Airshafts, loudspeakers, and the hip hop sample: contexts and African American musical aesthetics.

The art of digital sampling in (primarily) African American hip hop is intricately connected to an African American/African diasporic aesthetic which carefully selects available media, texts, and contexts for performative use. Thomas Porcello explains that digital sampling allows one

to encode a fragment of sound, from one to several seconds in duration, in a digitised binary form which can then be stored in computer memory. This stored sound may be played back through a keyboard, with its pitch and tonal qualities accurately reproduced or, as is often the case, manipulated through electronic editing. (69)

And Porcello concludes, perhaps rightly, but in any case reductively, and that "rap musicians have come to use the sampler in an oppositional manner which contests capitalist notions of public and private property by employing previously tabooed modes of citation" (82).

When popular discussions of rap or hip hop come around to digital sampling, they often do so by way of telling metaphors. Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee asserts that "rap culture" is "becoming more of a scavenger culture" when "mixing all the colors together" (Kemp 20); Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace liken sampling to "holding music at gunpoint" (57); and a March 1991 Keyboard magazine article refers to sampling as "audio junkyard collisions" (Dery, "Tommy" 64).

The oral pedagogical techniques hip hop artists utilize have maintained what Porcello calls "three capabilities of the sampler - the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative[,] and the extractive" (69), and these capabilities reveal, among other things, what W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903 called "second sight" (5) - that process by which the "minority" knows the majority not only better than the obverse, but often better than the "majority" knows itself. Du Boisian second sight is not reserved for quietly ideological activity, but has historically been exercised in a thoroughly public and thoroughly popular forum - and thus a forum in need of contextualization - the African American musical performance.

In his study of African American musical aesthetics Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition, Ben Sidran relies heavily on a distinction between literate and oral "approaches to perception and the organization of information" (3). This distinction, Sidran notes, is not concrete: Whereas "literacy freezes concept, as it were, through the use of print" (xxiv), the so-called oral mode relies on "basic actionality" (5), a functional elaboration, often through performance, that allows communication and perception a massive spectrum of referents. Whether Sidran's distinctions are accepted in full or not, there is a clear continuum in which African American artists have put things learned by listening into action by way of performance. Greg Tate argues that one of the most extraordinary transformations in African American aesthetic history - Miles Davis's late 1960s and 1970s electric band - was the result of an act of listening: "What Miles heard in the music of P-Funk progenitors James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly Stone was the blues impulse transferred, masked, and retooled for the space age through the lowdown act of possession" (73). The closeness of listening and performative possession becomes all the more clear as hip hop artists appropriate bits and pieces of numerous musics and non-musical sounds into their performative matrices. And this appropriative process is hardly novel, despite digital technology, in the 1980s or 1990s.

References to Harlem in early Duke Ellington compositions - "Harlem Speaks" (1935), "Echoes of Harlem" (1936), and "Harlem Air Shaft" (1940) - often concern what Ellington heard in the community. Indeed, Ellington explained "Harlem Air Shaft" as a composition explicitly heard before it was written and arranged:

You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbor's laundry. You hear the janitor's dogs. The man upstairs' aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. . . . An air shaft has got every contrast. . . . You hear people praying, fighting, snoring. . . . I tried to put all that in my Harlem Air Shaft. (Shapiro & Hentoff 224-25)

While "literate" Western culture is a stereotype at a certain point, it is so because Western culture(s) have largely fetishized reading as a function solely of print and the sole mode of learning and subsequent "actionality," whether musical or not. Ellington's exegesis for "Harlem Air Shaft" points to a musical actionality that reads context for potential material. The resultant composition is an evocative interchange. The text Ellington reads in order to offer the listener his performed reading is an evocative prompt which conjures up the possibility of composition and performance, and the narrative Ellington offers as discussion of his compositional technique shows that the evocative prompt goes to the listener as well. We are supposed to experience the "great big loudspeaker" where "every contrast" is possible at once.

This expansive idea of musical composition and performance is the center around which contemporary hip hop constellates. Possibilities for simultaneous contrast are enhanced - if not revolutionized - by the art of digital sampling so prevalent in hip hop and yet so seldom elaborated within the hip hop texts themselves. Within the musical performance is the kernel of the theoretical conviction that "the great big loudspeaker," a multi-sensory extravaganza, can be actualized performatively.

In her essay "The Race for Theory," African American feminist critic Barbara Christian points out that

people of color have always theorized - but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the norm) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. (336; italics added)

The textual "theorizing" Christian discusses has virtually always been present in African American musical aesthetics, as John Miller Chernoff's exploration of African and African diasporic traditions through his experiences as a drumming student in Ghana make clear. Chernoff says early in his African Rhythms and African Sensibilities that "the variations from formal and familiar structures in an actual performance are what count most in distinguishing and appreciating artistic quality in a certain type of music" (30). While Chernoff apparently sees them as separable - variation as a process and structure as a quasi-static model - "formal and familiar structures" are, in the African American tradition, intimately related, de facto, to controlled and cultivated variation.

Using Ghanian drumming and other "folk traditions" (an admittedly dubious designation which suggests an age-old dichotomy between folklore and art) in the context of hip hop sampling has to take into account the question of musical technology and the contexts for exercising that technology historically in the U.S. Obviously, sound recordings are not and have not always been widely available. Perhaps the best history of the technology (my term) of early African American music is John Lovell, Jr.'s Black Song: The Forge and The Flame - The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out, a book rarely mentioned in bibliographies of African American historical material.(1) Using technology as a rubric for discussing the spirituals may seem out of place, but the components of musical performance - whether instruments or not - are technological by virtue of their presence in the performance. In Black Song, Lovell notes the slave's "special attitude toward the Bible, his selectivity with respect toward its contents, and his special way of turning Biblical materials to imaginative purpose" (255). Although this "turning" is complex and never altogether clear, the power of the oral pedagogical tradition has its origins here. While Eugene D. Genovese points out that "the estimate by W. E. B. Du Bois that, despite prohibition and negative public opinion, about five percent of the slaves had learned to read by 1860 is entirely plausible and may even be too low" (563; italics added), widespread selective adaptation of Biblical material had to have occurred by way of listening, rather than reading. Lovell writes,

The Biblical item is selected most often for . . . symbolization of the deliverer or overcoming the oppressors; inspiration from notable accomplishments under impossible circumstances (the slave considered himself a potential accomplisher in a universe where he had little or no hope but great expectation); and exemplification of the workings of faith and power. (257)

Rather than the literal learning of the Biblical text, there was, Lovell observes, a "thin Bible" (262) spread throughout Southern plantations as the highest textual technology that afforded sInging opportunity (masters were placated by religious texts being sung) and momentary empowerment. "Nearly all of the Biblical personages the slave poet dealt with," writes Lovell, "were involved in upheaval and revolution (Moses, Daniel, David, the Hebrew children, Samson, Elijah, Gideon, Jesus, Paul)" (228).

The dissemination of Biblical knowledge does not perplex historians of slavery or the spirituals, but the functionality (Sidran's "actionality") of Biblical material relied on another disseminative presence:

How a group without newspapers or any mass media, and mostly without the ability to read or write, kept informed on . . . the news of the day, inventions and discoveries, the approach of underground agents, the details about David Walker and Nat Turner, the ebb and flow of wars . . . can hardly be explained. The incontrovertible fact is that all this happened by a regular system . . . . From this kind of communication, and the resultant close interrelationships, the songs acquired impetus, ideas for poetic development, and power for dissemination. (Lovell 121)

A "regular system" of dissemination made performative space available for the carefully cultivated Biblical references, paired up with potent ideological commentary. The spiritual text is as much a chronicle of slave culture, a "massive archiving," as it is a religious document. Here I intend the term culture as John Miller Chernoff has defined it: "A culture may perhaps best be considered . . . a dynamic style with which people organize and orient themselves to act through various mediators" (36). The dynamic style of organization through "various mediators" is, for Chernoff, and here, overtly musical.

David Coplan makes the important observation that "ultimately it is not any systemic logic of music as organised sound but rather the nature of metaphoric enactment that prevents the analytic reduction of music performance to other levels of action" (123; italics added). While Coplan is concerned with the metaphoric bridges musical performance builds between performers and the society around them in South Africa, metaphoric enactment is important in the African American context as well. Coplan says,

In musical performances, metaphors fuse several realms of experience into single, encapsulating images linked to the formation of personal identity. . . . The images of performance embody values and characteristics that people identify, at some level, with themselves. (123)

Lovell, for example, discusses the centrality of motion to the spirituals: "In his mind, the slave was constantly on the move, partly because of his desire for a new life and partly because of his fascination with moving vehicles" (247). From the use of "arks and chariots," obvious Biblical references, Lovell charts the metaphorical usage of the railroad train in the spirituals (which is replete in jazz traditions as well):

Songs about trains are a minor miracle. The railroad train did not come into America until the late 1820s; it did not reach the slave country to any great extent until the 1830s and 1840s. Even then, the opportunities of the slave to examine trains closely were limited. Yet, before 1860, many spiritual poems exploited the train: its seductive sounds, speed and power, its recurring schedules, its ability to carry a large number of passengers at cheap rates, its implicit democracy. (249)

Performatively, the train's potency was tonal, ideational, and not altogether explainable as a literally technological presence; this is further indication of a "regular system" of dissemination. The technology ran from the machine implications into the implications of the notion of mass transit itself. Inevitably, the "seductive sounds, speed and power" found their way into a rhythmic matrix that virtually every chronicler of African American and African diasporic performative aesthetics discusses.

Besides being frequent in hip hop discourse, associations of the African American rhythmic matrix with labor are common when dealing with early music like the spirituals. This is not to say that singing was confined to the fields or the "yard," but Harold Courlander's comment about prison gang songs in the early twentieth century is germane here: "A song starting out as a description of the prisoners' work shifts into a narration of the Noah story. The thread that binds the two parts together is the pounding of the hammers" (99; italics added). The rhythm of labor is expropriated carefully. Lawrence Levine observes that "the work song . . . allow[s] the workers to blend their physical movements and psychic needs with other workers" (215) and quotes Bruce Jackson to underscore an earlier, harsher evocative prompt:" 'By incorporating the work with theirs, by, in effect, co-opting something they are forced to do anyway, they make it theirs in a way it otherwise is not' "(215). Prompting an actional method of taking possession, the work became framework for song.

The expropriation of work rhythms as a method for taking possession of one's physical labor is situated at an aesthetic/economic crossroads that long antedates the recording of work songs. In Singing the Master: The Evolution of African American Culture in the Plantation South, Roger D. Abrahams explores how "constantly . . . within each other's gaze" (37) slaves (unwillingly) and the white-planter class participated in the evolution of not only African American culture but American popular culture in general. Abrahams focuses attention on an end-of-harvest celebration at which slaves were called upon to shuck enormous amounts of corn:

Corn . . . was not a demanding crop, since it might be cut away at any time and left in the field. The corn needing shucking would accumulate until all the other crops had been harvested. . . . Thus, the communal shucking of the corn was not crisis work, but rather the final act in the harvesting of the grain which provided the basic food resource for slaves and domestic animals. (74-75)

That the institution of corn shucking, from the "white" side of the gaze, was a "display event" (23) can be explained by the fact that corn shucking was not "crisis work" and that, as Abrahams further notes, Southern planters tended to cling "to many of the more aristocratic features which had characterized the Cavalier perspective in England" (65), particularly "ever more theatrical opportunities by which their public postures of power might better be appreciated" (40).

Briefly, an overseer or master elected two "captains" who picked "teams" which raced against each other to finish shucking their assigned pile of the corn harvest first. With the recognition of "the most powerful voice" came the selection of a leader from the slave community "to stand on top of the corn pile and lead the singing" (325). Abrahams points out more generally about "slave life" and singing that

few observers . . . failed to notice the importance of call-and-response singing. All [accounts] focus on the sense of power produced by the overlapping of the leader's voice with the voices of the chorus as they engaged with each other antiphonally. (91; italics added)

It is the centrality of "overlapping" that echoes throughout the African American musical tradition. From the vocalized overlap to the individualized instrumental meandering of much jazz, a constant is Thompsonian (as in Robert Farris Thompson) "apart playing," in which "a central performer interacts in counterpoint or some other contrasting mode with the rest of the performing group."(2) Of equal importance in the work/play matrix Abrahams discusses is the overlap of English quasi-aristocratic display and the actional engagement of the display opportunity, which slave singers found well(enough)-suited for their own performances.

The corn-shucking event - complete with the festivities which followed the shucking labor - is an oft-ignored aesthetic event which, Abrahams notes,

has received scant attention from historians. Doubtless this is because it represents such an apparent capitulation to the image of the happy slave purveyed by the planter-apologists for slavery. (21)

But Abrahams locates the corn-shucking event as a pivotal occasion for white onlookers to learn "slave style." The "slave" qualification here is vital, as recognition of an African style would counteract the white dominant practice of inculcating the slave into the person at every turn. From this onlooker learning comes the institutionalization of the white "vernacular artist," who appears variously throughout the nineteenth century, "on the minstrel stage, the lecturer's platform, or the written page" (145). Vernacular artistry, for white performers, was a function of "an ardent effort to bring to the stage studied imitations of slave styles of singing and dancing and celebrating" (133).

What we find here is the central presence of imitation in an emergent Anglo-American popular culture. While the corn-shucking event sits at the economic and aesthetic crossroads, every opportunity afforded slaves at that crossroads is transformatively worked into a multi-level aesthetic performance which whites tried to duplicate exactly, even to the point of using specific "tales of random encounters" to give their nineteenth-century stage acts authenticity. Regarding blackface entertainment and white minstrelsy, Abrahams notes that

the authenticity of the material itself became an important feature of presentation for these singers and dancers wearing blackface. . . . By the end of the nineteenth century such authenticating stories had become almost conventional, so often had the theme been embellished upon by the most successful writers of the time: Joel Chandler Harris, Lafcadio Hearn, Mark Twain, and George Washington Cable. (142)(3)

While Anglo-American popular culture became saturated with the problematics of authenticity and the establishment of a standard for "vernacular artistry," singularity again was fetishized. That is, a one-to-one, unmediated knowledge of slave life offered "an abundance of stylized ways of acting, singing, and dancing" (142) in American popular culture. White minstrelsy in blackface did not rest once the performance was authenticated; instead, it reinforced a singular expression of what Joel Williamson describes as an organic society in which African Americans were considered and treated as innately incapable of operating beyond a social sphere of servitude and, ironically, the aping of the master class.

In opposition to this is the multiplicity of performatively engaged, metaphorically enacted texts worked into the slaves' performances during corn-shucking events (and elsewhere). When we read William Cullen Bryant's reminiscence of a post-corn-shucking celebration in which the "commander," called on to speak after dinner, confesses "his incapacity for public speaking," and in turn asks "a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his stead," we see a non-musical but nonetheless performative actionality that draws on numerous discourses. Toby, Bryant writes,

came forward, demanded a piece of paper to hold in his hand, and harangued the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump-speeches in his day. He spoke of "de majority of Sous Carolina," "de interests of de state," "de honor of ole Ba'nwell district," and these phrases he connected by various expletives and sounds of which we could make nothing. (qtd. in Abrahams 225)

From the "piece of paper" Toby "demanded," to his "political" discourse, Bryant can see nothing coherent, perhaps because of the "various expletives," etc. In any case, Toby appears not to have tried exact replication of any specific stump speech; rather, he used the tone and the pose and the props. In other words, this metaphoric enactment makes Thomas Porcello's map of the digital sampler's functions, "the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative[,] and the extractive" (69), begin to look like an ahistorical overview of African American aesthetics rather than a comment on postmodern technology. I would add to Porcello's analysis the constant element of simultaneity. Distinguishing between mimesis and the actional uses of that process - that is, manipulation and extraction of one's stylized signature - is difficult, if not impossible.

Following the corn-shucking competition, slaves and guests - those who worked and those who watched, respectively - were treated by the plantation master to a large feast at which the captain of the winning team would make a speech, and following the feast the slaves, again, would become the spectacle. With the setting up of a platform dance floor, the entertainment began. Wood below the slaves' feet kept up the "multimetrical effects" (93) that were, Abrahams suggests, a pervasive presence throughout the dancing and music making, from "patting" to the ring shout. While paring (clapping) "created a field of rhythm in which each performer respond[ed] to a basic beat," it did so in an asymmetrically harmonious fashion: "By doubling or tripling the time, breaking each beat into doublets or triplets, a performer produced a rolling effect that played against the master pulse without necessitating an actual change in the basic meter" (95).

Abrahams further locates the "apart playing" of the dances which white planters watched from the distance of the owner's gaze. With the dancer's hips as the "center of gravity," there was division and cohesion, paradoxically engaged at once: "Thus the flexibility and fluidity of black dancing arises from the division of the body at the pelvis, with the upper body playing against the lower much as individual dancers or singers playfully oppose themselves to the rest of the performing community" (98-99). This bodily intertextuality, under the gaze of the planter class, presented a much more communally fluid aesthetic, contrary to "European social dancing," in which "the body is maintained as a single unit of behavior" (98).(4) The overlapping is multi-directional, with the body functioning similarly to the grouped voices.

The body in hip hop is again foregrounded, with the solid thumping of the backbeat speaking directly to the flexibility necessary to negotiate what Tricia Rose calls "the complex web of institutional policing to which all rappers are subject" (276). The contestation over "public space" Rose discusses was initiated in the early eighties with break dancing and the renegotiation of urban space to include the bodily appropriation of prerecorded music. Subsequent escalation of musics tailored specifically for breaking widened hip hop's appeal, as did the appropriative use of recognizable pop fragments which "hooked" listeners. Rose argues that the very musical signifiers, both samples and raps, that evoke comparisons to animalism in white mainstream journalism carry "the power of Black collective memory," which initiates the automaticity of the body's appropriation of the digital sounds. These ". . . cultural markers, and responses to them are," Rose asserts, "in a sense 'automatic' because they immediately conjure Black collective experience" (286). From the outlandish space costumes Sun Ra and his various Arkestras sported over the decades from the 1950s to the 1990s, to the space age rhetoric and massive stage shows of George Clinton's Parliament in the 1970s, to the current streamlined (and newly mass-marketed) hip hop style, the body has been vital as a locus within and around which theorizing performance occurs.

Commonly working in tandem with the "cultural markers" of sampling in hip hop is the thump of the sampled bass/rhythm line, that beat which signals the automaticity of the body's appropriation of digital sound. Repetition supplies a groove within which the rap can be executed and to which the audience can dance. Balanced against deep bass repetitions are the variations which other sampled material (and the rap) supplies. This complex sonic arrangement has an important analog in Chernoff's drumming experiences: "In essence, if rhythmic complexity is the African alternative to harmonic complexity, then the repetition of responsive rhythms is the African alternative to the development of a melodic line" (55).

It may be a tired story at this point,(5) but it is important to explicate briefly the re-emergence of a crossroads aesthetics - where performance merges, balances, and elaborates rhythmic complexity and "the repetition of responsive rhythms" with renewed fluidity in what would become hip hop. Houston Baker quotes Jazzy Jay from a June 19, 1988, Village Voice article:

"We'd find these beats, these heavy percussive beats, that would drive the hip hop people on the dance floor to breakdance. A lot of times it would be a two-second spot, a drum beat, a drum break, and we'd mix that back and forth, extend it, make it twenty minutes long." ("Hybridity" 199)

Baker's genealogy of hip hop ("the Rap Race," as he calls it) reaches back to DeeJay Kool Herc, a Jamaican national who came to New York in 1967 and brought with him the Jamaican dance hall/recording techniques of "dub" and "talk over," formative aesthetic techniques that have explosively invigorated popular culture in the United States.

In a 1991 essay on hip hop, Elizabeth Wheeler argues that "fragmentation and reassembly describe both black music and black history" (199). In light of this "fragmentation" Dick Hebdige's vague, early 1960s, "One day" reassembly-genealogy-scenario of dub and talk-over offers this portrait of then-producer King Tubby "working in his studio mixing a few 'specials' (i.e. exclusive recordings)":

He began fading out the instrumental track, to make sure that the vocals sounded right. And he was excited by the effect produced when he brought the music back in. So . . . he cut back and forth between the vocal and instrumental tracks and played with the bass and treble . . . until he changed the original tapes into something else entirely. (83)

From the studio, with the knobs and controls close by, it is but a transference of technology to the live dance hall and eventually the New York "disco," where performative reassembly happens live. In a 1973 article "The Impact of Technology on Rhythm and Blues," April Reilly points out with some trepidation that

authorities of the music industry have observed that modern music has become more and more "the creature of the control room and less the documentation of a musical event." As a result, we have for the first time in history the phenomenon of "a musical entity being created that has its first existence on tape." The tape is, indeed, the performance. (140)

Indeed Reilly's comment that, in the late '50s and early '60s," . . . the live-performance concert was the occasion that offered the audience the opportunity to appreciate the music, skills, and talents of the R & B artist" (140) specifies an historical era at the tail end of two decades which Ronald L. Morris points out had seen a 40 percent decline in "night club and dance hall dates" (192).(6) While Reilly says that the "live concert of yesteryear was a total theatrical experience, as distinguished from the primarily listening experience that it is today" (141), the work of King Tubby, et al., turned a static product into fluid process.

Rather than succumb to an industry specification for a product that would relegate live performances to promotional support for a recent release, DJs and performers picked up the variation-prompt. Houston Baker says,

Why listen - the early hip hop DJs asked - to an entire commercial disc if the disc contained only twenty (or two) seconds of worthwhile sound? Why not work that sound by having two copies of the same disc on separate turntables, moving the sound on the two tables in DJ-orchestrated patterns, creating thereby a worthwhile sound? The result was an indefinitely extendable, varied, reflexively signifying hip hop sonics. ("Hybridity" 200).(7)

Greg Tate illustrates the transformation thus: "The advent of hip hop can be said to have contributed . . . radical acts of counterinsurgency, turning a community of passive pop consumers into one of creative . . . producers" (154).

Production, in the sense Tate uses the term, also refers literally to an economic process which has allowed numerous African American performing artists and aesthetic improvisationalists to earn a living, to work profitably, successfully, and critically, often by utilizing Porcello's "previously tabooed modes of citation" (82).

Working the turntables, Public Enemy's Chuck D insists, is not far removed from the lofty plateau of musicianship, from which sampling is often looked down upon as unoriginal:

. . . when Terminator X rocks the beat back and forth, it gives the music a real feel, almost like playing real chums. . . . You gotta understand that when the deejay cuts the record in and out, it's almost like a live drummer's kick. . . . Deejays like Jeff or X are able to play the turntables like somebody else might play the guitar. . . . If you strum a guitar or play the keys, the real creativity lies in your ability to make those strings or those keys do something original. (Defy, "Public Enemy" 85-86)

The turntable places the record at the center of the hip hop performance, turning the notion of musical virtuosity on its head by using pre-recorded material not only as rhythm but also as melody and harmony. The questions of authorship, musicianship, "creativity," and "originality" are, thus, problematized. Like the purveyors of African American improvisational jazz, whether bebop or the so-called "new thing" of the 1960s and onward, hip hop artists have to negotiate the charge of being labeled musically unfit. They do so with the aid of the growing complexities of sampling.

It is this re-cognition of the multiform possibilities for records that makes hip hop, ultimately, what Houston Baker calls a "massive archiving" ("Hybridity" 200). The hip hop archive serves as a miniaturized repository for vast interactive historical material - interactive because all archival material is handled by the archivist, who listens carefully (with Du Boisian "second sight") for the beats and shippers which will accompany and be accompanied by vocalized narrative. The pro-active artistic process which utilizes and makes functional what is heard backdrops hip hop from start to finish.(8) Indeed, the fascination with sounds of myriad shapes, pitches, and durations that characterizes the Chicago avant-garde continuum (including Henry Threadgill, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, et al.) ups the aesthetic ante considerably for African American musical aesthetics overall, serving to "archive" an immeasurable range of sonics.(9)

The "massive archiving" Baker alludes to is also the backdrop to the various military/robber metaphors rampant throughout hip hop criticism and commentary. Like Tricia Rose, who excellently explores "the exercise of institutional and ideological control over Hip Hop and the manner in which the Hip Hop community (e.g., fans and artists) relate and respond to this context" (277), my focus here is on popular depictions of sampling, mostly in music periodicals. Ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes argues in a 1990 essay that Paul Simon's album Graceland "operates as a sign which is principally interpreted by means of the notion of collaboration" (37). Listeners, Meintjes continues, go through a series of "interpretive moves" which link "formal stylistic components" to the listener's "unique set of accumulated musical and social experiences," and the preponderance of "social experiences" (49) lead to judgments based on the social collaboration at hand as much as, if not more than, the musical collaboration.

Sampling in hip hop is not collaboration in any familiar sense of that term. It is a high-tech and highly selective archiving, bringing into dialogue by virtue of even the most slight representation - "a short horn blast, a James Brown scream, a kick or snare drum" (Kemp 20) - any range of "voices." The transformation enacted in hip hop's "radical acts of counterinsurgency" hinge on the recording, which turns, as Tate notes, the "community of passive pop consumers into one of creative . . . producers" (154). This transformation addresses Rose's tripartite summary of her concerns with the politics of hip hop: "It is not just what one says, it is where one can say it, how others react to what one says, and whether one has the means with which to command public space" (276-77). De La Soul's Posdnuos says,

We don't exclude anything from playing a part in our music. I think it's crazy how a lot of rappers are just doing the same thing over and over - Parliament/Funkadelic/James Brown - and all that. I bought Steely Dan's Aja when it first came out, and "Peg" was a song I always loved, so when it came down to making my own music, that was definitely a song I wanted to use. . . . It doesn't make any difference whether a sample is from lames Brown, Cheech and Chong, Lee Dorsey, or a TV theme; if there's something that catches my ear, I'll use it. (Defy, "Tommy" 70)

High-tech selection allows this form of archiving/orchestration to act similarly, albeit in a different context of virtuosity, to the various jazz "archivings" often read and re-read by critics and historians. So we have the ever-pivotal bebop evoked by Q-Tip, on A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory:

Back in the days when I was a teenager before I had status and before I had a pager you could find the abstract by listenin' to hip hop. My pops used to say it reminded him of bebop. I said well Daddy don't you know that things go in cycles.

The mention of bebop is firing, because the conscious and often referred to selectivity of pop tunes and chord structures which took flight in the 1940s and '50s does, indeed, look like hip hop - of course in proportion to the technology available. Indeed jazz lexicographer Robert S. Gold locates one of the earliest uses of the term lick in popular music criticism in a 1932 Melody Maker article: "They manage to steal a 'lick' from an American record" (188-89). References to African American musical aesthetics and their relationships to "American" products have consistently relied on theft to dismiss or explain these aesthetics.

Musicologist James Patrick's 1975 essay "Charlie Parker and Harmonic Sources of Bebop Composition: Thoughts on the Repertory of New Jazz in the 1940s" brought briefly to jazz discourse, "by analogy to text substitution in medieval music," the term melodic contrafact (3). The contrafact is an expropriated piece of another tune, brought in as the basis for the composition/performance at hand. It is not always localizable as its own entity, however:

. . . many contrafact compositions derive at least in part from solo improvisations on well-known tunes and the blues. In general there are two possibilities. The original solo line (or a close variant) may appear as part of a composition either in its original (or similar) harmonic context or in a completely different harmonic context. The original material may often be nothing more than a pet phrase which becomes formalized as an incipit of a contrafact composition. (7)(10)

The bebop use of contrafact harmonies cannot really be isolated except insofar as players of the era perfected their playing in small ensembles outside regular gigs but always within earshot of the emerging ubiquity of recognizable popular music.

Dizzy Gillespie points out that "when we borrowed from a standard we added and substituted so many chords that most people didn't know what song we really were playing" (209). Many players, though, put a more ideological spin on their doings. With the move "downtown" in the New York jazz crucible of the 1940s, players had to accommodate requests and the (white) desire to be entertained in a familiar fashion. Max Roach says,

When we got downtown, people wanted to hear something they were familiar with, like "How High the Moon," "What Is This Thing Called Love?" Can you play that? So in playing these things, the black musicians recognized that the royalties were going back to these people, like ASCAP, the Jerome Kerns, the Gershwins. So one revolutionary thing that happened, they began to write parodies on the harmonic structures. . . . If I have to play it, I will put my own particular melody on that progression. . . . If you made a record, you could say, "This is an original." (Gillespie and Fraser 209)

The statement This is an original points handily and dually to the issue of technological dissemination and the treatment generally afforded what became, by virtue of dissemination, communal knowledge.

Roach's enthusiasm for his appropriation of previously copyrighted music is, of course, shortsighted on the level of legal ownership. However, communal knowledge has perhaps always been the basis for selectivity and appropriative utility in African American aesthetics. Lawrence Levine quotes Newman White from his 1928 American Negro Folksongs:

The notes of the songs in my whole collection, show nothing so clearly as the tendency of Negro folk-song to pick up material from any source and, by changing it or using it in all sorts of combinations, to make it definitely its own. (196)

I quote this passage not to equate bop or hip hop with White's version of "Negro folk-song," but rather to illustrate further and historicize the question of originality and ownership vis-a-vis communal knowledge.(11)

Communal knowledge in the 1990s initiates a discussion of issues like intellectual property rights. Currently, hip hop artists like EPMD credit those works they have digitally sampled in this fashion: "This recording embodies portions of the recording and composition 'The Message' by Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five; appears courtesy of Sugar Hill Records."(12) Embodiment and its physical implications intensify Newman White's confounded observations of performative appropriations of communal knowledge. While exactitude is mandatory contemporaneously, James Patrick, when faced with a specific Dizzy Gillespie solo figure reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, could assert that "it is . . . likely that these phrases and thousands of others were simply 'in the air' and had become associated with familiar harmonic contexts" (10).

This "in the air" ubiquity of phrases and progressions is not simply an historical product of the phonograph or other technology, just as sampling is not simply an historical product of the digital technology now widely available. The propensity for selective expropriation, for the dually directed evocative prompt, gains more and more exposure as time goes on. This propensity in the African American musical text is akin to the blues singer whose power is in the "anonymous (nameless) voice issuing from the black (w)hole" which "comprises the 'already said' of Afro-America" (Baker, Blues 5, 206). Traces of the "original" are lost in translation, whether digitally sampled or instrumentally improvised. Technology serves and has served well the dissemination of important aesthetic elements. Levine points out that "Negroes living far apart could now share not only styles, but experiences, attitudes, folk wisdom, expressions, in a way . . . simply not possible before the advent of the phonograph" (231). Contrary to April Reilly's fear of the rise of industrial technology in music production, Levine contends that ". . . records can be seen as bearers and preservers of folk traditions" (231).(13)

The evolution of American popular culture happens with African American culture at its hub. The popularity of authentic entertainment in African American idioms would become highly prevalent in the early twentieth century.(14) What needs to be looked at and looked for in the future is the theorizing Barabara Christian discusses. From slavery days to emancipation to the early-to-mid twentieth century, the musico-social collaborations between African American aesthetics and available texts become variously more obvious and more oblique. With digital sampling, expropriated material is (often minutely and momentarily) recognizable, yet placed so that it often sounds radically anomalous, especially when the sampled material is overlapped or layered.

Porcello quotes a 1988 Billboard magazine article from which he draws on record producers who "have often claimed that rap records using [sampling] techniques are simply pioneering a new phase in popular music's already extensive history of recycling source material" (72). This recycling stands historically situated at an aesthetic/economic crossroads still of great importance today. Hip hop sampling has a disseminative function which tends to be ignored, especially if we refer to the sample as recycling and be done with it. Public Enemy's Chuck D. says,

"Our music is filled with bites, bits of information from the real world, a world that's rarely exposed. Our songs are almost like headline news. We bring things to the table of discussion that are not usually discussed, or at least not from that perspective." (Dery, "Public Enemy" 93).

In no way do I want to equate any two aesthetic expressions, but historically such cultivations of discursive space have been constant and constantly a function of available resources. The contingencies of historical situations resist, I think, any dismissals which often attend associations with general pop culture.

Nearly 175 years ago these cultivations of discursive space were the central focus of a growing (white) authenticating impulse which spawned an imitative popular culture. African American musical aesthetics are historically little concerned with the exactitude of imitation. The "massive archiving" Houston Baker insists on is centrally present as a highly selective aesthetic/economic/historical catalog. Regarding his drumming in Ghana John Miller Chernoff says,

In more than one sense, music carries the mark of tradition to an occasion, and at a rudimentary level it thus signifies the traditional solidarity of a community; but aesthetically, the music involves people with their community in a more dynamic way, thus recreating the tradition, and . . . the nature of this involvement is the key to understanding the integrative power of the music.(125)

So the massive archiving stands to signify and theorize communality. With sampling technology, this solidarity may be the aim, but issues of authenticity, ownership, and property seem part and parcel of high-tech aesthetic exercises. And as the disjuncture seen by some in hip hop sampling indicates to them the fragmentations of post-modernity, there is a simultaneous inability to see the act's vibrant connectedness in historical relation to African American aesthetics.

Notes

1. Ishmael Reed makes this observation in a review of Harold Courlander's Treasury of Afro-American Folklore (152). In my own work, I rarely see any mention of Lovell's Black Song.

2. Abrahams (91-92) alludes to Robert Farris Thompson's tern apart playing, first coined in 1966.

3. Note especially that Abrahams uses success here rather than a valuative tern like best, or even noted, to describe these writers. Success obviously means monetary support, and this points further to the institution of the black body/encounter as an authenticating force in whose presence either redemption or profit occurs.

4. Zora Neale Hurston points out that adornment, asymmetry, and angularity are key polyphonic features of African American art and that African American dance not only incorporates these elements but acts as a "realistic suggestion" in light of the fact that "no art can ever express all the variations conceivable" (56).

5. Several good histories of hip hop and rap exist, the best of which, Rap Attack, is authored by David Toop and comes in two volumes. The examples that follow are more useful for their hermeneutics than is Toop's study - thus its absence.

6. Morris quotes a Time magazine story on the American Federation of Musicians from May 7, 1956, that used 1930 as a "base year" with "99,000 live dates open to musicians . . . . by 1954 only 59,000 night club and dance hall dates were available, a decline of 40% in two decades" (192).

7. The importance here of a "reflexively signifying" aesthetic is at the head of hip hop and its aesthetic continuum. Bakers juxtaposition of this concept with the phrase indefinitely extendable needs clarification, perhaps, precisely because the "commercial disc" relies so much on indefinite extend-ability as a marketing device.

8. As an indication of the "massiveness" of the hip hop archive, Mark Dery says Public Enemy DJ/producer Hank Shocklee estimates his record collection at "nearly 19,000 records" ("Hank" 83).

9. For more on this, see Lock, Radano, and Wilmer.

10. The presence of "pet phrases" is central to the modes of collaboration, both social and musical, present throughout jazz history. Leonard and, later, Ogren discuss these interactions and collaborations in jazz's formative years, with soloists who would themselves become icons for later generations of players.

11. Royalties and credits have always ridden alongside the controversies over the explicitness of rap, but in a more muted "high legal" discourse which seeks to curtail hip hop artists' use of the sampler.

12. Liner notes to EPMD's "Nobody's Safe Chump," Business Never Personal.

13. For more on expropriation in jazz, see Gabbard.

14. See Ogren for further discussion here, especially of file growing nostalgia evident in club settings (The Plantation Club, Club Alabam, etc.)

Works Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. Singing the Master: The Evolution of African American Culture in the Plantation South. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Baker, Houston A. Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

-----. "Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s." Technoculture. Ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991, 197-209.

Chernoff, John Miller. African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms. Chicago U of Chicago P, 1979.

Christian, Barbara. "The Race for Theory." Making Face, Making Soul (Haciendo Caras): Creative and Critical Writings by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 335-45.

Coplan, David. "The Urbanization of African Music." Popular Music 2: Theory and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. 113-29.

Costello, Mark, and David Foster Wallace. Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. New York: Ecco, 1990.

Courlander, Harold. Negro Folk Music U.S.A. New York: Columbia UP, 1963.

Dery, Mark. "Hank Shocklee: Bomb Squad Declares War on Music." Keyboard Sept. 1990. 82-96.

-----. "Public Enemy: Confrontation." Keyboard Sept. 1990. 81-96.

-----. "Tommy Boy X 3: Digital Underground, Coldcut, and De La Soul Jam the Beat with Audio Junkyard Collisions." Keyboard Mar. 1991, 64-78.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Ellington, Duke. Music is My Mistress. New York: Doubleday, 1973.

Gabbard, Krin. "The Quoter and His Culture," Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History and Meanings of Jazz. Ed. R. T. Buckner and Steven Weiland, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 92-111.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Gillespie, Dizzy, and Al Fraser. To BE, or not to . . . BOP. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Gold, Robert S. A Jazz Lexicon. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Hebdige, Dick. Cut 'N' Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music. London: Comedia, 1987.

Hurston, Zora Neale. "Characteristics of Negro Expression." 1935. The Sanctified Church. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1983. 49-68.

Kemp, Mark. "Issue by Issue: The Death of Sampling." Option Magazine Mar.-Apr. 1992: 20.

Leonard, Neil. Jazz and the White Americans Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.

Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

Lock, Graham. Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-Reality of Creative Music, Interviews and Tour Notes, England 1985. London: Quartet, 1988.

Lovell, John, Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame - The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out. 1972. New York: Paragon House, 1986.

Meintjes, Louise. "Paul Simon's Graceland and the Mediation of Musical Meaning." Ethnomusicology 34.1 (1990): 37-73.

Morris, Ronald L. Wait Until Dark: Jazz and the Underworld, 1880-1940. Bowling Green: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1980.

Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Patrick, James. "Charlie Parker and Harmonic Sources of Bebop Composition: Thoughts on the Repertory of New Jazz in the 1940s." Journal of Jazz Studies 2.2 (1975): 3-23.

Porcello, Thomas. "The Ethics of Digital Audio Sampling: Engineers' Discourse." Popular Music 10. 1 (1991): 69-84.

Radano. Ronald. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Reed, Ishmael. Shrovetide in Old New Orleans. 1978. New York: Avon, 1979.

Reilly, April. "The Impact of Technology on Rhythm and Blues." Black Perspective in Music 12 (Fall 1973): 136-46.

Rose, Tricia. "'Fear of a Black Planet': Rap Music and Black Cultural Politics in the 1990s." Journal of Negro Education 60.3 (1991): 276-90.

Shapiro, Nat, and Nat Hentoff. Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It. 1955, New York: Dover, 1966.

Sidran, Ben. Black Talk: How the Music of Black America Created a Radical Alternative to the Values of Western Literary Tradition. 1971. New York: Da Capo, 1981.

Tate, Greg. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary Music. New York: Simon, 1992.

Thompson, Robert Farris. "An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance." African Forum 2.2 (1966): 85-102.

Toop, David, Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop. Boston: South End P, 1984.

-----. Rap Attack, Number 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop. London: Serpent's Tail, 1992.

Wheeler, Elizabeth. "'Most of My Heroes Don't Appear on No Stamps': The Dialogics of Rap." Black Music Research Journal 11.2 (1991): 193-216.

Williamson, Joel. "The Genesis of the Organic Society." The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation. New York: Oxford UP, 1984. 15-43.

Wilmer, Valerie, As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. London: Allison & Busby, 1977

Discography 

EPMD. Business Never Personal. Chaos/Sony, 1992.

A Tribe Called Quest. "Excursions." The Low End Theory. Zomba, 1418-2-J, 1991.

Andrew Bartlett is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. at the University of Washington in American Ethnic Studies with primary emphasis on the aesthetic intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. He writes about jazz in several Seattle publications and in Cadence.