Thoughts on Who Knows What

It’s ridiculous to me that you have to pay to sample now a days. Sampling has been around forever but genres like funk began because it was poor man’s music. Funk artists and DJs used those samples to create entirely new songs to play in clubs and for fun. How is it that now even a tiny sample has to be paid for? Sampling used to be done for people who were poor it has a whole culture that evolved from it. There’s no way out of the whole copyrighting has put me in. The more we discussed it in class the more I began to find it ridiculous. The creative commons law is all people have to put creative twists in already existing sources and while it’s good, it’s already been attacked. Creators on YouTube are already getting copyright strikes and demonetized for their creative work that may include samples. It makes me scared for our future if this is already a problem. I know this sounds over-dramatic, but I can’t help but be afraid that some The Giver type dystopian world is where we’re headed. Who knows though, it could stagnate or maybe it’s a pendulum effect that we’re about to swing back into. I don’t know, there’s no way to actually predict the future.

Then there’s the question of what actually belongs to us. Does the past belong to us? What about heritage? Thinking back on the medium is the message class we had forever ago, history says things in a museum are important to our past— they help define us, who we used to be and what has become of us. Museums also say “you can’t be trusted to touch this history, you’ll taint or destroy it” (which is weirdly metaphorical if you think about it). Can you really say it belongs to us then? I don’t know it’s a crazy concept.