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Comment by footlose_3815 | Hacker News Reader

Why is it "Shared DNA" if all rappers do is sample and totally rip-off music (Logos, artist names etc) before them?

The concept of "DNA" with music goes much deeper than some lucky nobody who sampled someone's life work so they could pollute it with lowest common denominator poetry and a Roland Drum Machine.

I submit that oogling over people who steal music by sampling is not that deep, and there's deeper methods of musical analysis than "This band sampled this beat, this means they're a natural progression of art".

Every example I skimmed over was some hiphop artist who ripped off music before them.

Other artists have some shame and just copy chord progressions, but rappers went so far to just completely steal parts of the song.

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Some sampling might be lazy, but there's plenty of impressive producers which take the art to the next level. Some suggestions you can sample: DJ Shadow, J Dilla, Madlib, The Avalanches, Statik Selektah. And as a bonus, an artist definitely not hip hop which makes beautiful use of sampling is Jens Lekman.

I will be charitable even though you called rap "lowest common denominator" poetry.

If you are genuinely interested, I suggest you look into the history of hip hop. IMO, the point of early hip hop was not to create sophisticated music, but to connect people by using sounds they were already familiar with. More important was the message and vocal delivery of the MC.

I use the Roland 505ii looper, and do massive 'samples' - whole verses etc, great for song analysis, practice etc. If I could incorporate something into a hit song, I'd happily pay the royalties to the 'samplee'. I rather suspect the early days of sampling/ hip hop etc, it was the "how do we get paid...they're ripping us off" panic that created issues. Now, the money-flow has been standardised, and sped up, there are considerably less problems. Oh, my favourite example of extreme sampling - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJYeSpyRpRA&list=PLXa6-G1Tk7...

May I add some awesome producers: Sounwave, DJ Dahi, The Alchemist, Kanye West, DJ Premier, 9th Wonder

> Every example I skimmed over was some hiphop artist who ripped off music before them.

Mozart ripped of Händel. For example parts from his famous Reqiuem are a rip of of Händels Messiah. And a lot of classical Composers (ex. Beethoven) ripped of from their "godfather": J.S Bach. Altough they did not call it rip of, but learning.

Exactly. The attitude is just so totally ignorant. Otherwise, just consider practically all equal temperament western music a ripoff of J.S Bach.

Of course, someone who knows nothing about music like this wouldn't know that.

The irony is that it could be argued hip hop is one of the few western pop musical art forms that isn't a complete J.S Bach ripoff.

I'm always weirded out by such "domain-specific knowledgey" statements like this.

I just don't get how someone simultaneously e.g. knows what a Roland Drum Machine is, but also manages to stay wildly ignorant about an entire genre of established music to make such a sweeping statement.

I agree that rap/hiphop artists are often guilty of just gracelessly slapping a beat over some one else's hook or chorus and it really does come off as lazy and disrespectful. This is especially true when the sample is of something that is (or was) already popular and easily recognizable.

That said, samples can be used in a lot of creative ways and even some very straightforward ones while still creating something unique/transformative. I still think it's a good thing that artists can use samples in their work since it does expand what's possible and I can always just ignore the low effort garbage.

Your cutoff is somewhat arbitrary.

Whatever artist you think is legitimate never did anything fully original either. The only original musician may have been the first caveman to hit two logs together.

There's a great video essay series known as "Everything is a Remix" by Kirby Ferguson [1] if you have an hour to spare. Ferguson uses the trends of music sampling as a base for how artists draw inspiration from others. The controversy of sampling has been used across genres, include around minute 9 Ferguson points out that Led Zepplin were considered ripoffs for their appropriation of Jake Holmes. Axis of Awesome also has a "chord progression song" [2] that makes fun of how similar many pop songs are.

The video draws a nice parallel to how so much in our world serves as "inspiration" for our own works, but acknowledges the controversy around using a single source as "too much inspiration". Especially as we move into whatever copyright arguments are getting made toward AI right now, I think it serves as a nice outline on why this is such a complicated matter.

[1] https://www.everythingisaremix.info/everything-is-a-remix-20...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

this is a weirdly anti art view of music as a whole, do you just not enjoy organized sound?

The very first rap/hip-hop song, Rapper's Delight is itself ... inspired by previous a song or two.

But that's ok, since they absolutely added improvements.

The 'haha! ha!' from Genesis's 'Mama' is quite literally taken out of 'The Message' by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (the first rap hit song): I just think it's neat Genesis were listening to that. They don't seem like they'd be listening to rap and yet it's well documented in their own words that they'd not only heard it, but were that into it that they kept sticking that riff in 'Mama' and it stuck.

I'm glad you mentioned Genesis because they're the subject of one of my favorite samples. OutKast's famous track "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" contains a sample from Genesis's "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight" and upon learning this, I just thought it was so cool that OutKast listened to Peter-Gabriel-era Genesis when Genesis was very much a progressive rock band rather than the pop powerhouse most know them as today.

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