ESA/Hubble
One good thing about the last few months is the mashup of people who want to start making their own art and institutions that are releasing collections for free use. This photo is from NASA’s Hubble telescope collection, which is ginormous and free for usage under Creative Commons license Attribution 4.0 International, which means you can use them for anything as long as you clearly give credit to ESA/Hubble for the image. The British Museum lets you use select images of its collection in the same way, just not for anything that will make a profit. (Some of their collection photographs aren’t owned by the British Museum itself and some aren’t shareable because they’re of human remains or other culturally sensitive stuff, which is maybe something America needs to look into.)
Coolest of all is the Library of Congress’s project Citizen DJ. It’s a website built to help people make hip-hop beats from the LC’s public use audio files. It’s in beta right now and the full site will launch later this summer - you can go try it out now and offer feedback.
Look, I’m white. I learned about hip-hop from a friend and my college radio station’s CD library. I’m not the one to tell the story of genre even though I love it dearly. Check out Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola) and the documentary Copyright Criminals for the whole story, and download their mixtape to really get the idea.
But I do have some thoughts on sampling from an Open Access perspective.
Sampling has become a shaping issue within hip-hop, mostly because of copyright laws. Here are a few reasons why that’s not a good thing.
It limits non-rich recording artists. The uneasy solution the hip-hop world has come to is, simply, pay up. Find the copyright holders of the stuff you want to sample, ask permission, pay for usage. Okay. Fine. Great, even; everybody gets paid. But this limits access of a wide swath of musical possibilities to those who can afford to sample them. And even those who can afford the samples they want often focus on a single riff or song nowadays to keep production costs down to a dull roar. Kanye West’s (I know; look, he’s a great producer and if he has meds I hope he starts taking them again soon) (and no, white people can’t say, rap, or sing the n-word, ever, how is that still a fucking debate) “Gold Digger” is a great modern and obvious example of both with Jamie Foxx’s riff on “I Got a Woman” as its hook. (PLUS IT FUCKING SLAPS STILL, FIGHT ME.) Both of those practices take away the awesome diversity of experiences and DIY skills that make hip-hop interesting in the first place.
It changes the fundamental sound of hip-hop. This point is a direct result of the first. Public Enemy started in that sweet spot of the 1980s when copyright laws were lax and they could lay on the samples thick as they wanted. But as lawsuits started closing loopholes, they had to switch to creating their own sound samples, which changed their musical direction completely. You could argue that limiting the use of samples made hip-hop become more creative by forcing artists in that direction. And you’d probably be right, if the law was applied to everyone equally. Which, spoiler alert, it’s not.
Why hasn’t Girl Talk gotten sued? More importantly, why has a white kid named Gregg not been sued for the 350 samples of songs that were literally top dollar when he stitched them together, but Biz Markie had to pull an album for basically the same reason? There’s a lot more to the history of copyright and hip-hop, covered nicely by this NYU paper about Girl Talk. TL;DNR: nobody actually knows what the fuck “fair use” means or what it looks like in music. It’s unfortunately close to obscenity, in that courts “know it when they see it,” which means case-by-case decisions that contradict each other and tend to favor folks like Gregg over those like Chuck D. When Gregg’s cases even get to court, that is - he’s never even gotten a cease and desist letter, apparently.
While Danger Mouse can’t even release The Grey Album for love OR money. Y’all go listen to that and tell me we’ve got a fair system set up.
No, for real, listen to it here. The Internet Archive has Danger Mouse’s back, at least. You can even download it and use it to make your own art creation 10000% more badass.