Reinterpret creativity

When I hear people discussing music, sometimes the idea comes up that the use of sampling, as in hip-hop, is less valid than music played live. The idea usually comes down to the thought that sampled music is somehow “stolen,” making the product, as a whole, lacking in originality.

Thoughts like, “Why should I respect the music of someone who can’t even write their own stuff?” are used to justify the idea that music artists directly compose themselves is superior to music coming from sampled sources.

I don’t think that this argument makes much sense at all. A comparison with jazz, which is a ubiquitously respected, if not enjoyed, form of music, should make this clearer.

When a typical jazz artist ““ and this was especially true until about the 1960s or so ““ performs, they take a pre-existing song and, while preserving the song structure and chords, use that song as the basis for improvisation.

Many completely respectable jazz gigs and albums have involved no composition from the artists whatever. The key to what makes jazz interesting can come from composition, but it isn’t necessary. More often it comes from the improvisation ““ the fascinatingly different ways in which the musicians turn the same chords into different solos, moods and ideas.

Jazz musicians have been borrowing as long as they’ve been around ““ as far as hip-hop goes, a similar process is involved. The sampled parts of songs that account for the bulk of hip-hop beats are like the already-existing songs that jazz artists use.

The hip-hop counterpart to jazz improvisation, or the original element inspired by the borrowed backdrop, are the lyrics that the artist composes. As in jazz where the focus is on the improvisation, in hip-hop the focus is on the flow. Discounting the music based upon the fact that the beat wasn’t composed by the artist misses the point.

But criticism about the fact that the sounds themselves weren’t composed by the artists misses an even greater point.

There is a large degree of subtlety and artistic vision that goes into the creation of beats from sampling.

While the artist originally responsible for the composition had a specific conception of the song, there are other combinations that could be composed from the same sounds, and these are often exciting ones. Listening to the work of a skilled producer can be just as musically exciting, if not more, than listening to the work of rock’s best composers.

When someone like Madlib raids old jazz records and combines disparate elements with a new drum track, he’s composing in his own way, with his own instruments. In a sense, he fills in for missed opportunities ““ after all, how can one person or group be expected to know all the possible applications of their music?

Another example of how much art can be involved in sampling comes from the subgenre of artists who predominantly or only use sampling in their music, such as Black Dice.

With music like this, sounds from any and all sources are recorded and arranged into beautiful, horrifying or psychedelic soundscapes: no small feat of artistry.

The fact that no instruments are involved doesn’t make it a less valid form of music, but one with different tools ““ the sounds of everything.

If you need to look for artistry, look in the right places. With rap, it’s the lyrics and the inventiveness of selecting the right sample, using the repetition to its own advantage.

I don’t see any real reason why music should be a dictatorship of guitars and keyboards. There are many ways to make music and many tools that can be used to that end; to judge the validity of a type of music against a set of criteria it doesn’t seek to fulfill is to misrepresent it.

Worse, it’s to miss completely a form of music that others have discovered.

If you completely missed that, e-mail LaRue at alarue@media.ucla.edu

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