Cut-and-paste Dance Music
When the cut-and-paste Dance collage Pump Up the Volume topped the Dance charts in the fall of 1987, it opened the floodgates for sampling in Dance music. Sampling was not a new technique or technology, but inexpensive digital sampling equipment made the technique widely accessible. The vogue for sampling led to some recordings made up entirely of other pre-recorded elements from a wide variety of sources. Soon, copyright law caught up with the use of these elements without permission and the frequency of use of sampling was significantly reduced by the early 1990's.
Sampling is the technique of taking a segment out of a previously created recording and utilizing it as a sound element (instrument line, riff, vocal segment) in a new recording. The origins of electronic sampling probably date back to the invention of Musique Concrete in 1948. Musique Concrete was the technique of taking recorded tape loops, altering them in some way such as by speeding up or slowing down, and piecing them back together to create a new recording. Musique Concrete techniques were exploited to great effect by various Rock artists in the 1960's including the Beatles on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
The cutting back and forth between records by early Hip-Hop DJs in the late 70's and early 80's soon led to scratch mixing of particular elements from a wide variety of recordings. The mixing of Blondie, Queen, Sugarhill Gang and others into Grandmaster Flash's Adventures On the Wheels Of Steel is an excellent example of this form of sampling.
Arthur Baker 's used of sampled elements in his remixes of the mid-1980's brought sampling forward with more sophisticated use of technology. The introduction of Fairlight sampling computers made sampling techniques more efficient and cheaper for a wide variety of applications. Soon a number of Hip-Hop and Dance producers and artists were experimenting with samples.
Pump Up the Volume appeared in late 1987 and featured a host of samples from Eric B. and Rakim and Ofra Haza among many others. At around the same time, the first recordings by Bill Drummond and Jimi Cauty, as the JAMS (Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu) appeared. Their album 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On) featured long samples of music by Led Zeppelin, Abba, and the Beatles. Abba sued on grounds of copyright infingement and the album was eventually pulled from record stores.
Legal issues began to swirl around the practice of sampling even as such classics as the Timelords' (the new incarnation of Drummond and Cauty) Doctorin' the Tardis were released. Samples were incorporated into a wide range of music from De La Soul's acclaimed debut album 3 Feet High and Rising (using bits from Johnny Cash to Public Enemy) to Black Box's Ride On Time (using a sample from Loleatta Holloway's Love Sensation) . However, by the early 90's the legal backlash led to requirements to legally clear all samples used on recordings. Financial reality significantly reduced the wide-ranging use of samples by the mid-90's, but sampling has remained a significant element in a wide spectrum of popular music.