Sampling, Remixing, and the Art of the Flip. Or, When does One Song Become Another?

“Art is a circulation of energetic ideas. What makes them appear new is that they’re combining differently each time they come back.”— Rick Rubin¹

There is a long tradition of artists adapting older works for a new audience or context. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was adapted from 15th century writers Masuccio Salernitano and Luigi Da Porto. Johannes Brahms composed Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn. Charlie Parker adapted George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” for his composition “Anthropology”, “My Country ’Tis of Thee” uses the same melody as “God Save the Queen”, Ulysses is a retelling of the Odyssey, and so on.

Far from being the exception, borrowing, transforming and adapting prior work is the norm in modern music, and I would argue, has always been a key part of the human creative process. For millennia, songs (much like stories and poems) were processes rather than products — they were handed down from generation to generation, and passed around from village to village, with melodies and verses added, removed, swapped, and otherwise modified from performance to performance. It was only once lyrics and music notation could be printed and sold (and later, musical performances could be captured onto audio recordings like piano rolls, wax cylinder, and vinyl records) that the question of a song’s author and fixed form became salient. Which leads me to the topic I’m curious to investigate: when does one song become another? And what are the features and affordances of hip-hop in particular that lend itself to the transformation of creative works through the process of adaptation? I will explore these questions through historical, cultural, legal, and ethical lenses.

Second-Order Music

Adaptation, allusion and reference are foundational aspects of hip-hop music and culture. The very first recorded hip-hop song, “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugar Hill Gang musically interpolates four bars from Chic’s song “Good Times”. Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” was covered mostly verbatim by Snoop Dogg. A Tribe Called Quest sampled Average White Band and Minnie Riperton for “Check the Rhime”. And so on, thousands and thousands of times over. The chain of adaptation can contain multiple links, as in a recent example from 2024: Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” sampled saxophonist Monk Higgins, who in turn was covering Ray Charles.

Sonically speaking, hip-hop extended the promise of musique croncrète to create a powerful new kind of music constructed from bits and pieces of other records. (Musique concrète is a theory and practice of composing music using recorded sound as its primary building block, rather than traditional notes and rhythms. Beginning over 100 years ago, musique concrète practitioners created works for radio, tape loops, wire record, and gramophone, rather than instruments like piano or violin.)

Musical borrowing has always been a substantial part of the musical composition process (“to compose” quite literally means “to place together”, evoking the image of combining multiple pre-existing elements into one). But for the first time, new musical recordings were being created from pieces of older recordings — a self-referential, or ‘second-order’, music.

How did this happen? Originally hip-hop was more of a musical process than a product². Continuing and building on the tradition of Jamaican DJ’s who played records on massive sound systems, and hyped up the crowd with rhyming over the instrumental versions of songs, early hip-hop DJ’s like Kool Herc found ways of extending short instrumental interludes (known as ‘breaks’) by playing two copies of the same record back-to-back, transforming a short introduction or interlude into a musical statement in and of its own.When hip-hop became a musical product unto itself, at first record producers essentially recreated the party atmosphere, by recording rap verses on top of instrumental grooves from existing songs (i.e. “Rapper’s Delight” on top of Chic’s “Good Times”, or “Planet Rock” on top of “Trans-Europe Express” by Kraftwerk). However, over time, hip-hop production evolved into a carefully crafted bricolage style, with songs often layering dozens of song samples and pop culture references into a dense audio collage.

Art of the Flip

The designer Virgil Abloh famously taught (himself cribbing from Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade concept) that one needs to change only 3% of an existing design to produce something new. How could we apply that teaching to the world of music? Can we change only 3% of an existing song in some crucial way to form something new? 

When approaching an adaptation, colloquially known as a ‘flip’, I often like to consider three questions: what do I want to change, how do I want to change it, and why?

In music, there are many common parameters to transform: tempo, key, genre, groove, style, feel, orchestration, and density come to mind. There are also many ways to transform any of those parameters: transposition (changing key), translation (shifting earlier or later in time), retrograde (reversing the order of events), inversion (reversing the pitch contour), repetition, contraction/expansion (slowing or speeding up rhythmic events), chopping and re-ordering musical events (notes or phrases), filtering (adding/subtracting frequency groups), and applying any number of other modifications either to the raw audio signal or to the underlying musical content. What makes your transformation unique includes what portion of the source work you choose to adapt, which parameters you transform versus keep the same, and how you choose to reposition it within a new context.

Why adapt the source at all? Adaptation can be used to re-contextualize a work for new audience; to deconstruct an original work to focus attention on one aspect; to subvert the intention of the original work; to find a new perspective or way of looking at the original; or just to be fly! As in all things in life, the trick is to find a balance between keeping the essence of the original work and exploring new territory — to balance the familiar against the novel.

Culture Clash

Justin Williams writes that “hip-hop presupposes an unconcealed intertextuality”³ — in other words, when Pharcyde begins their song “Officer” with the lyric, “I got a letter from the DMV the other day” it’s assumed that the hip-hop listener in th eknow will immediately recall Public Enemy’s opening line “I got a letter from the government the other day” from “Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos”, and understand that Pharcyde intended that reference; and know that Pharcyde knew that they would know. The absurd contrast between receiving a letter calling one to military service, and receiving a letter informing one that one’s driver’s license is suspended, clearly marks the song as parody, not plagiarism.⁴

However, different creative communities form their own norms and ideals around authorship and borrowing. Within hip-hop, “no biting” has been the norm for generations, meaning that while it’s expected for hip-hop practitioners to use the literary devices of reference and allusion generously, it’s prohibited to copy. In other words, it’s expected that producers would sample records from any and all genres, including other hip-hop records, but it would be taboo to sample the same record as another producer, and flip in the same way. Rappers are free to riff off each other’s lyrics, but it is almost unheard-of for one rapper to perform another rapper’s verses verbatim.

In the jazz world, there’s a common musical vocabulary or “language” of bebop that all jazz musicians are expected to learn and be able to freely improvise using; however, performing another musician’s improvised solo note-for-note would be grounds for ridicule. In the singer-songwriter world, artists are expected to be performing songs they wrote themselves; however, in the pop and R&B world, it’s expected that artists perform songs written by an outside team of writers.

Beyond music, there are many more communities with norms around adapting and transforming creative works. Within software engineering, there is an extremely influential “free and open source software” movement wherein software developers give away the source code of their products, and explicitly allow for others to “fork” or modify/transform the code for their own needs. In academia, scientists are expected to repeat others’ work to verify the results. Mathematical proofs are published in full and each finding is expected to be built upon by other mathematicians. In general, it is expected that academic work builds on prior work, with proper citation.

What happens when these communities rub up against each other, when rapid globalization of culture brings together communities that may have different values and expectations around authorship and transformative re-use, and when creative communities come into contact with capitalism?

Copywrong and Capitalism

Who funds the production of all this creative work? In academia, findings are not bought and sold on the open market, but academics are funded to teach, research, and produce work regardless of its market value. The open source software that underpins much of the internet is often the side projects of otherwise well-employed tech workers, is supported by foundations and non-profits, or giant corporations that benefit from giving away source code in other ways. It’s possible that adaptation and borrowing are policed and litigated much more closely in the music world because music doesn’t have an external source of funding — the songs and recordings themselves are the product, and therefore must be guarded more heavily.

Whereas the art world has long celebrated appropriation of corporate identity, from Warhol to Duchamp, within the commercial music industry it has played out very differently. For a combination of historical reasons, U.S. copyright law is interpreted starkly differently in music than in other art forms.

Siva Vaidhyanathan put it plainly, in an interview in the Copyright Criminals documentary: “The courts were not interested in listening to young Black men describe their creative processes, they had no tolerance for that […] That meant that groups like Public Enemy could no longer make their powerful sounds in the way they wished to.”⁵

Hank Shocklee, founding member of Public Enemy, describing his creative process in the same documentary: “We always felt that, like, when you’re creating, you create. Whatever you decide that you want to use, you use to create your own particular vibration your own way. And that, to me, was like an unwritten code within the hip-hop world.” Chuck D., another founding member of Public Enemy, was very clear about the collage aspect of his musical process: “We kinda looked at music as an assemblage of sounds. We felt you couldn’t copyright a sound.”

Once hip-hop left the parks and streets of the Bronx and became big business, the recording industry realized they could play on the biases of the legal system to police the creativity of this new art form. In other words, the judges and juries deciding cases like De La Soul v. The Turtles (1989–1991) and Grand Upright v. Warner (1991) found it easier to fit hip-hop artists and producers into their existing stereotypes of young Black men as criminals, rather than see them as groundbreaking artists continuing a millennia-long traditions of musical transformation and adaptation.⁶

Another reason copyright law may have taken a different trajectory within music than in visual art is that while Warhol took a commercial product like a soup can and turned it into visual art, hip-hop artists like Public Enemy took records and turned them into other records. If you blur your eyes, it can look a bit like the new song is competing in the market with the old song, like a counterfeit Prada handbag competing with the original. However, in practice, Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” does not resemble James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” in the slightest; there’s no possibility of confusion for the consumer, and if anything, hearing “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugarhill Gang would only make the consumer want to go out and buy “Good Times” by Chic as well. So on the face of it, the argument that sampling harms the market for the original work is absurd.

U.S. copyright law does allow for exceptions under the ‘fair use doctrine,’ which generally protects transformative use of copyrighted material. To quote from the U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index, “transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.” ⁷As far as I can tell, this should allow for all kinds of sampling and remixing, but in actual case law, money (and power and race) talks. There have been almost no court cases that ruled in favor of sampling/remixing artists, accepting fair use arguments.

Where does adaptation end and copying begin? Is sampling/remixing tantamount to stealing — legally, ethically, or professionally? Who gets to decide? What does ownership mean with respect to creative works? And finally how do race, class, gender, and other identities intersect with power dynamics surrounding property ownership as pertains to creative works?

The phrase “intellectual property” carries the implication that a song or a story or a poem can be “property”; that is, that it can “belong” to someone. It’s worth examining to what extent the analogy of intangible creative works to tangible, real property is valid. Vaidhyanathan compares “intellectual property” (non-rivalrous) with “real property” (rivalrous) meaning, physical tangible objects that can only be in one place at a time: “Rights over rivalrous property are about managing scarcity. Rights over non-rivalrous things are about creating artificial scarcity where scarcity would not naturally exist.”⁸

Copyright law has long since strayed from its original stated intent: “to promote creativity in the arts & sciences”. It now chiefly serves to enclose the creative works of artists, to hoard capital, and consolidate power in multinational corporations like Disney and Warner Brothers. Describing Thomas Jefferson’s initial work to create copyright law, Jonathan Lethem writes, “This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole.”⁹ In other words, copyright should be just strong enough to incentivize artists to create works, but just weak enough to allow the public to benefit from them and other artists to adapt and transform them into new works.

What’s next?

As a borderline Gen-X/millenial, I’ve seen this topic cycle in and out of the zeitgeist several times in my life. In the 1980’s, the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Software movement built a hugely successful paradigm for sharing information and building on one another’s creative work. In the 90’s, it was “remix culture”, in the early 2000’s, “mash-ups” were trending, and then memes, and most recently, TikTok trends. I recently gave a workshop on this topic to a group of talented undergraduate music students, and the prevailing fear among them seemed to be that their generation had forgotten how to be “original”, and that “everything was a remix” (also the title of a TED talk by Kirby Ferguson)¹⁰. One reason it keeps coming back is that human beings love to imitate, and human beings also love to innovate. So the tension between imitation and innovation will always be a part of human creativity.

Generative A.I. opens up a whole new conversation around creativity. With regards to sampling and remixing, essentially that’s the exact same process that Large Language Models like ChatGPT perform every with every query — they probabilistically compose snippets of prior writing to generate something brand new. As much as I have issue with LLMs for other reasons, my view is that LLMs are indeed making new creative works, based on existing works, in exactly the same manner that humans always have.

Despite my grumblings that the legal landscape surrounding sampling in music has closed off a beautiful multiverse of creativity, I can see that the same impulse to remix and sample, and the art of the flip, is quite alive and well on TikTok, and within internet meme culture in general. Sampling and remixing is a natural part of any human creative process, especially oral/aural traditions rich in intertextuality, and we need to find a way to reshape the legal and commercial landscape to a world in which this kind of transformative adaptation is celebrated and normalized.

1. Rubin, p. 14 ↩︎
2. Schloss, p. 33 ↩︎
3. Williams, p. 4 ↩︎
4. Moreover, the crackle and hiss of vinyl records being sampled served to ‘textually signal’ the borrowing of source musical material in “golden era” hip-hop — in much the same way that intentionally rough cut-and-paste graphic design serves to signal the complex lineage of modern-day memes. ↩︎
5. Franzen, 26:15 ↩︎
6. Of course, this begs the question of from whom these musical thieves were stealing. By and large, the drummers and other instrumentalists that were most heavily sampled in early hip-hop owned the rights to neither the audio recordings they produced nor the underlying musical compositions (those distinct but overlapping copyrights were generally held by record labels and publishing companies, respectively). So even if some debt of creativity were owed to the source artists, copyright law was not working to enforce that debt. ↩︎
7. U.S. Copyright Office ↩︎
8. Vaidhyanathan, p. 11 ↩︎
9. Lethem ↩︎
10. Ferguson ↩︎

References

Copyright Criminals. Directed by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod. 2009. Chicago: Kartemquin Films. Documentary film.

Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004).

Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007, 59–71.

Kirby Ferguson, “Everything is a Remix,” TEDGlobal, 2012, https://blog.ted.com/everything-is-a-remix-kirby-ferguson-at-tedglobal-2012/.

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

U.S. Copyright Office, Fair Use Index, U.S. Copyright Office, last modified February 22, 2025, https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/.Justin A. Williams, Musical Borrowing in Hip-hop Music: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies (PhD diss., University of Nottingham, 2009).