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Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop.

Article Excerpt
Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. By Joseph G. Schloss. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. (Music/Culture.) [xiii, 246 p. ISBN 0-8195-6696-9. $24.95.] Bibliography, discography, index.

Consider an aesthetics of music in which recordings are superior to live performance, originality is determined by the skill with which one manipulates the music of others, and widely accepted notions of authorship and intellectual property are all but dismissed. It is an aesthetics that inverts many of the traditional values of Western classical music; it is also an aesthetics that underlies one of the most influential and popular musics in the world today: hip-hop.

In Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, ethnomusicologist Joseph Schloss explores hip-hop aesthetics as manifested in the practice of digital sampling, the electronic borrowing and manipulation of recorded sound. In hip-hop, sampling typically draws upon funk and soul records of the 1960s and 1970s to create the instrumental portion of a song (or "beats") that accompany the rhymes of the rapper (also known as the MC). Schloss is hardly the first scholar to study hip-hop sampling, but what distinguishes Making Beats is its ethnographic approach, and its focus on the producers (many of whom he interviewed) who compose using digital sampling. As Schloss explains from the outset, "Some people make beats. This book is about those people" (p. 1).

Schloss places ethnography front and center, opening the book with an excerpt from an interview with a producer named Mr. Supreme, one of his consultants (He avoids the more traditional "informant."). "I wanted...

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