Part I: Borrowing as Cultural Continuity
There’s a quiet strength in borrowing. Not theft. Not imitation. But a creative, deliberate act; drawing from what has been said or sung before, not to replicate it, but to reframe it. Borrowing as a homage. To respond. To carry forward.
The contemporary tendency to dismiss modern music as “uncreative”, where sampling is branded as antithetical to true musicianship, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how culture actually evolves.
We celebrate Quentin Tarantino’s meticulous homages that reward those who recognise the layers. There’s joy in finding hidden references in books, or paraphrased beauty from literary works. We revere jazz musicians who reinterpret standards. Yet when a producer transforms a drum break into something entirely new, suddenly we cry theft?
As someone who has been “playing” the computer and has been sampling music since the days of the Amiga 500, I’ve witnessed this double standard firsthand. The innovative use of a computer as an instrument, creating new sonic landscapes from existing elements, operates on the same principles as a jazz musician reharmonizing a standard or a classical composer building on a folk tune. It’s about belief in the power of sound to transcend its original context.
The Roots of Creative Reuse
This practice of creative reuse isn’t a modern invention; it’s one of our oldest cultural traditions. From folk songs passed around fires to symphonies shaped by ancestral melodies, creative reuse has never been the exception. It has been the essence of human storytelling and sharing emotions.
In blues, folk, and early country traditions, this conversation was constant. Songs weren’t owned; they were carried, adapted, personalised. Authorship was fluid. Interpretation was everything. These traditions thrived on oral transmission, where songs circulated freely and were shaped by each musician’s unique expression. Musicians such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie embodied this tradition, adapting and personalising songs like ‘Goodnight, Irene’ and ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ reflecting contemporary issues while maintaining a link to tradition.
Think of jazz standards. Gershwin’s “Summertime” has been interpreted by thousands — Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane — each performance a new lens through which to view the same emotional core. Or consider Brahms’ “Variations on a Theme by Haydn,” which reworks a chorale possibly not even written by Haydn. Bartók and Dvořák infused folk music into classical forms, treating existing melodies not as property to avoid, but as raw material for transformation.
Genres like house and hip-hop simply made this ancient practice explicit. Sampling became a vocabulary, a way to quote, reference, and pay tribute. Producers transformed fragments like a bassline, a vocal hook, or a drum loop into something personal, layered, and entirely new.
Some still call this theft. But theft doesn’t typically result in homage.
Similar Beliefs
True creative borrowing isn’t about copying. It’s about transformation, recontextualization, and forging new meaning from existing elements. Whether drawing from an obscure funk record or a classical chord progression, the borrowed element becomes a foundational ingredient in a new artistic recipe.
Consider the sampled vocal phrase: “I believe.”
In 1990’s house music, it became stitched into some iconic tracks by different producers. Many cite Celvin Rotane’s 1994 release “I Believe”, which propelled the vocal into club anthem status. Others point to K-London Posse’s “I Believe”, released in 1993. But dig deeper, and the trail leads to Sandra Edwards’ distinctive vocal on Happy Clappers’ seminal track with the same title, which itself samples the piano riff from “Who Dares To Believe In Me?” by The Believers, released in 1993. The question remains who borrowed what and what the origin of the piano riff and the vocal phrase is.
I believe there’s a belief in the strength of this particular sample. I have spun the vinyl so many times when I was DJ’ing, and the crowd always responded with joy without any prejudice to where it came from.
What travels through this chain isn’t merely a sound, but an impulse. A belief in the emotional power of that phrase and its ability to elevate, transform, and connect. Each artist believed in the power of that particular sound to elevate their own creation.
This isn’t theft. This is trust. Trust that the sound still holds something vital. That it can live again in a new shape.
Artists Defending the Art
When sampling came under fire in the late ’80s and early ’90s, artists responded not with legal arguments, but with music itself.
In 1988, Stetsasonic directly addressed the criticism with “Talkin’ All That Jazz.” Over a rich tapestry of jazz samples, they declared: “You see, you misunderstood, a sample’s just a tactic / A portion of my method, a tool…” They saw sampling as an extension of music’s natural evolution, a way to breathe new life into older sounds and connect with wider audiences.
Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad created dense, multi-layered sampling environments; not collage, but commentary. Their chaotic yet cohesive soundscapes were defiant statements about sampling’s legitimacy.
De La Soul’s “3 Feet High and Rising” invited listeners into a joyful, referential soundscape where every sample was a wink or a doorway. Their approach wasn’t about concealment, but about creating new narratives through a collage of sounds.
Perhaps most powerfully, Liam Howlett of The Prodigy offered a practical demonstration with “The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume One” in 1999. This wasn’t just a DJ mix, it was a masterclass in breakbeat and hip-hop history, meticulously blending over 40 tracks that directly influenced The Prodigy’s sound. Howlett presented it as explicit education in the raw materials that formed his band’s sonic identity, proving how existing music isn’t merely copied, but disassembled and reassembled into something entirely new.
Beyond Genre: The Universal Practice
This pattern appears throughout musical history:
Farley Jackmaster Funk’s “Love Can’t Turn Around” (1986) extensively reworked Isaac Hayes’ “I Can’t Turn Around” from 1975, taking the emotional core of a soul track and giving it entirely new energy within the nascent house genre.
The “Amen Break” — a 6-second drum loop from The Winstons’ 1969 track “Amen, Brother” — became the rhythmic backbone of entire genres like jungle and drum & bass. This one small sample demonstrates the profound collective belief in rhythmic potential.
Even atmospheric borrowing tells the story: 808 State’s “Pacific State” and A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray” share DNA not through direct sampling, but through exchanged moods, palettes, and intent.
In Britpop, an iconic example of creative reuse is “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve, which uses a string arrangement sampled from an orchestral version of The Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time”. More recently, the controversy around “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke ft. T.I. & Pharrell showed how a popular song reinterpreted the “feel” and the “sound” of Marvin Gaye. Finally, another example can be found in the 2017 release of “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran; while not a direct reinterpretation or sample, it raised some eyebrows because of a vocal hook said to be strikingly similar to a song titled “Oh Why” released in 2015.
The Generative Nature of Ideas
There’s a saying: If you and I both have an apple and exchange them, we each still have one apple. But if we both have an idea and exchange them, we now each have two.
Music, like ideas, is generative. To share a phrase, a rhythm, a tonal mood is not to lose it, but rather to multiply its meaning. To let it echo in more than one body, more than one moment.
This is what creative borrowing offers us: not scarcity, but endless possibility.
Part II: The Machine That Samples, But Cannot Listen
And yet, there’s a paradox.
We celebrate the DJ who skilfully mixes elevating club tracks or a producer who loops a James Brown drum break, but recoil when a machine generates a song “in the style of” the same artist. The very acts we celebrate in musicians become fraught when performed by machines.
Why?
A Question of Agency and Intent
Perhaps the discomfort isn’t with the act, but with the actor.
When a musician samples, we presume intent. Awareness. A lineage of listening. The sample becomes a gesture; of homage, subversion, irony, or love. We understand that behind the choice lies hours of digging through records, a moment of recognition, a decision about what deserves to live again.
But AI doesn’t listen. It processes. It doesn’t borrow with reverence or remember the first time it heard that break. It doesn’t believe in the transformative power of that particular sound.
This isn’t a criticism of the tool, but a recognition of what makes artistic borrowing meaningful in the first place. The emotional texture of the why is inseparable from the how.
From Sampling to Scraping
When artists borrow, they enter a cultural conversation. There’s context, narrative, and often explicit acknowledgement of sources. The borrowed element carries its history forward, creating layers of meaning for those who recognise the references.
When AI trains on massive datasets, it tends to do so without permission, narrative, or context. This transforms the act from dialogue into data extraction. Sampling becomes scraping. Homage becomes harvest.
Suddenly, what once felt generative now feels transactional. The ethics of reuse begin to fracture, not around originality versus derivation, but around presence. Around whether the act of reuse is rooted in participation or just pattern replication.
Returning to the Apple
So let’s revisit that analogy. When I share an idea with you, and you with me, we both gain. But when AI takes my idea (trained on it without credit, feedback, or interaction) I don’t feel like we now both have two. I feel like something was used, not shared.
This may be the core tension. Creative borrowing is not just a mechanical process; it’s relational. Rooted in time, attention, and belief. When that relational layer is removed, the act becomes hollow, even if the output sounds familiar.
This isn’t a call to ban “the machine”. Nor is it an argument against technological evolution. It’s an invitation to pause and consider what we’re actually protecting when we defend artistic borrowing. Are we defending the mechanical act of reuse? Or are we defending something deeper? The human impulse to find meaning in resonance, to build bridges between past and present, to participate in an ongoing cultural conversation?
Technology can remix. It can simulate. It can borrow with unprecedented scale and sophistication. But can it believe in the transformative power of the sounds it processes? Can it feel the weight of musical history in a single drum break? Can art made without listening still be called creative reuse?
That is where we draw the line. Not at the act of borrowing itself, but at the belief that that, too, is a form of standing on the shoulders of giants.
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