White Girl Wasted and the magic of sampling
Live MintEarly in September, I found myself on a wild goose chase online. I had been listening to the eponymous debut album by the UK hip hop duo White Girl Wasted and there’s this grungy little keys-and-bass combo on the DJ Premier cut Doc Ellis that became an instant ear-worm. While they were making snide remarks about “studio trickery” and “musical theft”, the sampler was reconfiguring contemporary music’s relationship with time, adding recorded sound as another layer for musicians to manipulate alongside things like harmony, tone and timbre. The result is something Simon Reynolds once called “seance fiction”: the art of using samples to create musical events that never happened, a collaboration between the ghosts of music past and present. How much more fun could Indian dance music be if our musical legacies weren’t in the hands of 20th century holdovers, who only give out licences to awful but major label approved “remixers”?
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