Uppity-Negro.com

Bits of separate interviews with Chuck D. and Hank Shocklee combine to form AlterNet: How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop, which seems appropriate somehow.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout -- meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound -- for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

It's a nice look at how external forces -- in this case, a clampdown on unauthorized/unlicensed samples -- affected the development of an art form, from what used to be called "primary sources," people actually involved at the time. Think one of the reasons I've never read much music history, or history generally, is having to wade through and process/extract the biases of the person writing the thing. Which in the US usually means patriarchal white suprmacy bullshit, and I can get enough of that from the papers, radio, television, websites, etc. discussing current events, let alone stuff that happened back in the day when people were less hesitant about expressing that sort of thing.

Or not, which is why I'm staying the hell away from Spirit of America. Yeah, whatever:

I'm a bit less patient with that sort of thing these days.