Browsing Category
Opinion
Original editorial opinion about music sampling, copyright law, creative culture, and more.
Grandmaster Flash Battled Mozart At the Fever, and Mozart Got Burned
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…
Hip Hop/Rap Art Music vs. Club Music; Favoritism vs. Empirical Evidence: How Taste and Sonic…
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…
Source Material As A Black Cultural Space: The Link Between Continuum Record Collections and the…
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…
The Matter of Atonality and Sampling
Why sampling has no partiality to traditional musical tonality.
Was It Fair Use? Kool G Rap & DJ Polo – “Road To The Riches” (prod. by Marley…
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…
The Crucial 26 — 26 Albums That Personified the Fundamental Developments In Hip Hop Beatmaking: #1…
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…
Digging In the Crates Is Cool, But E-Digging Is Great Too
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…
Sly Stone — Pioneer of Machine-Made Music and O.G. Beatmaker
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…
Handel’s Impact: The Well-Funded DYI Composer Who Set Everything Off
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…
The Truth About the Revival of Sampling: It Was Never In Danger of Dying, and the Internet Didn’t…
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…