Do I have to tell you over & over? KOOP is having its Fall Membership Drive right now. Go support KOOP!
This Friday, for my second & final Membership Drive show of the year, I am going to play lots of silly songs that have either samples of people talking, samples of music, samples of samples, or all of the above. I'll have a couple of songs that predate the year of my birth, but most of them will come from the last twenty-five years or so. Why is that? Because the first digital sampler was released in 1975. That's essential. Before that, it was a lot of cutting up & pasting of tape.
I myself was sampled once, & this is definitely not the beginning of a story about some sex shop I visited in Copenhagen, nor is it a story of being cannibalized. Actually, I think I've been sampled more than once. I guess that comes with being on the radio. People can tape you, they can edit you, they can mix you up. I fully expect one day, with all the talking I do, to hear myself talking very audaciously about something terribly disgusting. That would rule.
I'm a little tired & so can't think of any funny lies about sampling. I guess sampling applies mainly to the music/sound world, so if I "sampled" anything in print, it'd just be plagiarism. A lot of the problems people have with sampling is related to the concept of claiming someone else's writing is your own - surely it's the same with music!
& so it is. But the truth is, the stuff I'll play interests me because it's creative, not derivative. Nowadays, a lot of musical artists will basically sample an entire song, usually a popular song, even if they sing or rap something different over it. Far more difficult is to do something truly creative, like what Danger Mouse did with Jay Z & the Beatles. I can't play any of that, though - that's illegal!
I am very amused & excited by songs in which the normal verbal parts are replaced with samples. That's a lot of what I'll play Friday. But why a show called "A Brief History Of Sampling"? Ask me tomorrow.
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