Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop

5 Sampling Ethics

c h a p t e r 5 Sampling Ethics Joe: It’s one of those things, that there seem to be . . . I don’t know if “rules” is the right word. . . . Vitamin D: Yeah. Joe: But there are certain things. . . . Vitamin D: They’re rules! It’s all following rules. (Vitamin D 1998) One major influence on the artistic practice of hip-hop producers is their general adherence to a defined set of professional ethics. In this chapter, I will explore the major themes of this ethical system, in order to set the stage for questions regarding the producers’ philosophical outlook and aesthetic approach. I will argue that at base these ethics tend to equate creativity with moral value. From that axiom, a variety of rules have been derived, disseminated, and enforced within the producers’ community. It is important to note at the outset that what is at issue here is the validity of various strategies toward sampling; producers’ ethics are not concerned with whether sampling itself is appropriate or not. As I discussed in chapter 4, hip-hop producers, among themselves, feel no need to justify sampling; it is the foundation of the musical system. This may be why the so-called producers’ ethics have largely been overlooked by the academic community—they simply do not bear on the questions that most scholars have been interested in. But they do shed light on many issues that are important to this study, including the way a community’s social norms may be reflected in its specific musical choices, how an ethical system may be used to create and maintain social boundaries, and how music can mediate between the interests of individuals and their community. 101 Furthermore, it must be said that many of these rules hold little signi ficance for the larger hip-hop community. If a producer violates them, it will often only be apparent to other producers. At the same time, high ethical standards are largely valued only within the production world. But, as will become clear in the following pages, concern for one’s reputation among other producers is often enough to enforce a sense of ethical obligation. The community of hip-hop producers is small enough that the threat of ridicule among one’s peers can be a substantial sanction. Similarly, a sense of ethical obligation serves to demonstrate producers’ concern for their peers’ opinions. In a spoken interlude on their 1998 album Moment of Truth, for instance, Gang Starr’s DJ Premier berates other hip-hop artists for “lettin’ the industry control the rules of the hip-hop world that we made.” In doing so, he is implicitly arguing that this hiphop world can be distinguished and protected from the “industry” by its control of a set of rules. In other words, producers’ ethics are one of the primary factors that allow hip-hop musicians to see their work as an endeavor that is separate from commerce: as art. Section headings in this chapter reflect my own attempt to express each ethical principle in its most generally applicable form; the rules were not necessarily stated to me in these terms by any one consultant. Furthermore , I want to make it clear that by distilling the various ethical issues into a prescriptive form at the beginning of each section, it is not my intention to endorse that particular approach to the ethic in question. I have taken this step merely to delineate the ethics in their most generic terms before discussing the complexities that inevitably underlie them. Similarly, such an approach may appear to impose a systemicity on the rules that does not actually emerge from the community. While the following pages will clearly demonstrate that these ethics are highly contested , it is essential to their function that they not be seen as the construction of particular individuals. I would suggest, therefore, that regardless of how unsystematic the enforcement of the rules may be in practice, the systemicity of the rules as a matter of principle is of the utmost importance to producers. Although the development of an individual producer’s particular ethical sensibility is often based on his own participant-observation, its very existence in the first place is founded on the assumption that the ethics 102 Making Beats have an internal systemicity that exists independently of the observer: “I guess where the ethics came from, to...