Hip Hop, hauntology and metamodernism: Sampling invented sonic spectres

Borne out of the recontextualization of past phonographic records, sample-based Hip Hop represents a creative response to socio-economic crisis. Its music-making paradigm challenged established ideas about intellectual ownership and, as the music ecosystem played catch-up, sample-based practitioners kept variating their approach in response to an ever-tightening licensing landscape. One of the creative mutations still resonating today involves the production of original sampling content by the beat-makers themselves. The approach brings to the forefront aesthetic implications concerning the construction of samples, manifesting an invented past in their sonic signatures. The issue is complicated by an overwhelming longing for retro signifiers in all forms of contemporary expression. A postmodern reading attributes this trend to nostalgia, while a metamodern understanding traces the motivation in hauntology – a haunting of contemporary aesthetics by pasts that never came to be. This article examines the poiesis of hauntological content in sample-‘creating’-based Hip Hop, investigating the motivations, mechanics and sonic manifestations of this, reimagined, creative process. The research deploys autoethnographic and practice-based strategies to highlight how textural and spatial staging infuse contextual dimensions of ‘time’ and ‘space’ on sampling content and how diachronic contrasts enable an oscillation between – and beyond – past, present and future disjunctions in sample-based musicking.