I’m here to talk about why sampling is one of the best forms of creativity in modern hip-hop. If you don’t know what sampling is, the basic definition is the recording and manipulation of music to implement into another form of art. Why do I care so much? Because as a listener of music, I constantly try to dive deeper into the history of certain songs and how they came to be so good. Sampling has done just that. It has made music sound better, especially in the rap and hip-hop scene.

I have three main reasons for why I think it helps the hip-hop industry so much, and my first is that it shows appreciation or can pay homage to the roots or origin from which the sample comes from. Maybe even a separate genre that’s an ancestor of modern hip hop. My second reason is that given the ability to manipulate sounds, there are a ton of possibilities for what you can put into a track. The third reason is that sampling music allows the world to have more music to listen to. It extends the amount of music available. 

Alright, so my first reason, that sampling can help show appreciation for many musical elements, I just have this as a reason because of the vast history of music that has led to where we are now. Obviously, there aren’t many people sampling symphonies or folk music or things like that. However, ever since music has been available to the public, young artists have taken heavy inspiration from it, and in order to tie their own products back to their roots, they can present a modification of a famous track that meant a lot to their upbringing. 

Music does have an extensive history, and an example of showing appreciation for musical roots is the album cover of Fly Siifu’s by Pink Siifu, in which you can see a collage of many famous artistic icons and imagery from the likes of which I immediately recognized albums from Aaliyah and MF Doom. The main point here is that when certain people have had such an impact on your music tast, sampling music is a good way to pay homage to those people, even if you never knew them personally.

The second reason why I think sampling is so good is that with sampling you can manipulate sounds and it just basically means that you can make a song sound better by adding something and changing it a bit. And there are a ton of ways you can change it a bit to fit the needs of your genre or whatever sound you want. 

You can layer it or equalize it, which I don’t really know what that means, but you can change the frequency so you can mess around with dynamics. Speeding up and slowing down, maybe a song you like is really hyper, I’d hear a bumped up instrumental because it fits the need for hype music. You can re-pitch it in case you already have an octave to be at. Looping a specific section, however, is the most familiar one I always hear in many of my favorite songs. About eight seconds of a track can be enough for a full instrumental on a rap song, if you just loop it.

My Third Point and my biggest priority. Is that sampling allows for there to be more music for the world. Multiple songs can sample one track. I’ve heard Freddie Gibbs, a rapper, and the Neighborhood sample the same song, and while those two are completely separate genres, I still listen to both. And for songs that have had their origin in the melody of a hit from the 1980s. It’s almost like there’s no limit to how much you can get out of that.

Another thing that sampling is helped is new artists starting their careers. A lot of rappers or singers that I know have started by looking at other songs and taking them so that they can see what best fits their abilities. 1999 is a debut mix-tape from one of my favorite rappers, Joey Bada$$, and it was a while before I learned that most of the songs in this album were already produced by people like Madlib and MF Doom. So what Joey was able to do was take what he thought sounded best and rap over it to demonstrate his skill. And to see if it would be a career worth looking into. As a young rapper, he had such a future ahead of him and has now come up with a couple more albums that are more of his own. 

Nostalgia Ultra is also a mix tape by 2011 Frank Ocean, who also had a lot of potential talent to offer the world. The mix-tape is composed of a ton of covers and remixes from the likes of MGMT and also the Eagles. While these songs were almost taken entirely from elsewhere, the mix-tape was our chance to see what kind of talent we could get into with Frank Ocean, and what he had to offer the world. This all shows that starting out, artists can take samples from various different people, and overtime, after they’ve proven themselves, they can make more music for the world that we all know and love. 

Now clearance eased a lot of the tensions I had about sampling because originally, I thought sampling was like stealing. But properly paying and getting permission to use it from the original creator is a whole different story. And even still, artists, even the ones who have made names for themselves, have been sued, time and time again, because of the whole clearance issue. They can hear something, knowing that it sounds too good to even go through the whole legal process. But right there is when I would consider it property theft, even if it does sound as great as it does. 

Because the clearance process is so complex, why don’t artists just start from scratch and create their own sounds? Well, if you want to make world changing music, sometimes starting out, you have to take from world changing music and build from there. Obviously you can’t just sample everything you hear, so sometime later down the line, artists have to start producing their own, which is what will separate them from the crowd of new artists. 

Why is it important to keep ties to roots in the hip hop industry? When people are connected over the creation of music, they can lift each other up and collaborate on projects. And what they both might have in common, that they had to bond over, is the roots of where their music came from. You know, legends like Lauryn Hill have had so much influence on many modern rappers that those rappers appreciate that impact, and have had a common understanding of their upbringing and they feel like they have to respect that. 

Why do some artists use less samples as they go further into their career? Well, sampling music gives artists the ability to develop their own taste and experiment with what they are interested in. And as they become more invested into this specific style of music, they learn more about it and can start to create their own. Having to use less samples means more artists who can become more iconic and maybe even inspiration for their descendants in the hip hop industry. 

But it’s stealing, right? It’s unoriginal. I will be honest. When I first discovered sampling, I thought so too. But what I’ve picked up, is that as history goes on, there are less and less chances to identify an actual idea that is original. You know, because people are always going to mimic their role models no matter what. And as you know, history repeats itself, especially in many creative fields. There are fundamental truths for what works best, what sounds best, what appeals to most everybody, and a lot of artists have had to take from people who have made their fame off of these fundamental truths, in every single form of art. Architecture, paintings, photography. People have taken inspiration from their predecessors.

The main reason we are able to prosper so much is because of our ability to take inspiration from our ancestors. Technological developments all have their roots. Like the plane here, there’s a reason it’s modeled with the wings in the tale that the Wright Brothers first started out with, because that works best. 

Alright, so my conclusion is that if you want to call sampling not creative, then fine, you don’t have to listen to it. But the energy you spend criticizing producers who sampled songs, could be saved if you just embrace the full properties of music as a whole, because when one song from 2013 comes to me with the same song from like 1969, I don’t see why I can’t listen to both. Why would I have to pick and choose? If I can listen to both, because both sound good, then I 100% will.