Blog #5 Music Sampling

         Without a doubt one can determine that all forms of music from any culture or social context is incredibly unique and varies in terms of pitch, tempo, and rhythm.  Even the most minimalist of music is extremely complex in its own method of madness. For example John Cage’s 4’33” composition exemplifies the use of no instruments, but rather leaves his audience in silence for a random period of time, to illustrate the sounds of what our environment and the people create around us.  Well with all of the recent controversy of copyright infringement in the hip-hop music industry, is this not similar to Cage perhaps, using sounds from other people in the audience to construct his piece? Or maybe he is just stealing time away from our lives by playing absolutely nothing?               

         With technology at its peak, it is hard to turn away from computer-generated sounds, nifty turntables, and applications that make beats for you, not to mention utilizing works from previous artists and implementing pieces into your own.  That said I had to go back a couple decades into the famous rock band Journey and their song Send Her My Love.  Joe Budden sampled Send Her My Love and renamed it Send Him Our love. Incredibly, the song is very similar to the original, and I find it to be exceptionally innovative and creative. While the song pulls lyrics and beat from the original Journey song, it keeps its originality by applying its own overlying lyrics, beat, and intentions.  It is obvious that there are mixed feelings about artists using previous works and somewhat implementing them into their own sound. Of course, there will be varying opinions from different perspectives with certain songs. In the case of this song, and regardless of me being a die-hard journey fan, I can agree that it is inflicting with copyright laws because it was taking the original directly and plugging it into their song.  Where as with another song I searched, Blink- 182’s All the Small Things was sampled by Pearl Jam and in this scenario, the song had taken nothing at all original from Blink’s All the Small Things, and more so only had similar sounding power chords. There is definitely a fine line when tampering with music from the past, despite one’s positive and respectful intentions when composing remixed music.  So where should I stand? I don’t know.  I do know that legal rights are forcing cultural consumption into cultural production and is allowing for a more diversified culture within the music industry (Keller).  That’s a positive start.