The Manhattan apartment is filled with bookshelves, but most of them don’t hold books. Instead, they overflow with albums—classical over here, jazz over there, and lots of soul and rock-and-roll in between. A parakeet named Adri flies around the living room offering guests, as the bird’s owner puts it, ‘’sweet gangsta kisses.’’ Most always there’s the steady thump thump of hip-hop blasting in the background.
You have entered the world of Hope Carr, who is known to her rap clientele, she says, as ‘’the white lady who clears samples.’’
Rappers, producers and record labels enlist her help in getting permission to use samples: the words and scraps of old funk, jazz, soul and pop that are recorded by other artists, then recycled and made a part of just about every new rap song on the charts. Ms. Carr spends her days listening to albums, cassettes, obscure 12-inch disco singles and CD’s and then tracking down publishers and recording companies.
‘’I live for this,’’ Ms. Carr said one morning as she prepared for another day of work. As is often the case, she had been sent a tape to vet but was not told specifically what to look for by the rappers themselves, who many times do not know the source of their borrowed material. ‘’I spent a whole day trying to figure out if someone was saying ‘Whoomp, there it is’ or ‘Whoot, there it is.’ ‘’ The distinction was critical because each was the chorus to a different song.
She finally figured out that the rappers weren’t saying either. ‘’They were saying ‘Hoop, there it is,’ ‘’ she said of the refrain, which was recorded for the soundtrack of Michael Jordan’s movie, ‘’Space Jam,’’ but ultimately not used.
It was Ms. Carr who also made sure that Naughty by Nature could borrow the hook from the Jackson Five’s ‘’ABC’’ for the rappers’ 1991 megahit ‘’O.P.P.’’ She cleared the bits and pieces of Minnie Riperton’s ‘’Memory Lane’’ and New Birth’s ‘’You Are What I’m All About’’ that the rappers Junior Mafia used in their song ‘’Player’s Anthem.’’ And she has vetted nearly every song recorded by the New Age rappers P. M. Dawn.
Prince Paul, who has produced performers like De La Soul, Queen Latifah and Vernon Reid, wishes he had had Ms. Carr’s expertise in 1989, when he produced his first album, ‘’Three Feet High and Rising,’’ by De La Soul. That album prompted a multimillion-dollar lawsuit because it sampled a Turtles song without permission. The case was eventually settled; for how much, Prince Paul wouldn’t say, but he said it was costly.
‘’One reason Hope comes in handy, he said, ‘’is labels don’t want to take that risk, so they ask a professional, ‘What do you think?’ Who knows? If we had cleared the Turtles, they might have said, ‘Oh, give us $2,000.’ Or they might have said, ‘Don’t use it at all.’ And that would have cleared up the whole problem.’’
When a sample is not cleared, a performer faces other risks. In 1992, the rapper Biz Markie was found to have used on an album, without permission, parts of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 hit song ‘’Alone Again (Naturally)’’ Warner Brothers, which distributed the rapper’s Cold Chillin’ label, was ordered to stop selling the album. ‘’That was sort of the turning point for people clearing stuff,’’ Ms. Carr said.
Rap has become one of the biggest-selling genres in pop music, and sampling, which along with driving beats and blustering poetry is a trademark of the music, has spawned its own cottage industry. Performers like George Clinton and James Brown were introduced to a new generation through the sampling of their music.
The minimum cost of using parts of a song has risen from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Investors have purchased music catalogues with the sole intention of selling the use of the songs to rap artists. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which collects royalties for songwriters and publishers, also expanded its sampling department to deal with rap.
Ms. Carr’s company, Clearance 13-8, has been clearing sampled music since 1989, and by now she is thoroughly conversant in the subject. She knows that samples of George Clinton, the mastermind behind Parliament Funkadelic, are still the rage among West Coast rappers and that Barry White is hot but very expensive. And ‘’no one samples James Brown anymore because it’s kind of passe,’’ she said. She also knows which artists others should steer clear of. The Eagles, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, to name a few, rarely allow their music to be sampled.
For certain artists, sampling seems to have become another battlefront in the war over the morality of rap music. Anita Baker will simply not allow any of her songs to be sampled by rap artists, while James Brown forbids the sampling of his songs in raps about violence or drugs. ‘’He really doesn’t want to be involved in any kind of rap that demoralizes any segment of society,’’ said Larry Fridie, Mr. Brown’s special assistant.
Ms. Carr thinks that such disdain for sampling smacks of hypocrisy. ‘’I don’t think anyone thinks less of James Brown because of all the songs that have sampled his music,’’ she said. ‘’And if you have a movie with the foulest language, he’d be happy to have his songs in it.’’
With her tousled red hair and tortoise-shell glasses, Ms. Carr, 38, resembles a librarian more than a hip-hop connoisseur. A former tour manager for European pop artists, she happened into her specialty by accident. Back in 1989, her husband, Lawrence Stanley, then director of business affairs at Tommy Boy Records, a prominent rap label, asked her to clear songs for the ‘’De La Soul Is Dead’’ album.
‘’It was trial by fire because no one was really doing it,’’ she said, ‘’and there was no place to plug into.’’ She was shunted from the copyright to the legal affairs departments of the record labels and back again, she said, because many companies simply were not prepared to deal with this new facet of the music business. ‘’Now I call, and they know what I’m doing.’’
She charges $50 an hour and works as much as 70 hours a week from her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Getting permission from the necessary parties can take months, and she is so busy that she has hired an assistant.
But it is a labor of love for Ms. Carr, whose tastes in music runs from Stravinsky to Wu-Tang Clan. ‘’One thing that appeals to me about hip-hop is its scavenger mentality,’’ she said. ‘’I’m delighted by the use of a song we’ve heard 400 times, and they’ve figured out a way to reloop it. Some of what people do in their home studios is amazing.’’
One afternoon, she flipped on a cassette that had been sent by B Rock and the Biz, an Atlanta group. The music, in her words, was ‘’your basic booty rap.’’ The feverish beat of a new ditty called ‘’My Babydaddy’’ boomed through the living room, and Ms. Carr went to work.
It turned out that the rap had lifted a huge chunk of Cheryl Lynn’s 1979 hit, ‘’Got to Be Real.’’ Because the rap used the main beat of Ms. Lynn’s actual recording, Ms. Carr had to contact the publisher of the original composition as well as the record company, both of whom would have to be paid for its use. She reached for one of her most important tools, a copy of a compilation by the Japanese disk jockey Toshinobu Kubota, to find out who owned the song.
Whether it is two seconds or two minutes, a familiar hook or groove usually requires clearance. ‘’Really what it is is recognizability,’’ she said. A rap group used just the ‘’good’’ from the refrain of the 1979 disco hit ‘’Good Times’’ by Chic, and the artist had to pay for using the lyric.
Publishers require payment for the use of the composition—the copyrighted music and lyrics of a song. Generally they demand 50 percent of the new song’s profits. When an artist digitally samples an actual recording, record companies also want compensation, usually asking for a minimum fee in the thousands of dollars, plus an additional payment if the record sells more than a certain number of copies.
Because the cost is so high, ‘’more people are doing songs without samples or trying to make songs where the samples are so obscure you don’t hear them,’’ said Ms. Carr, who works with her clients to determine what they can borrow and not pay for without getting caught.
Industry insiders like Peter LoFrumento, a consultant to ASCAP, sees rappers relying less on samples and more on their own creations. ‘’There was a point where sampling was very popular in the business, and everybody was sampling something,’’ he said. ‘’I think that’s kind of come and gone.’’
Ms. Carr maintains that sampling is creative in its own right. Even classical musicians, she said, have used tape loops to create a new sound out of previously recorded melodies. But rap has been the primary musical form to use sampling.
‘’This is a technological advance in the way music is made,’’ she said. ‘’It’s no different from collage, and that’s a perfectly acceptable art form.’’
