How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee
When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. ‘It Takes a Nation’ came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and–in the case of “Caught, Can I Get a Witness?”– digital sampling…
An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee, who make the rather valid point that the current corporate approach to sampling and copyright in a digital age is anti-music. Not only does it not help protect the rights of the artists, as the record companies claim, it kills creativity.
Simply put, if today’s approach to copyright law had been in effect twenty to thirty years ago, there would quite possibly be no rap music and, by extension, no hip hop.
Certainly, the collage approach to sampling that Public Enemy took would be completely out of the question – and the world would have been deprived ‘Don’t Believe the Hype’, ‘Bring the Noise’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Channel Zero’.
I can’t think of a more appealing argument for copyright reform… though there are, of course, lots of other reasons.
