Opinion

A note about the title of this article: Battles are an important part of hip hop culture. In hip hop/rap music specifically, head-to-head battles have taken place between rappers, DJs, and crews traditionally at park jams and clubs. The…

Marley Marl, Easy Mo Bee, DJ Premier, RZA, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, Large Professor, DJ Quik, DJ Toomp, J Dilla, Madlib — These are all important figures in the beatmaking tradition of hip hop/rap music. But one’s sonic preference for and…

Marley Marl, the father of hip hop/rap’s music modern beatmaking tradition and the man who spearheaded hip hop/rap music’s major sampling era, remembers his early source materialfor sampling this way: he reason I even used, went back to…

Why sampling has no partiality to traditional musical tonality.

Released in 1989 as the title track off the album of the same name, “Road To The Riches,” produced by Marley Marl, features a sample of Billy Joel’s “Stiletto” (1979). Kool G Rap & DJ Polo and Marley Marl were never sued for copyright…

It’s during the Pioneers/Avant-Garde Period that hip hop/rap music experiences a second art-based renaissance. By 1988, the modern hip hop/rap music era was two years old, and hip hop/rap music had shifted from a mostly dance-based music to…

There are a number of beatmakers (some of them very notable) who view e-digging as some sort of bad or inferior process. Inasmuch as e-digging is, fundamentally, a means for searching for and finding new music, I don’t see how anyone can…

Of all the early adopters of drum machines, as part of the recording process, nobody used the drum machine like Sly Stone first did in 1969. His use of the drum machine is the precursor to what beatmakers (producers) in the hip hop/rap…

Of the three English musicians who were able to earn a solid living solely or primarily from their compositions, not performance, George Frideric Handel was the most important in terms of the composers’ fight for copyright. Handel made his…

In The BeatTips Manual (2015) and previous editions of The Art of Sampling (2013, 2017), I noted that the sampling tradition of hip hop/rap music was never in jeopardy of dying. In view of recent commentary that continues to suggest that…