Documenting Hip-Hop Sampling As Critical Practice

Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 10, No 1 (2014)

When Beats Meet Critique: Documenting Hip-Hop Sampling as Critical Practice

Marcel Swiboda

Introduction

The isolation of rhythm and beat-based elements has been an aesthetic mainstay in the repertoire of hip-hop DJs since the formative development of this culture in the South Bronx in the mid-1970s. In its original form, this practice involved the extraction of short instrumental passages from mainly soul and funk records, using two copies of the same recording on two separate turntables to repeat passages back-to-back to create extended rhythmic sequences. Exponents of this process of isolation and manipulation called these passages breaks, or breakbeats, for dancing, providing beats for emcees to rhyme over and—since the advent of digital sampling—for producers to make beats as a mode of hip-hop practice in its own right.

The centrality of the break in hip-hop is described by musicologist Mark Katz:

If you hope to understand the art of the hip-hop DJ—and even the origins of hip-hop— you must understand the break[.] (Groove Music, 14)

Early breakbeat practices evolved within the disenfranchised communities of South Bronx’s housing projects and were predominantly forged among their African American communities. The range of practices associated with hip-hop culture are fundamentally African American in character, while at the same time drawing on cultural practices and traits from elsewhere in the African diaspora. As ethnomusicologist and hip-hop sampling scholar Joseph Schloss writes,

Hip-hop developed in New York City in neighbourhoods that were dominated by people of African descent from the continental United States, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies. As a result, African-derived aesthetics, social norms, standards, and sensibilities are deeply embedded in the form[.] (Schloss 3)

Schloss draws our attention here to hip-hop’s formal inscription of material, aesthetic, and social practices associated with African American and African-derived cultural traditions and histories. Regarding the musical content of early hip-hop breakbeats, the musician, curator, and writer David Toop describes as follows the kinds of sonic elements that would often be isolated to comprise the break:

A conga or a bongo solo, a timbales break or simply the drummer hammering out the beat — these could be isolated by using two copies of the same record on twin turntables and, playing the one section over and over, flipping the needle back to the start on one while the other played through. (Toop 60)

In the case of breakbeats, the idiomatic character of hip-hop attests to the singular ways in which formal traits and sonic elements from African American and African-derived traditions and histories are brought together with the aid of phonographic technologies of reproduction. A number of these traits and elements, as well as their technological synthesis in hip-hop beatmaking, will provide a major focus for what follows.

Regarding the technological histories of hip-hop’s beat-based elements, the majority of critical writing to date has tended mostly to focus on the origins of breakbeat culture as rooted in the explicitly live, performative aspects of hip-hop. Among these aspects, the verbal component of rap is usually cited as exemplary, yet the kind of phonographic manipulation techniques just introduced are also often given as examples under the auspice of ‘turntablism’ as a form of performance practice. Given the centrality of turntablism in hip-hop music-making, it stands to reason that these technological and aesthetic aspects combined should provide a main focus on hip-hop’s phonographic histories for academic and critical documentarians.

Without in any way seeking to challenge the preeminent centrality of the live performance-based aspects of rap or turntablism, what follows will consist of an investigation into the use of electronic technologies as tools for beatmaking central to hip-hop’s breakbeat ethos. The practices utilizing these techniques will be considered in terms of their aesthetic and material histories and also in terms of their mobilization as vehicles for the establishment of technological, vernacular and idiomatically specific modes of critical knowledge- practice. Furthermore, I will show that digital beatmaking can be meaningfully engaged in relation to improvisatory musical practices, despite the predominantly non-live character of hip-hop sampling.

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Music Technology and Cultural Agency: The Case of Electro

The use of electronic rhythm machines to supplement turntablist approaches to break isolation and sequencing, or looping, became a mainstay of hip-hop DJing from the beginning of the 1980s onward. These incorporations would also mark the beginnings of the expansion of the DJ’s role to include studio production as an element of hip-hop practice. At the same time, “electro” (short-hand for electro-funk and electro- boogie) creatively tapped the lines of aesthetic and technological potential furnished by the major leaps forward in electronic music technology since the late 1970s, particularly in the design and manufacture of synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines.

Electronic drum machines (for example the Roland TR-808, Linn LM-1, and Oberheim DMX) first became commercially available at the beginning of the 1980s. As devices in some measure designed to produce backbeats in rock and pop music, drum machines were mainly conceived as electronic workhorses. The design and manufacture of these machines was, in part, driven by economic imperatives, such as the need to mitigate the rising cost of studio-time. Despite such imperatives, many different early users of these machines, across musical styles, would seek to tap their creative potential, as exemplified by post-new wave British-based synth acts, such as The Human League, and exponents of West German electronic music, notably Kraftwerk.

In part through the influence of some of these acts, electro musicians made use of these devices to forge a specifically vernacular, cybernetic aesthetic. Consider as a case in point electro pioneer Afrika Bambaataa: he took inspiration from the European “robotic” aesthetic of Kraftwerk and how this band used the sounds of everyday technology. A famous example was Kraftwerk’s integration of the handheld calculator—an early commercially available portable digital computer that was featured in a track entitled “Pocket Calculator” on the 1981 album Computer World. The technological and aesthetic inspiration that Kraftwerk found in the calculator, as well as in older industrial machines—notably trains—carried over into electro, as exemplified by Bambaataa’s landmark 1982 track “Planet Rock,” which incorporated the melody from the title track of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album Trans-Europe Express.

At this time, what ultimately made this kind of technological musical bricolage relevant to African American DJs and artists in New York was captured by Baambaata’s qualification that the sounds it generated could be described as “funky” (130). Through a combination of turntablist break manipulation techniques, the oral elements of rap and synthesized (or “vocoded”) voices, and the use of rhythm machines, electro DJs and artists forged an electronically driven funk-based aesthetic. If taken in isolation, the rhythmic interplays of their live and synthetic elements simultaneously affirmed and confounded the metronomic (or motoric) character of the electronic beats of the drum machines. Here and elsewhere in hip-hop’s historical relationship to technology, breakbeat exponents exemplify what techno-theorists call “early adopters.”

In light of the contemporary tendency to situate ideas of technological adoption squarely within the discourses of Silicon Valley-inspired cyber-culture, media theorist Anna Everett has made the following observation:

Perhaps our ongoing ignorance of African American early adoption of and involvement with prior innovative media technologies such as the printing press, cinema, radio and [. . .] video authorizes much of today’s myopic consideration of black technological sophistication. (24)

Using electro as a case in point, Everett argues that “part of controlling the technological beast and its elitist scientific applications is black artists’ skill at recoding science and technology” (27). Africana scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose also situates these technological and aesthetic developments within their specific African American socio-economic contexts in order to illustrate the ways in which these methods of technological music-making correspond to specific circumstances affecting African American urban youth:

Electro-boogie took place in a historical moment — “Planet Rock” was released [. . .] when factory production and solid blue-collar work were coming to a screeching halt in urban America. Urban blacks were increasingly unemployed, and their best options were to become hidden workers for service industries or computer repair people. People said, “Look, technology is here; we can choose to be left behind or we can try to take control of the beast.” (qtd. in Everett 27)

Through the work of scholars like Rose and Everett, these issues have been addressed under the auspice of emergent discourses surrounding Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism seeks to disinter critically the disavowed histories and legacies of technology used in African American and African-derived cultural practices, in particular literature and music. While tapping into lines of enquiry pursued by Afrofuturist scholars, this current investigation will ultimately pursue electronic music technology’s relationship to cultural agency along different, if related, trajectories.

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Sampling and Signifyin(g)

Mark Katz describes digital sampling as follows:

Sampling is typically regarded as a type of musical quotation [. . .that] encompasses the digital incorporation of any prerecorded sound into a new recorded work. The equipment used to create samples varies widely, from traditional-looking keyboards to purpose-built machines [. . .] The advantage of digitization is that sound, once rendered into data, can be manipulated in a variety of ways down to the smallest details. (Katz, Capturing Sound 147)

Sampling was thus used to build on earlier turntablist and electro innovations and, at the same time, to expand the repertoire of beat isolation and looping techniques available to hip-hop DJs, and gradually came to define the role of hip-hop breakbeat artists over the course of the 1980s. While sampling did already exist as a technology,1 the next generation of commercial sampling machines allowed users to input, alter, and edit their own sounds, significantly from any source.

Digital sampling first started being used regularly in music and sound production in the late 1970s and early 1980s: it was made possible by the development of devices such as the Australian company Fairlight’s first inordinately expensive computer musical instruments, or CMIs, and USA-based company E-mu Systems’ less expensive but still prohibitively priced first-generation “Emulator” machines. Although the Fairlight became famous after being featured on Herbie Hancock’s landmark 1983 electro hit “Rockit,” it never became a regular tool in the hip-hop inventory. The E-mu devices were used by some DJs and producers in the early 1980s, but their prohibitive cost limited their appeal.

The latent aesthetic potential of these devices for hip-hop production was nevertheless explored by DJ Marley Marl—an early adopter of sampling technology and a user of E-mu’s Emulator:

One day in [. . .] ’82 we was doin’ this remix. I wanted to sample a voice from off of this song with an Emulator and, accidentally, a snare went through. [. . .] I kept running the track back and hitting the Emulator. Then I looked at the engineer and said, “you know what this means? I could take any drum sound from any old record, put it in here [the sampler] and get the old drummer sound on some shit.” (qtd. in Rose 79)

Marley Marl’s fortuitous encounter with the Emulator led him to realize that early commercially available digital samplers, whose data storage capacity was minimal due to unfavourable cost-capability ratios, could be used profitably to digitally encode short “hits,” such as a snare drum sound, so that such a keyboard- based device could effectively construct sample-based breaks. Thus the ability to isolate and repeat instrumental breaks, a defining element of breakbeat practices in hip-hop, became supplemented by techniques whereby breaks could themselves be broken down into smaller elements and manipulated accordingly.

While Marley Marl and a few other DJs and producers made use of these expensive machines during the early 1980s, it was only with the advent of a second generation of relatively affordable, mass manufactured devices in the mid-to-late 1980s that digital sampling would regularly be used in hip-hop. In the period since the advent of digital technologies of reproducibility, early sampler-sequencer devices, in particular the E-mu SP-12/1200 and Akai/Linn MPC60 models, went on to become mainstays of hip-hop music—partly due to the percussive orientation of their user interfaces and their ability to record, store, edit, and sequence combinations of user- defined sounds. Although not originally designed to be used in such ways, they became indispensable to many hip-hop DJs and producers in ways that rarely corresponded to the manufacturers’ stated intentions.

Building on the early innovations of turntablism, DJs and producers working during the late 1980s and early 1990s retained the break as the core sonic element, but they were now in a position to use more complex sonic manipulation made possible by digital samplers’ capacity for converting and storing sound as digital data. At the forefront of these developments were key figures in the history of sample-based hip-hop, such as Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad production collective. Speaking of the E-mu SP-1200, Shocklee rates it positively on account of the range of methods it offers for altering a sample: “You can cut it off, you can truncate it really tight, you can run a loop in it, you can cut off certain drum pads” (qtd. in Rose 76). In contrast, what Shocklee praises about the Akai/Linn MPC60 is how it “allows you to create more of a feel,” courtesy of an algorithm that makes it possible to swing the sequences of samples (qtd. in Rose 76). Shocklee also draws attention to the ways in which some new user-programmable digital innovations, like their earlier transistorized and digitally pre-programmed precursors, were designed and built initially to conform to a Europeanized musical aesthetic—a tendency Shocklee simultaneously points out and critically counters from a vernacular perspective: regarding the SP-1200, he states that “The limitation is that it sounds white, because it’s rigid” (qtd. in Rose 76).

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What sampling shares with turntablist techniques is an emphasis on the isolation of sonic elements for recombination, or what Katz, in the passage at the outset of this segment, calls musical “quotation.” In African American and African-derived contexts, including sampling, quotation connotes vernacular signifyin(g). Signifyin(g) was initially explored primarily in African American linguistic and literary contexts by sociolinguists Roger D. Abrahams and Geneva Smitherman and literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr. Subsequently, scholars of hip-hop have made use of the term to describe the many vernacular figurations that can be found at work in all the elements of hip-hop culture.2 That said, the main emphasis is usually on the oral element of rap, which most directly speaks to the rhetorical character of signifyin(g).

Schloss states that “signifyin(g), without the g is a traditional term in African American culture”; he also cites Smitherman (1977) to illustrate some of signifying’s core components:

Signification has the following characteristics: indirection, circumlocution, metaphorical- imagistic [. . .]; humorous, ironic, rhythmic fluency and sound; teachy but not preachy; directed at person or persons usually present in the situational context [. . .]; punning, play on words; introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected. (161)

Quotation in cultural contexts that are signifyin(g) is not a question of merely transplanting or transposing semantic or rhetorical elements, but of also mobilizing them as vehicles for rhetorical play in ways that are performatively situated.

As is evident by the example of electro, and now sampling, the kinds of dialogue that comprise signifyin(g) in instrumental music-making do not have to be limited to phonic instances, but can be expanded to embrace signifyin(g) as phonographic. Much of the value of signifyin(g) is attributable to how it draws attention not only to the aesthetic and technical facets of idiomatic sense-making, but also to the materially and technologically inscribed cultural and historical forces at work in acts of signifyin(g). Shocklee’s formulation thus constitutes an instance of signifyin(g) on the conspicuous “symbolism of colours,” described by Paul Gilroy as rhetorical elements of "the language of race" (1-2). This signifyin(g) act relies on the comparisons Shocklee draws between the machine-generated rhythms of different sampling devices.

In terms of the signifyin(g) use of samplers as exemplified by Shocklee, the “groove quantize” algorithm that the MPC used in order to generate “swing” is important here. Shocklee positively rates the MPC, on account of its capacity to algorithmically generate rhythmic swing, for its divergence from the metronomic “white” sound of the SP-1200—an aesthetic trait fundamentally associated with a diversity of African American and African-derived musical practices and idioms.3 In his appeal to machine-generated swing, Shocklee’s signifyin(g) rhetoric correspondingly shows how the advent of sampling devices signals another shift, not just in the technological and aesthetic character of the music being produced, but also in the potential uses made of these innovations for rhetorical signifyin(g). This shift led hip-hop beatmaking practitioners to furnish new modes of discourse in relation to their use of sampling technologies in order to help establish an idiomatically specific ethos of sampling-practice.

Sampling as Philosophy

The ability to use digital devices in ways that counteract the “live" elements of their design remit has led producers to foreground the artifice of these machines. Concomitantly, what such uses signal is the development of hip-hop music-making as a studio-based practice:

For hip-hop producers the process of creating recorded music has become almost completely estranged from the process of capturing the sound of live performance. In fact, one of the major challenges of performing hip-hop on instruments [. . .] is that many of hip- hop’s most typical musical gestures (such as sixteenth notes played on a bass drum) are virtually impossible to reproduce without electronic editing. Sample-based hip-hop is studio-oriented music. (Schloss 42)

As Schloss points out, for all the many areas of continuity between pre- and post-digital era hip-hop music- making, one major area of discontinuity is the role played by live, performative elements in music production—a discontinuity that in no way dispenses with the live, performative aspects that continue to be at hip-hop’s core, although often as materials to be digitally manipulated by means of increasingly studio- oriented production practices.

In addressing the “individual histories” of hip-hop producers and their approaches to digital beatmaking, Schloss makes a three-fold connection between the formal and technical aspects of sampling, the autodidactic character of beatmaking, and the development of a conceptual approach to sampling practice. Regarding the relationship between technique and form, he observes that “The development of individual producers’ technical ability often mirrors the development of the form as a whole” (43). Schloss interviews numerous practitioners whose learning

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experiences further testify to the inherently contingent character of beatmaking. Consider the following description from producer King Otto:

There’s occasions where maybe somebody sounds like somebody else, ‘cause everyone has their own distinct style, but sometimes you’ll cross the line and make a [DJ] Premier beat [. . .]; Or maybe a Pete Rock beat. ‘Cause their sound is so distinct. If you get too close to it you can tell. (qtd. in Schloss 50)

Technological and aesthetic differences are thus mirrored at a formal level through an evaluative discourse commensurate with the abstract dimensions of hip-hop sampling. Correlative to the growth of sampling’s idiomatically specific modes of media and technological literacy is an attendant set of discursive and critical parameters for evaluating sampling practices, a feature that can be tracked through the technological, vernacular, signifyin(g) strategies that make sampling “an exercise of intellectual, social and artistic power” (Schloss 168). Furthermore, the imbrications of hip-hop sampling’s formal, technical and aesthetic considerations lead Schloss to describe hip-hop beatmaking as possessing its own “internal logic” (43).

Hip-hop sampling as explored here is a specific mode of hip-hop knowledge-practice.4 As the idiomatic specificity of hip-hop is not unitary, but hybrid in character, and therefore resistant to systematic codification, the kinds of knowledge produced by and through hip-hop practices, taken in their own concrete specificity, are first to be encountered as indigenous to the practices themselves (Schloss 67). If hip-hop sampling as a mode of learning, or knowing, is possessed of a certain internal logic as Schloss claims, then it is crucial to consider what such a logic consists of, or what makes it internal or indigenous to sample-based hip-hop—not just in terms of the individual histories of producers, but in the broader material, cultural, social, and aesthetic histories these producers inscribe. As Schloss also asserts, “The hip-hop aesthetic is, in a sense, an African-derived [. . .] philosophy” (22).

Such a philosophy evidently cannot simply be understood to mirror the logic of Western philosophy in its traditional or institutional senses—whatever form “logic” takes in these contexts. A question hereby arises regarding what might be positively gained by furnishing academic discourses that ostensibly reside outside of the practices they seek to describe—the significance of the question compounded by the fact that the practices at issue furnish their own critical discourses. A response to this question might be to consider those discourses that engage with African American or African-derived musical and aesthetic practices whose exponents have already critically reflected on this question, whether or not sampling is the primary focus. The work of the musicians and critical improvisation theorists George E. Lewis and Jesse Stewart collectively offer a pertinent sounding-board for exploring these issues in the burgeoning field of improvisation studies, in particular Lewis’s conceptual distinction between “Eurological" and "Afrological” musical tendencies.

Sampling Meets Critical Improvisation Studies

“Eurological” and “Afrological” are conceptual formulations Lewis uses as “critical tools” to describe “musical belief systems and behaviour that [. . .] exemplify particular kinds of musical ‘logic’” (“Improvised Music After 1950” 132). The primary contexts for Lewis’ terminological distinction are drawn from the post-War experimental musical and sonic practices variously described under the auspices of “indeterminacy” and “improvisation.” Lewis’ work shows how prevailing documentary attempts to account for experimental music innovations since the Second World War have clustered these innovations in accordance with whether they represent Euro-American “indeterminacy,” European “free improvisation,” or African American “improvised jazz,” all without attending to underlying discursive and epistemological assumptions.

This problem is well-illustrated in Lewis’ reading of a collaborative performance in Baden-Baden, Germany in 1969 involving members of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or AACM, and representatives of the burgeoning European “free improvisation” scene:

Perhaps the first extensively documented musical collaboration between members of these two avant-gardes took place in December of 1969, at the “Free Jazz Treffen” in Baden- Baden [. . .]. A recording of several pieces that were created for the meeting survives; the recording was released in 1970 under the name of Lester Bowie, with a pointedly ironic title, Gittin’ to know y’all. (“Gittin’ to Know Y’all” 2)

This time, the danger highlighted is that of a bifurcation that splits the plural character of improvisational musics along discursively and epistemologically specious lines. Lewis shows how this meeting, or mis- meeting, catalyzed a loaded division that led some European commentators to codify in Eurological ways the role of improvisation in contemporary music.

While “the European improvisors and the AACM pursued projects of collectivity, politically and musically” (“Gittin’ to Know Y’all” 19), the discursive accounts of improvisation that followed by European commentators

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missed out on the singular, Afrological character of the AACM’s contributions. This is illustrated by the discursive eschewal of structuring elements that led European improvisors to keep “compositional plans [. . .] to a minimum,” causing them to be blind-sided, or to blind-side themselves:

The AACM musicians [. . .] were emphasizing a hybrid compositional-improvisative discourse that incorporated insights, sounds, techniques, and methods from a variety of areas, including European high musical modernism. (“Gittin’ to Know Y’all” 16)

The AACM’s approach to their practice thus shared commonalities with their European counterparts to the extent that both parties were concerned with collectivity, “musically and politically;” rather than seek to explore the imbrications of their respective takes on collectivity, however, the AACM’s perspective remained, according to the European commentators, too “idiomatic” to be amenable to an aesthetic in which improvisation can be considered truly “free.”

The mis-meeting and subsequent discursive disconnect find something of their basis in a formulation of the late improvising guitarist and documentarian Derek Bailey:

Bailey theorizes about the interface with “known” styles in improvisation with his distinction between “idiomatic” and “non-idiomatic” forms of improvisation. (“Improvised Music After 1950” 147)

It is on the basis of such a distinction, once mobilized for the purpose of valorizing free improvisation, that the complex, hybrid, singular musical and performative practices of the AACM are reductively affiliated with jazz, more strictly “free jazz,” reducing the music to a purportedly more idiomatic status and collapsing the multiple, divergent contexts of jazz and African American experimental musics that have emerged since World War II.

Suffice to say, “freedom” is a relative term and partly what makes it so, in the current context, is that improvisation’s relationship to freedom takes on singular and specific aspects. As Lewis points out, considered in an African American context, freedom is inextricable from “any kind of struggle that might be required to obtain it” (“Improvised Music After 1950” 138). The urgency of responding to the profoundly disintegrating toxicity generated by the racism affecting the Civil Rights and Black Power era was of paramount concern to experimental improvising musicians, among them musicians who were founding members of the AACM (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz 15-31).

Lewis has taken extensive time and care to explore the singular and specific approaches of the AACM (Power), documenting them in ways that not only avoid but also critique these partisan modes of discursive policing:

AACM musicians emerged from a musical tradition that had already played a major world role in problematizing the border between popular and high culture. At the same time, these artists, like many others, were experiencing at first hand the breakdown of genre definitions and the mobility of practice and method that was starting to inform the emerging postmodern musical landscape. (“Gittin’ to Know Y’All” 10)

Such a “postmodern musical landscape” had fully emerged by the time sample-based hip-hop DJs and producers commenced their explorations of digital technologies of reproducibility. Within their own context, sample-based hip-hop innovators in the 1980s and ’90s were also “experiencing at first hand the breakdown of genre definitions and the mobility of practice and method.” The connection between Lewis’ terminological coinages and hip-hop sampling has been explored by Jesse Stewart in relation to the music of DJ Spooky, alongside Spooky’s writerly critical practice, which he signs using his pen name Paul D. Miller.

As part of a growing number of producers honing their craft in the 1990s, DJ Spooky expanded the archival basis of sample-based hip-hop, incorporating elements of jazz, blues, dub, electronica, newsreel footage, and film soundtracks (as well as material from Euro-American post-War avant-garde traditions) alongside hip-hop culture’s soul and funk mainstays. He also incorporated elements of European improvisation into his sample-based productions.5 DJ Spooky has hereby explored in a signifyin(g) musical dialogue the sonic worlds that Lewis describes in terms of Eurological and Afrological tendencies, all under the rubric of sample- based hip-hop. One can read, or more accurately hear, DJ Spooky’s sample-based critique of the latent politics of “idiomaticity” as encountered in the Eurological discursive documentation of Gittin’ to know Y’all.

For Stewart, like Lewis, “Afrological” approaches attest to a “postmodern landscape.” Stewart’s mobilization of Lewis’ conceptual distinction strategically affords the possibility of positively referencing postmodernism in the context of hip-hop sampling, without forfeiting idiomatic specificity, while at the same time critiquing simplistic appeals to postmodernism:

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My use of the neologism “Afro-postmodernism” in this context warrants examination. Hip- hop is routinely touted as a quintessential postmodern form [. . .]. However, relatively few studies have explored the specific ways in which African diasporic communities’ creative responses to the postmodern condition resonate with—and differ from—those of European and Euro-American communities. (338)

The need to qualify this neologism is to some extent rooted in the dangers of academically institutionalizing postmodernist discourse in ways similar to those of Eurological music discourses, thereby producing a Europeanizing appropriation of African American and African-derived culture and their indigenous modes of discourse and knowledge:

Simply to subsume hip hop under the slippery rubric of postmodernism is to run the risk of obscuring its origins in the African diaspora and its continuities with earlier Afrological forms. (339)

Simplistic appeals to the postmodern theorization of culture symptomatize the attendant risks of furnishing an academic critical discourse for exploring practices whose idiomatic character demands they be considered in terms of their concrete specificity and as modes of knowledge-practice in their own right. The failure to heed these risks can thus be read as isomorphic to the risks of valorizing Eurological musical and discursive tendencies when considering Afrological cultural practices and their epistemological characteristics. What postmodernism (as a set of institutionalized critical discourses) symptomatizes here is the danger that Lewis and Stewart highlight regarding the disavowal of history and memory as core elements of improvisatory musics indispensable to Afrological traditions.

Regarding history, Stewart shows how postmodern discourses, when they do not simply subsume Afrological histories, still run the risk of collapsing historical difference. Stewart cites as a cautionary illustration postmodern theorist Russell Potter’s writing on hip-hop: “Potter gets around this problem [subsumption] by retroactively claiming the centuries-old emphasis on Signifyin(g) in African-American cultures as ‘fundamentally postmodern’” (339). This kind of historical collapsing is often a problem in postmodern and other de-historicizing modes of contemporary critical discourse, in particular those that tend to conspicuously affirm postmodernism. The stakes raised by these issues are pointedly emphasized by Lewis when, in the context of his discussion of improvisation and indeterminacy in post-War experimental music, he states that “deemphasizing memory and history would appear to be a natural response to the impossibility of discovering such antecedents on the part of those for whom the preservation of European purity of musical reference would be a prime concern” (“Improvised Music After 1950” 148).

Conclusion: Towards an Analogico-Digital Critical Culture

It is not only the idiomatic specificities pertaining to history, but also memory that stands to be compromised by hardline approaches to postmodern discourses. In a conversation with improvising pianist Vijay Iyer, Paul D. Miller describes his own approach as one of mnemonically putting “documents put into play”:

A record is essentially a document and so is a file. If you're recording a voice, once that voice leaves the body, it essentially becomes a file someplace on somebody else's hard drive. [What I want to examine here is] improvisation, and its relationship to materiality. Think of it as digital mnemonics, or how we use different kinds of recall to make raw data into useful information. (3)

Miller’s observations and the broader critical stakes of sample-based musical culture can be productively read in the work of the philosopher and social activist Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler is most renowned in academic circles for an argument central to all of his work: that human memory operates by means of a process of “exteriorization” through technology, which he conceives very broadly to encompass language, symbols, and other more recent “industrial” forms of material recording and inscription, including photography and phonography. Memory, for Stiegler, is always technologically mediated in ways that store and preserve its traces outside of the organism and thus transmit across generations.

In an essay entitled “The Discrete Image,” Stiegler articulates using the following description the relationship between individual, “mental” memory and shared, “objective” memory: “The difference which asserts itself most immediately is that the objective lasts, whereas the mental is ephemeral. Similarly, a souvenir-object lasts [. . .], whereas a “mental” souvenir is ineluctably effaced” (147). Stiegler argues that the advent of digital technologies of manipulation raises serious challenges regarding the accuracy and authenticity of material recordings of past events. His observations in this regard mainly focus on image culture, namely photography, while keeping open the possibility of reading aural culture along similar lines: “the analogico-digital [. . .] is the beginning of a systematic discretization of movement” wherein the manipulation possibilities offered by digital technologies are liable to challenge and even transform how one perceives the documentary aspect of image-based reproductions, and arguably also phonographic ones (148). In thinking about photography, Stiegler draws

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attention to the ways in which the material traces of past events captured in analogue photographs can be digitally manipulated in order to intervene in a spectator’s perception of the photographic image, thus challenging one’s ability to definitively assert the fidelity of the representation to the event it purportedly records.

For Stiegler, the challenges hereby raised point to an evolutionary shift in how beliefs regarding past events are conditioned—by and through such technological developments—such that certitude becomes increasingly challenged, engendering “an anxiety and doubt which are particularly interesting and threatening” (149). The challenges raised are thus liable to engender suspicion on the part of the spectator, which might positively provoke a more critical relationship with the image. What Stiegler suggests is that the pre-digital image culture is challenged in a digital age by new kinds of critical dialogue that actively utilize the digital manipulation of analogue recordings as a vehicle for critical analysis, and that the realization of such a possibility amounts to furnishing a new “critical culture of reception” (162-63).

Recently, sound studies scholar Frances Dyson has considered Stiegler’s argument more explicitly in relation to aural culture. Primarily focusing on technological mediations of the human voice, Dyson observes that when analogue recordings of voices are made available for digital manipulation, the lack of a clearly locatable or discernable fixed origin means that an analogue phonographic recording is necessarily “already abstracted— removed from its real world context”—and thus immune to the kind of challenges and suspicions described by Stiegler regarding the authenticity of the photographic image (Dyson 80). That said, one could nevertheless argue that digital technology’s interventions into the analogue phonographic archive certainly raise challenges and open new critical possibilities. What surely remains the case, as the foregoing exploration of digital sampling has shown, is that the “already abstracted” character of analogue recording is mirrored by that of digital recording in the practice of the beatmaker, such that the encounter between analogue and digital as a signal feature of practice points to the possibility of the kind of critical culture of reception that Stiegler describes.6

Hip-hop sampling Afrologically explores the relationship between analogue reproductions of once live performance events and their digital manipulations in ways that attest to the possibility of a new critical culture of reception. This possibility is further suggested by Miller’s references to “encoding” as a feature of critical work that

invok[es] systems of thought, procedures of extrapolation, syntax and structure, and most of all a sense of movements and actions taken in a realm of correspondences, of translating one form of code into another. (33)

If this is the case, then academic critical writing needs to grapple with its own encoding, or its idiomatic specificity, before it seeks the code to the idiomatic specificity of other kinds of knowledge-practice, a lesson that sample-based hip-hop offers up. As composition scholar Jeff Rice has observed regarding hip-hop sampling and pedagogy,

In this way hip-hop pedagogy performs an extremist act by arguing that the “reality” of academic writing (the linear structure of thesis, support, conclusion) is in fact an ideological formation that can and should be challenged through the sample. [. . .] The lesson of sampling can be extrapolated [. . .] in order to form various alternative methods of critique. (466, 468)

This approach is echoed by hip-hop scholar Mickey Hess’ exploration of sampling and academic citation practices as imbricated forms of documentary critical practice: “the strongest connection between sampling and academic writing is the requirement to work from sources” (Hess 284).

The lesson from the likes of Miller, Rice, and Hess regarding the role of hip-hop in pedagogy and in knowledge production is very much the same lesson that this investigation of sample-based hip-hop has gleaned, situating academic critical reflection as one among numerous kinds of critical knowledge-practice. Sampling practice evidently has a good deal to teach academics about the broader stakes of criticality in an “analogico-digital” age, including that sample-based hip-hop has the hallmarks of a critical culture of reception. This conception of critical culture has great potential to contribute to a concrete, participatory response to the challenges posed by diverse forms of “social instrumentality,” both within and outside of the academy (Lewis, “Improvised Music After 1950” 134). The analytical imbrications of digital beatmaking in sample-based hip-hop and critical knowledge- practices—indigenous and non-native—offer a complex, challenging, and highly prescient sounding-board for exploring the contemporary stakes of knowledge production in an increasingly digital world.

Notes

1 The sounds on Linn LM-1 and Oberheim DMX drum machines were digital reproductions of live-recorded drum sounds (the sounds on the Roland TR-808 were produced using analogue transistors).

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2 Roger D. Abrahams, Geneva Smitherman, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. were among the first scholars to explore the significance of signifyin(g) in relation to African American linguistic and rhetorical practices in academic contexts. Abrahams and Smitherman were early explorers of the role of signifyin(g) in African American urban contexts, for example “street rap” (Abrahams 41-57; Smitherman 73-100). More recently, Gates has drawn attention to hip-hop as exemplary of signifyin(g), in particular in its “‘sampling’—quoting and riffing off [. . .] R & B and soul recordings” (xxx).

3 One might consider as a case in point big-band jazz, in which hip-hop sampling finds a precursor, particularly in its idiomatically specific, mimetic manipulation of industrial technology’s rhythmic elements as a vehicle for vernacular counter-cultural musical practices. Joel Dinerstein provides a detailed exploration of the history of swing as a mode of technologically-inspired counter-cultural practice (1-104).

4 The idea of hip-hop as knowledge-practice has been extensively explored in hip-hop scholarship. Houston A. Baker, Jr. has produced an important study of the genealogical imbrications of rap culture and black studies as an interdisciplinary academic field in the USA (1-32). Priya Parmar has explored the practice of rapper KRS-One as exemplary of hip-hop as a critical, political, and ethical vocation, while Elaine Richardson has explored hip-hop as a mode of knowledge production under the rubric of “hip-hop literacies” (Parmar 1-24; Richardson 41-56). Cheryl L. Keyes explores rap and “street consciousness” in the context of hip-hop’s African American and African diasporic histories (17-51).

The majority of available studies to date have tended to focus mainly on the live performative aspects of rap. Relatively few have considered in substantive detail sampling and production as modes of knowledge-practice. Schloss’ work is one of a small number of extended studies on this conjuncture available to date. Amanda Sewell’s thesis, entitled A Typology of Sampling in Hip-Hop, is also an important contribution; however, its relative lack of engagement with the question of digital technology places it largely beyond the scope of this investigation. There are a good number of critical engagements with sampling in relation to pedagogy, including articles by Mickey Hess and Jeff Rice, both of which feature briefly as part of the current investigation.

5 For example, DJ Spooky samples the British improvising saxophonist Evan Parker on “Nommos Ascending”—a track from the album Celestial Mechanix: The Blue Series Mastermix.

6 Stiegler derives a substantial part of his own analysis from theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes’s exploration of photography in Camera Lucida (3-60), drawing primarily from the concept of the spectatorial punctum, the “prick” by which the viewer of an analogue photograph is “punctured” or “wounded” by the “that-has- been,” by the traces of the past event inscribed in the photograph. Frances Dyson also points out (78-81) that Stiegler makes reference elsewhere (in Derrida and Stiegler 100-112) to Barthes’s essay “The Grain of the Voice,” which articulates the singularity of the singing voice using his concept of the “grain” and provides an aural correlative to that of the photographic punctum.

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