The credit for exploiting this possibility is generally given to Queens-based producer Marley Marl. As Chairman Mao writes, “One day during a Captain Rock remix session, Marley accidentally discovered modern drum-sound sampling, thus magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.” (Chairman Mao 1997: 88). The innovation was quickly embraced, and almost immediately ended the era of live instrumentation. In fact, as I will discuss later in this chapter, many current artists characterize hip-hop’s brief use of live instruments as merely a deviation, a capitulation to circumstance, rather than a step in hip-hop’s evolution.
Hip-hop sampling grew out of the deejays’ practice of repeating breaks until they formed a musical cycle of their own. The segments favored by early hip-hop producers tended toward funk and soul breaks, which—even in their original context—were clearly defined. An untrained listener, for example, can easily hear the beginning and end of the break in James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” (1969), perhaps the single most-exploited sample in hip-hop music history. The break begins when everything but the drums stops playing and ends eight measures later when the other instruments resume. This conception of the break is consistent with that of the earliest hip-hop deejays; the drums are by far the most important element. In fact, the idea of a break with lackluster drums would actually be contradiction in terms.
But the advent of sampling yielded a significant change: because more than one loop could now be played simultaneously, producers could take their drums and their music from different records. With samplers, any music could be combined with a great drum pattern to make what is essentially a composite break. Moreover, different loops (and “stabs”—short bursts of sound) could be brought in and taken out at different times.3 This substantially broadened the spectrum of music that could be pressed into service for hip-hop.
Today, the term “break” refers to any segment of music (usually four measures or less) that could be sampled and repeated. For example, the song “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” by Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth (1992) is based on a break from a late-sixties jazz artist. The break in this case, however, is not a moment of intense drum activity but a two-measure excerpt from a saxophone solo. Presumably one who was not already familiar with the hip-hop song would not hear those particular measures as being significant in the context of the original music. In contemporary terms, then, a break is any expanse of music that is thought of as a break by a producer. On a conceptual level, this means that the break in the original jazz record was brought into existence retroactively by Pete Rock’s use of it. In other words, for the twenty-four years between its release and the day Pete Rock sampled it, the original song contained no break. From that day on, it contained the break from “They Reminisce over You.” Producers deal with this apparent breaching of the time-space continuum with typically philosophical detachment. Conventionally, they take the position that the break had always been there, it just took a great producer to hear and exploit it.4 Record collecting is approached as if potential breaks have been unlooped and hidden randomly throughout the world’s music. It is the producer’s job to find them. This philosophy is apparent in a contemporary hip-hop magazine’s review of a relatively obscure 1971 album, in which the author describes one of the songs as if it had been pieced together from subsequent hip-hop breaks:
It opens with a solo sax that was re-arranged slightly to become the sax in Artifacts’ “Wrong Side of the Tracks.” Prince Paul’s loop from “Beautiful Night” follows, along with everything but the drums and lyrics of Showbiz and AG’s “Hold Ya Head” (sensing a trend?). This bassline also reappeared on Marley Marl’s remix of The Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka.” The cut closes out with the loop from Smif-n-Wessun’s “Bucktown” is [sic] immediately followed by the Cella Dwella’s classic “Land of the Lost.” (Turner 2000: 64)
DJ Jazzy Jay even goes so far as to suggest that the original musicians may not have understood the significance of their own work: “Maybe those records were ahead of their time. Maybe they were made specifically for the rap era; these people didn’t even know what they were making at that time. They thought, ‘Oh, we want to make a jazz record’” (Leland and Stein 1987: 26).
As digital sampling became the method of choice for hip-hop deejays (who, now that they used sampling, began to call themselves “producers”), their preexisting hunger for rare records became of paramount importance. They developed elaborate distribution systems for records and knowledge about records, yet still went to great lengths to “discover” new breaks before others did. In the mid-1980s, a Bronx-based deejay named Lenny Roberts began to press compilations of rare recordings, each containing a sought-after rhythm break, under the name Ultimate Breaks and Beats (Leland and Stein 1987: 27). This development reinforced the producers’ resolve to find new breaks that were rarer, and in response Roberts would compile those new breaks on new editions of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. As a result of such competition, hip-hop producers soon found themselves with record collections numbering in the tens of thousands as well as a deeply embedded psychological need to find rare records.
At the same time, this process established a canon of records—some of which appeared on Ultimate Breaks and Beats, some of which did not —that a producer had to be familiar with, an expectation that still stands to this day. For example, Bob James’s 1975 jazz fusion recording “Take Me to the Mardi Gras,” though it does not appear on Ultimate Breaks and Beats, was a favorite of early hip-hop deejays and producers (most notably, it forms the basis for Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper” [1986]). It is so well known, in fact, that few contemporary producers would even consider using it for their own productions.5 Nevertheless, producers must have the recording in their collections if they want to be taken seriously by others. As I discuss in later chapters, record collecting occupies a role for hip-hop producers similar to that of practice and performing experience for other musicians. Peers would consider a producer who did not own canonical records to be unprepared, in much the same way that jazz musicians would criticize a colleague who did not know the changes to “Stardust.”
The Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, for its part, eventually grew to twenty-five volumes and spawned hundreds of imitators (see chapters 5 and 6).
That was big, big, big, big influence to me, you know. I had ’em back in the days in like 1983, 1984, before they were even Ultimate Breaks, when they was just Octopus records with the little picture of the Octopus DJ on ’em…. That’s what they were originally. And they didn’t list any of the artists’ names or anything, it was just the titles of the songs, no publishing info or nothing. It was just something somebody pressed up out of their house or something. Yeah, they were a big, big influence, man. I mean, I had all of ’em: doubles and triples of everything.
That was the foundation of hip-hop, man, ’cause you listen to all the rap records when they first started sampling, and it was all that Ultimate Break stuff. That’s the foundation, right there. (Stroman 1999)
Although many producers today see such compilations as a violation of producers’ ethics (see chapter 5), most make an exception for the Ultimate Breaks and Beats collection on the grounds of its historical significance in alerting producers to the value of breaks in the first place: “Those were the ones that started folks looking for breaks and shit, anyway. I don’t know too many people that got the original ‘Substitution’ break, you know? So nine times out of ten, if you hear that shit on a rap record, they got it from Ultimate Breaks and Beats” (Samson S. 1999).6 Of course, not everyone made this exception:
Even [Ultimate Breaks and Beats]—I’ll tell ya, man—there was a lotta mixed feelings about those, too…. You talk to old school cats like Grandmaster Flash, and they’ll tell you that was like the worst thing to ever happen to hip-hop ’cause it took all the mystery out of the whole breakbeat game. But it inspired me, man. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know if I’d even be in it to the level that I am now. (Stroman 1999)
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