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Shared DNA in Music

(pudding.cool)
248 points ksampath02 | 1 comments | 01 Apr 25 21:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.633s | source
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crawsome ◴[02 Apr 25 03:23 UTC] No.43553354[source]▶
Why is it "Shared DNA" if all rappers do is sample and totally rip-off music (Logos, artist names etc) before them?

The concept of "DNA" with music goes much deeper than some lucky nobody who sampled someone's life work so they could pollute it with lowest common denominator poetry and a Roland Drum Machine.

I submit that oogling over people who steal music by sampling is not that deep, and there's deeper methods of musical analysis than "This band sampled this beat, this means they're a natural progression of art".

Every example I skimmed over was some hiphop artist who ripped off music before them.

Other artists have some shame and just copy chord progressions, but rappers went so far to just completely steal parts of the song.

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1. tsumnia ◴[02 Apr 25 14:23 UTC] No.43557028[source]▶
There's a great video essay series known as "Everything is a Remix" by Kirby Ferguson [1] if you have an hour to spare. Ferguson uses the trends of music sampling as a base for how artists draw inspiration from others. The controversy of sampling has been used across genres, include around minute 9 Ferguson points out that Led Zepplin were considered ripoffs for their appropriation of Jake Holmes. Axis of Awesome also has a "chord progression song" [2] that makes fun of how similar many pop songs are.

The video draws a nice parallel to how so much in our world serves as "inspiration" for our own works, but acknowledges the controversy around using a single source as "too much inspiration". Especially as we move into whatever copyright arguments are getting made toward AI right now, I think it serves as a nice outline on why this is such a complicated matter.

[1] https://www.everythingisaremix.info/everything-is-a-remix-20...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I