Making Beats: The Art of Sample-based Hip-hop (Music Culture) - Tapa dura

"Making Beats is a leap into the future of hip-hop studies. The book should be required reading for scholars and serious fans of hip-hop music and culture." -- Mark Anthony Neal, author of Songs in the Key of Black Life

Despite having created one of the most important musical cultures of the last fifty years, hip-hop composers who use digital sampling are rarely taken seriously as artists. But hip-hop deejays and producers have collectively developed an artistic system that features a complex aesthetic, a detailed array of social protocols, a rigorous set of ethical expectations and a rich historical consciousness. Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop is the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods and values of this surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects - from hip-hop artists' pedagogical methods to the Afro-diasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of "digging" for rare records - Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values and cultural realities.