Sampling and Appropriation

This week, I had to do a couple of readings by Steven Shaviro and Jeff Rice. The reading from Shaviro was a passage from Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society. The majority of the passage that I had to read was about sampling or appropriation. Sampling is the art of taking a collage of other peoples work and putting them together to make your work. An example of this is found on youtube. Apple, make a commercial called “Think Different”. They took a variety of videos of different genius icons and put them together in their commercial, which associated Apple with the geniuses. They used words like, rebellious and not normal to make their product “cool”. Then Shapiro, talks about sampling in rap. On page 68, he says that, “….sampling in rap is a way of making new connections between the past and the present…”. He also makes reference to how sampling “revitalizes” old songs by looping the old song throughout the new song.

I also had to read a couple of chapters from Jeff Rices’ book, Writing about Cool. These two chapters were about popular culture and technology. On page 56, Rice said, “Popular culture is a realm in which a considerable amount of expression takes place. Most of us receive the bulk of our information through the media of popular culture….”. Another thing he talked about, and I found very interesting, is how major networks programs are “transformed into entertainment”. I find this comment to be very true, although, I wish that weren’t the case. Today, media can’t put on stories that are “good” because not very many people would read or want to hear about them. They only want to hear the death stories or if someone committed a crime. So the media is forced to publish gruesome stories or to face bankruptcy. Jeff Rice also talked about when you choose to sample someone else’s work, you need to have your audience in mind. An example that totally captures this idea, is when Public Enemy addresses segregation they sample Martin Luther King, Jr. It connects with their audience and emphasizes the point that they are trying to get across.

Today, as a class, we were asked if we believe that sampling is plagiarism. I think that in the traditional writing sense, it is. I think that it is illegal because I would guess that most of the time the old work, that is sampled, is not cited. But then, I also understand that if everything was protected and only in private hands then creativity would end. People have been using other people works for inspiration for centuries. I believe that the line between sampling and plagiarism is very thin is dependent on the person who is sampling.