When Beats Meet Critique: Sample-Based Hip-Hop as Knowledge-Practice

This article explores sample-based hip-hop (Schloss, 2004) as a mode of critical knowledge-practice. Situated in the broader context of breakbeat culture as a feature of hip-hop music-making, hip-hop sampling is considered in its technical, aesthetic, formal, discursive and intellectual aspects. The "internal logic" (Schloss, 2004) of sample-based hip-hop is explored in how it illustrates "Afrological" versus "Eurological" musical tendencies (Lewis, 2004a; Stewart, 2010). These tendencies are examined in the context of the technological and material transformations heralded by the advent of digital technologies, rendering hip-hop sampling an example of Afrological compositional-improvisative music-making. Hip-hop sampling is hereby used to sound the critical and theoretical stakes of academic critical writing regarding idiomatically specific practices such as hip-hop sampling, at the same time as highlighting how sample-based hip-hop constitutes a mode of "critical culture" (Stiegler, 2006) in its own right.