Damn that Rap, Snoop Stole My Music

A discussion on intellectual property and the future of Black expression

Damn that Rap, Snoop Stole My Music
by Mark Anthony Neal

Most rap music fans are probably unaware of Michael Henderson and his rather formidable musical career. Henderson recently filed separate complaints against Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus) and producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, charging both with copyright infringement.

In layperson’s terms, he’s accusing them of stealing his music.

The cases continue what has been a more than two decade struggle over hip-hop’s aesthetic principles and intellectual property law. At stake in these skirmishes is the future of Black cultural expression.

A Little History

At his peak, bassist Michael Henderson, was most known for his work as a sideman with Miles Davis during Davis’s electric funk period in the early 1970s appearing on albums like Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971) and Live-Evil (1971). An in demand session musician, Henderson also worked with and recorded with Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. Like his peers Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke, Henderson was of a generation of electric bassists that were redefining the sound of the instrument in the early 1970s, furthering the funk revolution that James Brown initiated in the 1960s.

It was with James Brown in mind that Davis recorded On the Corner (1972), an album in which Henderson’s bass is prominently featured. The genius of On the Corner, was that even as Davis and his musicians liberally borrowed from the musical impulses of Brown, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendix and others, there’s little doubt that On the Corner offers singular evidence of Davis’s creativity and musical genius.

Critic Greg Tate has suggested that On the Corner’s production values were a prototype for later rap production. Indeed Davis’s last studio album before his death in 1992 was the hip-hop influenced Doo-Bop which was produced by Easy Mo Be (Ready to Die). In bringing suit against Snoop and 9th Wonder, Michael Henderson is ironically suing the children and grandchildren of On the Corner.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

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Editor's Note: This past spring Neal co-taught the class “Sampling Soul” with producer 9th Wonder at Duke University.

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of five books, including the forthcoming Looking for Leroy. He teaches Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Email Mark at mark@theloop21.com. Follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

"Sampling Soul": The Mid-Term Exam

9th Wonder and I intended the course "Sampling Soul" to be accessible to a wider audience than that contained in the classroom. In that spirit, we are making the mid-term exam available to the public and encouraging readers to respond to the prompt. The best responses will be published @ NewBlackMan.

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Sampling Soul

Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D. (e-mail: man9@duke.edu)

9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit)

Midterm Examination

Answer the essay question as comprehensively as possible.

Response should be typed and double-spaced. (minimum 1500 words; 4-6 pages)

Throughout McLeod’s Freedoms of Expression and Schur’s Parodies of Ownership, both authors make claims about black communal practices (and examples of non-black oral cultures) that embraced informal notions of borrowing, revision, and sharing; practices which became critical to musical and performance practices amongst black performers. In his video treatment of Imani Uzuri’s “Sun Moon Child,” visual artist Pierre Bennu makes an even more explicit claim on this culture of borrowing, revision and sharing, by literally linking various performance movements across time and space (diaspora). Bennu produced his treatment using fair use doctrine, to protect his use of Uzuri’s music, as well as the imagery of noted black performers such as Nina Simone, James Brown, Alvin Ailey, Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Judith Jamison, The Jackson 5, Rita Moreno and countless others. Youtube recently removed Bennu’s video, which had been posted on the site for three years, claiming that it was copyright infringement.

Sun Moon Child from pierre bennu on Vimeo.

Using Bennu’s work as a backdrop, discuss the ways that black artists have employed formal and informal modes of borrowing, revision and sharing in musical, literary and visual arts. What is hip-hop’s relationship to these practices? How has the practice of contemporary musical sampling, largely influenced by hip-hop production, altered the viability of these communal practices? Given the emergence of intellectual property law in the last decade, what are the implications for communal art practices and “black” art in general? In that Soul and Funk music have been used as raw material in hip-hop sampling practices, how has sampling impacted the legacy and commercial value of these musical genres and the artists that produce them? From the standpoint of intellectual property law, how would you defend or reject Bennu’s claim that “Sun Moon Child” is fair use?