Sample and Hold

This lush and amazing rare-groove track by Lowell was the musical foundation of Massive Attack´s "Lately", and it came embedded in a great piece about sampling that Simon Reynolds wrote for The Guardian.

I think that everybody knew that "Massive Attack" were using tons of samples, more so that their whole sound and aesthetics revolved around sampling. So I guess that the current release of "Protected: Massive Samples", a collection of the original sources, won´t cause the same fuzz that surrounded a similar project that unveiled the foundations of many Daft Punk songs. It is still different how you use a sample, and especially how an audience perceives a song and the band that produces it.


With their huge, blown-up, stadium shows Daft Punk had turned into a rock-dinosaur, happy to regurgitate their own, limited repertoire over and over. Their boldness and twisted genius made them get away with lifting almost complete, fairly obscure, songs and making them their own.

Massive Attack on the other side made sure to work their samples around an idea that always tried to be something else. In the best case the end result would be something bigger than the sum of its parts. The question remains: which approach is more rockist? And why did it shock so many people when it was "revealed" that Daft Punk´s music was almost completely stitched together from old disco, funk and Barry Manilow records.

Did they see them as something "authentic" because they played to huge crowds which would normally not listen to "electro"? Maybe because they didn´t read the credits on the sleeves because they never bothered to buy the record?