This stuff can be revelatory for so many music
listeners because it operates under the radar. It’s
our own musical history, hiding in plain sight,
an ocean of raw material awaiting some fresh
genius glue to bind it into something new.
This was true at least as far back as the second
half of the 19th century.
By then, according to the eccentric roots-music
pioneer Harry Smith, enough folk lyrics were
kicking around the republic, cross-pollinating
between black and white musicians, to provide
fodder for thousands of still-to-be-written
songs — what the critic Greil Marcus calls “an
almost infinite repertory of performances.”
So many tales of American experience
emerged from that era and its critical mass of
storytelling fragments.
Now, the fragmentation has gone global.
The character of this new disapora, though,
is different. It now includes high-powered
marketing, mass intellectual-property theft
and economic forces that dwarf — sometimes
steamroll — the local and regional traditions
that spread folk music around in the 1800s.
Today, the practice of harvesting musical and
lyrical snippets is flourishing — most creatively,
perhaps, in hip-hop and dance music, where
readily accessible technology encourages
sampling for remixes, remakes, dance mixes and
party mixes.
But what to one artist is a nod or tribute can, to
another, be theft. And when lyricists and musicians
begin drawing not from tradition but from fellow
modern, revenue-conscious entertainers, the
results get more contentious.