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Sonic Lattices: Sampling as Historiography in Hip-Hop, 1973-1998

Carleton, Camille Lee
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Carleton, Camille Lee
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Hip-hop—History and criticism, Sampling (Sound recordings)—Social aspects, African Americans—Music—History and criticism, Music and race—United States, Oral tradition—United States
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Honors Papers
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2026_honors_thesis_carleton.pdf
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https://hdl.handle.net/10267/37260
Abstract
This honors thesis argues that sampling in hip-hop functions as a form of historiography, serving as a sonic practice that preserves, reinterprets, and transmits Black historical experience. Emerging in the South Bronx during the 1970s amid urban decline and systemic racism, sampling reworks fragments of earlier Black musical traditions into new compositions that connect past and present. Drawing on the concept of rupture, the study examines how artists from the 1970s through the 1990s—including Public Enemy, N.W.A., Dr. Dre, and Lauryn Hill—use sampling to respond to historical and ongoing disruptions such as slavery’s afterlives, policing, and mass incarceration. Through practices of placemaking, oral archiving, lineage-building, and narrative construction, sampling becomes a counter-archival method that reassembles cultural memory and asserts historical agency, producing layered musical texts that function simultaneously as historical record, political critique, and forms of resistance.
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