“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.” – Goethe
Hip-hop is rich with history. The hip-hop producer’s method of sampling pre-recorded sounds from old records and then interweaving them into a new pattern establishes the basic framework for the music’s sonic aesthetic. This allows hip-hop to simultaneously reference the past while attaining a forward thinking perspective. The producer can take advantage of using familiar sounds in our musical repertoire — James Brown drum breaks, George Clinton vocals, and ubiquitous pop culture snippets like a Mr. Clean commercial — to build upon the referents that shape the way we listen, and more fundamentally, the way we perceive. Most popular music, and I’d even argue that most creative endeavors, pivot on this technique of sampling, at least in the broad sense underlined by the Goethe quote introducing this article. For this reason, analyzing the creative process behind sampling might afford clues as to the very way that human beings go about imagining and innovating.
While as hip-hop production typically relies on purposeful editing of sonic elements, sometimes sampling results from an obtuse misperception of the original source. For instance, today’s torchbearer of the hip-hop sampling aesthetic, Kanye West, carved out his own rhymes to the single from 2007′s Graduation “Drunk and Hot Girls” certainly as inspired from Can singer Michael Mooney’s lyrics in “Sing Swan Song” (from which Kanye also took the lyrical melody, drum patterns, and atmospheric ambience). Whereas Kanye sings with a hedonistic wink about “drunky, hot girls”, Michael Mooney croons in a garbled voice about “drunky, hot bowls.” The actual sonic resonance of Mooney’s words sound so much like Kanye’s misinterpreted “drunky, hot girls” that while listening to the original song, it’s difficult to even tell that Mooney indeed swoons dreamily of bowls, not girls (although, the meaning of those bowls may not be all so different in the end). In fact, the perceptual relation, or the audible resemblance, is so similar that Kanye actually incorporates Mooney’s vocal segment throughout “Drunk and Hot Girls”, albeit with a bit of editing to emphasize Kanye’s own romantic vision.
While there is no way for me to prove it, I believe that it does not take too great a leap of reason to trace Kanye’s creative process for his Graduation hit. I see it like this: Kanye is listening to Can’s seminal Ege Bamyasi one late evening, slightly intoxicated with just enough alcohol and herb to inspire the creative juices. He may have been at a club earlier that evening, or perhaps a weekend beforehand, where a–not to be too crass–drunky, hot girl seduced his fancy and flittered away from his masculine grasp consequently due to her inebriated ways. We all know from reading Proust that the distance of an unattained and desired object only propels that desire to higher levels of intensity, and Kanye, late in the evening when the passions only grow, must feel the sharpness of that longing.
Soon enough “Sing Swan Song”, the penultimate chapter of the amazing record, begins. Kanye’s mood and existential disposition colors the way he listens to the music, forming not only his emotional response to the sounds but also the way the collage of noises and lyrics actually sound to him. We tend to anticipate in the act of perception, both expecting to hear, see, or touch what is already familiar to us. In cases where we deal with the unfamiliar, unexpected, or perhaps the obscure — we at first unknowingly come to piece the perceptual object together to the best of our capacities. If called out for it, as I have been many times in conversation when I “thought” I heard something that indeed my partner never said, I might reflect on it and come to a resolution. As Goethe suggests, we do not perceive nature as naked — raw, isolated, and removed from its background or the context, our past–, but rather we perceive a holistic nature, one that has already incorporated our own feelings and histories, one that mirrors and reflects other parts of itself.
Stonesthrow recording artist Oh No demonstrated a similar strategy of imaginative misperception in his last two efforts, Dr. No’s Oxperiment and Ethiopium. Both are concept alums that sample obscure psychedelic and jazz-funk records from particular regions of the world; the first, Turkey, and the second, Ethiopia. With no raps recorded on either album, Oh No tends to chop a selection of the lyrics from the source material, twisting and stuttering the vocal cut over a bass knocking beat. Oftentimes Oh No chooses to name the song in respect to what that foreign vocal cut sounds like, the Ethiopian and Turkish words interpreted spontaneously by an English speaker (I am assuming that Oh No also has no linguistic expertise with either language). The misinterpretation is hence a phonetic mistranslation, although one that is self-aware. Just listen to the following example pilfered from Ethiopium, hilariously called “Pussy”. I do hope to not offend the reader with such a title, but it seems that cases of misperception are always immersed in the nexus of desire.
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Let me underline that mistaken misinterpretation — the unaware kind as opposed to the intentional kind illustrated by Oh No — may also possess creative powers. The French philosopher and nimble thinker Pierre Hadot traced a number of Roman translations of Ancient Greek philosophical and poetic texts, and even modern interpretations of those sources, as influenced by their own misinterpretations of words, concepts, and arguments. Such acts of misinterpretation, Hadot argues, actually shaped many of the innovative strands of thought throughout those periods. And that’s not even mentioning such memorable instances as in Michelangelo’s infamous sculpture of Moses, the horned Jewish prophet and law giver.
I admit that my exegesis of these musical works and the creative processes which produced them is not full proof. However, I’ve advanved my argument primarily with the aim of detailing the phenomenon of imaginative perception, a creative act I believe fundamental to not only the way that we innovate but also to the way we imagine. Some of my most creative ideas emerge in these uncanny moments of misperception. The familiarly ordered world seemingly breaks down, offering a moment of haze broken from the commonplace relations of meaning, where I am granted the intellectual and imaginative space to project my own nebulous and evolving sensibility onto the world. Hence, a new archaeology of meaning may arise.
On the edge of such an unfamiliar and ungrounded space, I’m able to channel that unwieldy and hidden creative source, which allows me to at least for a brief instant to see differently, maybe even to think tremendously, or at least to misperceive in my own personal and idiosyncratic way.
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