Hip Hop building blocks

In the Bronx, in 1972, a new technique for creating music started to form. At parties DJs find they get a better response from the crowd by looping the best parts of each song. This is done by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record on different decks. They get MCs to speak rhythmically over these beats, and rap music is born. Sylvia Robinson notices this trend and assembles a group called “The Sugar Hill Gang”, who copy the rhythm from Chic’s “Good Times” to score a hit with “Rapper’s Delight”. Grandmaster Flash builds on this technique, recording the first music created only with turntables. This method of taking music from older songs and transforming them into new songs, becomes known as Sampling.

All this happened just in time for the digital age, when it spread outside of Hip Hop and became so ubiquitous that you’re probably not aware that most of your favourite songs use sampling. Often samples of old songs are transformed in such a way that the original source is unrecognizable unless named. Artists may use sources so obscure that their fans wouldn’t be recognize or even be aware of the original. However some artists have to pay 50% of all the recording royalties just to use a sample which may be a few seconds long, leading to a long tail of wealth transfer the original artists never expected. In some cases unapproved sampling like Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”, which used the bass line from Queen’s “Under Pressure” have ended up in court, with settlements in the millions of dollars. In other cases like the “Amen Break” – a six-second drum solo in The Winstons' 1969 track “Amen, Brother”, sampled by thousands of times, including by The Prodigy, Oasis and NWA – the original artist was never credited or paid for their sample. The statute of limitations for copyright infringement is 36 months in the US: you can only sue in the first 3 years.

Whatever you think about the artistic integrity of sampling other people’s music, or the system of copyright laws protecting against it, it’s clear that this trend has a tradition that extends far outside of 1970s New York City. Led Zeppelin were accused of copying many of their songs from the Blues around the same time as Hip Hop was taking off: it’s no less a violation of copyright if you sample a guitar riff rather than a beat. The Beatles changed the face of pop music, but much of their music borrowed heavily from Bob Dylan, who himself copied from old Folk songs.

We see this across every creative human endeavour. If you think someone is innovative, it’s likely you just aren’t aware of their sources, or they weren’t: their ideas bubbled up through their subconscious so they thought they were their own. This is exactly as it should be: copying isn’t derivative, it’s how all creativity happens. Taking old ideas and breaking them down into their building blocks lets you take the best parts and combine them into something new. Knowing that these ideas worked at least once before takes some of the risk out of the act of creation. People get exposed to ideas they otherwise wouldn’t have encountered, that “unlock parts of your brain” as the musician Gotye expresses it, in a format they find more accessible.

As Kirby Ferguson says in his famous YouTube series “Everything Is A Remix”. In many ways this chapter is a remix of Kirby’s work, which first inspired me to write this book! From Star Wars, to the iPhone, to the Ford Model T, almost everything we think of as innovative, owes its creation to what came before. The concept of plagiarism assumes individuals own ideas, but in reality we treat most ideas practically as if they are in the public domain. Copyright law is only for the unlucky few that get caught. “Information wants to be free”, as Stewart Brand so elegantly put it. When you research their influences, you find that successful creators are really collectors of ideas, more than originators. As Mark Twain readily admitted: “All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. We are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own”.

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