Last night I watched Copyright Criminals<\/a>, a documentary covering the legality of samples in rap\/hip-hop music. <\/p>\n

Both sides of the issue are covered. You’ll get to hear from seminal DJs like DJ Qbert, Mix Master Mike, Hank Shocklee and Shock G who argue that turntables are instruments and sample-laden songs are simply music collages, reflections of pop culture. Inversely we get to hear from Steve Albini (who refers to sampling as “stealing”) and several music lawyers who cite laws and court cases.<\/p>\n

Specifically we hear about De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising”, which used an unlicensed sample from The Turtles and soon found themselves in De La Court. Around the same time, Biz Markee was also sued for using a sample. These two lawsuits put an end to the “sample free” world of rap music — although I was greatly surprised that the David Bowie and Queen vs. Vanilla Ice (who used the hook from “Under Pressure” in his hit single “Ice Ice Baby”) wasn’t mentioned. Queen and David Bowie ended up with 50% authorship of “Ice Ice Baby” which made them millions of dollars. It was a huge news story at the time and, again, I can’t believe it wasn’t at least mentioned.<\/p>\n

A disproportional amount of the documentary — maybe 10 minutes of the film’s 55-minute run time — focuses on the story of Clyde Stubblefield, James Brown’s drummer. Stubblefield recorded lots of “drum breaks” (small snippets of drums with no instruments or vocals over them), which are popular among DJs. The documentary discusses how even though often times these drum samples are “cleared” (paid for), the money ends up going to record labels and not the artists who performed the music. “They tell me I’m the most sampled drummer of all time,” Stubblefield notes, “but I never made a dime from in. Nobody even ever thanked me.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The documentary also touches on a fact that I’ve said many times: sample-thick albums like the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back” simply couldn’t be released today, as clearing all the samples in those albums would be cost prohibitive. The end of the documentary mentions “underground artists” who sample whatever they want and release their work for free on the Internet.<\/p>\n

It’s a shame that “Copyright Criminals” isn’t two or three hours in length. Many of the film’s subjects only appear in one or two small segments (DJ Qbert, for example, gets less than 30 seconds of screen time). I thought the documentary touched on a lot of interesting topics, most of which I would have loved to hear a lot more information about. <\/p>\n

You can get Copyright Criminals from Amazon for $25, or also from Netflix. <\/p>\n

Watch the trailer here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I watched Copyright Criminals, a documentary covering the legality of samples in rap\/hip-hop music. Both sides of the issue are covered. You’ll get to hear from seminal DJs like DJ Qbert, Mix Master Mike, Hank Shocklee and Shock G who argue that turntables are instruments and sample-laden songs are simply music collages, reflections of pop culture. Inversely we get to hear from Steve Albini (who refers to sampling as “stealing”) and several music lawyers who cite laws and court cases. Specifically we hear about De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising”, which used an unlicensed sample from… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}