Original subtitles

[MUSIC]

>> DJ Qbert: See some one recorded this sound.

>> [SOUND]

>> DJ Qbert: So does that mean they own it if I go?

>> [SOUND] >> Jeff Chang: Digital samplers

allow you to take a snatch of a record.

Sound or anything like that and

it turned out into a building block for a song.

>> Mix Master Mike: We grabbed conga sounds, trumpet sounds,

violin sounds, drum beat sounds and we manipulated and

created our own music.

>> Anthony Berman: If you sample one note of a sound recording

it's copyright infringement.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ken Freundlich: You can't just have a record that's made

up of everybody else's records and then not pay them for it.

>> George Clinton: You pay for guitar, you pay for piano,

you pay for anything else that you can make a song with.

>> Speaker 1: By ignoring the rules they came out with

a whole new way of thinking about music.

>> Mase: It's actually taking sounds and

meshing them together and putting them all in time

to come up with something totally different.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Anthony Berman: At the end of the day,

the court said not only is this copyright infringement, but

we see criminal prosecution in line for this one.

>> Harry Allen: We never anticipated getting someone to

pay for James Brown going >> Harry Allen: And that's it.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I didn't even know what sampling was, and

I didn't know anything about it until people said,

they're sampling your drums.

>> Jeff Chang: We live in a remix culture now and

the laws have to change to be able to

help that culture do what it has to do.

>> [MUSIC]

>> DJ Qbert: [LAUGH] >> Jeff Chang: We are here in

this record store, in a lot of ways it's a repository,

it's an archive of what's come before.

I mean records, literally they're named records right,

you're encoding history into these grooves.

So, DJs, by taking these records and

playing them back are giving us snatches of our history.

They're giving a reinterpretation of that

history to us.

In the present day.

>> Greg Tate: For me, the most definitive sound in hip hop is

the sound of a needle skipping over a scratching record,

like the sampled sound.

>> Matt Black: A good, appropriated sample,

it has good quality of its own, and it has a strong

reference that evokes cultural resonance, as well.

>> Steve Albini: In sampling the way it's conventionally used,

you are supposed to be able to understand what

you're listening to.

And that's because what you're listening to has its own

qualities, its own importance.

>> Drew Daniel: That's what's cool about sampling,

that it transports the listener, if they're willing to move in

that pathway, back to a specific action.

It's sort like an archive of memories of real experiences.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Tom Sliverman: All of these layers of archaeology,

audio archaeology, that are happening You can dig

down to find out where, the actual, thing originated.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Anthony Berman: The view on the traditional side was this

is a very lazy way of songwriting and making records.

>> Steve Albini: I've made records with a lot of people.

Probably the most famous would be Nirvana, The Pixies,

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin.

As a creative tool, like for someone to use a sample

of an existing piece of music for their music,

I think it's extraordinarily lazy artistic choice.

It's much easier to take something that is already

awesome and play it again with your name on it.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Steve Albini: It's sorta like a bad dance move or

something like that.

You think the people doing it should be embarrassed for

behaving this way.

Or, you think the people doing it should be self-aware

enough to understand what they're doing is cheap and easy.

And everyone else can tell that it's cheap and easy.

>> George Clinton: Rock and roll was the lazy.

Three chord,

everybody would look down on basic rock and roll.

People would say that's not music, bop baba lou bop.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Steve Albini: The argument that

a sampler is no different from any other instrument is absurd.

It's absurd because no other instrument allows you,

simply and easily, to take someone else's life's work and

put your name on it.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Shock G: Perhaps it's a little easier to take a piece of

music than it is to learn how to play a guitar or something.

True, just like it's probably easier to snap a picture with

that camera than it is to actually paint a picture.

But what the photographer is to the painter

is what the modern producer and DJ and

computer musician is to the instrumentalist.

>> [MUSIC]

>> MC Eyedea: The turntable is the newest instrument.

The turntables are more rhythmically complex than any

other instrument.

Based on on the fact that what you can do with a fader and

your hand playing at the same time, no guitar player or

a horn player can play that fast.

>> [MUSIC]

>> DJ Qbert: Okay, so

this is how the record would sound normally.

>> [MUSIC]

>> DJ Qbert: Right, so then to destroy it you would.

>> [SOUND]

>> DJ Abilities: Basically

when I'm sampling I have all these artists.

They're in my band.

And I'm sampling fuckin Wes Montgomery to play guitar

on my shit.

He's in my band.

I got Art Blakey, he's my drummer.

That's tight. >> MC Eyedea: [LAUGH]

>> DJ Abilities: You know what

I'm sayin? I got all these legendary

musicians that are in my band.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Speaker 2: It's not, you don't just go to a store and

grab one record, put it down, sample it, bang it out and

that's it.

Like there's a process.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Miho Hatori: Always buying records, searching, searching,

and like sometimes we find the oh silver apple you know record

or something like that and listen to one very short part.

That bass line.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Greg Tate: Essentially what they were all doing was they

were beat miners.

They were mining old records for those break sessions,

basically 70s funk records

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: George Clinton is a major, major funk icon.

He's the Maverick, he's the person that through

parliament in funkadelic in his own works later on created

a lot of the foundation for what hip hop would become.

>> [MUSIC]

>> George Clinton: Funk is the DNA in hip hop.

They were less EQed than most records.

So it left a lot of room for

the Zeppelins to put their own sound to it.

I don't think they thought of it like that, but it just.

That raw sound seemed to appeal to them.

The drums and guitars.

>> Miho Hatori: A lot of records back in time

has a really good sound, like James Brown.

The beats are just so fat.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: James Brown's music was so useful,

I think, to a lot of hip hop heads because

Clyde Stubblefield's the epitome of the funk.

>> [MUSIC] >> Clyde Stubblefield: When I

sit down, I just started playing a beat, something simple,

and everybody joined in. And then Brown came in and

put the lyrics to it and

it was called Funky Drummer.

>> [MUSIC] >> Clyde Stubblefield: Next

thing I know, all the rap artists was using it to,

the sampling. I went, okay,

why didn't they choose something else like Cold Sweat or?

I got the feeling of something,

but they choose that, so. [LAUGH]

>> [MUSIC]

>> Hank Shocklee: Basically what you're looking for

is any toolbar or one bar snatch that of a drum beat.

That's funky enough that keeps them sort of a groove.

So that could be anywhere.

So you're looking for breaks from any record,

whether it's Ross Stone, Herman Kelly and Life,

whether it's something that's in a Corner Gang record, as long as

it was two bars it was just enough for a DJ to catch it.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Hank Shocklee: Sampling came out of the DJing culture.

You would have a drum beat.

And then we would scratch

a horn hit on top of a drum beat.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Bobbito Garcia: There was always a culture of borrow and

take because it was a culture that was founded upon a lack of

resources.

>> Saul Williams: The idea of not having any instruments, but

having a turntable and saying well fine,

this is my instrument.

And you see it now with people with overturned buckets,

pots and pans, we saw it then.

>> Jeff Chang: What sampling technology did was it basically

mimicked exactly what the process was for

what the DJs were doing in the parks and

the community centers and the nightclubs.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: When you really start hearing digital sampling

in hip hop, it is around the mid 80s, 86 and 87.

>> Chuck D: Well, the second half of the 80s,

the freedoms of sampling came with the advent of technology

companies that put together equipment.

>> Matt Black: When it got cheaper,

basically because a lot more people were able to use them,

that in combination with some of the other factors gave rise to

an explosion of new ways of making music, and new music.

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: The golden age of hip-hop was

really defined by some seminal albums.

De La Soul with 3 Feet High and Rising, Pete Rock.

A little bit later with Mecca and

the Soul Brother, A tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders.

Eric Bees, Rack'em, KRS one, the 80s golden age of rap.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Mix Master Mike: Well, back then the sample police didn't

roll as thick as they do today.

Look at the Paul's Boutique record.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Mix Master Mike: That was sample mastery right there.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Mix Master Mike: You put something out like that these

days and you get lawyers calling you and

a whole bunch of bullshit that goes with that.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Matt Black: Public Enemy were iconoclastic, definitely.

You never really heard anything like that before.

>> Prefuse 73: When you hear it for the first time, back then.

It's just like, woah.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Harry Allen: The Bomb Squad was the association of Chuck D,

Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee, and Eric Vietnam Sadler.

Those four individuals together were the Bomb Squad.

They were the ones who put together the sound of

Public Enemy's music.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: They've worked out an unbelievable method in

which all of these different people that are in the group

are bringing in different types of sounds.

And the figuring out, how to jam with the samples.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Hank Shocklee: I wanted to do somethings that were not

musical, in music.

What was my vision was,

was to have this group be

a production assembly line.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Hank Shocklee: There's gonna be a time when we gonna have

a nice little groove.

Where Keith is gonna be on some [INAUDIBLE],

Chuck is gonna have some [INAUDIBLE] and

I'm gonna be like [INAUDIBLE] and so we're all together.

And there's this one little moment that it all just

meshes together in a nice vibration.

And that became the music to

Don't Believe The Hype.

>> [MUSIC]

>> George Clinton: They would take parts,

them little small parts.

And have a whole 24 track full of samples

that equal one whole arrangement.

>> [MUSIC]

>> George Clinton: Indeed it artsy fartsy I called it.

They made noise sound good the way Jimi Hendrix did with

the Feedback on the guitar.

>> [MUSIC]

>> George Clinton: And they named it perfectly on

one of the songs, Bring on the Noise.

That's exactly what they did.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Drew Daniel: What was exciting about Public Enemy was

the militancy of it.

Like the way that Paris and Public Enemy were kind of taking

Malcolm X and Black Panther speeches and recordings and

sort of re-animating them.

>> Recording: Have you forgotten that once we we're brought here,

we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language,

we lost our religion, our culture, our god.

And many of us by the way we act, we even lost our minds.

>> Hank Shocklee: What we wanted to create was that kinda like

reality record.

You hear it out there on the streets, and now what you heard

in the streets is now back in the record again.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Anthony Berman: Now there was a cultural issue in

that it seemed like more or less an underground urban phenomenon,

how was this gonna translate to the big record business.

And at that time, the big selling artists

were Fleetwood Mac and Springsteen, and things

that are more traditional, you could wrap your arms around.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Anthony Berman: And it turned out that

all the traditional people who were so miffed by this,

way back in the early days,

quickly realized there's a huge amount of money to be made here.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: Look, nobody took hip hop seriously until it

started making a lot of money.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Greg Tate: Well, I think that once people who held music

copyrights got wise to how much money hip hop was making,

then it became kind of a feasting frenzy.

>> Mark Hosler: So lawyers were getting involved and

there was starting to be these lawsuits over sampling and

there was an awareness that was arising about, hey,

they're taking something that doesn't belong to them.

It's mine.

I gotta get paid.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: In the early 1990s,

there were a series of lawsuits and

threats of lawsuits that made it very clear that the lawyers in

the entertainment world were gonna reign in this practice of

unauthorized digital sampling >> Greg Tate: I think everybody

woke up after the De La Soul's 3 Feet High and

Rising came out and they ended up losing like most of their

percentage of copyrights to The Turtles.

>> Mase: For me, I felt like, wow, we're popular now.

I'm getting sued by somebody I ain't even know.

[LAUGH]

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: So De La Soul was on an independent label called

Tommy Boy that put out a lot of very, very important records.

>> Tom Sliverman: The most notable one was

De La Soul's first album which had so

many samples I can't even remember how many.

And for each one you have to have a deal with the publisher

and with the maestro who sold it.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: You'd have French language records,

you'd have The Turtles, you'd have Led Zeppelin,

you'd have Hall & Oates,

you'd have all kinds of crazy things coming out of the mix.

And it sounded exactly like a lot of people heard pop culture

at that particular moment in time.

>> Mase: We sample something of theirs,

rightfully so, it didn't get cleared for whatever reasons.

>> Tom Sliverman: In 3 Feet High and Rising,

they told us what the samples were on the record,

we cleared them all.

They didn't tell us about The Turtles one.

That's what usually happens is they, we changed the speed,

it's an unknown song, it's only this amount,

those are the ones that get you at the end.

>> Posdnuos: It's something that we did, silliness we played.

It was actually a song I put together and, like I said, once

we gave the information to Tommy Boy they just unfortunately took

it as well, this is a skit, why should we try to clear this?

Yeah, it happened with us.

But I think once it happened

to Biz, it really took off.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ken Freundlich: Biz Markie sampling case was the case

that was brought by a man named Gilbert O'Sullivan,

who had a hit song in the 70s called Alone Again Naturally.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ken Freundlich: And it was very ubiquitous.

It was sample.

You really could here the song.

It was over and over again, loop.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: So Biz Markie takes this

Gilbert O'Sullivan song.

And makes a parody of it called Alone Again.

And he sings, he doesn't really sing,

he warbles it in his funny Biz Markie type of voice, right?

And it's a great joke.

Everybody kinda laughs and

you play it once, you're like, oh, cool!

That's kinda funny and stuff.

Gilbert O'Sullivan didn't really think he was that funny.

[LAUGH] >> Ken Freundlich: It was

a pretty aggressive sample of a song that Mr.

O'Sullivan, it was his big hit.

He was just a no nonsense guy,

he didn't want the song with a rap version.

>> Jeff Chang: So he decides he's gonna make an example

of this kid and files this huge lawsuit.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ken Freundlich: And the judge pronounced it biblically

incorrect.

>> Chuck D: Now how country is that?

How backwoods is that?

That's somebody who totally is like oblivious to the speed of

things happening.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Saul Williams: Shouldn't Biz Mark be having an album out

by now?

And you start hearing oh man, he's going through hell and

then he comes out with an album a year late and

the album is titled All Samples Cleared!

[LAUGH] >> Harry Allen: Some of those

first sampling cases or those early records, whether it be

De La Soul, Bismarky, P.E and others, knew that

they were going to be thieves or trying not to get caught.

It was just like, we kind of didn't know.

>> Hank Shocklee: Cuz we always felt like when you're creating,

you create.

Whatever you decide that you wanna use,

you use to create your own particular vibration your way.

And that to me was kinda like an unwritten code

within the hip hop world.

>> Chuck D: We kinda look that music as a symbolage of sounds

and we felt that you couldn't copyright a sound.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: Once people in the industry got wind

of the fact that the courts were not interested in listening to

young black men describe their creative processes they had no

tolerance for that.

A new industry emerged, the industry of sampling clearances.

That meant that groups like Public Enemy no longer

make their powerful sounds in the way they wished.

>> Jeff Chang: Record companies are beginning to put more

pressure on the artist,

to disclose the samples from the very, very beginning.

>> Posdnuos: I think it was,

Stakes is High, where it was the first album I record where we

sat down at the beginning of the album.

Like the record company made sure, you know what, let's make

sure we speak to our, whoever you want the clear samples.

And they went through a list of like,

George Clinton's litigation with West Brown.

So don't mess with his stuff right now.

George Harrison don't like rap, don't mess with him.

We actually had a list of people not to touch.

>> Mia Garlik: We knew going through rights clearing process,

you really need to identify all the different people who

own all potential elements of that particular sample or

musical element and

make sure that they've agreed what you want to do.

And that can be very time consuming because there's a lot

of people involved in making music.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Lawrence Lessig: To create requires a permission of

somebody else and

it's that transformation which has been radical and reasoned.

>> Joanna Demers: Our copyright act was basically last

rewritten in 1976.

So we're operating with a lot of antiquated assumptions about

what musical creativity is.

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: It is cheaper, easier, and

more predictable if you wanna cover somebody's song entirely

than if you wanna take three seconds of somebody's song.

That doesn't make any sense.

Why should an entire song be easier and

cheaper to do than three seconds of somebody's song?

>> [MUSIC]

>> Tom Sliverman: You have a right to cover any record as

long as you don't change the words.

You could cover Stairway to Heaven.

Those who tried to change the words and make it [INAUDIBLE]

Gilligan's Island, which someone tried to do,

[INAUDIBLE] will shut you down in two seconds.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Tom Sliverman: Should an artist be able to say,

you can't take my Stairway to Heaven and

make it Stairway to Gilligan's island.

Or anything else.

Or you can't use it on a hip hop record.

You can't take it out of context for.

You can't recontextualize what I've done.

It has to stay true to the original.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Tom Sliverman: If I go to somebody and I wanna sample

a Marvin Gaye lick, and I go to Marvin Gaye's estate.

I might have to pay like some people did, Erik Sermon I

believe, over $100,000 to sample one song, in advance.

>> Anthony Berman: Let's look at the factors

that determine how much it's gonna be.

Obviously, a factor is gonna be.

What is the economic viability of the work you're sampling?

Is it something like the Beatles that is hugely viable in

the economic stream?

Or is it something that's pretty obscure?

Are you taking some R&B song and recording,

that is lost in the vault and you've brought it back to life?

That's a whole another Level.

>> Harry Allen: Records like It Takes a Nation

to Hold us Back and Three Feet High and Rising.

They're kind of like artifacts of an earlier time.

Records that couldn't exist today.

They're just legally, financially untenable.

>> Mr. Len: New Cast was like man you know that's our style,

you know.

[LAUGH] And

now you tell me that my style is too expensive, you know?

>> Saul Williams: I think of what started happening in

[INAUDIBLE] hop with artists like Tricky and and Bjork.

And what they started doing to their samples.

They play a guitar riff, press it up, record it,

press it up on vinyl and sample it off of the vinyl.

Just to have the effect of it being sampled.

>> Hank Shocklee: Our thing about sampling was

there's the confusion element.

Because we know we had to be confusing,

because we been want people coming after us.

>> Greg Tate: People started getting pretty savvy

about what they were sampling and how they would mask it.

>> Hank Shocklee: So, we would make it a game for

you to like try to figure it out.

Okay, try to figure out where this came from.

You can go all day long.

And I know you won't find it.

>> Ken Freundlich: They can change the tone, they got so

much technology today, the speed go up, whatever they

want to do with it, and I won't even know if it is me.

>> Steve Albini: It is more difficult to make a record than

it is to sample it.

That's patently obvious.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Steve Albini: I guess,

I'm more concerned with the 20 years or so that got

the musician to the point where he could make the record,

that then, is important to the listener because of what in his

life has brought him to making that record.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I didn't know anything about sampling

until people come and say some artist is using your junk band.

I go, cool!

>> [MUSIC]

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I'm Clyde Stubblefield,

the original funky drummer as they say.

I joined James Brown band in 1965, 65 yes, 65.

And I stayed with him until 1970.

I played on Giving up turning lose, I'm black and

I'm proud, >> Clyde Stubblefield: Cold

Sweat.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Clyde Stubblefield: That's Cold Sweat.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I started playing.

>> [SOUND] >> Clyde Stubblefield: And

the bass player came in.

>> [SOUND] >> Clyde Stubblefield: And

then the guitar player came in.

The rhythm was there, James came in and heard it and

said yeah I like that.

Then he started putting lyrics,

I don't care, then they put the horns in, we had a song.

And I started it.

[LAUGH] But we said okay, Cold Sweat.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: That was mine.

He didn't give me, he didn't tell me what to play or

ask me to play, I played what I felt but he owned it, so.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: So you take a drummer like Clyde Stubblefield

who plays the funky drummer.

And James is like, you know, take it, Clyde.

And he goes ahead and takes his break.

And that break ends up becoming one of the basis for

a whole bunch of sample based records.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I never got a thanks.

I never got a hello, how are you doing or

anything form any of the rap artists or anything.

The only one I got a thanks from, was Melissa,

Melissa Etheridge.

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: His name never appears on

any of those compositional credits.

His name is not part of the legal legacy

of all of those great tunes he played on.

He doesn't get royalties.

He got paid for the time in the studio.

>> Jeff Chang: The producer or the publisher of that particular

track is getting compensated for the use of that sample.

But the artist that originally played that drum break that got

sampled, is not necessarily getting any compensation for it.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: So many groups sample my stuff.

They say I'm the the world's number one samplist drummer,

so I haven't got a penny for it yet, though, but.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I can't be sure

if that's my drum pattern if its a little snap I can't be sure,

but that's where honesty come in.

A person could say yeah, that is your drum pattern.

Then we discuss things.

Otherwise than that, I cannot go to no one and

say, hey, you using my drum pattern, but

just a little

>> [SOUND] >> Clyde Stubblefield: I don't

know that was me.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: It's real easy to look at the big picture

and say that the money doesn't always go to the people who do

the most creative work.

>> Jeff Chang: Clyde's Stubblefield

is still playing out today.

He has a regular gig in Madison on Mondays and he goes on tour.

He was on tour actually with DJ Cool Herc recently.

And you listen to him and he's still got it all,

still playing Give It Up Turn It Loose.

With all the fire that he had back in 1971.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: My music is my life.

My music is my breathing.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: One of the things that sampling has done is that

it's revitalized a whole bunch of musicians' careers.

At the time that a lot of hip hop

producers started sampling George Clinton,

his records weren't available commercially any more.

So hip hop literally re-introduced the world to

George Clinton.

>> George Clinton: It really helped us a lot because actually

people heard it and got to know who it was, and

then they wanted his long version of the sample songs.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Tom Sliverman: Rick James' biggest record was by MC Hammer.

I mean there's many examples of an original record being outsold

by the cover, or the remake that used part of it.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Tom Sliverman: Even Gangsta's Paradise did much more than

Pastime Paradise by Stevie Wonder, like ten times more and

that was Stevie Wonder, who the hell is Coolio?

>> [MUSIC]

>> Paul Miller: So sampling usually is viewed as a musical

thing, right?

But if you look at the art world for example you have Andy Warhol

taking photographs and painting them.

You have different photographers taking certain scenes and

reconstructing them digitally.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Paul Miller: It all implies a layer of collage and

pulling together bits and pieces.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: The fact is,

look at how any bit of culture is made.

Look at how Shakespeare made culture.

Look at how every great poet, how Homer made culture.

It's about collage.

It's about taking bits and

pieces of your influences and forging them.

Into something newer and stronger.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Lawrence Lessig: Think about the way Walt Disney was created.

All of Disney's greatest works, were taking other people's works

and doing something different with them.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Harry Allen: I've never really heard a completely

original musical idea, by anyone.

Most musicians will say that the best musicians copy.

>> Recording: Hey, hey what you doin man?

That aint the piece we supposed to be doin.

I guess I better get in here with him.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Chuck D: Jazz musicians, when they ad-libbed, happen to do

a cover of somebody's record, and they went into that ad-lib,

and then to their riff, you kinda say that their riff but

the ad-lib belongs to the musician.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Recording: Sykes, that's me, well all right.

>> Saul Williams: You can also look at the Blues and

for that matter, you can look at anything, I mean,

melodies have always been borrowed.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Steve Albini: Mashups are an interesting case.

They sort of demonstrate how simple it is to make music this

way, because virtually everyone has made a mashup.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: Danger Mouse is a hip hop producer who created

this thing called The Grey Album, right?

He took Jay-Z's a capella from the The Black Album, and

he cut up the music from the Beatles White Album, and

put them on top of each other.

>> Jay-Z: Now I ain't trying to see no highway chase with Jake.

Plus I gotta few dollars.

I can fight the case.

So I pull over to the side of the road.

I heard.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Mark Hosler: They Grey album came out.

I think it was it was just a limited edition thing that was

in some kind of promo form.

It was just supposed to be kind of fun.

And somehow it got out further than they expected,

came to the attention of the record label, I believe EMI.

>> Joanna Demers: EMI sent out all these cease and desist

letters to Danger Mouse and folk who were trading the album.

And really try to squelch the album all together and

to stamp it out of existence.

>> Anthony Berman: Any attempt to sample The Beatles,

for example, on the sound recording side,

are gonna be very tricky to do, pretty much impossible to do.

The Beatles, actually, in Revolution 9,

it's a whole nine minutes of them using a lot of

stock sound recordings into this new work.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: Well of course EMI's lawyers got wind

of it.

EMI controls the sound recordings to the White Album,

and EMI decided that the Gray Album shall be no more.

>> Mark Hosler: What's interesting about the Gray Album

is that the artist themselves didn't seem to have any interest

in trying to protest this,

or see it as a point of which to struggle or resist.

It was really fans of the work.

It was other people who cared about these issues that came in.

They took the work and started posting it up online everywhere.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Siva Vaidhyanathan: Danger Mouse won, EMI lost.

This album, if it were actually for

sale might've been one of the biggest hits of 2004.

Another of the absurdities of the music industry

is that nobody made a dime.

Nobody made a dime from one of the most successful albums

of 2004 and it didn't have to be that way.

If we had a more rational system for dealing with samples,

then perhaps somebody deserving would have been able to

make a little bit of money off of this amazing phenomena.

But, as it turned out, we still got to dance to it and

that was good.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Mia Garlik: The ability now to mash up and create new songs,

I guess has really been facilitated by digital

technologies, where it kind of democratizes that process.

You don't need to have a recording studio and

lots of fancy equipment.

You can basically do it just on your computer, or

in the privacy of your own home,

with tools that are relatively easy to acquire.

>> Jeff Chang: Sampling is the kind of technology that's really

shifted the way that people consume and produce culture.

The consumers have become producers.

>> Matt Black: It came out of the studios,

the professional recording studios and into the bedroom.

And that changed the music industry to a large extent and

the reverberations of that are still going on.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Johnny Wilson: What we do is remix video, musically.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ian Edgar: We take videos, music.

Beats and mix them all together into something new.

So it's like composing with,

like if you were to drum on pots and pans.

You know?

Just finding out what sounds, where, and then play them.

So you can just arrange them on your timeline.

Put them in the right place to make the right little rhythm

or riff.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ian Edgar: Anything that can be

put onto audio and

video together is fair game for us.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ian Edgar: We'd have the backing of a label and

so we're just out there in the world interacting pretty

directly with people.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Johnny Wilson: The way we exist is on the Internet and

we operate almost immediate publishing.

What we're doing on the Internet.

And we've received no cease and assists, and no person going,

how dare you touch my content.

That's never happened.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ian Edgar: What we do is so transparent.

That it's a remix.

You know? We're literally moving the video

with our hands.

We're dropping classical music over beats.

And the speed and the way we mix it continuously

means you couldn't mistake it for anything else.

It is Inevitably and

ostensibly a remix.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Johnny Wilson: I didn't see what we were doing as

like stealing.

Because we're so obviously representing those acts.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ian Edgar: The whole point of what we do is that we sample.

It's not some feature of what we do.

It's all we do.

Just totally illegal.

Insanely illegal.

And impossible to clear.

It would be impossible to release what we release if you

did it through legal channels.

It can only exist on a kind of mix-tape form.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Jeff Chang: I think hip-hop producers have to be a lot more

cautious than they were 25 years ago.

I think they understand fully, that ultimately,

they're gonna pay the bill, right?

At the end of the day,

the sample clearance is gonna come out of their pocket.

So, I think that that's changed the way that producers think

about how they put music together.

>> EI-P: The way I used to start a song was if I heard some shit

on a record that I liked, I'm snatching it, and

then I'm starting there.

But, and now it's a little different.

Now, where I start is a little more cautious.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Chuck D: Maybe I was wrong with sampling of a beat, but

my thing is that sometimes you can't put soul in a bottle.

You can't quantify soul by a person that

just a got a briefcase, and just sits down,

and thinks that everything soulful is actually exclusive.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ian Edgar: As much as everyone else seems to have

a problem with it, we're still doing it.

We're still just getting on with it, and people are bringing out

technology out to help us the whole time.

And now we work with all the companies that make

all the technology we use.

They invented the technology, so

that people like us could use it, and have fun, and

make music, and progress, and move on.

Wouldn't that be nice, if we could just get on with it?

>> Tom Sliverman: When you have some kid in the Bronx with two

turntables who could be a musical Einstein, and

has the genius idea for a record that could do 50 million copies

and change the world, you can't do it.

>> [MUSIC]

>> Ken Freundlich: I think artists that sample and

ignore copyright law are not in business.

I mean, what about if that artist has a hit song,

and somebody else is going to sample their song.

What goes around comes around.

There are rules of the game, there's a copyright.

You have to get permission.

I can't walk in your house, and just sit down on your couch, and

go to your refrigerator, and take a glass of milk out.

There are rules.

>> Steve Albini: I'm allowed to have an opinion on whether or

not sampling is cool, and as it turns out, most of the time,

it isn't.

But I don't think we need to get the law involved.

I think the law's involved in way too many things already.

>> Jeff Chang: The other thing that you see happening is

sampling going back underground, like way underground, for

a bunch of artists who feel like, hey,

I'm gonna be outlaw about it.

Because sampling law has created two classes.

You're either rich enough to afford the law, or

you're a complete outlaw.

>> EI-P: If you can catch me, then I didn't do my job.

Straight up, it's my fault.

>> MC Eyedea: It's just something that we definitely

have to think about, because we're looking at it,

at a level where like, man, if we did get hit with something,

how the hell are we gonna afford to really deal with it?

>> [MUSIC]

>> Mix Master Mike: If you're using little pieces and little

>> Mix Master Mike: from

James Brown or whatever,

I think those should be like, kinda like giveaways.

>> Clyde Stubblefield: I prefer to get my name on the record,

saying this is Clyde playing.

The money is not the important thing.

Just to get myself out into the world,

knowledgable with my name is the more important.

>> Bobbito Garcia: I think ultimately, it's up to every

artist if they're gonna borrow something from somebody

to pay respects to the persons that they borrowed it from.

>> DJ Qbert: That's how society moves forward.

It doesn't just invent new things.

It evolves through taking old

things and changing them.

>> [MUSIC]