Samples from Public Enemy and Beck

Our reading for Tuesday was focused on the art of and the controversy behind sampling. Jeff Rice, in chapter 7 of Writing About Cool, describes sampling as stringing together multiple parts of songs, that leads to either commercial or rhetorical purposes. Sampling brings about a lot of questions dealing with copyright laws and ownership. If you are using someone else’s music, how much of it can you use before it becomes stealing. If you distort the sample enough so that it is barely recognizable, does it even matter then?

My dad is a lawyer and mainly deals with boring stuff like nursing-home contracts, but in the 80’s he represented a client that sued the BeeGees for copyright infringement. His client claimed that the BeeGees used some of his music in one of their songs. I don’t know the exact details of the case, but in the end the judge ruled that the two songs did not sound enough alike to warrant the BeeGee’s guilt. My dad’s client felt that he owned the music and that it was stolen from him, but, in this case, the BeeGee’s sampling was deemed perfectly legal.

In class, we also talked about the different reasons why Beck and Public Enemy use sampling. I had never heard much from either of the artists but from the reading we deduced that Public Enemy had used sampling for social change, and Beck used it mainly because he could. Since I don’t really know Beck and Public Enemy’s music, I "youtubed" them. Unfortuantely, I don’t really know music in general, so I can’t really tell when they are sampling other artists, but their videos show sampling as well.

This one is kind of long, but right away you see that Public Enemy is sampling from images and a newscast from the March on Washington. They also show a clip of Elvis and John Wayne, and while rapping that they were both racist. From their video, you could tell that Public Enemy was using sampling to "create a sense of power in the African American community" (Rice, 60).



In this video, Beck does a little sampling of images too, such as the car race, the girl playing the drums, the guy fishing, and the two guys dressed as astronauts. However, this sampling doesn't really seem to have a reason behind it. It seems that Beck just stuck these images in his video because he could. I do not know if they really have a rhetorical value, but the samples just add to the overall oddness of the video.