The longest sample chain

Music evolves the way life does: through change in the heritable characteristics of populations over successive generations. Most of the heritable characteristics of music are abstractions like rhythm patterns and chord progressions. However, you can also see heritability at work more obviously in the form of sampling. It’s especially illuminating when a song samples a song which in turn samples yet another song. The longest such chain that I know of: “Workin’ On It” by Dwele (2008) samples “Workinonit” by J Dilla (2006), which samples “King of the Beats” by Mantronix (1988), which samples “Pump That Bass” by Original Concept (1986), which samples “Close (To The Edit)” by Art of Noise (1984), which samples “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes (1983), which samples “Kool is Back” by Funk Inc.

It is widely reported online that “Owner of a Lonely Heart” uses a famous orchestra hit called ORCH5, a factory sound that came packaged with the Fairlight CMI. Robert Fink tells its story here. I think sampling classical music is a good idea.

However, this sound does not in fact appear in “Owner of a Lonely Heart” at all, which you can tell just from close listening. The “orchestra” stabs are samples of the brass hit at the beginning of the drum break in “Kool Is Back” by Funk, Inc. If you listen to “Owner of a Lonely Heart” at 0:19, the single stab is from “Kool Is Back.”

Art of Noise samples two different Yes songs for “Close (To The Edit),” which is less surprising when you find out that the two bands share several members in common. The band came into existence specifically to make sample-based music with the Fairlight. “Pump That Bass” by Original Concept and “King of the Beats” by Mantronix are sample collages too, but with a funkier, more hip-hop feel.

“King of the Beats” plays a significant role in hip-hop history: it’s the source of the ubiquitous  Dilla siren. Let’s ponder the Dilla siren for a second. Dilla is hardly the only producer to use sirens as a signature sound. He also wasn’t the first to sample the one from the Mantronix track. Why don’t we call it the Mantronix siren? How did Dilla come to have cultural ownership over this sound? One answer is, well, Dilla is famous, at least among nerds like me, and he used the siren about a thousand times, so. But even though I know where the siren comes from, I hear Mantronix and think, oh wow, there’s the Dilla siren! Copyright law does not agree that Dilla has any kind of claim over the sound. But copyright law is predicated on an exclusive theory of musical intellectual property that is far removed from the reality of hip-hop production, or musical creativity in general.

When you create music, you do very little creating; you mostly rearrange existing pieces of music. The creativity comes in the combining, editing and juxtaposing of those existing pieces. In sample-based music, this is particularly obvious, because you can compare the edited version of an idea with the original version. It’s possible that music information retrieval will advance to the point where we’ll be able to “sequence the genome” of any piece of music and draw a complete tree of its ancestry. At that point, we will have to do some society-wide rethinking of the concepts of musical authorship and ownership.