rap music and its culture as a dynamic tradition” (1996: 224). When I refer to the ahistoricality of much of the contemporary literature on hip-hop, I am referring to the difficulties of putting hip-hop music into the context of a larger musical history and the resulting implication that hip-hop as a musical form is sui generis. There have been several excellent works that strictly concern the development of the broader culture (see Castleman 1982, George 1998, Hager 1984, Toop 1991). Craig Castleman’s work—essentially an ethnography of the graffiti-writing community in New York City (including police officers who try to stop graffiti writing)—has been a particular influence on this study. But most works on the musical facets of hip-hop present it as a discrete moment in time, and the few that do take a larger historical view almost universally follow the development of rapping, to the exclusion of other hip-hop arts. This has its benefits as well as its liabilities.
The primary benefit of such ahistoricality is that it implicitly presents history (i.e., a developmental paradigm based in linear time) as only one of a variety of possible settings for analytical work on hip-hop. Many of the works cited above primarily emphasize economic, social, and cultural contexts, all of which are valuable approaches. The liabilities emerge, however, when history is summarily excluded as a paradigm due to the paucity of source material or the requirements of a theory. While some scholars find that historical context is not relevant to their particular arguments, many imply that historical context cannot be relevant because hip-hop’s use of previous recordings from different eras automatically voids the paradigm of historical development. This, I believe, is a mistake. As Keyes notes above, hip-hop’s aesthetic is deeply beholden to the music of other eras, and an understanding of these sensibilities can only enrich our understanding of contemporary practice.
Furthermore, the boundary between hip-hop insiders and outsiders can be rather porous, a state of affairs that may be obscured when hip-hop is removed from its larger context. As I will show, the nature of the producers’ art requires them more than other hip-hop artists to explore beyond the genre boundaries of hip-hop. The producer Mr. Supreme, for instance, rejects the notion that a “true hip-hopper” should listen only to hip-hop music: “If you’re a real true hip-hopper—and I think a lot of hip-hoppers aren’t—like I always say, ‘It’s all music.’ So if you really are truly into hip-hop, how can you not listen to anything else? Because it comes from everything else. So you are listening to everything else. So how can you say ‘I only listen to hip-hop, and I don’t listen to this.’ It doesn’t make sense to me” (Mr. Supreme 1998a).
In fact, every producer I interviewed cited older musical forms as direct influences. An extreme example of this phenomenon arose in an interview with Steinski, who was a heavily influential figure in the development of sampling, particularly with regard to the use of dialogue from movies, commercials, and spoken-word records:
Joe: If you weren’t the first, you were one of the people that really popularized that idea of taking stuff….
Steinski: Oh, cut-and-paste shit? Yeah.
Joe: Were you the first person to really do that?
Steinski: I don’t think so.
Joe: OK, I guess “Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”—
Steinski: Buchanan and Goodman. 1956. Did you ever hear the “Flying Saucer” records?
Joe: Oh, where they cut in—they ask the questions and they kinda … So you see that as an influence?
Steinski: Totally. More than an influence, it’s a direct line. Yeah. Absolutely, man. Those guys had pop hits with taking popular music, cutting it up, and putting it in this context. Totally. Yeah. Absolutely.13 (Steinski 2002)
If such influences are rarely seen in scholarly writing about hip-hop, it is largely because they do not answer the questions that scholars are interested in: What does hip-hop’s popularity say about American culture in the early twenty-first century? How does African American culture engage with the mass media? How does global capitalism affect artistic expression?
Although there have been several short works on the role of deejaying in live performance (White 1996, Allen 1997), there has been very little substantial work on sampling within a hip-hop context. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there have been only three widely published academic works that focus specifically on sample-based musical gestures (Krims 2000, Walser 1995, Gaunt 1995). All three of these works emerge from a similar disciplinary perspective: musicology informed by personal experience with hip-hop music. All three authors provide insightful, provocative, and—particularly in Walser’s case—politically engaged analysis. But because they are musicologists, they focus on the results of sampling rather than the process; they are, essentially, analyzing a text.14 Again, each of these works stands on its own, but there is a resounding silence when it comes to other perspectives on hip-hop sampling—particularly when one considers that hip-hop has been a major form of American popular music for almost thirty years.
There are two primary reasons for the lack of attention that the non-vocal aspects of recorded hip-hop have received from academia. First, the aesthetics of composition are determined by a complex set of ethical concerns and practical choices that can only be studied from within the community of hip-hop producers. Most researchers who have written about hip-hop have not sought or have not gained access to that community. Second, most of the scholars who have studied hip-hop have emerged from disciplines that are oriented toward the study of texts or social processes, rather than musical structures. Simply put, it is not the music that interests them in hip-hop. But such an approach—legitimate on its own terms—does reinforce the notion that the nonverbal aspects of hip-hop are not worthy of attention. For example, Potter, in an otherwise excellent book, dismisses the instrumental foundation of hip-hop almost out of hand, beginning a chapter with the pronouncement that “[w]hatever the role played by samples and breakbeats, for much of hip-hop’s core audience, it is without question the rhymes that come first” (Potter 1995: 81; emphasis in original). In some sense, this entire study is devoted precisely to questioning this conclusion.15
The study begins with a brief history of sampling, questioning some of the assumptions that scholars have made about this history, which have subsequently influenced the general tenor of the scholarship on sampling. Specifically, I have tried to problematize the relationship between general societal factors—culture, politics, and especially economics—and hip-hop music, arguing that individual artists often have more control over the way these issues affect their work than they are given credit for. In other words, I am not so much interested in the conditions themselves as I am interested in the way hip-hoppers, given those conditions, were able to create an activity that was socially, economically, and artistically rewarding. In most cases, my approach can be expressed in three related questions: What are the preexisting social, economic, and cultural conditions? Given those conditions, what did the individual choose to do? Why was the individual’s choice accepted by the larger community?
The practice of creating hip-hop music by using digital sampling to create sonic collages evolved from the practice of hip-hop deejaying. The nature and implications of these developments are discussed in chapter 2. Also discussed in that chapter is the way that this progression is largely recapitulated in the lives of individual producers as part of an educational process that intends to inculcate young producers in the hip-hop aesthetic. This process is ongoing throughout a producer’s career and may affect many facets of hip-hop expression. In chapter 3, I address hip-hop producers’ embrace of sampling by examining their rejection of the use of live instrumentation. I argue that sampling, rather than being the result of musical deprivation, is an aesthetic choice consistent with the history and values of the hip-hop community. Chapter 4 addresses the social and technical
