"Was Foucault a Plagiarist?"*: Interviews with Count Bass D

Mickey Hess, Rider University

I interviewed Nashville hip-hop artist Count Bass D on March 26, 2004. The following are two sound clips from that interview:

In "Sampling Is," Coutn describes sampling's tranformative power in terms of the visual arts, claiming that sampling does with sound what graphic designers do with programs like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. He believes that sampling's critics often don't understand the multitude of sources involved in creating one new hip-hop track.

In "Renegades," Count claims that independent artists don?t have access to the system of sample clearance, which requires a record label?s financial backing and legal team. Even though he defends sampling as a creative act, he still celebrates it as crime, and as a way to liberate sounds that black artists signed over to their record companies under unfair contracts.

 

* This article appeared in Computers and Composition, 23(3), the print accompaniment to this online special issue about sound in/as compositional spaces.