Musical Plagiarism — Creativity or Unoriginality?

The Bose speaker at my bedside is blaring. My room is packed with boys from other halls. It’s 2 in the morning and we’re dancing. Half of us won’t be awake for breakfast at 7am tomorrow or even make our first class at eight; but we don’t care. “ I know when that hotline bling…” We’re rapping along to Drake’s new single Hotline Bling. Those who don’t know the lyrics mumble; but you could still tell they know what they’re mumbling. Some prance energetically around the room; others sit on the beds and groove their heads lazily but rhythmically. The beat is almost intoxicating. It has been on repeat for about ten minutes now and at this rate, it might go another ten, or even thirty. Who knows?

When Hotline Bling came out, it peaked on four different music charts. It was the most played song at every party and social gathering. It made its way into one of the Super Bowl ads through deals with T-mobile and Apple Music. It was an internet, radio and TV sensation. I was a bit more sensitive to the musical composition of the song itself. I was curious as to how the producer of this new world banger put such music together. After I did my research, I was disappointed—or rather—I thought that I was. “Hotline Bling” was sampled.

Sampling is a mainstream practice in music production today. It is simply taking a snippet of a sound recording, and reusing or repurposing it in a different music recording.

In the earlier days of music creation, music was clean—fully inspired from the creativity of an artist’s mind. It took the musically genius minds of composers like Beethoven years to write some pieces that are still being performed in theatres, music concerts, and is used in numerous film and movie soundtracks today. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony was composed for four years (1804-1808) and till today is still incorporated “in most of the modern genres [of music] including rap, disco, blues, metal and rock and roll” (Goodman). Music was inspiring because it welled straight from one’s expressive spirit and flowed seamlessly into one’s fingers as they pranced about a piano or fluidly frolicked up and down the saxophone. Music was new and refreshing. It was revivifying.

Now, critics argue that technology has watered down the beauty of hip-hop music. Music production software like Fruity Loops Studio, Garageband, and many others have oversimplified the process of music creation. It doesn’t take a genius to make music that appeals to listeners, it merely takes a laptop. I have nothing against the simplification of music production. In fact, I support it because technology is only useful when it makes difficult processes easier. However, this blessing has become the door to which the music industry has used to plagiarise music in the name of art.

As I dwelled on the thought of how much hip-hop music today is in fact fully original, I grew despondent. J-Cole’s most recent album, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” had ten out of the thirteen songs sampled from nineteen older tracks. However, I found the album musically and lyrically genius. I couldn’t determine if the fact that he borrowed a few artists’ works took away from his creativity. But if everyone keeps “borrowing” from each musician’s work, how long would it take before ingenuity is completely wiped out of our minds? Would our musical creativity gradually fade away until we are just a world of copy cats? Would any artists or musicians release any purely novel music or would every track playing on the radio be a version of something we have heard before just reversed, sped up, or slowed down? What would the future of music look like if we keep sampling from the past?

As I worried about my consensus view about the global declination of musical originality, I began researching other forms of art to check for other types of “artistic plagiarism.” I came across film and I studied Quentin Tarantino—arguably one of the world’s greatest movie directors. In an interview with Empire magazine, the award winning film director claimed: “I steal from every single movie ever made. If my work has anything, it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together” (Tarantino). Jean-Luc Godard, a French-Swiss movie director once said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to” (Godard).

In Steve Johnson’s Ted Talk, he boldly asserted that: “we take ideas from other people, from people we’ve learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That’s really where innovation happens” (Johnson). This is the beauty of the world being a global village. The fact that the world is in a digital age should lift the burden of us ever having to create or invent anything from scratch; because whether through music or scientific breakthroughs, the world enables us freely collaborate with people from every part of the world.

The world doesn’t need solely “original” inventors, musicians, artists, fashion designers, mathematicians, and so on anymore because humanity—past and present—has served and constantly serves to be original for us.

Sampling inspires innovation because it involves taking another person’s work and making something newer, more entertaining, repurposing it to the present era, making it do things it couldn’t do in its own time. Sampling is not a crime. Sampling is not an indication of the non-existential dearth of originality around the globe. Sampling is one of the manifestations of technology and global collaboration in our world today through music. Sampling is creative. Sampling is art.

The next night, I plugged my Bose speakers into the wall. I opened up my iTunes and found “Hotline Bling.” I clicked play. I sat on my bed and closed my eyes. I compared it to the RnB singer Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together,” from which Hotline Bling’s instrumentals were sampled from. It was genius! The soul singer’s track, composed in 1972 comprised only a Hammond organ and drums from an old rhythm machine. However, the producers of Hotline Bling adapted this old soul track and transformed it into a Billboard smash hit forty-four years after its creation. If this isn’t creativity, I don’t know what is. The rest of the guys joined me in my room again. It is around 11pm now. “Hotline Bling” is blaring. Some prance energetically around the room while others sit on the beds and groove their heads lazily but rhythmically to the song. It has been on repeat for about ten minutes now and at this rate, it might go another ten, or even thirty. Who knows?