The dope art of cut-and-paste hip hop

The first two chords cut like the steel edge of a knife and you know you've heard the song before; even the silver-tongued lead that follows is familiar. Now the knife comes down once more — two more sharp chords, then that lead again. A rasping, cavalier voice joins in and you know you've heard him before. Woodstock?

The answer comes to you in seconds. Jimi Hendrix.

But at the song's 30-second mark, a new voice enters, younger, more impatient. You know it's a rapper but at your age, you dislike rap because it makes no sense to you. Your son tells you it's a legendary rapper called Tupac. Google tells you he died young, at age 25, but is regarded as the single most influential musician in hip-hop. You still are not quite sure what hip-hop is, but you remember that Jimi Hendrix also died young, at age 28.

You can still hear Hendrix's lead guitar, backing Tupac. Deeper into the song, Hendrix's voice comes back, and now you're hearing two legendary musicians jamming together, seemingly on the same stage.

There's only one small problem — Tupac was born a year after Jimi Hendrix died. How did they put the rapper and the rocker together?

I know enough people who appreciate rock music but are genuinely flustered by rap and secretly wonder what hip-hop is. They might be hard put to name their favourite rap song. If you asked them what sampled music was, they'd try to look intelligent but dry up completely.

Till recently, I checked all the boxes in that list. I thought rap was tuneless music produced by unemployed youths with outlandish hair. I thought hip-hop was some kind of dance. Then I met this avid, slightly passionate Gen Z genius on the Internet with the time and patience to explain his music to me.

According to him, "musical borrowing" is at the heart of all hip-hop music. An entire generation and genre of music is based on manipulating snippets of pre-existing music to make new songs that are essentially mash-ups of bits and bobs from other songs. The fun of hip-hop, he told me, was in recognising those snippets, appreciating how beautifully they had been reconfigured into a gorgeous new and yet not new musical mural.

I googled "sampled music" and learned with some surprise that it had been one of the standard techniques used by the Beatles. For example, the bass line in I Saw Her Standing There was borrowed from Chuck Berry's I'm Talking About You. Listen to Otis Redding's Respect and you'll hear the bass of the Beatles' Drive My Car.

They got more inventive as they evolved. In For The Benefit of Mr Kite, they cut taped samples from several steam organ pieces into snippets, threw them in the air and spliced them back together.

Then things got digital and the whole game changed. If Paul wanted to sample Otis Redding's bass, he'd have had to play it himself. But with digital music you could take any part you wanted of a digital soundtrack, especially if you had a few hundred dollars worth of sampling and mixing equipment.

Suddenly, everyone was sampling everything in their home studios and putting out (usually depressing) mash-ups. Take a drum roll from Led Zeppelin, a bit of Eric Clapton's lead guitar, loop an organ solo in the back, speed up a few phrases, slow down some others, reverse some bars back to front, change a flute to a harp and overlay it with, say, some rap lyrics from Childish Gambino.

And you have a hip-hop song. Gen Z has a word for it: dope. It means extra-fantastic.

Is it art? No question about that. The best hip-hop songs are triumphs of musical imagination, technology, inspiration and creativity.

Is it costly? The costs of sampling have gone up so much that many musicians improvise. For his Thong Song, Sisqó wanted to sample the Beatles Eleanor Rigby, but it cost too much. Here's what he did instead — https://tinyl.io/3Ety

There's an album where Hendrix samples have been brilliantly blended with hip-hop and rap. If you're of the generation that was weaned on Woodstock and the Beatles, challenge yourself by trying to guess the original song by listening to the sampled snippet.

You'll find the entire album, called Not Dead, for free on Spotify at this link — https://tinyl.io/3Eqn

Listen, for example, to Old-Schooled and have a moment of deja vu when you hear a three-chord slide from a classic Hendrix song you know you should know.

Or listen to Not Dead. That's the one where old Hendrix who died so young jams with young Tupac Shakir, who also died too young.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper

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