The Jan Diaries — Sampling: Legal, Illegal or Moral? (Part Two)

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 7 December 2020

Akira Kurosawa is said to have earned more from suing Sergio Leone over A Fistful of Dollars, an unofficial remake of Yojimbo, than from all his own films combined. Jan Kinčl opens the second of his two entries on sampling with that story, because it sets up what part one left alone: not whether a sample is legal, but what it is worth to the person on the other end.

What the piece covers

Where part one dealt with courts, credits and the four-bar myth, this one deals in arithmetic and ethics. Juan Atkins almost certainly made more from his sample appearing on a Missy Elliott record than from a lifetime of sales of the original, and the Spotify figures show the gap: 115,065,567 plays for Lose Control against 619,000 for Atkins’ most-played track and 292,000 for his Model 500 alias — about half a percent. Run a conservative cascade over that figure — five percent learn there is a sample, two percent learn who wrote it, one percent go and listen — and you still get some 1,150,000 people arriving at a Detroit pioneer’s catalogue. That is what a sample does: it bridges genres and eras that have drifted apart. Hip-hop and electro were near-identical in the 1980s and now barely acknowledge each other in America.

Underground practice is another matter. A record pressed in 300 to 1,000 copies barely covers its costs, so nobody with real money at stake comes after it — an American producer with thirty years behind him told Kinčl to sample whatever he likes, and if it ever draws attention that means the record is good. Working with an axe over your head is an understandable feeling, he writes, but far more dramatic than the practice.

The part that stayed

Rather than justify theft, Kinčl replaces the legal test with a moral one: a sample has to build a new musical context and add real value on top of its source. He is hard on lazy sampling — the tech-house habit of looping a disco section under a generic hi-hat — and puts it plainly: making music need not be quantum mechanics, but it is certainly not ten minutes of chopping up somebody else’s track in Ableton. His own examples come credited: You Never Told Me samples Quincy Jones’ I Never Told You, and Blue Funk a vocal from Kerri Chandler’s Get It Off. The closing story is the best evidence for the bridge argument. Chains, the 1996 anti-nuclear anthem by DLT and Ché Fu and a New Zealand hip-hop classic, had never been officially remixed — until Matt Davies, a Brighton producer who lived in New Zealand and later Zagreb, picked a sample off the Kinčl and Regis album while cooking dinner and began the first one.