There’s been a lot of debate recently about the ethics of sampling in music. Some scholars say that it’s the equivalent of stealing. They compare taking pieces of other musicians’ songs with taking their personal property. On the other side of the debate are scholars who say sampling is an art form. Yes, it involves taking pieces of other people’s music, whether it’s lyrics or the snare on a James Brown record. However, it also involves combining and recombining those bits and pieces to make something new.
How did sampling become such a hot button issue then? Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, tries to explain. He claims it has something to do with the evolution of the copyright. The first law in American was passed in 1790. It was originally intended to prevent publishers from printing authors’ books without their permission. An author had to register his or her book with the copyright office (133). Since then, though, the law has become very broad. Authors don’t have to register their books anymore. All works are copyrighted as soon as they’re created. The law also includes things other than books, like architecture, music, and art. It even includes derivative works—not just the original, but anything it inspires (Lessig 138). As a result, Lessig says people have come to associate any creative work with personal property. Sampling, however, goes against this idea.
So how important is the idea of authorship? I’ve wondered this ever since I read Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author.” He acknowledges that usually “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it.” Not so much anymore, though. He cites authors—Mallarme, Valery, Proust—who tried to divorce their words from any preconceived meanings. As a result, Barthes claims that readers have become the real authors. He writes, “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (280). They interpret other people’s signifiers. Barthes refers to this as “the intentional fallacy.”
Sometimes, though, the author plays an important role. Michel Foucault writes about this in his essay, “What is an Author?” He claims that the author’s name “permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others” (284). It serves as a way of classifying and thinking about texts. Foucault calls this the “author function.” However, it doesn’t apply to all texts. Foucault writes, “An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author” (284). In order to have an author, a text has to meet certain requirements. For example, Foucault writes that authorship “does not develop spontaneously.” It’s the accumulation of works; it evolves over time (286).
So what do Barthes and Foucault have to do with sampling? I try to explore this question of authorship with my site. A lot of the content I created myself, but the rest I found on the internet. I used different kinds of samples, including audio, video, and still images. Many aren’t recognizable. (For example, all of the images for my Flash piece I found on the internet. They’ve been manipulated so much in Photoshop that, hopefully, they can’t be traced back to their sources.) Some are recognizable, though. My question for you, then, is this: does your ability to recognize a sample affect how you interpret my site?
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." The Book History Reader. Eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006.
Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" The Book History Reader. Eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2005.