In the 1990s, it was considered avant garde to use sampling in popular music. It was mostly politicized hip-hop artists, such as Public Enemy and De La Soul, as well as mostly anonymous acidhouse rave musicians, with their unbridled celebration of psychedelic drug use, who tended to use sampling. Copyright issues and postmodernist theories of "recombinance" and collage as a reflection of an ever-mixing, ever-homogenizing world culture magnified sampling's radical-intellectual lustre.
Over time, however, as hip-hop and house music gained favor among Western youth, and became subject to the laws of fashion, sampling--not to mention political and psychedelic themes--became less common in those genres. By the end of the millenium, the ultimate success of record-industry funded copyright lawyers and the inevitable realization of postmodernism's basic fraudulence seemed to have pumped the final rounds into sampling's chest. Samples still exist in popular music, but these days the technique is used almost strictly as a way to avoid writing fresh hooks. Copyright issues are bypassed because the company that owns the sample also distributes the derivative song.
But sampling is not dead. Artists such as Negativland, Emergency Broadcast Network and John Oswald who have always been the true engines of sampling's progress, still record to this day. As with many experimentalists, these musicians survive because of a small but enthusiastic fan base built from word-of-mouth and outposts at the periphery of the media landscape.
Such outposts include Some Assembly Required, Jon Nelson's podcast out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is an exceptional program, devoted entirely to music made with sampling techniques. However, its existence underlines the sad state of sampling's popular support. Only in a world where sample-based music is no longer considered fashionable could a podcast dedicated exclusively to the genre be considered indispensible.
Over time, however, as hip-hop and house music gained favor among Western youth, and became subject to the laws of fashion, sampling--not to mention political and psychedelic themes--became less common in those genres. By the end of the millenium, the ultimate success of record-industry funded copyright lawyers and the inevitable realization of postmodernism's basic fraudulence seemed to have pumped the final rounds into sampling's chest. Samples still exist in popular music, but these days the technique is used almost strictly as a way to avoid writing fresh hooks. Copyright issues are bypassed because the company that owns the sample also distributes the derivative song.
But sampling is not dead. Artists such as Negativland, Emergency Broadcast Network and John Oswald who have always been the true engines of sampling's progress, still record to this day. As with many experimentalists, these musicians survive because of a small but enthusiastic fan base built from word-of-mouth and outposts at the periphery of the media landscape.
Such outposts include Some Assembly Required, Jon Nelson's podcast out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is an exceptional program, devoted entirely to music made with sampling techniques. However, its existence underlines the sad state of sampling's popular support. Only in a world where sample-based music is no longer considered fashionable could a podcast dedicated exclusively to the genre be considered indispensible.
