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Bring That Beat Back

How Sampling Built Hip-Hop

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Nate Patrin

BOOK PREVIEW—We've provided a sample of the full-text here for review purposes.

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.

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  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Introduction: The Art of the Loop
  • Part I. The Grandmaster
    • 1. Wheels of Steel: How DJs Became Artists
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Selected Discography
  • About the Author

Metadata

  • publisher
    University of Minnesota Press
  • publisher place
    Minneapolis, MN
  • restrictions
    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
  • rights
    Copyright 2020 by Nate Patrin
  • rights holder
    Nate Patrin
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