Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop. Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. But the medium really took off with the arrival of digital sampling, wherein a recording of one or more pieces of music (or later, non-musical sound) was repeated, often with alterations, to create a new piece. First it was two turntables, then two turntables with an MC adding vocals. But it was hip hop that plucked sampling from the experimental fringes and placed it front and center for all to hear.Īs hip hop came into being in New York City in the 1970s, it had always made use of multiple sound sources. Laurie Anderson developed a “tape-bow” violin in 1977 for her live and recorded art music pieces. “Tape music” was performed as early as 1944, and in 1953 John Cage presented a piece composed of 600 different sounds that he’d recorded over the course of a year. Public Enemy Sampling: A Collage for the EarĪlmost as soon as audio tape came into being in the 1930s musicians had begun experimenting with it, putting together pieces from different sources to create new works out of the “found” parts. This breadth of knowledge would be crucial to the musical technique that they adopted and helped define: sampling, wherein sounds, often from other albums, are recorded, manipulated and then pieced back together to create a new musical work. (Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola) So together, you know, we started working out different ideas. Eric is coming from a musician’s perspective. Shocklee says the different backgrounds contributed to the final product: My grandmother would have Etta James, Muddy Waters.” Shocklee told Torsten Schmidt that his father had been “a crazy jazz buff” and that all his musical background arose “from the aesthetics of jazz.” On the other hand, The Bomb Squad member Eric “Vietnam” Sadler was a guitar player. My mother was into Stax, Motown, Atlantic. Chuck D told Billboard that he had become a record collector because “my parents collected records, belonging to the Columbia Record Club and jazz record clubs. The original members of Public Enemy - Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) and Flavor Flav (William Drayton) - and of their production team, The Bomb Squad, led by producer Hank Shocklee, had grown up in rich and diverse musical environments. This success was no accident, nor did it come without preparation. LA Times music critic Robert Hilburn called their first four albums “the most acclaimed body of work ever by a rap act ” Rolling Stone ranked them at 44 on their 100 Greatest Artists list - the highest ranking of any rap or hip hop act - and in 2013 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As Adam Rauch wrote for Rolling Stone, they “completely changed the game musically,” and that game-changing style propelled them to the top of the music world. Public Enemy, the self-titled “prophets of rage,” didn’t merely succeed at hip hop, they defined it.
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns, Getty Images.
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