My best friend from home recently resolved to “get into beatmaking.”  Naturally, I fired a few technical questions at him.  In essence, I asked him how he planned to accomplish such a mammoth task.  He declared that first of all, he would never use samples in his beats.  Avoiding samples is a matter of integrity, he said.  Surely making music from scratch is “artistic” in a purer sense than rehashing existing material.

I admit that my friend’s hesitance to sample is understandable.  For example, Ghostface Killah’s self-produced song “Holla” may be cited as problematic.  In “Holla” Ghostface rhymes over the entirety of The Delfonics’ 1968 classic “La La Means I Love You.”  One may begin to wonder whether Ghostface’s choice constitutes musicianship or outright stealing.

This tension is an essential aspect of hip-hop culture.  Here, I take hip-hop culture to encompass a range of practices that have developed alongside the music including break dancing, graffiti, and even some styles of skateboarding.  Ghostface’s virtuosic verses on “Holla” are analogous to Saber’s famously large graffiti piece on the banks of the Los Angeles River.  In both cases, the artists chose to treat someone else’s property as if it were a blank canvas.  (If minor issues of legality are your concern, then you should probably stay away from hip-hop.)

In more the more typical examples of sampling, wherein a producer manipulates one or more samples, the analogy only runs deeper.  The untouched sample—bear with me here—is akin to a block of marble waiting to take on a new form.

If sampling is essential to hip-hop culture, it is equally essential to how we create and consume music.  With hip-hop came a revolutionary paradigm for making popular music.  Homemade, clumsily wired turntables, mixers and samplers replaced centuries-old instruments as the tools of music making. Think about it, how many pop icons from the 1960s and 70s played instruments?  Now, how many do today?

These innovations arose from practicality: young people who couldn’t afford instruments turned to their home stereo systems to help them make music.  They raided their parents’ record collections, seeking out the snippets they could dance to.  Early hip-hop partygoers recognized a distinct new style of music despite the fact that they had heard the original records before.  Today’s obsession with remixes and mash-ups mirrors this phenomenon.

Like many things that probably shouldn’t be lifestyles, sampling is a lifestyle.  Hip-hop heads call this lifestyle Crate Diggin’, a term immortalized by The Lootpack’s song of the same name.  The term evokes images of a solitary beatsmith digging through dusty vinyl treasure troves haphazardly stored in milk crates, looking for rare and exotic sounds to sample.  As a veteran crate digger, I aim to use this column as a space to examine the art of sampling, and reveal the overlaps between the music of today and the music of the past.

Samuel Frampton

There are few things in life that I like better than British artists who sing in their native accents. As a Brit myself, I might be slightly biased, but the accent is such a great one that it would seem silly to waste its obvious allure by swapping it in for a generic American one. The Beatles immediately come to mind, they who were never afraid to warble away in their fantastic Liverpuddlian accents. For me, the accent adds a charm and character like no other. On top of a magnificent accent, clever lyrics that have me contemplating their awesomeness provide me with an almost unparalleled joy. But more than any of these, what gets me going every time is a melody that I can’t help but sing for hours afterwards, often to the vague amusement (and occasional aggravation) of my friends and family.

So it’s no surprise that when artists like King Charles come along with their distinctive voices, inter-referencing lyrics, and catchy tunes, my heart is filled with elation and a kind of musical ecstasy. King Charles walks the fine line between too cool and uncool, and does it with mastery. Not only is his music some of the most exceptional stuff coming out of the UK, his style is unique and truly fabulous. Think beehive, waxed mustache, and edgy vest/floral-print jacket combinations. To add to this larger-than-life character, he also plays the cello. It’s casual.

Listening to his 2012 album LoveBlood is a refreshing, glorious experience. This is because unlike many artists in this day and age, King Charles has not fallen prey to the ever-present only-one-actually-good-song-on-the-album trap. Every song has a life-blood of its own (durrhurrhurr), each with it’s own witty turns of phrase and tunes that will have nodding your head (un)conspicuously no matter where you are (trust me – it’s unavoidable). No two songs are the same, but each always manages to maintain that psychedelic folk-pop feeling that is so characteristic of King Charles.

Choosing a favorite song from this album would almost be like choosing a favorite child, but if I had to pick a couple particularly sparkly gems, I’d probably go with Ivory Road – probably my favorite lyrics in any song ever – and Mississippi Isabel, a song so catchy you’ll never sing anything else again. I challenge you to listen to either of these songs and not have them stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Allie Krause

How do we talk about music, and can it be talked about? Doing violence to the “text” and the language of music as anti-language. 

A Historical Orientation

“Logocentrism” is a favorite word of mine, because it sums up the main thing that the projects of modernity and post-modernity are ultimately up against. Logocentrism means the positive evaluation and centering of the logos. The logos is a Greek word for which we have no English translation and yet it is a concept that is unparalleled in historical significance.  The Logos is basically a mixture of language (as in spoken and written language) and rationality, especially as a kind of ground for culture or being as a whole.  The decline of logocentrism is the beginning of modernity as well as the beginning of music in the way we understand it today.  Before the end of the logos (around the beginning of the 20^th century) music is basically a bourgeois luxury, a certain activity associated with leisure, and conditioned by the logos. These two aspects – bourgeois luxury and being related to the logos – are not unrelated.  It is often said in modernism that the logos is “anti-life,” in other words, that the logos categorizes, cuts things up, and tries to organize things into their separate spheres.  This means that the way music was understood was conditioned by relegating it to a certain sphere of life: what the bourgeois understood as “purely aesthetic.” All that means is that music becomes separate from the active and practical modes of life, such as work. It is in this sense that it becomes “anti-life” in that life itself is primarily work, suffering, and struggle.

Not only did the logos relegate music socially but it was conditioned the way it was understood. Classical pieces of music are all about order. Like the visual art of pre-modernity, the goal of music is to imitate a peacefully and rationally structured universe.  The foundation of this universe and the ordering principle happens to be “The Word” (‘in the beginning there was the Word” John:1:1) which is an English translation of the logos. So, in both music’s social role and its ontological structure there is a hidden concession to the logos. In other words, a faith in language and its primacy conditions music.

Modernism wants to invert this relationship between language and music, and this relationship is what this column wants to explore. With modernity comes the realization that reality cannot be reduced to what is thought or said and that “life” or “existence” comes first.  Music is taken as something that taps into existence itself rather than talking, speaking, and writing, which merely gloss over the surface of things.  This is the reason why rock n’ roll and blues music (and thus most of the music of the 20^th century) comes to have the character that they have. Both genres were about the man who faces the world, who struggles with the world, and what this man thinks or says is largely irrelevant (although obviously not what he sings).  This is the power of music in the 20^th century and why it becomes such a major and important art form. Music in the 20^th century understands the truth of existence itself over and above thought and it glories in this roll.

I feel as though musical culture in our digital age has in some sense forgotten this role.  The mass proliferation of music blogs and music reviews means that music once again is up against language. The fact that “knowing obscure bands” or “having hip music taste” has become a sign of sophistication indicates that the bourgeois understanding of music is threatening to come back.  Music threatens to be something we engage with merely for the sake of demonstrating our leisure and our ability to talk.  In the internet age, where text (and image) is everything, music needs to maintain its role as that which speaks to truth of existence itself. What we cannot do, however, is stop talking about music, because we talk about things we love. What we do need to do is rethink how we talk about music, and with that how we think of music.  We need a way to spread “the word” of music’s ineffability (a paradox that has to be surmounted) such that we can avoid the pitfalls of a bourgeois “hipster culture” and a marginalization of music’s power for truth.

Adam Klein