It took a nation of lawyers ...

[byrdie]

<s>"Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It's rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989." </s>

For the sake of Coz's blood pressure, I present this snippet instead:

• Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything -- they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

- Chuck D. from "How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop", an interview with Public Enemy

[Cozmo D]

The next time I see Chuck I'm gonna take him to task over this bullshit.