Last night I watched Copyright Criminals, a documentary covering the legality of samples in rap/hip-hop music.
Both sides of the issue are covered. You’ll get to hear from seminal DJs like DJ Qbert, Mix Master Mike, Hank Shocklee and Shock G who argue that turntables are instruments and sample-laden songs are simply music collages, reflections of pop culture. Inversely we get to hear from Steve Albini (who refers to sampling as “stealing”) and several music lawyers who cite laws and court cases.
Specifically we hear about De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising”, which used an unlicensed sample from The Turtles and soon found themselves in De La Court. Around the same time, Biz Markee was also sued for using a sample. These two lawsuits put an end to the “sample free” world of rap music — although I was greatly surprised that the David Bowie and Queen vs. Vanilla Ice (who used the hook from “Under Pressure” in his hit single “Ice Ice Baby”) wasn’t mentioned. Queen and David Bowie ended up with 50% authorship of “Ice Ice Baby” which made them millions of dollars. It was a huge news story at the time and, again, I can’t believe it wasn’t at least mentioned.
A disproportional amount of the documentary — maybe 10 minutes of the film’s 55-minute run time — focuses on the story of Clyde Stubblefield, James Brown’s drummer. Stubblefield recorded lots of “drum breaks” (small snippets of drums with no instruments or vocals over them), which are popular among DJs. The documentary discusses how even though often times these drum samples are “cleared” (paid for), the money ends up going to record labels and not the artists who performed the music. “They tell me I’m the most sampled drummer of all time,” Stubblefield notes, “but I never made a dime from in. Nobody even ever thanked me.”
The documentary also touches on a fact that I’ve said many times: sample-thick albums like the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back” simply couldn’t be released today, as clearing all the samples in those albums would be cost prohibitive. The end of the documentary mentions “underground artists” who sample whatever they want and release their work for free on the Internet.
It’s a shame that “Copyright Criminals” isn’t two or three hours in length. Many of the film’s subjects only appear in one or two small segments (DJ Qbert, for example, gets less than 30 seconds of screen time). I thought the documentary touched on a lot of interesting topics, most of which I would have loved to hear a lot more information about.
You can get Copyright Criminals from Amazon for $25, or also from Netflix.
Watch the trailer here.
The “Variations” podcast series by Jon Leidecker takes plenty of time to explore the legal issues involved in sampling. It begins in the early 20th century with copyright and sheet music and winds up with hip-hop and avant garde audio collage. 5 episodes so far, an hour each, worth checking out. Each episode also has pdf liner notes available. Go here – http://rwm.macba.cat/en/curatorial/
There’s also the film “RIP! A Remix Manifesto” which is available for download. It approaches the copyright/sampling issue from a slightly less academic perspective and spends a lot of time on Girl Talk and mashup. http://ripremix.com/
At this point it seems like record companies are not so much going after the little guy, but if one were to ACCIDENTALLY become the next De La Soul then I imagine life would suck pretty hard. Picture the prosecution demanding discovery of source material, and it turns out the samples were taken from illegally downloaded files. D’oh. Really, though; why should businessmen get to decide the ethics of whatever direction a creative art takes? Should illegal art even be possible? I don’t know.
I will add this to my queue.
I got “Scratch” from Netflix a few months ago. It doesn’t focus on copyright issues, but it’s a good video on the history of Hip Hop and Turntablism, basically all things scratching. Those who have interest in that style of music should check it out.
Jeez dude. As somebody who has already received a warning from his ISP before, don’t send out any emails with copyright in the title. About gave me a heart attack. haha
It’s cool that you mentioned Clyde. He is one of my favorite drummers. He is also needing a kidney transplant and could use the money from these samplers:
http://clydestubblefield.chipin.com/clyde-stubblefield
>”sample-thick albums simply couldn’t be released today, as clearing all the samples in those albums would be cost prohibitive.”
Yeah, definitely not as an example of “digging through the crates”, i.e. showing off your obscurity-finding skills and out-of-nowhere cultural context leaps. But the _style_ itself of rapidfire sample switching is still possible via the use of legal sample CDs. There are thousands of these things, covering every style source you could imagine. With enough patience, you could collect these things and dig through them all and put something together in a Bomb Squad or Dust Brothers-type way.
Why this doesn’t happen: I’ve been listening to a bunch of contemporary underground-dancey stuff recently and the vast majority of it is really lazy production. Which is fine, but I don’t know that these guys are willing to spend several weeks on a single song. I think they’re going for more “of the moment”, finish it in a night and on to the next one, way of working.
Plus, you don’t get the cultural cache of a listener going “Oh, clever sample, that’s from a Mickey Mouse record from 1974” Trainspotting of samples.
And on the other hand – the production that does get agonized over, like the major label dance-pop? The heavy sample style just isn’t in fashion now. That could change, or not.