Gentle Giant HAS BEEN HIP-HOP SAMPLED!!!

The Progressive Hip-Hop Hall of Fame, part one

Let's be clear.  Anybody who indulges in the ridiculous cliche that "hip-hop is not music" is at best, entirely deaf and at worst, monumentally racist. 

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nobody wrote: Anybody who indulges in the ridiculous cliche that "hip- hop is not music" is at best, entirely deaf and at worst, monumentally racist.

Hahaha...there, someone finally said it...And did you read up to that
nationally syndicated stand up comedy act that involved labelling me as
racist because I cited that the all but impovershed youth in places like
Brooklyn in the late 70s were resourceful to invent sampling and turntablism
since they couldnt afford instruments! Guess that means I was saying they
are '1/3 human' who 'can't express themselves properly' and need 'help.'
Excuse me sir, they do need help (read: better funded schools, a government
that gives a sh*t and music programs for the young ones!!!" I'm amazed at
how biblical people can act about something thats as foreign to them as
water is to the Gobi.

nor does it take as much talent to make it as it takes to make other forms of music.  (I've actually made rap songs before, so I know, rapping is incredibly easy)

Yes, any 3 year old child can operate an Akai S1000 sampler, or use SoundForge 7.0 to craft meticulous, exacting beats within a nanosecond of seamlessness, and then compose intricate rhyme schemes to flow effortlessly over them just like Rakim.  I do it all the time.  In fact, while I was typing this, I composed an album even better than Paul's Boutique with the other hand, all while eating a sandwich.  It's so easy I can't believe all 6 billion humans currently on Earth, including infants under the age of 6 months, aren't happily sampling and rhyming away.

Yes, the implication in "it's so easy anyone could do it" is the implication that the people doing it, mostly although not entirely of African descent, are somehow less artistic or less capable of "complex" expression (like prog--which to an outsider might seem like a bunch of poofters wearing capes with flower masks on their heads ripping off Leos Janacek).  Maybe it's not purely racist but it is elitist, as if simplicity in music isn't a virtue a lot of the time in the first place (i.e., 3 chord rock-n-roll).   Smacks of a devastating case of progsnobbery to me.

Anyway what's tired is the old "I am not a racist, some of my best friends are blacks in genres I like such as blues and jazz" argument.  Dojonane might be playing the race card but at least his deck isn't stacked and marked.

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You guys never cease to amaze me!  Calling me a racist just because I don't see it as a valid artform!  I also happen to see lots of other things as less valid forms of art which of course don't have anything to do with rap, but of course it's easy to ignore that and call me a racist.  If the only counterargument you guys have to the fact that rap is barely an artform is to call me a racist, you are pretty much admitting my point and sideskirting the issue.  I also don't see girl pop music as a very valid form of art, so I guess that makes me someone who hates white girls too?  But I guess since political correctness has engulfed everyones mindset, no one can say anything bad about rap without being a racist right?  Like I said, you are the one implying this, I didn't say anything about black people, and it is my opinion that if you constantly bring racism into discussions where they don't belong, you maybe are secretly racist, and have to bring racism up at all times to try to convince yourself that you are not a racist.  This is about copying music and not being original, and seeing this as tied to racism is completely ridiculous!!  I am honestly offended and like I said, if you really had a concern to fight racism, you wouldn't "cry wolf" all the time when things are being discussed that have have nothing to do with it.  You cheapen the issue, and if you say it enough for meaningless things, people will think that EVERY time you say it is another instance of this, and they will ignore it.  You are like the PETA people who recently have compared the enslavement of animals for mass produced food to the enslavement of African Americans over the past 400 years.  Using these comparisons cheapens the argument and makes people fed up with it and not want to here it anymore, and if you really had concern for African Americans you would stop cheapening the argument and cease to bring up racial issues where they do not belong.  Once again, I NEVER saw this discussion as having anything to do with race, YOU DID.  Maybe the fact that you would make this implication shows that you are the racist and not I.        

 

Cleo

I, personally, think madvillain is a great hip hop artist. the mainstream "look at my icy grillz i get ho azz pussy" hip hop i could do without though

This thread is fantastic, it would make a great book about two genres both loved and loathed, Progressive Rock and Hip-Hop.  Maybe at the end of the story you could have a blinged-out E-40 roll up in an Escalade with spinning rims to join hands with a sequin-caped Rick Wakeman at the big peace summit/jam-session-featuring-rhymes-over-odd-time-signatures .

IMHO the two genres have much more in common than might first be accessible to the casual ear: I mean it's so ironic in a million ways, not the least of which being the idea that the Led Zep tune in question, Kashmir, that was sampled itself features a sampler very prominently... a little machine called a Mellotron.  Are we critical of John Paul Jones because he didn't play all the violins and cellos on that song himself?  I didn't think so.  The objective, market-driven reality of where samplers came from lies in the proggers' initial desire to be able to play back previously-recorded instruments and sounds with a keyboard-trigger mechanism.   Once they started (like John Lennon & Yoko Ono did) putting their own, often "extra-musical" tape loops in the Mellotrons the groundwork was laid for things like the Fairlight CMI and the Emulator and on and on up until today.

Let's hop in the wayback machine for a minute (or a thousand years if you want, hey! why not? it's a time machine, right?) and examine where this idea of sampling started out: in the conceptualization of the 1950s French radicals known as the Situationists.  They called it detournement, the recontextualization of a familiar image or sociocultural meme in an alternative framework, designed to highlight the ineffectual, deceitful nature of the image or meme as they saw it, like a multidimensionalized form of ongoing, self-perpetuating satire.  In this they used mostly advertising images, taking images of products or pitchmen and twisting them into another shape, an auto-condemnation of the materials using the materials themselves detourned from their original, safe context or familiar milieu.  Kind of a post-media approach to mediamaking, essentially descended from the Futurists and Dadaists of the early 20th Century, with their "music" of found, "non-musical" sounds and anti-art "happenings".

Hip-Hop is tangent to these ideas but ups the ante by making these ideas popular: by making it possible, as in (for instance) Public Enemy's Bomb-Squad exhortation to "Party for Your Right to Fight," for you to dance to your detournement in a ritual part anti-authoritarian revolution and part celebratory confluence.  Sampling, at its best -- and, as has been stated by folks on either side of the divide evident on this thread, sampling is rarely done at its best when the needs of corporations, mainstream media conglomerates and the like are prioritized over the legitimate creative process -- is able to bridge a divide between a historical moment (say, the world and the mulitidimensional cultural moment that existed when the late great Curtis Mayfield made "Pusherman" for the film Superfly) and the present moment as it is lived (say, in a song that might sample or loop a bit of the bassline or brass from that song, like the Geto Boys' seminal "Trigga Happy N*gga").  It's almost like a Pirandello-esque cover-version-within-a-cover-version, a metastisized-but-echoic statement evident even in the paradigm represented by the lyrical content of both songs:

"I'm your mama, I'm your daddy
I'm that nigg*r in the alley
I'm your doctor, when you need
want some coke? have some weed
You know me, I'm your friend
your main boy, thick and thin...
I'm your pusherman."
                                 ---Curtis Mayfield, "Pusherman" (1972)

"Boys on my corner tryin' to run a dank game
Sellin' that phony sh*t, it's white but it ain't 'caine
Some stupid motherf*cker said I owed him
I ain't payin' the motherf*cker I don't play and I showed him
That if you come and front me with that bullsh*t
You card is filed and you'll die when I pull it
'Cuz life is a gamble when you f*ck with a psycho
No pity on another it's a game, that's how life goes
I'm hip to all the tricks of the trade
Killin', and stealin' and gankin' n*ggas to get paid
But this time, you bullsh*tted the bullsh*tter
and found out that I'm a trigga happy n*gga..."
                                   ---Geto Boys, "Trigga Happy N*gga" (1990)

The Geto Boys' song contains not just allusions to the Curtis Mayfield bassline but liberal helpings of Al Pacino as Tony Montana (from Oliver Stone's Scarface), admonishing any prospective challengers to the protagonist's ghetto-street supremacy in no uncertain terms, "Don't f*ck with me!!!!", accompanied by other indicative, moodsetting sounds like sirens and gunshots.  Maybe it's not everyone on this board's cup of tea, but as a piece of music it is galvanizing, stunning, and jaw-droppingly real, and it succeeds in not just sampling the bassline of the earlier tune but in transcribing into modern times the all-encompassing social construct of the world represented so eloquently by Mayfield in "Pusherman".  This is what the process of sampling does at its most effective: it imports and updates not just musical meaning but any manner of sociocultural meanings inherent in an earlier piece of music from one era to another, as no mere one-dimensional recapitulation or literal interpretation ("cover version") could.

That's not just indicative of a legitimate, multidimensional artform, it's indicative of something for which the possibilities are literally endless, which is why I feel that love it or loathe it, hip-hop will last a long time. 

 

 

 

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ivan_2068 wrote: I don't like Hip Hop or Rap, to be honest I hate most of it, but it doesn't make me a racist. And for those persons who feel superior open minded and love to go  labeling those of us who don't like Rap or Hip Hop as almost facists, let me remind you this is a Progressive Rock Forum, there are hundreeds if not thousands of Hip Hop forums where any of us would be considered a stupid (or not cool) for just mentioning Yes, ELP or King Crimsom, so if you want to talk about Rap and Hip Hop, those are the places, this forum is for Prog Rock. Iván

Please Ivan. No one is saying you are racist because you don't prefer to
listen to hip-hop. In fact, the only person thats been labelled a racist
outright in this little zinger has been myself by RobertPlantGuy, because
allegedly my finding the culture of sampling an inventive way for youth in
impovershed inner city areas to re-interpret the art of others when they
themselves are too poor to afford instruments and too remote from music
education to receive the same proper musical instruction as say, Genesis
from Charterhouse school for boys, apparently equates to my saying
"Rappers and Blacks in general are sub-humans who need help in
expressing themselves and can't do it on their own."

If anyone should be leaving bitter rants about being mislabelled as a
racist, it is myself. I've repeatedly stated to for my part, it is not my
intention to turn anyone on to hip-hop who could give a flying monkey
about it in the first place. As you stated, this is not a hip-hop forum, and
it is only being discussed at all because someone made it their mission
statement to demonize it on a whole as anti-art and theft, without being
prevoked, based on a Gentle Giant sample that I know for certain was
legally obtained and with good graces from the band themselves. As I
said to RobertPlant, I for one have no interest in converting your taste
into a carbon copy of my own, I was simply suggesting it may be crass to
assume that ALL hip-hop adheres to the same boring, stale, uncreative
and materialist monotony that the rap most often heard on the radio
does. That, to my eye, would be a bit like judging all of progressive rock
based on the output of the Rolling Stones or Whitesnake. The thing which
is confusing to me and I'd assume to some of the others in this thread are
why progressive music fans who might normally feel an intense sense of
curiosity and adventure in challenging new forms of music would almost
pre-dispose themselves to believing they can only look to certain genres
to find those fringe movements lurking. It just seems a bit militaristic of
what I'd assume fans of progressive music, not just prog rock, would be
willing to entertain. This refusal to believe in even the possibility of
'intelligent, original, thorough and conceptual lyricism in anything but
rock or pop.' Why logically can't it exist? Isnt it undercutting the
cleverness of humanity itself to say that an entire genre and everyone in it
are talentless? Personal taste aside, to say the irrevocable proof of its not
existing is only that youve never heard it only reflects your inability to
imagine it, not its inability to exist!

I only took issue with the ideal that Hip-Hop is not music at all which to
my taste seems a bit tyrannical and too lofty a statement for ANYONE to
make. As you stated, you hate most of it for the very reasons I do, but I
diverge when I connect with a great many inspiring and truly spiritual
voices in the underground whom many of us here seem entirely unwilling
to even entertain the existence of. Who are any of us to judge what is or
isnt music if its entirely subjective and means a great deal to so many
others? I suppose for me its just been a matter of judging the the moral
compass of the prog rock scene. My initial thought is that it might be
more embracive than that. Don't read "we like everything because were
liberalist hippy extremists." Read "we entertain the thought that
progression can be achieved anywhere, and where it crops up we wont
deny it." As its been pointed out, sampling can be done in a respectful,
legal manner and not just as a 'rip-off' but to weave bits of cultural
tapestry into new expression. Its not how tall is the tree, its how far can
you see up its trunk. No one is calling you a racist, only I have been
labelled as that. Now I will go to sleep with the intense burden of my
hatred of lesser ethnic peoples heavy on my brow. What have I been
thinking all these years. By the way, I never thought I'd be in a moral
conundrum with someone as obsessed with Genesis as I am.

At whatever the cost, prog on, sincerely

I don't see how not viewing Hip-Hop as a valid art form makes one racist. Closed minded, maybe. But not racist.

dojonane wrote: Please Ivan. No one is saying you are racist because you don't prefer to listen to hip-hop. In fact, the only person thats been labelled a racist outright in this little zinger has been myself by RobertPlantGuy, because allegedly my finding the culture of sampling an inventive way for youth in impovershed inner city areas to re-interpret the art of others when they themselves are too poor to afford instruments and too remote from music education to receive the same proper musical instruction as say, Genesis from Charterhouse school for boys, apparently equates to my saying "Rappers and Blacks in general are sub-humans who need help in expressing themselves and can't do it on their own." Nope, you were not the only one that wa accused of racist: nobody wrote: Let's be clear.  Anybody who indulges in the ridiculous cliche that "hip-hop is not music" is at best, entirely deaf and at worst, monumentally racist.  So my comment was not referred to your posts but there are interesting points you have touched. I don't consider Hip Hop or Rap music, i consider it a decadent form of poetry that has a humble birth but has changed into the easiest vehicle for untalented pseudo musicians to reach middle class white kids and exploit their guilt complex. They sample without authorizarion, ahh let them, they are poor guys exploited by an unfair Government who is guilty of everything, I heard this coment repeteadly (not by you) or the most common, "Art is property of the workld not the individusal" sorry but IMO this is BS, stealing is stealing and intellectual property is property. If anyone should be leaving bitter rants about being mislabelled as a racist, it is myself. I've repeatedly stated to for my part, it is not my intention to turn anyone on to hip-hop who could give a flying monkey about it in the first place. As you stated, this is not a hip-hop forum, and it is only being discussed at all because someone made it their mission statement to demonize it on a whole as anti-art and theft, without being prevoked, based on a Gentle Giant sample that I know for certain was legally obtained and with good graces from the band themselves. Would be nice to quote the source, being that illegal sampling is a common use in hip hop, because of my career I have access to Law reviews that have touched this cotroversial issue a lot of times, in the world of Rap and Hip Hop is comon to see settlements between non Hip Hoppers against hip hoppers and even read about a case where EMINEM was forced with a gun to transfer part of the rights of Ice Ice Baby (Which was already stealedd from Queen) to a Rap producer. As I said to RobertPlant, I for one have no interest in converting your taste into a carbon copy of my own, I was simply suggesting it may be crass to assume that ALL hip-hop adheres to the same boring, stale, uncreative and materialist monotony that the rap most often heard on the radio does. That, to my eye, would be a bit like judging all of progressive rock based on the output of the Rolling Stones or Whitesnake. No, it wouldn't be, the music they play on radio IS RAP and IS HIP HOP, Rolkling Stones and Whitesnake are not Progressive Rock nbands, so it would be at least wrong to judge a genre because of what bands of another genre play.  The thing which is confusing to me and I'd assume to some of the others in this thread are why progressive music fans who might normally feel an intense sense of curiosity and adventure in challenging new forms of music would almost pre-dispose themselves to believing they can only look to certain genres to find those fringe movements lurking. It just seems a bit militaristic of what I'd assume fans of progressive music, not just prog rock, would be willing to entertain. The problem is that I find nothing challenging in Rap or Hip Hop, the lyrics provided by Nobody on a recent post, despite his freak interpretation, are a prove of that. This refusal to believe in even the possibility of 'intelligent, original, thorough and conceptual lyricism in anything but rock or pop.' Why logically can't it exist? Isnt it undercutting the cleverness of humanity itself to say that an entire genre and everyone in it are talentless? Personal taste aside, to say the irrevocable proof of its not existing is only that youve never heard it only reflects your inability to imagine it, not its inability to exist! I'm a music maniac, and read here lots of examples of suposedly excellent hip hoppers, and ,managed to get legal samples of each and every one, and foumd exactly the same in each and every one, even this gut Inmortal Technique who spoke crap about a pseudo revolution in Perú (By a guy who lives away from the criminal acts of the terrorism), the guy knows nothing, speaks pure cr*p, but middle class white kids buy his albums and that's all what matters. Until today I haven't heard a decent Rap or Hip Hop album, nut the essense of Rap is precisely to avoid melody and this is the key element of music. I only took issue with the ideal that Hip-Hop is not music at all which to my taste seems a bit tyrannical and too lofty a statement for ANYONE to make. As you stated, you hate most of it for the very reasons I do, but I diverge when I connect with a great many inspiring and truly spiritual voices in the underground whom many of us here seem entirely unwilling to even entertain the existence of. Who are any of us to judge what is or isnt music if its entirely subjective and means a great deal to so many others? I suppose for me its just been a matter of judging the the moral compass of the prog rock scene. My initial thought is that it might be more embracive than that. Don't read "we like everything because were liberalist hippy extremists." Read "we entertain the thought that progression can be achieved anywhere, and where it crops up we wont deny it." As its been pointed out, sampling can be done in a respectful, legal manner and not just as a 'rip-off' but to weave bits of cultural tapestry into new expression. Its not how tall is the tree, its how far can you see up its trunk. No one is calling you a racist, only I have been labelled as that. Now I will go to sleep with the intense burden of my hatred of lesser ethnic peoples heavy on my brow. What have I been thinking all these years. By the way, I never thought I'd be in a moral conundrum with someone as obsessed with Genesis as I am. Again, my post wasn't directed to you. At whatever the cost, prog on, sincerely

BTW: If you want to listen music made by people who not only don't have enough to recieve musical education, but don't have enough to eat and live in terror between the sword and the wall (Military on one side and Terrorists on the other), try andean music, all the instruments are manufactured by them without ANY MUSICAL EDUCATION but listen the melodies they created initially in a pentaphonic scale with Quenas Antaras and native percussion instriuments, and better if you listen the later and more complex music with string instruments as Charango, Peruvian harp and Peruvian violin.

To be poor is not a excuse to be mediocre, and even when I admit the chance of a talented Rapper or hip hopper (Who I haven't heard until now), the genre IMO is far from being more than mediocre.

Iván