Discoveries

In the past few weeks of digging in the (mostly internet) crates, I've found a lot of useful materials. I'm going to use this post to document the best stuff.

Thanks to a response to a post on the hiphop/turntablism blog The Essential Elements, I was alerted to the presence of this video:

This is a bonafide hip hop holy grail! It documents an early freestyle battle between the young Lord Finesse and Percee P. They're rapping over a Mark the 45 King loop of the Funky Drummer! Although it's pretty low-fi (I actually like that about this) it really captures the ambience outside the Patterson Projects in the South Bronx.

Somehow I missed this one in my previous combing through youtube. It's a James Brown live medley from 1968 that has the best Clyde Stubblefield footage I've found yet. He's so young! Look for the drum break in Cold Sweat at around the 6:00 mark.

When I was researching Creative Commons, this interview with Negativland's Mark Hosler (an early and important influence on my own use of sampling as an artist) was really useful in helping to understand the limits of the CC model.

By comic artist Kagan McLeod, here's a great artistic representation of the Think break, another James Brown-derived sample that has an even richer history than the Funky Drummer. This is kind of another version of what I'm trying to do.

(click for full size)

This blog post by Ethan Hein has a nice visualization of the FD loop:

 I found some great info and images of King Records, which is both the studio where James Brown recorded the Funky Drummer, and the company that put the record out, here and here. It turns out King was a model of both a racially- and vertically-integrated company (they specialized in both country and r&b recordings).

 Jesse Kriss has a cool interactive visualization of famous samples.

This company "replays" or recreates samples as a way for companies to avoid paying royalties for them. This is so postmodern it blows my mind! 

The amazing and very helpful Larisa Mann/DJ Ripley shared her annotated bibliography on Intellectual Property with me.

Through her blog I found this great article by Simon Reynolds, a music writer I've been a fan of for a long time, entitled What Is Your Sampling Epiphany? 

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