Nile Rodgers talking about Sampling

The one and only Nile Rodgers (Chic, Sister Sledge, Early Madonna and David Bowie Producer) was talking about groovy Samples and Coverversions and in an interview he gave on 28th of July 2008. I would really like to know what he would think about Coffee or more :-D

Enjoy...

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What do you make of the kind of contemporary artists who don’t leave the computer to make music? Those people who have never picked up a traditional instrument? And those that sample? "I love where we are now. We’re in the era of what I’d describe as audio collage. When my music was first sampled for Rappers Delight, I must admit it felt really strange. It must be like tasting some strange food for the first time. Like, an acquired taste. So I’d have been like “woooah, what the f*ck is that?!” I recoiled. But I also couldn’t figure out how someone had done that. Never mind how they had taken my record, made it their own and had an even bigger hit with it. The breakthrough for me was realising that the people behind these records were artists. As soon as I got that perspective, I developed a real appreciation for those artists that worked in this way."

Is there not a part of you that believes that it’s unoriginal? "You’ve got to realise that those people are doing what they can with what’s available to them. Now I grew up in a different era when everyone was taught music at school. It was up to the individual if they wanted to take that further but everyone got that introduction and were able to begin with the basics. Now I speak to people like Wu-Tang’s The RZA and Public Enemy’s Chuck D – those guys that I’ve come to consider my friends – and they helped me understand that this other generation of people, who are artists at heart, haven’t had that same chance to discover music in a more classically-trained environment. So the government didn’t provide and so this new way of making music came along. Hip hop was born out of necessity."

Did you learn anything from the way that early hip producers would isolate a couple of bars of your music and subvert it for their own needs? "While I don’t chop-up music in the same way, it taught me how I had also always been about the groove. I can play the same guitar line over and over again for hours and really get into that groove. That’s really what Chic did anyway. We were all about the repetition."

While popular hits, your tracks weren’t ever conventional pop singles, were they? "No. But we could have kept playing and playing those grooves but we were limited by the fact that there was only so much music you could get on the vinyl. Live, we would stretch out a track for ten minutes and comfortably know that we could still do a further twenty if we wanted too. We would be groovin’ and groovin’. That wasn’t new, you understand. I’d already seen James Brown do that. And it would make you head straight for the dancefloor. I remember the first time I heard Hendrix and he was groovin’ and killin’ it too. It was primal. And at the heart of it was that all important rhythm."

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taken from Southport Reporter Magazine