Here’s a transcript of my presentation for the 2024 Pop Conference, which I gave at USC back in March. The theme of the event was an examination of archives, legacies, and preservation of musical artifacts and memories, so I put together this piece about how sourcing samples in music can be a simultaneous legal nightmare for the sample-using artists and a huge boon for otherwise underheard artists — and whether this conflict can be reconciled.
I think I know the answer to a mystery that's been bothering hip-hop heads for years. It's not one of the more intensely strange ones, like the time some internet sleuth discovered the origins of MF DOOM's beat "Arrow Root" was the bumper music from a now-semi-obscure jazz showcase program on the BET network. And it's not quite as storied as the 15-year-long sample-hunting quest that eventually figured out the Herbie Hancock lineage of Mobb Deep's "Shook Ones Pt. II". But the question still lingers for a few beatheads, including myself: where did DJ Premier get those strings for Jay-Z's "Bring It On"? This sample's gnawed at me for a while -- this plaintive, beautiful bit of orchestration that heightens the drama and opulence of the beat while making it sound strangely wistful.
I stumbled upon a possible answer a few years ago purely by chance. And it's really just a hunch, one I got after watching a documentary on a storied musical act -- who I will not name -- and realized that one of this act's songs, as played during this documentary, featured a string section that sounded uncannily like the one in "Bring It On," just in a slightly different form and cadence. I could imagine Premier taking this specific song -- which, in terms of renown, is a slightly lesser-known piece from an act famous enough to get their own documentary -- and rearranging its elements into something new enough to evade this kind of hunch-based identification while still keeping a lot of what made the piece it sampled so compelling in the first place.
But I can't confirm that this song was the actual sample. Nobody has yet. And what's more, I don't think I want to. Because the man who made that beat had something to say about this sample-spotter tendency -- tacked onto the end of Gang Starr's 1998 track "Royalty" (note the title):
"What’s the deal with you break-record cats putting out all the original records that we sample from and snitching by puttin' us on the back of it sayin' we used stuff? You know how that go! Stop doing that, y’all are violatin', straight up and down!"
In the early years of hip-hop -- which had its own sense of battling, competitive one-upsmanship among DJ crews -- finding an obscure break and realizing you had a jam nobody else did was like winning an arms race, and meant engaging in a sort of subterfuge to ensure nobody else could go nuclear with it. One of the most storied details about the early career of hip-hop pioneer Kool Herc was his tendency -- picked up from his Jamaican soundsystem-steeped father -- to soak the labels off his records to keep rubberneckers from swiping his choicest breaks. That was more or less the rule of the game for a long time -- a game that got trickier the moment that "Rapper's Delight" spurred the Chic braintrust to get in touch with their lawyers and people started realizing that this emerging form of music was going to have huge legal and creative complications now that it was part of the recording industry. But sample culture, and the snitching that went with it, exploded in the mid '80s.
Lenny Roberts and Lou Flores had the uncanniest timing. "Breakbeat Lenny" and "Breakbeat Lou" were at hip-hop Ground Zero during the genre's emergence in the early '70s Bronx. And right before the dawn of what people consider hip-hop's late '80s Golden Era, they started to chronicle the breakbeat repertoire of these old-school '70s parties and park jams. Ultimate Breaks and Beats was a long-running compilation series of rock, soul, disco, and funk songs, mostly dating from the mid '60s through the late '70s, all of which had the unifying factor of featuring an instrumental drum break or riff that hip-hop DJs gravitated towards. They wouldn't be the first to do this -- Paul Winley Records' Super Disco Brake's kicked off in the late '70s with a series of grey-market compilations that collected notable breaks like Bob James' "Take Me to the Mardi Gras" and Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio" with full attribution. But the first first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats just so happened to drop in 1986 -- the same year E-mu systems released the original SP-12 sampler, and hip-hop production took one of music's biggest leaps in accessible technology since the introduction of the Minimoog.
Within four years and give-or-take two dozen entries into the Ultimate Breaks & Beats series, Lenny and Lou had not only revived the hip-hop break canon for an era of hyperaccelerated sample-based creativity, they'd outlined a whole constellation of influence that broke down the barriers between the biggest bands in the world and one-off obscurities who'd cut a single 45 before vanishing. But in doing so, it heightened one of the contradictions of hip-hop's grey-market curatorial tendencies by doing a bit of an end-run around the whole curtain-pulling sample-snitch aspect: these compilations only credited the songwriters without revealing the artists themselves. What this meant was that it was a lot easier to connect the dots between the break and the originator when the credits read Gamble-Huff or Jagger-Richards than when they cited, say, Herb Rooney (Melvin Bliss's "Synthetic Substitution") or J. Carter-M. Daniels (Banbarra's "Shack Up"). In other words, it built a canon where it put obscurities on the same artistic footing as the big names without providing the same level of renown. So for many artists, the break itself would become exponentially more famous than the people who made it. You could make a case that the single most widely heard musician of the '90s wasn't Kurt Cobain or Whitney Houston or Garth Brooks but G.C. Coleman, the drummer for a short-lived Washington D.C. soul group called The Winstons, whose "Amen, Brother" has been sampled over 6,000 times by everyone from hip-hop beatmakers to jungle producers to the guy who composed the "Futurama" theme. I had to look Coleman's name up. You probably would've too.
But while sampled beats from obscurities like the Winstons could provide the fundamental building blocks of countless songs and even entire genres, sample-reliant producers still had an ongoing rapport with the bigger mainstream world of pop. And the more recognizable the sample source was, the more brazen and potentially lucrative it was to actually cite it. '86 was also the year of Run-DMC and Aerosmith teamup "Walk This Way", and it was one of the most high-profile early examples of both parties, sampler and sampled, acknowledging this symbiotic relationship and finding massive amounts of success in it -- Run-DMC went platinum, and Aerosmith staged a back-from-the-dead comeback. But a rift formed once the industry's necessity for sample clearance laws took hold -- giving final say to sampled artists and their labels (or sometimes just the labels) as to whether they'd approve the usage, and how much it'd cost. The rules got stricter, and the money got louder. It's not even like every producer was trying to rob the Fort Knox of pop music: the two cases people cite the most as the deathblows to unfettered sample culture were Tommy Boy failing to clear Prince Paul's sample of the Turtles' "You Showed Me" for De La Soul, and Cold Chillin' doing Biz Markie dirty by failing to cough up ten grand for Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" before releasing Biz's rewrite of it. The Turtles and O'Sullivan presumably didn't have as much to gain as Aerosmith when it came to potential hip-hop crossover providing a second wind for their careers -- they just resented hearing their shit mutated into something they didn't recognize.
Now by the time Preemo unleashed that diatribe against sample snitches in 1998, sampling had become not just expensive but something of a signifier of status: if you were Sean Combs, you could treat cleared Police and Diana Ross samples like they were luxury goods on par with a yacht or a Lamborghini. If you were on the indies, however, you had to dig deeper -- deep enough to hope nobody could figure out where you got your shit from, and creating more esoteric sounds in the process. But 1998 was more than just a dozen years removed from the 1986 of Ultimate Breaks and Beats -- it was five years after what Usenet inhabitants called Eternal September, the circa-'93 beginning of the internet's expansion into an everyday household media and information vector. Within a year, a techie named Blaine Armsterd would take advantage of this newly surging phenomenon to disseminate what he called the Sample FAQ, which would eventually evolve into the website the-breaks.com -- one of the internet's early go-to sites for sourcing and cataloguing samples and the tracks that sampled them.
And this is where the duality of the sample snitch comes in. Because, yes, Prince Paul and Biz Markie and dozens of others know how the record business will come down on your head if you try to do an end run around their draconian approach to sampling. But at this point everybody should know what happens and what's required if you want to sample James Brown or AC/DC, and those samples are usually so recognizable that snitching on them is kind of like taking the witness stand to confirm that the gigantic monster who knocked over all those buildings was, in fact, Godzilla. But the real fascinating thing behind the sample snitch phenomenon -- the contradictions, the subterfuge, the fine line separating "how'd they do that" and "where'd they find this" -- lies in the deeper connections between the producer and the more obscure work they sample.
Now somebody already snitched on the sample Premier used for "Royalty" -- it's right up there on the-breaks.com's more thorough successor WhoSampled.com, an exhaustive catalogue notorious enough that it's often trawled by record labels looking to spot examples of uncleared samples. The song Premier sampled, Latimore's "Let's Do It In Slow Motion," may or may not have been cleared, and the label Latimore recorded this song for, the Miami-based Glades, closed up shop around 1980, so it's safe to assume that the process of getting all the right people paid was or would have been at least kind of complicated, though who knows how affordable or expensive it might have been. (As an aside, here's another gray area of sample snitching: it's not always clear just what they're violating because it's not always public knowledge whether a sample has gone through all the proper legal channels or not.) But the Latimore song has also been uploaded to YouTube a few times, and every upload with any noticeable comment section activity features people not only acknowledging that Premier sampled the song (“Premier brought me here”), he transformed it -- made something singular and striking out of a work of music that might've otherwise been overlooked by a mainstream music press that didn't have much time for all but the most renowned crossover R&B artists -- especially ones from a generation earlier.
So this is where the enthusiast press comes in. By "enthusiast press," I mean the kind of publications that took the symbiotic relationship between these dusty old grooves and the new beats people made out of them, and made the connections explicit. Andre Torres founded Wax Poetics in 2001 to fill in the gap for publications aimed at cratediggers -- the sample-hunting obsessives who started out looking for breaks and wound up getting a piece-by-piece education on the previous generation's deep roots in the process. For people who considered Obama's campaign manager to be only the second-most-famous David Axelrod they knew of, a publication like this validated their idea that this dusty-groove history mattered even when the mainstream industry had left it in the back catalogues. To pick one example, their Winter 2004 issue #7, they shed new light and context on break-fodder names like Incredible Bongo Band, Deodato, Jack Ashford, and Roy Ayers -- and reinforced through research, conversation, and impassioned enthusiasm that these artists weren't just building blocks, they were entire foundations to themselves.
So eventually this knowledge becomes valuable as advocacy. One example of this that really hits home for me lies in the very simple, very brief harmonized brass riff which appears in the earliest moment of this piece, a riff that, even in the span of a second, should still be instantly recognizable to a certain generation of hip-hop heads:
A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders sold over a million copies. How many people who walked into their local record store to pick it up in November '93 knew who Woody Shaw was? Blackstone Legacy came out 22 years earlier, and while it featured a lot of players that jazz heads in the know rightly revere -- one of whom, Ron Carter, had himself shown up to play bass on Tribe's previous album The Low End Theory -- it was long out of print, so it's not like you could find it on that same record store's shelves unless they had an expansive used jazz vinyl section. (And even back then, it's likely that the collectors' market meant it was going to be too expensive to inspire a spur-of-the-moment buy.) Blackstone Legacy has enough of a reputation nowadays as a noteworthy example of post-bop, fusion, and free jazz colliding in spectacular ways. But for a lot of people of my generation -- the people who used hip-hop as the entry point into learning about lesser-known music from earlier eras -- the context for this album was: you know that horn riff from "Steve Biko (Stir It Up)"? Wait until you hear the other 4,700 seconds those guys did.
There are other, less litigation-based reasons to be annoyed with the sample snitch: for a while there were fly-by-night compilations that packaged themselves like thematic "as sampled by such-and-such artist" portfolios: Strictly Breaks Records, a label that aimed to pick up where Ultimate Breaks and Beats left off with their more golden era and early indie-focused Dusty Fingers series, also put out collections based specifically around tracks sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock, Beatnuts, De La Soul, and Mobb Deep that felt less like archival curiosities and more like direct examples of finger-pointing that traded off these famous names. (Funny enough, some of Premier's sample sources show up on volumes dedicated to Nas and Jay-Z, but the label apparently never had the post-"Royalty" chutzpah to release a dedicated The Preemo Collection.)
In an ideal world, this whole scenario around sample snitches would be a lot easier to figure out. The more famous the artist you sample, the less reasonable it is that a producer should feel entitled to keeping it a secret -- unless, of course, they do something to that sample so unrecognizable that it takes a decade and a half just to trace it back to, say, one of the most renowned jazz musicians to ever live, per "Shook Ones Pt. II." At which point it feels less like a legal transgression and more the epitome of transformative fair use that only serves to bolster sampling's creative utility as an actual musical art form. And if a producer's working in more esoteric turf, pulling back the curtain and showing off some of the obscure components of your favorite beatmakers' deepest pulls -- a surreal, borderline avant-garde childrens' album, a hundred-copy-pressing private-label jazz obscurity, a regional '70s prog rock LP from Poland or Turkey -- feels like a kind of epiphany. Reverse-engineering samples can expand musical canons and maintain the necessity of present-day artists rewriting and revising what it means to engage with the past beyond the nostalgic mass market. And it's not even as cost-prohibitive to clear this stuff as it used to be -- ironically perhaps because the initial costs of sample clearance pushed a lot of producers away from using them, and the market eventually corrected.
But the questions sample snitching raises about attribution and acknowledgement do take on a certain turn once you realize that when Midnight Marauders came out, Woody Shaw had been dead for four and a half years; he was only 44 and had been suffering through a litany of health problems. I don't have any problem whatsoever with producers making hits off the work of far more obscure artists, assuming one of two things: one, that this artistic relationship allows for the acknowledgement of the original artist as well as the sampling artist, and two, that the right people get paid. But in the end, that's not the beatmaker's job: that's the record industry's problem. And considering how these sample-using producers wound up doing more to creatively co-sign and build off these artists' neglected, out-of-print works than the labels ever did, it's probably about time the industry starts resolving these problems instead of facilitating more of them. There's a thin line between a snitch and a curator, but at a time when the music business's own crates have never felt shallower, it's better to be both than neither.