TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 138 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 69

Play It Again, Sampler


A revolutionary device turns pop on its ear by enabling musicians
to beg, borrow and steal sounds from all over

By GUY GARCIA


    When you hear new songs on the radio these days, do they
have a familiar ring? Listen more closely to what's tickling
your subconscious. In many cases you did hear that sound
before, maybe long ago. It's the James Brown beat that's now in
a rapper's groove, or the recycled '60s riff in a current
dance-floor hit. It's the steam heat of the early '80s hit Under
Pressure recycled in the vanilla-rap hit Ice Ice Baby, and the
streak of the funk classic Super Freak revived for M.C. Hammer's
U Can't Touch This.

    That oldies echo in your ears is the result of a high-tech
technique, digital sampling, that is turning pop music on its
ear. Besides creating some unexpected new sounds, sampling is
raising serious legal and ethical issues. "We're talking here
about the ultimate instrument," says Mike Edwards, founder and
lead singer of the British neopsychedelic group Jesus Jones. "I
think that sampling's effect on music cannot be calculated."

    The concept dates back to the late '70s, when some
enterprising disco deejay played a disembodied bit of an old
record over and over again to give it a funky new spin. That
technique took a quantum leap when the first electronic samplers
were introduced around 1980. Unlike synthesizers, which generate
tones artificially, samplers record real sounds. Anything
audible is eligible: pre recorded music, drumbeats, human
voices, even ordinary noise like a slamming door. Samplers
transform these sounds into digital codes, which in turn can be
manipulated to produce melodies, rhythm tracks and complicated
webs of sounds.

    Sampling enthusiasts range from the funk-and-roll bands
Faith No More and Fishbone to the avant-garde gurus David Byrne
and Brian Eno. On Fishbone's acclaimed new album, The Reality
of Our Surroundings, the band incorporates church bells and
human screams. "We use sampling to enhance the integrity of our
music," says drummer Phillip Fisher. "Butif you put a collage
together, you should give credit to the places you got your
pieces from."

    Not everyone shares such scruples. Rap is rife with riffs
sampled from other musicians without their consent, most notably
James Brown. (The Godfather of Soul says he has counted 134
examples.) Producer-performer Lenny Kravitz borrowed a drum
track from the rap group Public Enemy for the thrusting beat of
Madonna's hit Justify My Love.

    In Europe sampling has created some controversial musical
stews. The techno-rockers EMF have stirred up a fuss with their
single Lies, in which they sample the voice of Mark David
Chapman, the John Lennon assassin, reciting lyrics from Lennon's
last album. To create the disco hit Sadeness, Part I,
Romanian-born producer Michael Cretu sampled Gregorian chants,
juxtaposed them with whispered verses from the Marquis de Sade,
and set them to a metronomic beat. Whether such sampling is
artistry "depends on how you use it," says Cretu. "If you are
a really creative person, you use it as an instrument, you
participate. I'm sure if Richard Wagner were alive today he
would have the biggest sampler in the world."

    With millions of dollars in royalties at stake, sampling
has become a legal quagmire. U.S. copyright law protects a
composer from having his work duplicated by another musician.
But what happens if the second party samples only a few seconds
of a melody? Or just a fragment of drumbeat? "The latest
copyright law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1978, and it was out
of date pretty much the day it was passed," observes Jeffrey
Light, a Beverly Hills-based entertainment lawyer. "Sampling is
just another instance of the law not keeping up with
technology."

    Vanilla Ice ran into the problem when he was accused of
lifting part of the 1981 song Under Pressure, written by David
Bowie and Queen, for his No. 1 hit Ice Ice Baby. When Bowie and
Queen threatened a lawsuit, the rapper eventually added them to
the composer credits. Two years ago, the rap group De La Soul
was slapped with a $1.7 million suit by the '60s group the
Turtles for using an uncredited bite of their 1969 song You
Showed Me. M.C. Hammer avoided such problems by sharing credit
with Rick James, who wrote Super Freak, before sampling the song
for his platinum single, U Can't Touch This.

    Artists and music publishers are struggling to settle
disputes out of court by devising elaborate formulas to divvy
up royalties between samplers and samplees. "Everybody is going
to go ahead doing it," predicts Light, "except now they're going
to get their approvals before they make a record. If you go to
somebody after you've got a hit and try to cut a deal, they're
going to take you to the cleaners."

    Not all unauthorized sampling ends in discord. Tom's
Diner, an a cappella tune by Suzanne Vega, had been known only
to fans who owned her 1987 album, Solitude Standing. Then late
last year a couple of audacious remix artists who call
themselves DNA sampled Vega's voice and grafted it onto a
throbbing beat. Vega liked the new version so much that she
asked her record company to release it. The resulting Top Five
single was the surprise hit of 1990.

    While that cut-and-paste approach to pop may not work for
everyone, sampling may well be a permanent part of the musical
landscape. And what's wrong with that? The arts have a long
tradition of allusion and quotation, often with resonant
effects. In pop music the only danger of sampling is that
performers will use it as a crutch for the imagination, rather
than a tool to help liberate it.