Although I secretly love a catchy “Top 40” hit as much as the next person, I can’t help but feel mildly appalled when when the work of older or lesser known artists is repurposed and capitalized by large record labels. It often doesn’t seem right to remove components of a song from their original context, consequentially altering their meaning and how they are publicly received.

With the rise of new mixing and recording technologies, the music industry has grown and changed rapidly throughout the greater portion of the 20th century. It’s become increasingly common for artists to create “sound collage[s]” (Howstuffworks) of preexisting songs to supplement. This is referred to as sampling. 

Undue pretension still causes me to initially cringe when I hear popular songs like Gym Class Heroes ‘Cupid’s Chokehold’ (which takes the chorus/melody from Supertramp’s classic ‘Breakfast in America’), and Jason Derulo’s ‘Talk Dirty to Me’ (from Balkan Beat Box’s ‘Hermetico’) loop endlessly on the radio. Unfortunately, artists are silenced when what is borrowed is mistaken as original, as is the case with many of these songs. The recreation often compromises their recognition as individual pieces. 

The ethically of such reproductions thus comes into question. Robin Thicke’s infamous song  ‘Blurred Lines’ received legal fire after he was accused of copyright infringement, and a few turned heads at the similarity of the intro to “Best Song Ever” by One Direction to Baba O’Riley by The Who.

Although songs are often ripped off for their catchy lyrics and melodies, songs that contain sampled material are often brilliant in their own right. It undoubtedly takes a lot of creativity, talent, and vision to be able to lace different components of songs together to make something new. Furthermore, sampled material has the potential of being rediscovered after being featured in contemporary songs.

Today, although many songs are still originally composed, sampling in music is ubiquitous, though sometimes hard to spot. There happens to be an entire website dedicated to matching tracks with the various songs they’ve sampled. It’s quite addicting to go through, and I actually identified/created my own submission while I was avoiding finishing this blog post (I’ll link it here if it’s accepted).

What was supposed to be a quick browse turned into a two hour stalking session of some of my favorite songs to figure out if they contained any sampled material. A lot did to varying degrees, and were often sampled by other artists as well. To my surprise, a relatively “obscure” song from a relatively “undiscovered” band that I really like turns out to be almost entirely composed of samples from two Drake songs. That knocked my hipster cred down a couple notches. On that same thread, I doubt classically trained pianist Bruno Sanfilippo would have guessed that his 2008 work with German ambient musician Matthias Grassow would be featured in Drake’s hit ‘Started From the Bottom” a few years later. Through the website I now know that James Brown has been sampled just under 8000 times, there’s direct ties between J. Lo and the Sugarhill Gang, and that the backtrack to a 1960s French song has been used by rappers from around the world. The connections are endless.

Artists are relatively protected through contemporary copyright laws that inhibit others from sampling their work at will. That being said, if academics are expected to be very careful about referencing their work, why shouldn’t artists that sample be held to the same standards? While it’s hardly information that people would feel inclined to include on their iPods, it should be an industry standard to provide a readily available list of all the songs and artists that are featured for each track—like a musical bibliography.

The theme of “tracing” has resonated a lot in school this past month; whether it be following commodity chains in Geography, exploring family history in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, or researching collections at the RBSC archives. Going beyond what meets the eye, such as exploring the origins of a song, is necessary habit to form in both academia and in every day life.