An old cliche that many have heard is: Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Maybe your little brother wants to dress like you, style his hair the same way, even walk identically. Maybe you buy a specific product because your favorite actress or athlete uses it. In these cases, the impetus behind the mimicry is psychological. The mimicked are seen as examples of success and widespread acceptance: ergo, if I want to do well and be well-liked by everyone, I should do as they do. Why not in music as well? If you like a particular phrase or riff or beat, why not incorporate it into a song of your own? Though not an entirely original tool, musical sampling creates hybrid-originality.
According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a sample is “an excerpt from a musical recording that is used in another artist's recording.”(1) The word “excerpt” is slightly ambiguous, but it implies a part, not an entirety.(2) So sampling is anything short of taking someone else’s song, scratching out that artist’s name, and putting your own in its place? It is seemingly so, as long as you purchase the appropriate licenses.
Sampling is quite common, which may be unexpected to the average listener. While doing some background work on this article, I came across a website devoted entirely to finding and documenting links between songs and artists: http://www.whosampled.com/.(3) From simply perusing this website, anyone can figure out that sampling is fairly proliferate.
There have been numerous copyright suits and high-profile Court of Appeals cases regarding sampling. The courts haven’t established a common, unified definition for legal or illegal sampling. I, as well, am not going to try. Instead, think about the individuality inherent in songwriting. A songwriter looms part of himself into his song. A songwriter expresses her uniqueness, her originality among the 7 billion other people in the world.
I stumbled across a transcript of an edition of NPR’s “Science Friday” from January, 2011. The host, Ira Flatow, has a few guests discussing musical sampling. Flatow states the particular bent of the discussion: “Today, ‘sampling,’ or repurposing a snippet of another artist's music, is mainstream. Is sampling theft, or is copyright law making creativity a crime?”(4) Notice his bent is that creativity is inherent in sampling.
One opinion in the discussion is provocative. Professor McLeod of the University of Iowa had this to say:
“...it’s basically the central part of popular culture if you think about social networking and the way that people interact with each other across great distances...you think about open-source software, the way that people collaboratively create stuff, they’re essentially taking samples of computer code and remixing them. And the same is true with music...” (5)
I would counter this by saying that people know what they’re getting into when they collaborate in open-source software projects. They know it is a team effort, the end result not being the sole production of any individual. To say that music is identical is quite a stretch. However, his point is strong, though fogged by his inaccurate analogy, that music may be more a group expression, a piece of the human experience in sound, and much more than solely an individual’s self-expression.
Professor McLeod is on one extreme. On the other are those who think that any part of a song used without permission and licensure should be made illegal. It is for you to decide which side of the spectrum you want to be on, or whether being somewhere close to the middle is more accurate. Is music, to borrow the professor’s analogy, a piece of the open-source project we call “life,” something that can be borrowed from and re-employed in another song? Or is every song a sacred opus of the individual, to be left as a stand-alone work, its each part equally as important as the whole?
But this article is about hybrid-originality, not the legal or moral ramifications of sampling.
When sampling is brought up, people generally default to the ramifications I just mentioned when discussing it. Let us pretend for a moment, though, that this is a perfect world where everyone gives proper credit to everyone else for anything borrowed. There are no copyright infringements, no plagiarism, no buying essays off the internet for an assignment due tomorrow that you’ve known about for three months---people instead are honest and reputable in this world. I know, the imaginative part of your brain is beginning to cramp up.
If I write a song, and I incorporate a guitar riff into it from another song because I like it and think it complements my song, then am I less original that someone who instead chooses to write his own riff? Superficially, yes, there is less originality. But what if the borrowed riff, or beat, or phrase works better with your overall different idea for a song than the song it came from? When I talk about borrowing a part, I’m assuming the song subsuming the part is wholly different than the song being borrowed from.
Also consider the relative simplicity of modern popular music compared to music from the Romantic, Classical, or Baroque periods. A lot of songs today use the same chord progressions, annoyingly similar beats, and eerily similar vocal stylings. Also consider that the number of notes and chords are finite, unless you want to spill over into atonal scales like the artists from the Second Viennese School. (6)
When a plethora of artists are using the same finite group of accepted popular sounds, there is going to be overlap; there is going to be accidental use of someone else’s ideas. In other words, very little being written today is 100% original. Consciously building on or around another’s ideas, or simply accenting a song with them, is original in itself, though not purely original. It is something that could be called hybrid originality.
(1)
“Sample” http://www.merriam-webster.com/
(2)
This article’s purpose is not to define or support specific amounts of sampling or elaborate on the complex, confusing, and contradictory legal ramifications of it. I will touch on some of these points, but not in detail.
I haven’t explored the website in depth, but it appears that users, after creating a free profile, can submit their own alleged connections between songs. So this website does not scientifically prove that one song was sampled in another, but it lets you explore the strong probability that it was.
(4)
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/28/133306353/Digital-Music-Sampling-Creativity-Or-Criminality
(5)
same website as above
(6)
Check out Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire as an example of atonal music.
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