Sampler is an upcoming book (S25) that quilts together essays on music, sampling, and reappropriation. There are hundreds of books on Pop Art, but practically none on musical collage, which dominates recent music—from Charles Ives to Girl Talk, vaporwave to Madlib. As we enter a new era where songwriters get accused of cryptomnesia, or cribbing tunes, Sampler takes a long view back at how musical appropriation has always hummed under the radar---given that much of this collage art is, in 2024, still illegal.

The style of Sampler, like the collages it unpacks, stitches together description, analysis, and anecdote, with a juxtapositional panache modelled on John Cage’s Silence, his breakout book. The book is based on madcap librarianship and research, stretching from Britney Spears’ Toxic to Hindi film music, to create a breathless, panoptic level of reference, like the music it takes to court.

The book uses anecdote to examine aesthetics, from conversations with Beyoncé’s copyright lawyer, to festivals of Stevie Nicks’ impersonators, to the author’s father’s chats with Warhol.  Occasionally the book dips into diagrams and visuals, in later chapters. These parse my work, in which live performers are trained to lip-sync and move in lock-step with sampled collages. Sampler traces this body of work from its origins--the Edison is-it-live-Memorex stunts of the 1920s, called the Tone Tests--to the crowd-sourced participation of the Eras tour.