graf, The Gospel Of Jodeci, Oxford American
[2] Sara Knelman, The Women Artists Who Find Freedom In Collage, Aperture
[3] Tim Storhoff, Hearing The Stax Sound In The 36 Chambers, TSTOR
Further Watching
[1] Protect Ya Neck (Season 2, Episode 6), Wu-Tang: An American Saga (2021)
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Love this! Sampling has helped a whole generation discover 70s music. it keeps the classics alive.
this was a FEAST to read. thank you.