Reflection 4: He Can't Stop- Why Can't Kanye West Stop Sampling?

Going off from some of my final thoughts from my last blog posts there was one specific question I wanted to look into:

"What is the method to the madness? (What purpose does an artist, such as Kanye West sample so much?)"

I already touched on this question before using Jay Z and Biggie as examples. But I was more curious as to why an artist, specifically Kanye West samples a large amount of artists throughout his career he has virtually no relation to.

The following sources I explored to see a history of Kanye's sampled songs:
http://www.whosampled.com/Kanye-West/
http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/20/6048381/kanye-west-samples-listenable-history

I explored the comment sections to see what others' thoughts were and some of them looked like this:

This comes back to the notion that those who song sample are lazy artists cheating at music making. But I think that is idea is a sorry excuse for those to press hate against an artist that they just flat out do not like. It is a very surface level reaction to jump to the conclusion that artists are not original when they sample. 

Some comments, on the other hand, looked like this:

I want to highlight what the comment above says about originality, that everything we say or do is influenced by something else. Is that not what knowledge and learning is? We constantly take ideas from the past and adapt, change, and feed off them in order to progress and evolve.

When I think about Kanye West and his sample history, I think about him as an artist who is fluent in his musical history. It is not the lack of musical knowledge which is why West samples as much as he does. But rather he uses his large, expansive array of musical knowledge and history to creatively adapt and build upon his predecessors.

One observation I made while I was searching samples in Kanye West songs was that a majority of the artists he chooses to sample are of people of colour. Yes, he has sampled from artists such as Elton John, Bette Midler, Bon Iver, but there is a much larger range of artists of colour such as Etta James, Ray Charles, Chaka Khan, Curtis Mayfield, Ottis Redding, Lauren Hyll, Nina Simone, Donal Leace, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, and the list goes on.

It is no doubt that West has been known for his political outbursts at award ceremonies (Taylor Swift 2009 VMAs, Beck 2015 Grammys) noting the equality of award shows when it comes to people of colour and having their work recognized. He has advocated for this issue in past speeches such as his acceptance of the he Visionary Award for The BET Honors 2015, and also incorporated it into his speech for the 2015 MTV VMA Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. He has made it known that the issue of race and recognition of artists is important to him. I would like to argue that his use of sampling is a way to tribute and give recognition to what people of colour have done for music. West has no problem lending his voice for artists and providing a platform to do so. His use of sampling, in my opinion, seems related to this issue of race and recognition.

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Genius Hour Wrap Up:

I thought Genius Hour was a creative way to approach problem based learning and using self directed learning to accomplish their goals. 

I would use this in a classroom, I know in my block the class I am in will be working on public speeches. I am thinking of ways to incorporate Genius Hour as a way they can explore their topic and at the end use their speech to consolidate their research. 

I feel as though I did complete my goal, my research always lead into new questions or related back to old questions. I feel as a whole all the information I found supported the whole scope of what I wanted to know. Doing Genius Hour, I was able to experience that learning is not linear, I jumped from questions and revisited questions and reevaluated my answers a lot. Exploring multimedia information always introduced new ways of viewing the topic and lead to new paths that I did not think about or plan to explore in the first place, but became necessary in the process. I am excited to incorporate Genius Hour in my placement.