The transnational character of the literate musical community in the United States created an environment in which language barriers, ideological biases, and other potential sources of misunderstanding caused print items to change shape quickly as they were transferred from one reader to the next. The aesthetic controversy between William Henry…[Read more]

Since its release in 1987, Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” has been sampled over one hundred times by more than sixty different hip-hop artists. The resulting tangle of artists, producers, sampled material, and sampling techniques from the past twenty-five years creates a complex network of sampling practices and traditions surrounding “Brin…[Read more]

The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (1990) often draw comparisons because of their profuse and eclectic use of digital sampling. These two hip hop albums, however, use sampling in markedly different ways, a fact that is obscured because no well-developed language exists to differentiate how and why t…[Read more]

In 1991, the first lawsuit regarding sample-based hip hop, Grand Upright Music Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records, was decided in court, and this decision forever changed how artists and their record labels approached sample-based hip hop. Although several lawsuits had been filed before 1991, all of those were settled out of court. There was no…[Read more]

Hip-hop producers rely on several specific formulas to create sample-based hip-hop. Developed with a combination of analysis and ethnography, this typology of sampling is a systematic terminological and conceptual approach to this repertoire. There are three main types of samples: structural samples, surface samples, and lyric samples. Each of…[Read more]