Princes among thieves: sampling the '80s - hip hop music

ArtForum, March, 2003 by Andrew Ross

I don't recall that the vogue lasted for more than a few years, but one of the things many of us did in the 1980s was to put a music sample on our answering machines. The most socially confident simply replaced their entire voice message with a snatch of sound that summed up their mood for that day or week. Callers could interpret the morsel as they saw fit. It was a virtuoso way of customizing a new technology that offered an impersonal, and often awkward, resolution to a communication problem. Before it was widely accepted, the answering machine--like call waiting some years later--was considered an uncivil medium. Callers felt belittled or put off by their blunt encounters with mechanized greetings. Putting your own voice on the outgoing message, even if it was witty or self-mocking, seemed only to reinforce the breach of decorum. The music sample was a less complicit endorsement of the technology, and it gave callers something to savor. Genre-wise, it belonged to the baroque lineage of personalized statio nery, and it presaged the widespread use of quotations in our e-mail signature files.

It would be careless to overlook the relevance of the answering-machine sample to its moment in time. We were living through the salad days of music sampling, before a legal chill descended on this warm and lustrous craft. Sampling was, arguably, the most representative aesthetic of a decade that wanted to put everything in quotation marks. It gave a vernacular spin to highbrow tactics like appropriation, collage, and creative copying, which had played starring roles in the debates about postmodernism. In the art world, these tactics had often been used for what was called institutional critique. They challenged modernist credos--such as the notion of an originary author or one-of-a-kind production--on which a vast and lucrative edifice of art appreciation and evaluation had been built. By contrast, sampling had hard-knock origins, in impromptu Bronx house parties and street jams thrown by neighborhood DJs who were not uncommonly ex-gang members. But if sampling's artful workouts were homegrown, DJs were alwa ys hot to harness the new technologies of the day--from the early reengineering of turntable and speaker systems to the adaptation of drum machines and synthesizers, and then the wholesale embrace of digital production and distribution formats that emerged supreme by the early '90s. Sampling was the twitchy zone where the great tectonic plate of the analog world rubbed up against its digital successor.

The first significant pop hit of 1980 (at least from the perspective of appropriation)--and the first cassette single ever--was Bow Wow Wow's festive "C30, C60, C90 Go!" In that song, Malcolm McLaren's anarchist urchins rapped out his agitprop appeal to copy music onto tape and give it away. They dressed like buccaneers, and their message was a call to arms against a music industry that made pirates of half the world's population. The global revolution in home taping would give rise to a new kind of transnational police operation, as the US, along with other G7 culture exporters, increasingly scrambled to protect their corporations' intellectual property with every trumped-up ruling they could push through the eye of the WTO's legal needle. The coup at the end of the decade which established the CD as a consumer-product standard was a short-lived refuge for the industry-lasting until the MP3 whirlwind punched a hole into a new universe of piracy. Even so, the CD effectively sealed the extinction of the last a nalog species that could be considered dominant in its day. Today, the most stunningly inert legacy of the '80s is the stacks of music cassettes collecting dust on our bookshelves, more idle by far than the volumes of print with which they keep company.

Musically speaking, however, the decade had really begun in October when the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," a novelty item initially, became hip-hop's first commercial hit. The rap, which was performed over the bass break from Chic's "Good Times," recycled rhymes that, by then, had become common currency among New York City's early MCs, like Grandmaster Caz and Rahiem. As it happens, the recording technology wasn't sophisticated enough to sample the Chic song, so the Gang hired a house band to play the same section over and over. It's no small irony that the recording which propelled hip-hop from the city's northern underground to within earshot of the national FM public required live musicians to imitate what DJs had being doing with vinyl for several years. For a pioneer like Kool Herc, that had involved plucking preferred fragments--the break beats--from old songs to create a new soundscape. In the hands of Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore, turntable innovations in cueing, spinning, scratc hing, and needle manipulation followed in short order, as the competition between DJs quickened. The basic grammar was worked out in an entirely makeshift way, and each new technique had to pass muster with the audiences of the day. In due time, these rules of molecular recombination would have much the same impact on culture-making as gene splicing had for our understanding of biological nature.