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White wasted song8/12/2023 ![]() ![]() They were breathing new life into these records, but not with the reverence of classic rock fans, who treat every throwaway Genesis track as an offering from the gods. ![]() When Pete Rock was flipping 1970s soul and funk records in the 1990s, he was drawing a link between black American music traditions of the past and hip hop: part archive, part education for young black kids, part pure bop. And rather than just “lifting” melodies from old songs, they were bringing those songs into conversation with contemporary music and technology, in the process telling a story of black music and culture that had been ignored by white cultural gatekeepers. Hip hop producers in the 1980s-90s weren’t turning to the sampler to cheaply imitate real instruments-for them, it was the instrument, allowing them to most faithfully reproduce the dynamic mixscape of a Bronx street party on wax. Take a look at hip hop, the scene credited with making sampling a mainstream mainstay. Completely upending, in the process, the white rockist canon and the linear view of musical progress these purists held so sacred. While they were making snide remarks about “studio trickery” and “musical theft”, the sampler was reconfiguring contemporary music’s relationship with time, adding recorded sound as another layer for musicians to manipulate alongside things like harmony, tone and timbre. The anxiety behind this resistance-that sampling replaced “real musicianship”-seems ridiculous in hindsight, not just because instrumentalists continue to thrive a decade and a half on, but also because it was such a surface-level understanding of the sampler’s impact. Even up to the late 2000s in India, the rock underground was so wary of samplers that bands like Pentagram and Medusa were treated with jeers and bottles on Mumbai’s stages. But there was a time when the sampler was every so-called music purists’ enemy No.1. It’s hard now, with our post-modernist Society of the Insta-Spectacle, to think of a world where sampling isn’t widespread in music and the arts. This ability to reinject wonder and magic into the algorithmic data-stream of modern music consumption is just one of the ways sampling has transformed popular music and its relationship with our cultural and social past. Not just at the awesome crate-digging abilities of producers Preemo and The Purist, but also the fact that there are still musical oddities like this waiting to be excavated. By the time the label confirmed that no, they were not playing a prank on me, I realised most of the other credited samples were similarly un-Googleable. Google threw up zero results for the track, as did Discogs. Two fruitless hours later, I had to email the label. This is the sort of mystery that’s irresistible to a writer trying to finish a music review on a deadline, so I decided to try and track down the song.Īlso read: Sudan Archives: this queen of electro-R&B is a genre-bender I have listened to everything they have released-along with much of the band members’ extensive non-Fugazi catalogue-and I had never heard of Victor Lustig. The thing is, I have been a Fugazi fan since I first heard the warbling bassline on Waiting Room as a 12-year-old. It’s not the idea of a 2022 boom-bap nostalgia record sampling Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto’s punk-dub anthems that caught me off-guard (in fact, there’s a certain poetic rightness to it). Was it a sample, or just something Preemo had dug out of his archives? I checked the credit sheet and found out the song samples Victor Lustig by the iconic Washington, DC post-hardcore band Fugazi. There was something about the way the track strutted and swaggered with cartoonish menace. I had been listening to the eponymous debut album by the UK hip hop duo White Girl Wasted and there’s this grungy little keys-and-bass combo on the DJ Premier cut Doc Ellis that became an instant ear-worm. Early in September, I found myself on a wild goose chase online. ![]()
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