Hip Hop Samples Jazz: Dynamics of Cultural Memory and Musical Tradition in the African American 1990s

The critical attempt to historicize hip hop dates at least to David Toop's 1984 Rap Attack: African Griots to New York Jive, a book written with journalistic immediacy and yet, as its subtitle suggests, one that situates rap reportage in the black musical longue durée. But it wasn't until the mid-1990s that efforts toward an academic hip hop scholarship began in earnest, and it was then that ideas about the music's methods and meanings as rooted in the black musical past became common currency. This view wasn't surprising: a neat and untroubled line could be traced from the classic African American toasts to rap, and the use of digital sampling, whereby hip hop producers constructed their work from (black) music's recorded back catalogue, was equally suggestive for historically minded observers. This sampling practice, and its "historical" interpretation, form the central subject of this article.

Certainly hip hop's early scholars differed in their reasoning as to what the form's use of old records meant for black music and history. Some positioned the practice as part of a linear, cultural-national tradition sometimes shaded with essentialism. William Eric Perkins claimed, with totalizing confidence, that "sampling was and is hip hop's ongoing link with history and tradition, including all of the African and African American musical genres." A more modulated Kyra D. Gaunt contended that hip hop's sampling was "the perfect medium for expressing the temporal culture-scape of who we are, and how we became, across time." Joining these arguments, though, were more constructivist theorizations, these made by writers for whom rap's membership of a musical tradition was something bartered as much as birthright. In his book Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism, Russell A. Potter wrote that "hip-hop's continual citation of the sonic and verbal archives of rhythm and blues, jazz, and funk forms and re-forms the traditions it draws upon." Potter's work also embraced a third common scholarly perspective, one in which (as Potter put it) sampling producers' search for sounds would become "a kind of genealogical research" into the black musical past. In her landmark Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose had similarly positioned rap's sampling practice as cross-generational "homage," "a means of archival research, a process of musical and cultural archaeology." Whether cultural-nationalist, constructivist, or genealogical, much early scholarly writing on hip hop sampling sought to position the practice as one in which the musicians' relation to a black musical past was of primary importance.¹

A music so often and so determinedly formed of historical sonic artifacts surely deserved such a framing. And yet there might have been something suspicious about the scholarly attempt to stage musicians as researchers, genealogists, historians—that is, to portray musicians as people no less interested in tradition, memorial, and the past than the scholars themselves. In his ethnographic study of the aesthetics of hip hop production, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (2004), Joseph Schloss criticizes this tendency, emphasizing producers' creative and pragmatic strategies over any mooted cultural-historical concerns.

While such anachronic collages would seem to hold a great deal of interpretive promise for semioticians, producers are not particularly concerned with using samples to make social, political, or historical points. In fact, symbolic meaning (as opposed to pragmatic value within the musical system) is almost universally overstated by scholars as a motive for sampling.²

The author's argument is supported by the comments of numerous producer-interviewees. Schloss reads Prince Paul a critical interpretation of some of the producer's late-1980s work with De La Soul, the author of which was concerned with highlighting the irony supposedly inherent in a black musical sampling of blue-eyed soul relics Hall and Oates. Prince Paul responds: "Wow. That's pretty deep. But I think the bottom line is just: it was a good song! . . . We didn't consciously think of 'Hall and Oates,' 'Resurrecting,' you know...