I’m intrigued by a sentence written by Jonah Weiner in Slate today, referring to hip-hop’s “identity crisis” towards the end of the ’90s:

“And the fact that dusty old vinyl samples — particularly soul and jazz loops, intimately tied to black music’s past — were losing ground to glossier, colder synthesizers was alienating.”

As someone who has followed sampling history with a fairly keen interest since the mid-80s, it’s kind of incredible to see this technology employed in a precise reversal of how it has been employed for so many years previous. This is sampling posited not as the fake, anyone-can-do-it party line, but rather, sampling as the genuine article, the real deal.