Michael Jackson, sampling, remixing and mashups
A chapter of Cold Technology, Hot Beats
Making songs out of other people’s songs
The chant section at the end of Michael Jackson’s song “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” was borrowed from “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango. This chant has been sampled, quoted and remixed many times. Who does it belong to? The law is unsettled on this point, and the musical community has no strong consensus either. Quotation, sampling and other forms of repurposing existing materials raise questions about originality, ownership and authenticity that have no simple answers.
All of this uncertainty hasn’t prevented anyone from quoting and sampling. Most of the musical innovation over the past few decades has been a response to the sudden availability of easy-to-use, inexpensive digital audio editing tools.
Playback devices are musical instruments
Glenn Gould said in 1966 that knob-twiddling is an interpretive act, that music playback devices are musical instruments in their own right. Experiments with music constructed entirely from tape collages had been underway for several years at that point.
Sampling keyboards erase the gap between recording playback and musical instruments. The Mellotron played short tape recordings of different instruments when you pressed the keys. More modern samples use digital recordings, but the principle is the same. Any sound can be loaded in a sampling keyboard, not just musical instruments: speech, sound effects, samples of well-known recordings.
Miles Davis constructed his 1969 album In A Silent Way from recordings of his band improvising over simple chords, with some sections looped identically. While this technique was considered avant-garde at the time, it has become central to popular music production in the digital age.
Turntablism
The instrumental sound of hip-hop was invented by vinyl DJs looping breakbeats and scratching samples on top of them. A turntablist can also string together segments of different records to create new works, though doing so requires great skill and precise timing.
Herbie Hancock’s 1983 song “Rockit” was the first to bring turntablism to a wide audience, particularly through a live performance at the Grammy Awards featuring Grand Mixer DST.
Turntable scratching can radically remake a sound recording by speeding, slowing and reversing pieces of it. Over the course of “Rockit”, Grand Mixer DST transforms Fab Five Freddy saying the word “fresh” into expressively shaped noise.
Digital sampling and editing
Sampling keyboards are intended to simulate the sound of “real” musical instruments. Digital sampling can also be used to transform and combine existing recordings into new ones, much more easily than with tape or vinyl. Using a sampler or computer, you can easily mash multiple tracks up into new collage-like works. While some artists use obscure samples or disguise their source material, others explicitly reference well-known recordings, placing familiar sounds in startling new contexts.
Remix and mashup techniques influence the recording of new, “original” work. Rather than working out a composition live and then recording, it’s becoming more common to record improvisation over a beat, and then build the song through editing and sampling.
Sampling has also influenced live performance on conventional instruments. Using a foot-controlled sampling unit, instrumentalists and vocalists can record and play back loops of themselves on the fly, and then play on top of the loops.
Attack of the memes
Remixes and mashups challenge the notion of the original musical composition. Some people feel that sampling threatens the foundation of our copyright system, and the courts have handed down extreme punishments in response to this anxiety. When Biz Markie was successfully sued for sampling and referencing Gilbert O’Sullivan in 1992, it brought an end to the era of collage-like hip-hop tracks containing a dozen samples or more.
Some musicians share the courts’ opinion that unauthorized sampling is a form of theft. Others, like myself, feel that it’s a natural extension of the way that music has always been made. Anyone who’s composed an “original” tune knows that the process consists of reworking fragments of existing melodies, chords and scales. The process is less like conjuring out of thin air and more like collage. Sampling makes the collage aspect of composition more explicit, but it isn’t substantively different from any method that preceded it.
There’s a positive value to building new works out of recognizable pieces of old, familiar ones. Samples are musical DNA. Shared DNA creates family.
I’ve created a set of sample maps, diagrams showing which songs have been sampled by which artists. My Michael Jackson sample map has been viewed over a hundred thousand times and was widely reblogged in response to his death.
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” It’s a cliche, but it’s true, especially of Michael Jackson.
Playlist:
Beatles – “Strawberry Fields Forever”
Michael Jackson – “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”
Public Enemy – “Fight The Power”
Nas – “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” and “Nas Is Like”
DJ Earworm – “United State Of Pop”
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