The Kids Are Sampling Your Collection

Among the many things that I enjoy about returning to my parents’ house is visiting their physical music collection. This is in part due to the anecdotes I know surrounding each album—the college housing my mom was in when an artist was peaking in popularity, the concert where my dad got unwillingly involved in a group fight.

One of the best weeks in recent memory was the one where I was given an allowance to organize their collection. I returned to school, pockets stuffed with swiped CDs whose absences won’t be discovered for a few years, and my own physical collection 20% larger. These illicitly acquired records are still my favorites; they have a sort of spellbinding quality.

They are meaningful to me as pieces of a collection that accumulated organically alongside my parents’ lives—every album represents a decision to purchase that was once practical rather than nostalgic. In an almost autobiographical way, the collection reflects changing tastes, financial circumstances, and relationships. There is a certain temporal authenticity to that, in which material traces of use, such as scratches or receipts stuffed in sleeves, carry the atmosphere in which they were first heard.

Much gets lost or forgotten in digital music media. Data accumulates rather than physical history; music made entirely in this digital age must also be disconnected from music history. Yet the instinct itself has remained consistent. “Crate digging” has always been about the patient excavation of overlooked histories, forgotten sounds, and improbable connections. Today’s producers simply conduct that search through different terrain: unremarkable YouTube uploads, forgotten blogs, and Discogs listings.

Rap music has long been intertwined with crate digging and repurposing older music; this has continued into an era where sampling is a software feature. The best producers treat sampling as an act of reinterpretation rather than reproduction; a five-second soul loop might be pitched, chopped into tiny fragments, rearranged, filtered, and layered with entirely new drums until it becomes something almost unrecognizable. And this digital excavation just might involve some of the most broken-in records from your own collection.

New Jersey-based musician Frank Dorrey releases experimental hip hop under the moniker DORIS, and his music often feels like sound collage pieces due to the high concentration of sampling. One of his most popular songs, “close friends,” revolves around the rhythmic, sped-up repetition of Toni Braxton’s 1996 hit “I Love Me Some Him.”

Sleigh Bells are a noisy electropop duo from Brooklyn whose album Treats received significant critical acclaim. The album’s standout cut, “Rill Rill,” makes use of the earworm acoustic guitar riff throughout “Can You Get To That” by Funkadelic.

The rave-oriented electronic music genre of “jungle” has a similarly sample-based production style, where multiple popular tracks will be layered as an organizing principle of the song’s instrumentals alongside fast-paced drum breaks. This drum break pattern that much of jungle uses as a foundational backbone is itself a sample—the energetically syncopated rhythm so often looped in the genre comes from a six-second drum solo in funk track “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons.

Hopper1000 is a jungle DJ and producer from Miami whose drum-and-bass hit “cars that go BOOM” interpolates the 1988 L’Trim chart-topper of the same name, slowing it down and embedding it with heavy basslines and ethereal synthesizers.

Over in the Midwest, RP Boo is an iconic Chicago jungle and juke DJ who recontextualizes Stevie Wonder’s “Lately” on his own track “U-Don’t No.”

Soul and jazz are, in many ways, the musical DNA of rap production. Sampling became a way for hip hop to preserve, reinterpret, and extend Black musical traditions rather than break from them.

An entire subgenre of rap, aptly named “jazz rap”, incorporates the instrumentation of older jazz music, whose rich harmonies, live instrumentation, and loose rhythmic feel gave producers material that felt organic even after being chopped and looped. Jazz samples became especially associated with conscious and alternative hip hop through producers like A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock, and J Dilla, and the legacy continues today through the likes of groups such as Nujabes, Mach-Hommy, and Billy Woods.

Musician Earl Sweatshirt has a ten-minute track, “Solace,” which is built entirely around post-bop jazz musician Ahmad Jamal’s rendition of the jazz standard “April In Paris.”

His song “Riot!” also samples horns and a guitar lick from the Hugh Masekela track of the same name, while “Super Rich Kids” interpolates Mary J. Blige’s 1992 “Real Love.”

Similarly iconic jazz artist Miles Davis is sampled countlessly in rap: Irish singer Rejjie Snow uses 1971’s “Sivad” for her track “Black Pancakes,” Radiohead uses “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” in “Kinetic,” and aforementioned Nujabes interpolates “Joshua” from Steps To Heaven for their song “Horn in the Middle.”

What all of these artists share is an understanding that music history is not something to be archived behind glass, but to be continually reimagined. Maybe that’s why I still gravitate toward the CDs I quietly slipped from my parents’ shelves. They’re not meaningful because they’re physical objects or because they belong to some supposedly superior era of music consumption. They’re meaningful because they remind me that every collection, whether it lives in a milk crate or a labyrinth of browser tabs, is ultimately an accumulation of curiosity.

The archive may have become diffuse, scattered across the internet rather than concentrated in record stores, but it remains an archive nonetheless. And today’s young musicians are still crate digging, carrying fragments of forgotten music into the future so that someone else might stumble upon them and begin the search all over again.

-Sydney Willis

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