CHAPTER 22 | HIP-HOP, THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION, AND REMIX CULTURE 545
The early 2000s witnessed the spread of hip-hop outside the United States.
In Europe, Africa, and Asia, socially conscious rappers have used the music to
plead the cause of groups facing discrimination, from Turkish immigrants in
Germany to Palestinians. Within the United States, only one imported genre
related to hip-hop has reached a wider audience: reggaeton, a blend of hip-hop
with Latin American and Caribbean infl uences, including the Jamaican dance-
hall music that inspired hip-hop in the fi rst place. Popular throughout Latin
A m e r i c a , r e g g a e t o n i n t h e Un it e d S t at e s i s a s s o c i at e d p a r t i c u l a r l y w it h C o l o m b i a n
singer Shakira and Puerto Rican acts such as Daddy Yankee and Calle 13. All of
these artists are more versatile than the reggaeton label implies, ranging widely
through hip-hop, electronica, and various Latin styles such as cumbia and salsa.
In the second decade of the twenty-fi rst century, hip-hop has become a world-
wide phenomenon that in turn is giving rise to new genres.THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION I: THE SAMPLING WARS
Ever since hip-hop’s inception in the 1970s, prerecorded music has been an
important element in its sound. Indeed, the DJ techniques that are the foun-
dation of hip-hop are entirely dependent on prerecorded music. That posed no
legal problems as long as hip-hop was purely a live-performance art, but the
advent of rap records in 1979 changed the situation.
Since the 1909 Copyright Act, mentioned in chapter 7 in connection with John
Philip Sousa, music publishers have sought to retain control over the “mechani-
cal rights” to their music—a term that at fi rst applied to player pianos and other
music machines as well as phonographs. A 1976 updating of copyright law
addressed the technological changes that had taken place since 1909, extended
the length of copyright protection, and codifi ed a doctrine of fair use: the con-
cept that no formal permission is needed when a work of art or literature is cop-
ied or quoted for purposes of criticism, parody, scholarship, and similar limited
use. For example, when videocassette recorders became popular in the 1980s,
the Supreme Court decided that taping television broadcasts for later viewing
fell within the defi nition of fair use. What falls outside that defi nition is the
copying of a work for commercial gain, as in the making of bootleg CDs and
DVDs, actions that are clearly unethical.
Taking fragments of prerecorded music and assembling them into hip-hop
beats falls into a gray area regarding fair use and plagiarism (the latter involves
not crediting a source, while “fair use” concerns the economic value of intellec-
tual property). As long as the practice was confi ned to DJs spinning records at a
dance, it drew little attention from the music industry. But after “Rapper’s Delight”
turned hip-hop into a highly remunerative recorded art, the music entered new
legal territory. Because hip-hop records in the early years used fi rst studio musi-
cians, and later drum machines and synthesizers, to recreate DJ-style beats with-
out actually using earlier recordings, music publishers generally ignored their
use of elements from earlier songs. That changed in the latter 1980s with the fi rst
affordable samplers (see chapter 20), which could lift snippets—“samples”—from
other artists’ records and manipulate them digitally with much greater ease,
control, and complexity. For the next few years, hip-hop beats consisted of dense
tapestries of sounds sampled from earlier records: this is the sound of groups as
diverse as Public Enemy, De La Soul, and the Beastie Boys.fair useplagiarismreggaeton172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 545 23/01/13 11:20 AM