Can Sampling Work For Writing the Same Way it has for DJing & Producing?
I’ll be upfront in saying I have not read Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann, and the mere thought of reading a 17 year old author’s debut on clubbing and drugs, makes me cringe… I don’t care how highly praised it is.
But that isn’t the point of this post. The New York Times had a great article today about the controversy young Helene’s book has stirred. You see, while initially released to glowing praise, certain passages and chunks of Axotol Roadkill have since been accused of being lifted from a variety of sources. Helene Hegemann’s reponse to these allegations has simply been this:
I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me
The problem is that Helene never at any point cited in her book the original source material nor stated from the outset that she would be “sampling” existing prose. Her excuse was that she didn’t understand she needed to (oh how 17 of her!). She says her “sampling” of text was just a byproduct of her generation and the youth culture, comparing it to DJing.
I honestly think it’s a pretty intriguing concept that, if done correctly, could be giving new perspective and purpose to old ideas. Our modern Pop Culture says sampling is OK, and so sampling back from itself to create something “new” should in theory be acceptable, or shouldn’t it? How is it really all that different from countless generations looking to and appropriating religious ideas, archetypes, and text in creating their own works? Of course those never actually lifted whole passages and pages, but that was then and this is now. Sure some may poo-poo the idea and impact of Pop Culture as inspiration, but like it or not, it’s quickly becoming the dogma of choice for each incoming generation.
Now in regards to Helene Hegemann, I feel she should have always been upfront about her intentions and use of material not her own while constructing this story… but my question is how do you all feel about the concept of sampling for works of literature?
- My Pal the Crook
February 12th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
The difference is that music has the ability to stay in our heads, no matter who the person is. Once you catch that beat you instantly have it learned to memory. We can use those beats in our heads to track down the original author. That’s why George Clinton loved to be sampled. It’s how we’re wired I guess. Spoken word almost falls along those same lines which is why most can instantly recognize a Martin Luther King Jr. or a President Kennedy speech.
Silent text on a book doesn’t have that same trigger. Without someone quoting excerpts from a book over and over again like is done for popular books, we will never know the original source material: “Call me Ishmael”, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and so on.
In other words, it’s not the same.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
I’d have to read the book to form a valid opinion on this particular case…so it looks like I’m never going to form a valid opinion on this particular case.
But as an overall stylistic method, it could work. Depends on context. Depends on the book. DEPENDS ON THE AUTHOR.
It IS pretty amazing that this girl is published at such a young age, though. I’d like to know which book is better…the one she plagiarized from or hers…I guess that’s all that really matters in the end.
I think its cool that teens can read a book about teens written by a teen. There’s no trace of an arthritic, older perspective to edit through the insignificancies that seem so significant at that age.
It could be argued that writers have been “sampling” Tolkien, Shakespeare, Dick, Grimms, et al. since the inception of the literature industry.
February 12th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
i dont think rules to one particular form of art apply to others. it sounds very contradictory but thats my opinion. sampling music seems valid to me because taking a small part of a song to create something completely different is art. in writing, youre taking someones idea and using it to make your writing stronger
February 12th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
What is sampling though? I don’t think many of us take the time to actually investigate what it is about sampling that make sit so poignant, so controversial, and so apt all at the same time. It is not just the re-casting of sounds, but the repurposing of intentions, and the altering of time and space. When you sample music, you go back into the recording studio when the sampled piece was being played, and you instruct the musicians to play differently. This plays into the institution of cultural consumption, allowing the audience to become the performer. The larger dynamic that at work in sampling is one of revolt, and resourcefulness. The originators–Herc, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl, Bambaataa–were using the instruments at their disposal–record players–to make new music. They didn’t have access to any other cultural outlets, and rather than wallow in silence they created something from nothing–they overthrew a kind of imposed cultural silence.
The contradiction with writing and sampling is that there is no need for revolt in writing. Nearly everyone has access to the same tools. Differences in access are more about what books you may or may not have read. This isn’t to say that sampling can’t be used fruitfully in writing, but from the outset is requires a different approach. You can’t just pick up a tiny tree and call it your bonzai.
The thrilling aspect of sampling that Duder mentioned–the moments when you discover old music through new music–the casting of one’s genealogy of a cultural medium, in my eyes that is where sampling begins to become relevant in writing. From the aspect of craft it is nearly irrelevant, unless you’re going to get into the hard-line experimentalism of O.U.L.I.P.O. It can’t be novelty either, it should be the kind of thing where I read a book, find out afterward that it made use of many samples, and then I have an, “Oh, Cool,” moment. I can definitely see it being generative, but it has to be done smartly, by the right hands.
Just my 2 cents.
February 12th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
“The contradiction with writing and sampling is that there is no need for revolt in writing. ”
Tell that to Wilde, Melville, Burroughs, Palahniuk…etc. etc. etc.
February 12th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
We’re all using the same words. We sample from our shared vocabulary to make our own books and crap we say all the time. Just like sampling music is using tidbits of it, that’s as far as you can go with “sampling” words.
Whole sentences I find iffy, but if it’s piecemeal and acknowledged and it’s because there’s no other way to say it then it could fly. Whole paragraphs (let alone a page) is clearly theft.
Her book would be “mixing” if it were advertised as such from the get-go, and if the whole book was made of lifted paragraphs and sentences. Which is apparently not the case.
People have been plagiarizing books since writing has existed, it’s not new, that’s how we know that copying a whole song without paying dues is wrong; not the other way around.
February 12th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
The point of sampling is sampling. That’s the point. There’s no obfuscation involved in any way. DJ’s/Musicians and such don’t say they wrote/composed the myriad of samples used in their music themselves. The point is that they transformed the work of other artists into something different altogether.
Concerning the original point of this article, was the original purpose of the book’s author to create a new type of work based sampling, or was it just some back peddling due to her being busted? Sounds like the latter. Kinda like when Vanilla Ice said he didn’t sample Queen.
February 12th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
@ conrbluth Your interpretation of my use of the word “revolt” is off. OG sampling was a revolt against traditional forms of composition that occurred because the production of music is tied to specific materials. The music that sampling makes could not be created through any other means. Sampling changes the sounds that it takes. The same is not true of writing. If I sample a record to make a song when you hear my recording it will sound different than the original recording. Audio recordings are affected by every piece of equipment in the signal chain–that’s why some classic samplers are coveted, because they produce a sonic character that is valued. To the contrary, If I re-write a sentence and then you read it nothing has changed no matter what pen, typewriter, or word processor I use. There are fundamental differences between the mediums, so you can’t just interchange the terms, and practices and expect their significance to remain.
If you really want to talk about writing as a revolt against formal impositions then your examples are hackneyed and little more than superficial, emotional responses to the prompt. If you want to talk about real revolt in the institution of writing look at O.U.L.I.P.O., Lettrism, Dada, Concrete Poetry, Sound Poets, and Cage.
In fact this is a great time to plug Ubu Web. Everyone should visit http://www.ubu.com
February 12th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Can someone sample zach’s acerbic diatribe towards me and mix it into into a less turgid statement? It’ll be a much better read. p&t
February 12th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
I once assisted an artist to take apart 180 different Harlequin romance novels and reassemble them into 180 new books, each with 1 page from each of the original books (all Harlequins have almost exactly the same number of pages). The resulting books were conceptual pieces, obv, but the artist insisted that you COULD read them and the plot would develop in a linear, understandable way (because all Harlequins are plotted according to a formula). She then created a new cover for the book. The cover only bore her name as the author. Was that sampling or plaguerism?
February 12th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
I’d call that conceptual art and sampling. Even from my own rudimentary knowledge of copyright law while working at Marvel, I knew that if any thing used something like 6 different artists artwork for packaging or a poster, then none were entitled to royalties nor being credited. It was viewed as a collage and wholly it’s own work.
February 12th, 2010 at 4:53 pm
@DJ Dookie Fist! (haha, love typing that)
Let’s take the Shepard Fairey brouhaha over his HOPE image and the Associated Press. In my opinion, he took that photo straight up but it wasn’t the photo itself that’s plastered over t-shirts/prints/etc, it’s the way the photo was re-imagined by Shepard Fairey that gave it so much power. It became a totally different work of art even though the original source was lifted from the Associated Press. The meaning/intent/purpose was totally different. It was a case of sampling where he didn’t give the original source their due. I’d say your example is the same thing. Like they tell you in High School, always cite your sources.
February 12th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
@My Pal the Crook
I stand corrected. IANAL but a pop-culture junkie.
February 12th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
you know, the wasteland, published in 1922, used lines taken from tons of other works, including popular songs (but it also came with extensive footnotes). and it’s not exactly some obscure poem that people who’ve studied literature—like most people who work in publishing or at a book fair—wouldn’t know about. the same is true of a lot of other (english) literature from that period (ulysses, the cantos etc.)
i think this is almost a companion to yesterday’s news about mp3 blogs: the publisher and book fairs don’t really care if it’s plagiarism, they just want something to make it sound oh-so-controversially-contemporary to sell enough books to stay in business for one more year.
February 13th, 2010 at 1:47 am
Kind of cool I guess. Can you guys get back to covering real stories like the 5 dollar Volcano box or Die Antwoord.
February 13th, 2010 at 11:55 am
Burroughs invented method of writing involving cut’n'paste, random mixing and so on decades ago, and called it `sampling`. Some of his pieces that were written that way are Soft Machine and Nova Express. He also elaborated on the subject of the effect of sampling (in regard to audio too) in his non-fiction Electronic revolution.
I think that sampling can be more powerful in poetry though.
February 13th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
I stole money out of the cash register and called it a remix.