Drawing on the culture’s history before and after the birth of rap music, this book argues that the values attributed to Hip Hop by ‘postmodern’ scholars stand in stark contrast with those that not only implicitly guided its aesthetic elements, but are explicitly voiced by Hip Hop’s pioneers and rap music’s most consequential artists. It argues that the structural evacuation of the voices of its founders and organic intellectuals in the postmodern theorization of Hip Hop has foreclosed the culture’s ethical values and political goals from scholarly view, undermining its unity and progress. Through a historically informed critique of the hegemonic theoretical framework in Hip Hop Studies, and a re-centering of the culture’s fundamental proscription against ‘biting,' this book articulates and defends the aesthetic and ethical values of Hip Hop against their concealment and subversion by an academic discourse that merely ‘samples’ the culture for its own reactionary ends.

This ground-breaking book examines the multifaceted dynamics between copyright law and music borrowing within a rich diversity of music genres from across the world. It evaluates how copyright laws under different generic conventions may influence, or are influenced by, time-honoured creative borrowing practices. Leading experts from around the world scrutinise a carefully selected range of musical genres, including pop, hip-hop, jazz, blues, electronic and dance music, as well as a diversity of region-specific genres, such as Jamaican music, River Plate Tango, Irish folk music, Hungarian folk music, Flamenco, Indian traditional music, Australian indigenous music, Maori music and many others. This genre-conscious analysis builds on a theoretical section in which musicologists and lawyers offer their insights into fundamental issues concerning music genre categorisation, the typology of music borrowing and copyright law's ontological struggle with musical borrowing in theory and practice. The chapters are threaded together by a central theme, ie, that the cumulative nature of music creativity is the result of collective bargaining processes among many 'musicking' parties that have socially constructed creative music authorship under a rich mix of generic conventions.

Viewing hip-hop as the postmodern successor to African American culture's Jazz modernism, this book examines hip-hop music's role in the history of the African-American experience.

How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib Sampling—incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely—has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through forty years of musical innovation and reinvention. Nate Patrin tells the story of how sampling built hip-hop through the lens of four pivotal artists: Grandmaster Flash as the popular face of the music’s DJ-born beginnings; Prince Paul as an early champion of sampling’s potential to elaborate on and rewrite music history; Dr. Dre as the superstar who personified the rise of a stylistically distinct regional sound while blurring the lines between sampling and composition; and Madlib as the underground experimentalist and record-collector antiquarian who constantly broke the rules of what the mainstream expected from hip-hop. From these four artists’ histories, and the stories of the people who collaborated, competed, and evolved with them, Patrin crafts a deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated: the aesthetic and reconstructive power of one of the most revelatory forms of popular culture to emerge from postwar twentieth-century America. And you can nod your head to it.

Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects—from hip-hop artists’ pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of “digging” for rare records—Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities. This second edition of the book includes a new foreword by Jeff Chang and a new afterword by the author.

The art of sampling -- one of the most innovative music processes to emerge in the late-twentieth century -- stands today as both a celebrated art form and a cultural activity within the hip hop/rap music tradition and beyond. 'The Art of Sampling' (Amir Said, author of 'The BeatTips Manual'), examines this complex and controversial music process, and presents a study that illuminates the history, creative mechanics, and philosophy of sampling, while also exploring the implications that it holds for copyright law. Divided into three primary parts, including an in-depth History part, a robust Instruction (how-to) part, and a highly comprehensive Copyright Law part, 'The Art of Sampling' is detailed, sharply informative, and engaging. Astute and intensely thought-provoking, it's the definitive book on sampling in the hip hop/rap music tradition and copyright law, and one of the most striking and poignant music studies to come along in years.