I never think too hard about sampling on any kind of ethical level until a sample jumps out at me as being particularly “bullshit” or I’m forced to defend sampling as a concept. Recently, I was struck by the odd mixing of worlds that became Kanye West’s ‘Stronger’ and Justice’s ‘†’. Kanye samples Justice’s biggest influence, months after he insulted the group, while Justice, make an electro-ish, dance music that uses samples in a way that resembles a classic rap album and even includes a a rapper on one song. Kanye’s sampling of Daft Punk is Puffy-like in its simplicity and obviousness and from a purist perspective, it seems fairly offensive. Justice’s samples are generally more brief and subtle; the purist would applaud these French hipsters.
Yet, something struck me as messed-up about this dichotomy and it became really clear on ‘Phantom Pt. 1’ and ‘Phantom Pt. 2’ by Justice (I was also reminded of this by Daniel Krow’s sampling entries). ‘Phantom’ samples probably one of my favorite songs of all-time, ‘Tenebre’ by Goblin (from the ‘Tenebre’ soundtrack) and does it in a way equally obvious as Kanye’s looping ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’. While Kanye’s sample never bothered me on any sort of “ethical” level, Justice’s use of ‘Tenebre’ does. The main reason is that I’m not sure how many people even realize that those ‘Phantom’ tracks are based on samples, particularly because the sample is from an instrumental, electronic track, so it sort of just fits right in. There’s something cheap about the song, playing a barely-sampled, really dope-sounding song to a bunch of club types that will indeed respond to its dopeness but choosing a song obscure enough that very few of them will go “Hey, that’s Goblin!”.
Perhaps an equal amount of people aren’t aware of Kanye’s use of Daft Punk, but Kanye seems to have taken great pains to make his sampling explicit. He put the group in the video and has referred to them in numerous interviews. Furthermore, his intended audience, seems to be “with-it” rap-type nerds (I recall producer Black Milk referencing Daft Punk a year or so ago) that already know Daft Punk or will search out the source of the sample, and mainstream pop/rap fans with little interest in musical minutiae. For them, the sample source hardly matters. This defies previous understandings of sampling ethics. It now seems ethically appropriate to sample something obvious and arguably played-out, for although it is audience-baiting it is significantly less disingenuous.
This is undoubtedly the opinion that could only come from someone too young to be totally offended by the Puffy era of sampling. The apotheosis of sampling is undoubtedly the early Golden-age era which birthed the Bomb Squad, Pete Rock, DJ Premier and many, many, others. At the same time, but relegated to smaller regional genres, at least at first, is the extension of sample lengths and the open-ness towards interpolations of older songs. What was once kind of regional becomes super-common with Dr. Dre and others.
Dre’s George Clinton samples to me, are similar to Kanye’s Daft Punk sampling in that, the extension into popular rap excuses the obviousness but say, the RZA’s sampling, although classic and probably my favorite of all-time, feels a little cheap for its adoption of obscure or relatively obscure music and relatively minimal sampling: Wasn’t it just a little disheartening when you heard that Charmels song that is the basis of ‘C.R.E.A.M’? This is not to discredit any of these producers but it does really sort of complicate what defines a fair or ethical sample.
The ultimate rule is (and should be) fuck ethics if it sounds cool and to me, the Puffy era, for all of its “bad” deeds, did make producers more okay with this feeling. Maybe it’s why we get so many great beats but fewer and fewer great rappers. The rules for a rapper have still not been broken-down, the Rakim style is still mindlessly imitated and the ad-lib kings just made an end-run about the rapping part of rap; no one has really gelled the two together, although an argument could be made that Kanye and Lil Wayne are these weird transitional figures…I’m not so sure yet.
But back to sampling and Puffy’s positive contributions to music- Just Blaze and Kanye West, producers that were equally influenced by Puffy as they were by Pete Rock, got their start with Harlem World and moved onto Roc-A-Fella where they basically made more acceptable, more awesome songs in the vein of Puffy’s style. Is there really that big of a difference between Puffy’s super-obvious samples and say, Just Blaze’s sort-of obvious ‘Move On Up’ sample on ‘Touch the Sky’? Now that sampling is commonplace in everything from Coldplay sampling Kraftwerk to JR Rotem sampling something as “timeless” as ‘Stand By Me’ it is context that determines a sample’s ethical “legitimacy” and not a group of static, easy-to-apply set of cratediggers’ rules.
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