Break My Soul: Black women and sample culture
Kate Butler
Whatever you may feel about Beyoncé (and we should all have feelings about people who cross picket lines), her new single, Break My Soul, is the latest chapter in decades of controversy over Black women getting their dues in house music.
Break My Soul appears to sample Show Me Love, a big hit for New York singer Robin S (Robin Stone) in 1993. However, because Robin S didn’t write the song, and because Beyoncé doesn’t sample her vocal performance, it looks like Robin S won’t get any royalties.
This is a tricky moral question: Robin S probably doesn’t have any legal rights, but would the songwriters of Show Me Love (who are credited on Break My Soul and so, presumably, will receive royalties) have had such a big hit without Robin S’s performance? Would Beyoncé have sampled it, if it wasn’t for Robin S’s performance?
Black women singing on or being sampled on dance records has often raised questions of credit and compensation. For those of us who love sample culture as an amazing creative force, how should we feel about this?
In 1988, something seismic happened: it was the release of two singles by Inner City, called Big Fun and Good Life, a collaboration between singer Paris Grey, from Chicago, and Kevin Saunderson, from Detroit. The music was also influenced by Paradise Garage, the club in New York where Larry Levan had been resident since the late 1970s, and which Saunderson had attended. Inner City was a coming together of three intertwined strands of dance culture which were born in those locations: house, techno and garage.
But more than this, it was a potent marriage of the new dance culture with gospel culture: Paris Grey, whose real name is Shanna Jackson, had grown up singing in the church. Her singing style and positive lyrics, over the powerful, hi-energy kick drum and minimalist keyboard melody, was something different to the over-production of 1980s dance pop, such as Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody, or the chill, dubby groove of earlier crossover dance hits, such as Gwen Guthrie’s Aint Nothin’ Goin’ On But the Rent.
Big Fun and Good Life became global hits and, as it should be, both Grey and Saunderson had co-writing credits. But the following rush to find singers who could bring that uplifting gospel sound and message, and make a commercial hit out of it, meant that a lot of Black women got burned.
Loleatta Holloway famously described how a dance hit produced by three men in Italy — Danielle Davoli, Valerio Semplici, Mirko Limoni — Black Box’s Ride on Time, topped the charts for six weeks in 1989, and that, “I sat there and watched the television every day and saw this girl pantomime my song and get credit for it.”
When Black Box’s record label realised that Holloway’s record label hadn’t given them permission to use the sample from her song, Love Sensation (1980), the label reputedly engaged Heather Small to re-record it. Then Black Box employed a model, Katrin Quinol, to lip synch the lyrics for television and video performances.
That same year, and in 1990, there were three more global chart topping singles, where the producers pulled the same fast one, of using a Black woman’s vocals uncredited and employing another woman to mime the vocals in performances: Technotronic’s Pump Up the Jam (Belgium), featuring Congolese-Belgian rapper Ya Kid K (Manuela Djogi), which was subsequently re-released with Djogi credited; C&C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) (USA), featuring American singer Martha Wash, who sued and settled; and Snap!’s The Power (Germany), featuring another American, Jocelyn Brown.
In 2009, Brown announced that she was suing the German producers of The Power for £10 million, reputedly half the amount that the song had made. At the time, Brown said: “They [Snap] started saying they had re-recorded the vocal with another singer,” she said, “which was insulting, don’t you think I know my own voice? I used to feel so depressed that they had stolen my voice. Now I’ve decided to fight.” The outcome of the proceedings is not known.
Dance music producers weren’t just ripping off Black women, however: the introduction of sample technology at this time led to wholesale incorporation of other people’s creative work. Pump Up the Jam also sampled Marshall Jefferson’s Move Your Body, while The Power sampled Mantronix and rapper Chill Rob G — it’s not clear if any of that was done with permission.
At the same time, UK hardcore and jungle were emerging and were built on sample culture — the Amen break becoming one of the most used and uncredited samples of all time. Fans of the creative energy that was let loose by this free-for-all have mixed feelings about the issue of credit, perhaps because, for the most part, the money made by these records was not huge.
In the context of a contemporary billion dollar operation, however, it looks like another artist has been short changed by Beyoncé’s sampling: Stonebridge (Sten Hallström), whose remix of Show Me Love is the version that topped the charts in 1993, does not appear to get a songwriting credit on Break My Soul. Having received a remix fee at the time, it looks like he doesn’t have any legal rights either.
When it comes to the sampling of Black women’s creative output in dance music, however, it’s arguable that a specific moral question emerges: the sonic contrast between electronic music and gospel influenced vocals intensified the experience and was a huge part of the success of the genre. Using those vocals went a long way to ensuring that the songs were commercial hits.
There’s also the issue that it’s a person’s voice, which is such an intrinsically personal way to be musically expressive, potentially making the artist much more vulnerable. This becomes doubly troubling when other women’s bodies were/are used to help market and sell the records.
In case it needs spelling out, there was an acute problem in the cases listed above, where (mostly) white men from European countries with colonial legacies in Africa were exploiting Black women’s gospel tradition, which emerged in the horrific context of slavery.
But at the same time, there appears to be tacit acceptance within the grass roots of dance music, that sampling these vocals (most frequently without credit) has been a powerful driver of creativity, with commercialism potentially an ambition but frequently not an outcome.
We can see this on the journey taken by Dajae’s (Karen Gordon) vocals on Cajmere’s Brighter Days (1992), a big Chicago house record with a beautiful message of hope. Topping the dance charts in the US, the record was released as “Cajmere featuring Dajae”, with songwriters Cajmere (Curtis A. Jones) and Dana, a Black woman named Dana Stovall, credited.
A remix by Cajmere that was released at the time, the Underground Goodies Mix, took Dajae’s vocal and chopped it into a “ooh uh I need” rhythm, combining it with a few key phrases: “won’t you lift me up, “brighter days” and “can you hear me”.
DJ Rashad and others cite this remix as inspiring footwork, which is Chicago’s contemporary manifestation of house. In 2013, DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn released a footwork version, Brighter Dayz, on Hyperdub. Sampling only the vocal chop and Dajae’s sunburst “brighter days”, the track honours both her vocal and the creative production that it inspired.
In 2019, when Kanye West returned home to Chicago to perform his Sunday Service, he played from the Underground Goodies Mix of Brighter Days, messing around with the vocal chop and Dajae’s phrases, the crowd instantly recognising and going wild.
It doesn’t appear to be documented how all of this played out for Cajmere, Dajae and Dana Stovall: if they made money or not from DJ Rashad/DJ Spinn and Kanye’s tribute to them, or if they are happy that the song they made together inspired new generations of creativity.
What we do know, however, is that Robin S appears to be happy with Beyoncé sampling Show Me Love, even though the first she heard of it was when it was released. Indeed, Robin S, in an interview, thanked Beyoncé and her team “for giving me my flowers while I’m still alive”.
Ravers across the world have nostalgia for the early days of dance music because a lot of amazing and beautiful things happened. Some people will point out that a lot of the exploitation happening was at the commercial level of pop, and not at the grassroots, where a lot less money was being made, and that may be true. But we also have to recognise that it wasn’t a perfect time. Bad things, as well as good things, were happening in our culture.
And, no surprise, exploitation in the pop/dance world hasn’t gone away: in 2020, Woot magazine outlined more recent injustices experienced by Black women in the music industry.
In the 1990s, Black women singing on dance records made us feel good, they made us feel safe: as a generation went through the mind altering experience of rave for the first time, these women provided emotional support and spiritual guidance. In 1993, Kyo (Carol Leeming) sang on For What You Dream Of, “you’re losing your mind, but that’s OK”.
In Break My Soul, which also features Big Freedia and a gospel choir, when Beyoncé sings, “Ima let my hair down, cause I lost my mind” and “Ima build my own foundation”, it sounds a lot like she is going to look after no one but herself; which, if Robin S says so, is fair enough.
Kate Butler is a writer and DJ based in Dublin. She is currently writing This is a Story about Control: Music, Technology and Gendered Roles of Creativity, a book and documentary about women and non-binary people using technology to make music
