Eat What You Kill: Samples and Indie Culture

Yesterday afternoon as I was casually strolling the blogosphere, I found myself at the fantastic Altered Zones. This post particularly caught my attention, in that it resurfaced something I've been thinking about for quite a while. The song that piqued my interest was this:

Memoryhouse - Lately (Deuxieme) by BubbleWolf

Now normally on this blog we post things we're excited about or things that you need to stay away from. But what struck me about this track wasn't its quality. I thought it was OK; nothing special. What struck me was, while listening to it, I couldn't get over its use of sampling. My original reaction was anger that a song I know so intimately, "Phone Call" by Jon Brion off of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack, could be used so flagrantly and unaccredited. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was just my nerdiness/pretentiousness bubbling up ("How DARE they use a song that I know!"). The fact was, the use of that particular sample didn't really bother me, but how it was used did. And I started thinking: where does sampling fit in indie music?

Hipster Runoff did a piece last year about this very topic in response to the rise of Chillwave, taking an angle, "Do you feel duped?" and "Is this right?" that these tracks bite other songs, and slightly warp them and call it their own. My short answers are Yes and No to these two questions.

I don't feel duped, because this musical era is defined by genre-bending and synergy. Techniques, instruments and influences that were once relegated to specific genres have permeated the whole of the music landscape. This is why you have Kanye West sampling Can and Vampire Weekend unironically using Auto-Tune. The game has changed. Laptops are instruments as valid as guitars.

The "Is this right?" question is much more complex, because it calls into question artistic integrity and the role technology should play in certain kinds of music.

In hip-hop, sampling is essential. It became a style of music by taking old disco/soul/funk albums and chopping them up in a DJ booth to create something new. As MPCs and computers evolved, samples became more refined, and more manipulative. Producers were now revered based on the quality of their samples. The finest crate-diggers were often times the finest beatmakers.

With samples so ingrained in the structure of hip-hop, and the general availability and communal nature of beats among rappers (honor among thieves?), pretty much nothing is surprising when it comes to their gaudy and blatant use. In fact, some of my favorite hip-hop songs pretty much just take old soul songs, slap on a harder beat and call it a day. Case in point:
There's nothing off limits.

Sampling in indie/rock music is a bit more of a gray area. Hip-hop can get away with it because there are typically no instruments, so instrumentation and melody take a significant backseat to lyrics, flow and the beat.

Looking at the song that sparked this train of thought, and Hipster Runoff's Washed Out example, I think a certain line is crossed. The samples in these songs play such an essential role that it almost transcends the very idea of creation. Is it "original" music to take, say, an instrumental post-rock song and sing over it? To me, this method and musical approach is the height of laziness.

I felt the same way last year when the Internet was all a-buzzin' over "Ecstasy" by jj. Granted, their approach was slightly more clever (using car alarms), but at the end of the day absolutely no thought had to be put into structure or melody.

This is not to say sampling doesn't belong in indie music. I just think, as opposed to hip-hop, the sample needs to merely be a facet of the track, not the whole thing. I look at Animal Collective's "What Would I Want? Sky". The song made news because it was the first cleared sample of a Grateful Dead song, another sign of the times, that an indie band would be the first to license a sample. The track is a prime example of how source material can be integrated without becoming a flagrant rip-off.

Animal Collective - What Would I Want? Sky by BubbleWolf

I don't think I'm being overly sensitive or critical to expect musicians to play original music. Samples afford the opportunity to slack; to take someone else's work, tweak it slightly and call it one's own. But in order to be considered "original" for sampling among indie musicians, it needs to become something entirely new, not a derivative form of the source product. I believe indie needs to be held to higher standards than hip-hop, because with so much groundbreaking and innovative work happening, there is no excuse to offer up other people's material as a substitute for your own.

Discuss,
Erik

(Image by soschilds, Licensed under Creative Commons.)