Overview

Music sampling has become a predominantly digitalized practice. It was popularized with the rise of Rap and Hip-Hop, as well as ambient music scenes, but it has a history stretching back to the earliest days of sound recording and experimental music making from around the world. Digital tools and networks allow artists to sample music across national borders and from diverse cultural traditions with relative ease, prompting questions around not only fair use, copyright, and freedom of expression, but also cultural appropriation and ""copywrongs."" For example, non-commercial forms of sharing that are now commonplace on the web bring musicians and their audiences into closer contact with emerging regimes of commercial web-tracking and state-sponsored online surveillance. Moreover, when musicians actively engage in political or social causes through their music, they are liable to both commercial and state forces of control. Shifts back to corporate ownership and control of the global music business--online and offline--highlight competing claims for commercial and cultural ownership and control of sampled music from local communities, music labels, and artists. Each case study is based on archival research, close listening, and musical analysis, alongside conversations and public reflections from artists such as David Byrne, Annirudha Das, Asian Dub Foundation, John Cage, Brian Eno, Sarah Jones, Gil Scott-Heron, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dunya Yunis, and Sonia Mehta. Sampling Politics provides ways to listen and hear (again) how sampling practices and music making work, on its own terms and in context. In so doing, M.I. Franklin corrects some errors in the public record, addressing some longstanding misperceptions over the creative, legal, and cultural legacy of music sampling in some cases of rich, and complex practices that have also been called musical ""borrowing,"" ""cultural appropriation,"" or ""theft."" This book considers the musicalities and musicianship at stake in each case, as well as the respective creative practices and performance cultures underscoring the ethics of attribution and collaboration when sampling artists make music.

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9780190855482

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Reviews

This book beautifully explores the nuances of the cultural appropriation, misrepresentation, and erasure arising from unauthorized sampling in the music industry, and offers a deep dive into the theory and performance of the sampled non-Western musical traditions. A thoroughly researched, highly informative and engaging book. -- Johnny Farraj, musician and co-author of Inside Arabic Music Sampling Politics is an innovative, thought-provoking, and thoughtful book. It helps us observe the intricacies of border crossing in the world of music as the fissures of contemporary politics. The recognition of the self within the other forms part of this politics, and in so doing allows us the 'interlocking sampling-timelines' so necessary to developing communities of practice. Distinguishing between relationships of music-in-the-making and music-in-the-taking, Franklin draws our attention to the everyday struggles of boundary un/making at the local, national, and global levels. In the contemporary political moment, when we seem more focused on the visual than the auditory, Franklin's book is a political corrective, urging us to listen closely, carefully, and most important of all, politically. I hope it will find a wide readership much beyond the study of politics and international relations. -- Shirin Rai, University of Warwick Designed to provide music edification for an IR scholarly constituency, M. I. Franklin's superb book will serve well beyond that ambition. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about the musical fields it exploresDLtreating sampling, cutting, remixing, re-textualizingDLit makes connections that breach the boundaries of the theoretical thought world within which social science fields have been Aquarantined. -- Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i, Manoa

This book beautifully explores the nuances of the cultural appropriation, misrepresentation, and erasure arising from unauthorized sampling in the music industry, and offers a deep dive into the theory and performance of the sampled non-Western musical traditions. A thoroughly researched, highly informative and engaging book. * Johnny Farraj, musician and co-author of Inside Arabic Music * Sampling Politics is an innovative, thought-provoking, and thoughtful book. It helps us observe the intricacies of border crossing in the world of music as the fissures of contemporary politics. The recognition of the self within the other forms part of this politics, and in so doing allows us the 'interlocking sampling-timelines' so necessary to developing communities of practice. Distinguishing between relationships of music-in-the-making and music-in-the-taking, Franklin draws our attention to the everyday struggles of boundary un/making at the local, national, and global levels. In the contemporary political moment, when we seem more focused on the visual than the auditory, Franklin's book is a political corrective, urging us to listen closely, carefully, and most important of all, politically. I hope it will find a wide readership much beyond the study of politics and international relations. * Shirin Rai, University of Warwick * Designed to provide music edification for an IR scholarly constituency, M. I. Franklin's superb book will serve well beyond that ambition. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about the musical fields it explores-treating sampling, cutting, remixing, re-textualizing-it makes connections that breach the boundaries of the theoretical thought world within which social science fields have been quarantined. * Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i, Manoa *

Author Information

M.I. Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths University of London.

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