Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop
- Author: Patrin, Nate
This musicological study is never dry, always enthusiastic and appreciative, and groundbreaking in its analysis of the art of sampling as just that: art. Featuring plenty of entertaining cultural...
Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop
- Author: Patrin, Nate
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This musicological study is never dry, always enthusiastic and appreciative, and groundbreaking in its analysis of the art of sampling as just that: art. Featuring plenty of entertaining cultural...
About
How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib
Sampling-incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely-has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through forty years of musical innovation and reinvention.
Nate Patrin tells the story of how sampling built hip-hop through the lens of four pivotal artists: Grandmaster Flash as the popular face of the music’s DJ-born beginnings; Prince Paul as an early champion of sampling’s potential to elaborate on and rewrite music history; Dr. Dre as the superstar who personified the rise of a stylistically distinct regional sound while blurring the lines between sampling and composition; and Madlib as the underground experimentalist and record-collector antiquarian who constantly broke the rules of what the mainstream expected from hip-hop. From these four artists’ histories, and the stories of the people who collaborated, competed, and evolved with them, Patrin crafts a deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated: the aesthetic and reconstructive power of one of the most revelatory forms of popular culture to emerge from postwar twentieth-century America. And you can nod your head to it.
Contents
- Contents
- Introduction: The Art of the Loop
- Part I. The Grandmaster
- 1. Wheels of Steel: How Djs Became Artists
- 2. Change the Beat: Hip-Hop's First Crossover
- 3. Funky Drummer: Sampling Reaches the People
- Part II. The Prince
- 4. Synthetic Substitution: A New Medium Finds Its Canon
- 5. Talkin' All That Jazz: The Legitimization of an Art Form
- 6. Constant Elevation: Hip-Hop's Rising Underground
- Part III. The Doctor
- 7. Funky Enough: How the West was Made
- 8. G Thang: The Producer as Superstar
- 9. Aftermath: Auteurism in a Post-Gangsta World
- Part IV. The Beat Konducta
- 10. The Loop Digga: Sampling Preserves History (and Itself)
- 11. The Illest Villains: High Concepts and New Voices
- 12. Survival Test: Hip-Hop as a Community
- Epilogue: Breaks and Echoes
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Selected Discography
- Index
Awards and reviews
This musicological study is never dry, always enthusiastic and appreciative, and groundbreaking in its analysis of the art of sampling as just that: art. Featuring plenty of entertaining cultural history, this is a significant contribution to hip-hop studies
