Nilay Patel
Legalize hip hop!
There’s more lawyers and litigation in the music industry than ever before (because it’s so much harder to make money) but the release of De La Soul’s catalog to streaming services came with a bunch of compromises because the samples weren’t cleared. That’s a tragedy, argues Dan Charnas in Slate:
While De La’s absence has been a musical deprivation, their return is marked by a more insidious cultural crime: the adulteration of a landmark work of sonic pastiche. It’s part of a larger injustice we’ve been tolerating for decades [...] But the way hip-hop makes music remains completely unprotected by law.
