Mark Ronson provides an enlightening TED talk on the history and power of sampling
As far as iconoclasts of electronic music go, Mark Ronson is at the top of the list. From founding his own label, to DJing funk, jazz and hip hop nights, to being one of the more eloquent visionaries of our music generation, Mark Ronson has never failed to push the boundaries of his craft.
In an insightful TED talk about the state of modern music, Ronson puts on a live display of sampling while articulating the legendary history behind the medium. To exemplify the technique, Ronson takes Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s classic hip hop record, “La Di Da Di” (which Ronson pins to have been sampled at least 547 times) and shows its reification in Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” and Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop.”
At the close of the talk, Ronson goes into detail about the lingering resistance to sample-based music from some members of the community, ultimately concluding with a sage defense: “We live in the post-sampling era. We take the things we love and we build on them.”
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