remaking of consumption as production was the first thing lost in this translation; despite its appropriation of Caz’s rhymes, “Rapper’s Delight” [the first major rap hit] was first and foremost a thing to be consumed, not a practice in action; its relation to hip-hop actuality was like that of a “Live Aid” t-shirt to a concert: a souvenir, a metonymic token. Hip-hop was something goin’ down at 23 Park, 63 Park, or the Back Door on 169th Street; you could no more make a hip-hop record in 1979 than you could make a “basketball game” record or a “subway ride” record. (Potter 1995: 45–46)
Before sampling was invented—in the late 1970s and early 1980s—this de contextualization presented a very specific hurdle for the record industry: although playing a popular funk record at a hip-hop show made sense, playing a popular funk record on a record did not. It seemed strange (not to mention illegal) to release recordings that consisted primarily of other records. Early hip-hop labels, such as Sugar Hill, therefore, relied on live bands and drum machines to reproduce the sounds that were heard in Bronx parks and Harlem recreation centers. As Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc (bassist and drummer respectively in the Sugar Hill house band) recalled in 1987, there was a conscious attempt on the part of the record company to capture the essence of these performances:
Doug Wimbish: The reason you hear tunes [on Sugar Hill raps] and say, “Damn, I heard that tune before” is that you did hear it before….
Keith LeBlanc: Sylvia [Robinson, Sugar Hill president and producer] would be at Harlem World or Disco Fever, and she’d watch who was mixing what four bars off of what record. She’d get that record, and then she’d play us those four bars and have us go in and cut it better. (Leland and Stein 1987: 28)
But in the mid-1980s a new technology developed that was better suited to the needs of hip-hop musicians: digital sampling. In its earliest incarnation, sampling was seen as a strategy for expanding the tonal palette of the keyboard-based synthesizer, as in this definition from a 1986 issue of Electronic Musician magazine:
Sampling is like magnetic tape recording in that both technologies involve the capturing, storing and recreating of audio (sound) waves. In fact, many of the standard terms associated with this technique (e.g. loop, splice, crossfade, etc.) have been borrowed directly from the world of magnetic tape recording. Sampling is the digital equivalent of music concrete, wherein common sounds are manipulated (and sometimes integrated with traditional instruments) to produce musical compositions.
Sampling allows the musician to record sounds from other instruments, nature, or even non-musical sources, and transpose and play them chromatically on a standard piano or organ keyboard. This new and emerging technology greatly expands the creative horizons of the modern composer. (Tully 1986: 27–30)
Another use, however, soon began to emerge. With the SP-12 in 1986, E-mu Systems introduced the “sampling drum computer” (Oppenheimer 1986: 84). Unlike earlier samplers, which were intended to provide musicians with novel sounds for their keyboards, the SP-12 was created to allow a producer to build rhythm tracks from individual drum sounds that had been previously sampled. In order to facilitate this process, it boasted three separate functions: the ability to digitally record a live drum sound (“sampling”), the ability to manipulate the resultant snippet to the operator’s liking, and the ability to precisely organize many samples within a temporal framework (“sequencing”). Hip-hop artists would take the process two steps further. While the new technology was intended to shift the drum machine from synthesized, preloaded drum sounds to more realistic “live” sounds, hip-hop artists were soon using the machine to sample not their own drumming, but the sound of their favorite recorded drummers, such as Clyde Stubblefield from James Brown’s band, or Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters.
It wasn’t long, though, before hip-hop producers would go even further. They soon began to use the SP-12 not only to sample drum sounds from old records, but also to sample entire melodies. This technique would not have appealed to musicians from other genres, who wanted the freedom to create their own melodies and had no interest in digital recordings of other people’s music. For those trained as hip-hop deejays, however, the ability to play an entire measure—a break, in this case—from an old record was exactly what they were looking for.
The credit for exploiting this possibility is generally given to Queens-based producer Marley Marl. As Chairman Mao writes, “One day during a Captain Rock remix session, Marley accidentally discovered modern drum-sound sampling, thus magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.” (Chairman Mao 1997: 88). The innovation was quickly embraced, and almost immediately ended the era of live instrumentation. In fact, as I will discuss later in this chapter, many current artists characterize hip-hop’s brief use of live instruments as merely a deviation, a capitulation to circumstance, rather than a step in hip-hop’s evolution.
Hip-hop sampling grew out of the deejays’ practice of repeating breaks until they formed a musical cycle of their own. The segments favored by early hip-hop producers tended toward funk and soul breaks, which—even in their original context—were clearly defined. An untrained listener, for example, can easily hear the beginning and end of the break in James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” (1969), perhaps the single most-exploited sample in hip-hop music history. The break begins when everything but the drums stops playing and ends eight measures later when the other instruments resume. This conception of the break is consistent with that of the earliest hip-hop deejays; the drums are by far the most important element. In fact, the idea of a break with lackluster drums would actually be contradiction in terms.
But the advent of sampling yielded a significant change: because more than one loop could now be played simultaneously, producers could take their drums and their music from different records. With samplers, any music could be combined with a great drum pattern to make what is essentially a composite break. Moreover, different loops (and “stabs”—short bursts of sound) could be brought in and taken out at different times.3 This substantially broadened the spectrum of music that could be pressed into service for hip-hop.
Today, the term “break” refers to any segment of music (usually four measures or less) that could be sampled and repeated. For example, the song “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” by Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth (1992) is based on a break from a late-sixties jazz artist. The break in this case, however, is not a moment of intense drum activity but a two-measure excerpt from a saxophone solo. Presumably one who was not already familiar with the hip-hop song would not hear those particular measures as being significant in the context of the original music. In contemporary terms, then, a break is any expanse of music that is thought of as a break by a producer. On a conceptual level, this means that the break in the original jazz record was brought into existence retroactively by Pete Rock’s use of it. In other words, for the twenty-four years between its release and the day Pete Rock sampled it, the original song contained no break. From that day on, it contained the break from “They Reminisce over You.” Producers deal with this apparent breaching of the time-space continuum with typically philosophical detachment. Conventionally, they take the position that the break had always been there, it just took a great producer to hear and exploit it.4 Record collecting is approached as if potential breaks have been unlooped and hidden randomly throughout the world’s music. It is the producer’s job to find them. This philosophy is apparent in a contemporary hip-hop magazine’s review of a relatively obscure 1971 album, in which the author describes one of the songs as if it had been pieced together from subsequent hip-hop breaks:
It opens with a solo sax that was re-arranged slightly to become the sax in Artifacts’ “Wrong Side of the Tracks.” Prince Paul’s loop from “Beautiful Night” follows, along with everything but the drums and lyrics of Showbiz and AG’s “Hold Ya Head” (sensing a trend?). This bassline also reappeared on Marley Marl’s remix of The Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka.” The cut closes out with the loop from Smif-n-Wessun’s “Bucktown” is
