Bring That Beat Back

How sampling remade hip-hop over forty years, from pioneering superstar Grandmaster Flash through crate-digging preservationist and innovator Madlib   Sampling-incorporating found sound and manipulating it into another form entirely-has done more than any musical movement in the twentieth century to maintain a continuum of popular music as a living document and, in the process, has become one of the most successful (and commercial) strains of postmodern art. Bring That Beat Back traces the development of this transformative pop-cultural practice from its origins in the turntable-manning, record-spinning hip-hop DJs of 1970s New York through forty years of musical innovation and reinvention. Nate Patrin tells the story of how sampling built hip-hop through the lens of four pivotal artists: Grandmaster Flash as the popular face of the music’s DJ-born beginnings; Prince Paul as an early champion of sampling’s potential to elaborate on and rewrite music history; Dr. Dre as the superstar who personified the rise of a stylistically distinct regional sound while blurring the lines between sampling and composition; and Madlib as the underground experimentalist and record-collector antiquarian who constantly broke the rules of what the mainstream expected from hip-hop. From these four artists’ histories, and the stories of the people who collaborated, competed, and evolved with them, Patrin crafts a deeply informed, eminently readable account of a facet of pop music as complex as it is commonly underestimated: the aesthetic and reconstructive power of one of the most revelatory forms of popular culture to emerge from postwar twentieth-century America. And you can nod your head to it.

Nate Patrin is a longtime music critic whose writing has appeared in dozens of publications including Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, Bandcamp Daily, Red Bull Music Academy, and his hometown Twin Cities’ alt-weekly City Pages. This is his first book. 

Contents Introduction: The Art of the Loop Part I. The Grandmaster 1. Wheels of Steel: How Djs Became Artists 2. Change the Beat: Hip-Hop’s First Crossover 3. Funky Drummer: Sampling Reaches the People Part II. The Prince 4. Synthetic Substitution: A New Medium Finds Its Canon 5. Talkin’ All That Jazz: The Legitimization of an Art Form 6. Constant Elevation: Hip-Hop’s Rising Underground Part III. The Doctor 7. Funky Enough: How the West was Made 8. G Thang: The Producer as Superstar 9. Aftermath: Auteurism in a Post-Gangsta World Part IV. The Beat Konducta 10. The Loop Digga: Sampling Preserves History (and Itself) 11. The Illest Villains: High Concepts and New Voices 12. Survival Test: Hip-Hop as a Community Epilogue: Breaks and Echoes Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Selected Discography Index