This book was a great testament of what sampling has done for hip hop. This book is full of wonderful information and is just a pleasure to read. A must for any music fan period, not just a fan of hip hop. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the arc of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving this book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

I liked it, but hoped for more.

Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop (2020), by Nate Patrin, is a very detailed, informative take on the history of hip-hop and its relation with the art of sampling. In a way, this is a good thing: Patrin did a smart choice by electing the four protagonists - Grandmaster Flash, Prince Paul, Dr. Dre and Madlib – to guide the complex and intricate history of hip-hop, going from a niche cultural expression to one of the most popular genres today. In this aspect, producers take the spotlight and sampling is, primarily in the first and last chapters of the book, showed as the backbone of Hip-Hop’s sonic power. On the other hand, though, perhaps to escape the trappings of repeating already deeply explored themes involving sampling in hip-hop production by his antecessors – such as technologic, social and legal aspects in Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (2004) by Joseph G. Schloss or The Art of Sampling: The Sampling Tradition of Hip Hop/Rap Music and Copyright Law (2013) by Amir Said – and focusing in the historical milieu, Bring That Beat Back does not at all dissimilar from other researchers, such as Ed Piskor’s comics Hip Hop Family Tree (2013) or the TV show Hip-Hop Evolution (2016-). In this sense, the factual history of hip-hop clearly overshadows the sampling history, especially in the second and third chapters: the feud of Biggie and Tupac, in one example, gets much more attention than George Clinton’s defense of the new craft producers were using. But the most obvious example of the problem with this choice happens when Patrin says that “If ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ was the definitive record when it came to capturing the spirit of scratching on wax, hip-hop's reckoning with sampling is a bit blurry”: I finished the book and it's still blurry.

Since Bring That Beat Back was published by the University of Minnesota Press, I also expected some philosophical and theoretical development, historiographically speaking, which didn’t happen.

In general, however, I did enjoy reading Patrin’s sometimes fun, sometimes acid, but always meticulous prose.

On a more particular note, I missed the mention of some producers who, although they don't really get into the great canon of Hip-Hop, have carried (and still do) the tradition of the art of sampling. So, shout-out (in U.S.) to 9th Wonder, Blockhead, Kid Koala, Cut Chemist, DJ Nu-Mark, DJ Dahi and Salaam Remi, RJD2, Quantic and also to (internationals) The Architect, L’entourloop, Wax on Tailor, Chinese Man, Coldcut, Kognitif, Gramatik and Nave Beatz.