Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cultural osmosis alone. They’re aware, for example — whether or not they approve of it — that rappers usually perform over music constructed through sampling: that is, stitched together out of pieces of other songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clearly visualized in the video above from sample provider Tracklib.
Offering a breakdown of sampling as it’s happened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre really took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc developed what he called “the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ Technique,” an early example of which involved using dual turntables to switch back and forth between the instrumental breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock.” The original idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their microphones and started getting creative, a new music took shape almost immediately.
Mainstream America got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. In its repeating rhythm part, many would have recognized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actually wasn’t a sample but an interpolation, i.e. a re-recording. This drew a lawsuit — hardly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thousands of DJs-to-be digging through their record collections in search of usable breaks. Disco proved a fount of inspiration for early hip-hop, but so did jazz and even electronic music, as demonstrated by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” which sampled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”
As sampling goes, nothing is artistically off-limits; in some sense, the less immediately recognizable, the better. With the evolution of audio editing technology, hip-hop artists have long gone even further in making these borrowed clips their own by slowing them down; speeding them up; chopping them into pieces and rearranging them; and layering them one atop another. This sometimes causes problems, as when the difficulty of licensing De La Soul’s many and varied source materials kept their catalog out of official availability. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also featured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seriously break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.
via Kottke
Related Content:
A Brief History of Sampling: From the Beatles to the Beastie Boys
The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sampling Revolution
Hear De La Soul’s Highly Acclaimed & Influential Hip-Hop Albums Streaming Free for the First Time
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
