Question for those who Sample: Cultural Appropriation - what's your view?

[DougalDarkly]

Deleted

[jam-s]

I think that policy is bullcrap. As an artist one should not create additional mind blocks for oneself, but instead try to challenge the barriers that are in the heads of your audience.

[WarStar]

Doesn't make sense.. there's plenty of non white artists and producers that have sampled "white" bands too.. this is getting silly. I think cultural appropriation is real but not in this sense

I sample from all sources lol I don't discriminate when it comes to "sounds". Movies, commercials, songs, outdoor sounds, etc etc...

I do tend to sample classic rock more than any other genre.. so I guess I'm in the clear? Lol

[bxbrkrz]

Don't fall for it.

[Heater]

So sampling people of colour is wrong but sampling white people is okay. What a load of shite. I hate this kind of thing. How about treating everyone the same.

[bxbrkrz]

@2:20min

[xboix]

Without so called cultural appropriation half the content of this forum would not be understood by half the members of this forum. Language, cultures and behaviours have ALWAYS merged and changed and everyone has benefited as a result.

It's fine for non-Japanese people to wear kimonos and for Japans people to wear blue jeans.
It's fine for white people to braid their hair and for black people to straighten theirs.
It's fine for young white musicians to play (and change) the music of old black musicians.
It's fine to sample anything, anytime. Ideally the results will add something to the vibe but it's not compulsory.

If you take the anti-appropriation thing to it's logical endpoint we end up with segregation and apartheid.
And you come uncomfortably close to a certain short-arse German dictator with a daft moustache. (Did anyone ever figure out why his "master race" was blonde-haired and blue-eyed but he was not?)

[rgdaniel]

If George Harrison had not culturally appropriated Indian music,
or Paul Simon had not culturally appropriated African music,
the world would be the poorer for it.

[EdGrip]

I understand the sentiment, and if somebody asks you not to sample their stuff, fair enough.
But if white people hadn't "sampled" blues music in the 50s and 60s...

If white people hadn't enthusiastically picked up the house music from Chicago in the late 80s...

If people generally hadn't sampled breakbeats from largely black records in the 90s...

...the world would indeed be much poorer, to put it very mildly.

Every rock band, every pop act, every house, big-beat, jungle, D'n'B and techno producer, all of them owe their existence to black musicians. That's the entire musical revolution of the 20th century, pretty much.

I don't know what that means for the future of music, and we must always be aware of privilege and power imbalances in regard to other artists. But I think to have a blanket policy of not sampling or interpolating black music, or music built on black music, would leave us sampling.... I genuinely don't even know. Colliery bands?

[EdGrip]

...bagpipes, you could have,

[bxbrkrz]

[bxbrkrz]

Cultural appropriation beyond just sampling?

[DougalDarkly]

Deleted

[bxbrkrz]

Cultural appropriation beyond just sampling?

Some widely discussed examples, old and new:

11 Songs Prove the History of Music Is All About Cultural Appropriation:

https://www.mic.com/articles/111344/11- ... ropriation

Music’s 8 Most Cringe-Worthy Acts Of Cultural Appropriation In 2014:

https://www.thefader.com/2014/12/16/6-p ... -in-2014-1


[Edited to make it clear I'm responding to bxbrkrz]

Everything is a remix. What was not remixed is dead culture, forever forgotten, never to be remembered.

[tt_lab]

I think people gets confused by the common use of the term culture and craftmanship when in reality they want to say art, and viceversa.
Art is not region bounded. In definition ART could be considered as human culture as a whole. Cultural apropiation can only be posible in the terms of craftamanship and regional culture (clothing, food, etc...).
This is to put it in 3 lines, althought there are plenty of books about this same misunderstanding.
Art is a very misused term.

[bxbrkrz]

[platzangst]

To echo some sentiments already given: "cultural appropriation", far from being a bad or problematic thing, is how societies change and grow, and leads to more tolerance, not less. Modern society, despite any current flaws it has, would not be at all as good as it is, if every cultural distinction retreated into its own corner and locked itself off both from taking in new influences and from allowing itself to influence others.

To use the beginnings of rock and roll as an example, one could say that it's a pity that many of the black r-n'-b artists of the time were not as well recognized in their day, and that white rock and roll took that music and (cf Pat Boone covering Tutti Frutti) watered it down to make it more palatable to white audiences (or more specifically, the parents of the kids who were that audience, who were worried about the influence of all the black music out there). But without that foot in the door, so to speak, where would black music be today? Without that white appropriation to ease in black musical influences, would the white music industry have ever become receptive to more and more directly black music? Or would black music have remained in its own small niche, mostly ignored by white audiences, even to this day?

It's easy to forget in today's times that things used to be worse, and that what made it gradually change for the better was a long process of cultures sampling each other, finding common ground, adding new ideas and dropping bad ideas. To now insist that certain forms of cross-cultural sampling are morally off-limits is, I believe, a backwards step, and can only lead to stagnation.

[DougalDarkly]

Deleted

[bxbrkrz]

Everything is a remix.

I agree completely - the Everything's a Remix video is one I've posted myself on several occasions when the wider points around the validity of sampling as an art form are being discussed - it really hammers the point home about the naive aim of some to make something they consider entirely original and not influenced or inspired or copied from anyone else, drawn entirely from their own musical genius.

To steer back toward the question as it relates directly to sampling though, I've been sampling since the late 80s and there's no doubt that some of my favourite music, and therefore favourite samples, have come from African American artists - I love funk/soul/disco/rare groove! - and many other cultures too. Like a lot of you, I love music from all over the world and love nothing more than my collection of (to me) obscure stuff from China to Cuba to Iran to Everywhere-and-Anywhere and back again.

So, whether I like it or not, I am heavily influenced by the music and the culture of people that I've been listening to all my life - BUT I cannot deny that reading the demo policy I posted originally made me take a step back.

It definitely made me think twice about using those cool Cambodian Swing samples and I can't deny it's changed the way I'm approaching sampling.

Is there any point at which you decide not to use a sample for cultural reasons?

The answer is no. I have a universal pass with me all the time. It lets me sample anything I want without thinking about cultural blah blah blah. Can you guess what it is?

What if you decided to ignore the gatekeeper that tells you what you should or not do. Instead use all your energy and try to get in touch with the people or cultures the middleman tells you you are hurting. Ask them if you are hurting them directly. It may not be possible, or too complicated, or the artists are dead. If you can afford it travel over there. Spend some money, buy stuff, help the local economy, etc. Can't travel? Buy their stuff on eBay.

If you could, stay away and ignore the people whose soul was replaced by a void. They are fun vampires. Joy succubus/incubus.

You are making beats dude, not WMDs.

[DougalDarkly]

Deleted

[bxbrkrz]

I have a universal pass with me all the time. It lets me sample anything I want without thinking about cultural blah blah blah. Can you guess what it is?

You're white?

What if you decided to ignore the gatekeeper

To be clear, I'm the gatekeeper for me in this context - the demo policy I came across made me question if I was doing something wrong, and made me think about self-imposed boundaries on what I should or shouldn't sample.

The record company involved clearly have a strong opinion on the matter and, FWIW, I agree broadly with a lot of the views expressed in the thread already, so would never consider sending them a demo anyway!

This was some months ago BTW, but I do think about it now and again and was interested in the thoughts of other music-makers, not having any around me IRL.

After some reflection (and a LOT of sample-auditioning) I think I'm getting comfortable with my approach - I feel free enough as an artist to express myself, and I don't feel uneasy about the 'authenticity' of my shit.

I've leaned much more into heavily transformative sampling, rather than just using a 'sound-clip' as-is - so I don't generally use un-edited speech, vocals, drum breaks, percussion, melodic figures, chord progressions etc etc anyway, thus stripping away a lot of what makes music culturally distinct, reducing it to more of a sonic pallette.

I didn't do a lot of it before, but I do think I'm more aware of what I'm doing now - I love those snippets I've got of arguing in Japanese from the Peanuts' outtakes, but I have no idea what they're saying, so I won't use them in their 'native' form for fear of offending by ignorance.

I also think it's not what I use but how I use it that ultimately matters the most - if I am going to 'take' a part of that culture in the form of a sample of it's music/sound, I'm using it as inspiration for something new, I'm not imitating.

I feel comfortable paulstretching some sick spring reverb from Lee Perry to make weird techno with, but I'm not comfortable taking a drum loop/bassline and making another dub-reggae song, for example (sorry, couldn't think of a better one).

If anything, the intial shock I felt reading that demo policy has actually lead to some valuable self-reflection - I thought about what exactly an 'authentic me' would (not should ) sound like and it's definitely made me more focused.

Hey! I'm white today! Cool!

This cultural blah's phenomenon is so foreign to me. It is a personal journey and self-reflection. I agree.
I can't remember a time when "cultural blah blah" wasn't part of the world's History.
In my case I'll have to invent a sorrow, a lie, then pretend it to be a new idea.
In any case it would not come to me organically.

Any type of communication between humans is based on cultural blah blah blah.
It defines us.

[orthodox]

In the past, we have published works by white artists who sampled music by People of Color, but we want to eliminate the practice of profiting from Black labor in particular. Going forward, we no longer accepts demos that use such samples without permission and will donate any back catalog profits that contain such samples.

Just came upon this, and I'm really SHOCKED. The declaration is really funny until you think about those who wrote it, they must have been damn serious. It's a clear political assault from the liberal side. An analogue of the blackface issue recreated in the musical world.

Just say 'fuck them' quietly that they can't hear you and ignore it.

[pushedbutton]

Ikutaro Kakehashi invented the 808 drum machine.
Just saying.

[bxbrkrz]

Storch was born on Long Island, New York.[1][2] He was raised in South Florida and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[3] His mother, Joyce Yolanda Storch, was a singer signed to Philadelphia's Cameo-Parkway Records under the stage name Joyce Carol, and is of Lithuanian Jewish heritage.[4] His father, Phil Storch, was a court reporter.[5] His uncle, Jeremy Storch, was a founder of soul-rock band the Vagrants and wrote songs recorded by Dave Mason and Eddie Money.[4] Storch's parents divorced in 1983.[4]

Storch attended elementary school in Sunrise and middle school in Davie, Florida. In the middle of his freshman year, he left South Florida to join his father in the Philadelphia area, and attended high school in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.[4] After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, Storch was expelled from home at the age of 16.[5] By age 18, he was living with his father in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Some publications have written that Storch was born in Canada,[6] but in 2010 the Miami New Times wrote a denial under the title "Scott Storch is not Canadian.

I guess it's OK to sample SS.