Music is losing its originality as time goes on.
Music has been around since the beginning of human civilization. Billions of songs have been written about countless different things. Humans use it to make themselves feel a certain way, from sadness to jubilation. However, as more and more 0f it is made, newer music may be not as original as that of previous generations.
From primal rhythms to symphonies, from smooth jazz to metal, music has diversified itself into many different genres. Each one has its own style: rap has its rapid-fire lyrics; soul has its rhythmic tunes, and heavy metal has its ear-splitting guitar. The variety is half the fun.
This variety can be curtailed when it comes to sampling.
“Sampling” is the act of using elements of another artist’s music as the background for one’s own creation. An example of this is in Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DUCKWORTH’. He mainly samples three different songs in the song: ‘Ostavi Trag’ by September, ‘Be Ever Wonderful’ by Ted Taylor, and ‘Atari’ by Hiatus Kaiyote. Each of these songs are blended together in the background while Kendrick sings a tale of his upbringing. It’s hard to believe that this doesn’t contribute at all to the song’s popularity.
On the other hand, identifying what some would say is a lack of originality in this song’s background and rhyme style is easy. The song’s rhythm is based on the instrumental, the majority of which is taken from other songs.
This is a prime example of what seems to be a degradation of musical individuality. This is repeated many times by music critics such as Jarrod Leicher writing for the Baylor Lariat. Leicher speaks about how sampling kills originality in music when he says that sampling has “become a way of just having a beat that is already made so they don’t have to create one themselves.”
Other good examples of this are “Houdini” by Eminem sampling “Abracadabra” by Steve Miller Band and “Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye sampling “Seville” by Luis Bonfá. Many pop stars have also dipped into this pool, one being Ava Max.
The cadences in many of Max’s songs seem to be directly based on others, such as “Not Your Barbie Girl” sounding like “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, “Kings & Queens” having the same rhythm as “If You Were a Woman” by Bonnie Tyler, and “My Head & My Heart” nearly sounding exactly the same as “Around the World” by ATC. There are many other examples of this technique scattered throughout pop culture.
While a vast number of modern songs use sampling, it isn’t exactly anything new. An old version of sampling was simply adding a few changes to a song’s instrumentation and recording nearly the exact same thing. This may suggest that this problem has been around for much longer than one might think.
Examples include The Crew Cuts recording a slightly tweaked version of ‘Sh-Boom’ by The Chords, The Clovers putting their own taste into ‘Love Potion #9’ by The Searchers, and others.
At the end of the day, sampling hurts the music industry, and the identity of music itself is degrading because of it. Music is known for being original, something that comes from one’s own creativity. When sampling is introduced into the mix, it can seem that what it does is take away that same originality.
