HOW SAMPLING ALTERED THE UNIVERSE: a journey from Kool Herc to Janet Jackson to The Avalanches. If you have any thoughts, leave them in the comments on YouTube because they might get incorporated into the final video.

TRANSCRIPT

In the early seventies in New York City, a new technique for creating music starts to form. At parties DJs are looping the dancers’ favorite parts of songs.

An early pioneer is DJ Kool Herc, who extends instrumental breaks by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record. And as many black entertainers had been doing for a long time, he sometimes speaks rhythmically over these beats.

Boom: rap music is born. And starts to grow.

Sylvia Robinson spots this new trend and assembles a team to record an actual rap song. She creates a group called The Sugarhill Gang, they copy the rhythm from Chic’s “Good Times”, and score rap’s first hit, “Rapper’s Delight.”

Grandmaster Flash takes Kool Herc’s simple idea, refines it and turns it into a new art. He records the first music created with turntables, and brings together Chic’s “Good Times” with a song it inspired, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”

This technique of taking old bits of music and using it in new music becomes known as sampling. At first rap samples are mostly r&b, soul, and funk–lots of James Brown.

But soon artists are sampling different sorts of music, like rock. Run DMC and producer Rick Rubin sample The Knack’s “My Sharona” in “It’s Tricky.”

A Tribe Called Quest uses the bass line from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in “Can I Kick It?”

The sampling gets more and more eclectic and more and more complex.

Public Enemy uses nonmusical sounds: speeches, sound effects, noise.

De La Soul brings together sixties rock, seventies soul, and eighties pop into a single song.

And the Beastie Boys and producers The Dust Brothers unite hundreds of samples in their album Paul’s Boutique.

Sampling spreads outside hip hop, into mainstream pop music.

Janet Jackson samples Sly and the Family Stone in “Rhythm Nation.”

A riff by Tom Tom Club first used by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and then over a decade later shows up in a number one megahit by Mariah Carey.

The group Len samples a forgotten disco hit by Andrea True Connection in their smash, “Steal My Sunshine.”

Madonna samples ABBA in her dance floor hit, “Hung Up.”

Meanwhile, in the adventurous outer realms of popular music, artists are sampling too.

Radiohead takes a fragment from an obscure piece of early computer music and around that construct their song, “Idioteque.”

M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” samples The Clash, a punk band that grew to incorporate rockabilly, dub, r&b, reggae and more.

Portishead record themselves playing instruments, press these recordings onto vinyl, then loop these records. They sample themselves.

Sampling reaches its pinnacle with The Avalanches’ album “Since I Left You,” which merges perhaps thousands of samples into a swirl of sound unlike anything else. The album is layered together from distorted bits of obscure songs, sketch comedy, and movie dialogue. The title track loops and speeds-up a variety of forgotten songs from the sixties and seventies, then slices up, pitch shifts, and rearranges a vocal into an entirely new melody.

Rap even transforms country music, where hip hop beats become standard. And some country artists are now using samples. Sam Hunt’s song “Hard to Forget” uses samples from a country classic by Webb Pierce.

But remixing is much older than hip hop. Earlier musicians were remixing too. They couldn’t sample, but they could still copy.

Just like rap is a remix, so is rock.