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Sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, but it has a history stretching back to the earliest days of sound recording and experimental music making around the world. Digital networks allow artists to sample music across national borders and cultural traditions with relative ease, prompting questions around not only fair use, copyright, and freedom of expression, but also cultural appropriation and "copywrongs." Based on archival research and musical analysis, alongside conversations with artists and their own public reflections,
Sampling Politics provides ways to listen more closely and hear (again) music making.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: The World Around Us: Against Musical Common Sense
- Chapter 3: The Empire Samples Back: Raga, Dub, and Fortress Europe
- Chapter 4: Loss of Innocence: Found Sounds before and after 9/11
- Chapter 5: Re-Imagining Westphalia: Electroacoustic Reminders
- Chapter 6: "His Master's Voice" and (R)evolutionary Signifyin'
- Chapter 7: Conclusion
- Appendix I: Dr Das on Political Frequencies
- Appendix II: Hymnen Listening Guide
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
M.I. Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths University of London.
Summary
Music sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, but it has a history stretching back to the earliest days of sound recording and experimental music making from around the world. Digital tools and networks allow artists to sample music across national borders and from diverse cultural traditions with relative ease, prompting questions around not only fair use, copyright, and freedom of expression, but also cultural appropriation and "copywrongs." For example, non-commercial forms of sharing that are now commonplace on the web bring musicians and their audiences into closer contact with emerging regimes of commercial web-tracking and state-sponsored online surveillance. Moreover, when musicians actively engage in political or social causes through their music, they are liable to both commercial and state forces of control. Shifts back to corporate ownership and control of the global music business--online and offline--highlight competing claims for commercial and cultural ownership and control of sampled music from local communities, music labels, and artists.
Each case study is based on archival research, close listening, and musical analysis, alongside conversations and public reflections from artists such as David Byrne, Annirudha Das, Asian Dub Foundation, John Cage, Brian Eno, Sarah Jones, Gil Scott-Heron, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dunya Yunis, and Sonia Mehta. Sampling Politics provides ways to listen and hear (again) how sampling practices and music making work, on its own terms and in context. In so doing, M.I. Franklin corrects some errors in the public record, addressing some longstanding misperceptions over the creative, legal, and cultural legacy of music sampling in some cases of rich, and complex practices that have also been called musical "borrowing," "cultural appropriation," or "theft." This book considers the musicalities and musicianship at stake in each case, as well as the respective creative practices and performance cultures underscoring the ethics of attribution and collaboration when sampling artists make music.
Additional text
Designed to provide music edification for an IR scholarly constituency, M. I. Franklin's superb book will serve well beyond that ambition. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about the musical fields it explores—treating sampling, cutting, remixing, re-textualizing—it makes connections that breach the boundaries of the theoretical thought world within which social science fields have been quarantined.
