When I write next about Hip-hop, which should be soon, I don’t think I’m going to focus on the lyrics. The lyrical quality there is easily described, I think. What interestes me most is sampling.

I think of sampling together with what I think of what T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent“:

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”

Also, I think of sampling, and Eliot’s historical æsthetic, together with the notion of a link, a hyperlink, that increasingly common element where one text is joned to another.

It seems to me that allusion, the literary device, offers some creative possibilities.