Description
This paper explores some of the empiric-conceptual and challenges arising from research undertaken for Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural (Oxford University Press 2021) given the formative role that the ‘digital’ now plays in scholarship at the popular culture and world politics nexus. I argue for a consideration of sampling as more than the sum of the myriad digital tools and software applications that regularly (re)fashion samples for western pop and classical music playlists.
Using additional examples and ongoing conversations with musicians, the paper develops an approach beyond privileging lyrical content as the primary locus for music-making and/as politics. Furthering the argument that music sampling’s repertoires of sonic ‘borrowing’ techniques, now contingent upon digital tools and internet-dependent networks, are inherently political, I return to some of my starker findings. The aim is to further scholarly forms of political listening and contribute to correcting misperceptions about the geocultural provenance of sampled works - their musical aesthetics, performance cultures, musicianship cross the “colour line” undergirding the global cultural industries and world music playlists. For debates over the copyrights and copywrongs of music sampling, however construed (e.g. as creativity or its absence, modes of signifyin’, or cultural appropriation) continue to rage.
