Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop - Softcover

Patrin, Nate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1517906288 ISBN 13: 9781517906283

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2020

Synopsis

How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib

 

Sampling—incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely—has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through forty years of musical innovation and reinvention.

Nate Patrin tells the story of how sampling built hip-hop through the lens of four pivotal artists: Grandmaster Flash as the popular face of the music’s DJ-born beginnings; Prince Paul as an early champion of sampling’s potential to elaborate on and rewrite music history; Dr. Dre as the superstar who personified the rise of a stylistically distinct regional sound while blurring the lines between sampling and composition; and Madlib as the underground experimentalist and record-collector antiquarian who constantly broke the rules of what the mainstream expected from hip-hop. From these four artists’ histories, and the stories of the people who collaborated, competed, and evolved with them, Patrin crafts a deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated: the aesthetic and reconstructive power of one of the most revelatory forms of popular culture to emerge from postwar twentieth-century America. And you can nod your head to it.

About this title

About the Author

Nate Patrin is a longtime music critic whose writing has appeared in dozens of publications including Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, Bandcamp Daily, Red Bull Music Academy, and his hometown Twin Cities’ alt-weekly City Pages. This is his first book. 

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1517906288
• ISBN 13: 9781517906283
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336