How Original is Sample-based Music?

By Nickolas Weingartner on 06/09/2009

Inside of his semi-memoir, semi-heavy-metal-history-book, Fargo Rock City, famed critic Chuck Klosterman states "The Freshest ideas in pop music's past twenty years have come out of rap, and that genre is totally based on recycled, bastardized riffs."

Now, Klosterman was using this in response to an argument that Elvis Costello made about how glam metal shouldn't be considered Rock 'n Roll because it only copied what other artists had already done. Though Costello was talking about how glam artists heavily alluded to the music of the predecessors in their own music, Rap on the other hand literally takes music made by other artists and makes it is own.

What Klosterman is talking about is sampling - a method of creating music that involves taking a 'sample' of another song and putting it over a drum beat, often repeating it in creative ways to accompany the beat. This method is heavily used in the rap industry, with artists/producers like Kanye West and Lil Wayne using older songs as fuel for their new number one hits.

But what does it mean for music?

We're not sure yet; but it definitely changes how listener's perceive and assess it.  

The first story that comes to mind is that of a friend's. He was (and probably still is) a huge Kanye West fan, but when he played West's second album, Late Registration to his mom, all she could do was to point out what each song was that Kanye was sampling. She listened to the song differently than her son, who saw it as new and original, and instead saw it as fragments of songs that she used to love with a man rapping over them.  

But perhaps the most interesting component of rap's sampling comes in the form of the mash-up genre; a genre consisting entirely or other music; to the point where the originality takes form in how one manipulates other people's originality. Artists like Girl Talk (consisting only of former Graduate student Gregg Gillis) make entire albums formed solely of different artists music put together, only adding the occasional note or two. Gillis' latest album, Girl Talk's Feed the Animals, has received almost universal critical praise, even making TIME magazine's Top Ten Albums of 2008 and gaining the number two spot on Blender's list, behind only Lil Wayne's Tha Carter 3, which also makes heavy use of sampling. Yet due to copyright issues, the entire album is available online for free, or 'as much as you'd like to pay', as is classified and licensed as a non-commercial endeavor.

But in the end, it comes down to this: is music made from other people's music still regarded as original music?

As much of a pain-in-the-ass it is to the copyright holders, it is. Maybe we have gotten to the point where every note and progression has already been played, and for an artist to be truly original, all the can do is take what's been done and make it there own.

[Additional Photos: "Fargo Rock City, Simon Schuster, 2009; "Girl Talk", Girl Talk, 2009]