ILL Legal?
With their latest CD held up with legal wrangling over their use of samples, hip-hop tandem MarsILL looks ahead, hoping that album will soon see the light of day.
by Andree Farias | posted 10/24/2005
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From the Sugarhill Gang in the '70s and Run-D.M.C. in the '80s to heavyweights like Beyoncé and Kanye West today, sampling is widely used in popular music. It basically means taking a portion of someone else's recording and using it in a creative new way in another. Sampling is extremely common in hip-hop, but it came back to haunt rap duo MarsILL, whose much-maligned second album, PRO*PAIN (Gotee), has been delayed numerous times because of legalities involving somebody else's material. In this conversation, the tandem of Greg "Manchild" Owens and Nate "Dust" Corrona explains the technicalities of this hip-hop element, how the oversight has affected the release of their second album, and in what ways their very livelihoods have suffered because of it.
Nate "Dust" Corrona (left) and Greg "Manchild" Owens still hope to release their much delayed Pro*Pain in 2006
So what exactly happened to your second album with Gotee Records?
Dust We turned the record in. Gotee asked if there were any samples on it. We said, "Yes, but they're chopped up so don't worry about it."
What do you mean, chopped up?
Dust From a production standpoint, the art form of hip-hop is based around sampling. "Chopping up" is basically, according to lawyers, "interpolation"—pieces of music that have been re-sequenced to make something new. Sometimes you can get around the sampling issue by chopping things up, sometimes you can't. It's the law nowadays that whenever you use someone else's piece, even if it's half a millisecond, it still needs to be cleared. EMI [Gotee's parent company] wasn't comfortable releasing the album without it being cleared.
You're not new to the hip-hop game, yet you did something you knew would get you in trouble. Why?
Manchild Dust? (Laughs)
Dust (Laughs) Speaking as the producer and the person mostly responsible for the samples that caused the problem, [this situation] is a lot different that any other record we've put out. EMI really took notice of this record, and really got behind it. But their lawyers who work with licensing put it under a magnifying glass. It's not so much that PRO*PAIN is any more sample-based than any other project. We were just a little laid back in how we approached it initially. But EMI wasn't laid back about it.
We come from a very independent place, musically, and with our situation we just had a much different attitude. Obviously, our attitude is changing because of what happened. We're figuring out how MarsILL can exist under the sample law breeching. We'll work on it.
Manchild Dust hit the nail on the head. It's not that we were making a dangerous record; it wasn't like Dust was sampling Phil Collins or a really big artist. Our label got real excited. They thought, "This is the record that's going to do it! This is the one that's going to blow up!" So when they started looking at it, they were really scrutinizing every detail. They were very worried. [But] even now, the stuff that's holding it up is not a very big deal. But the lawyers have their jobs to do; they were really worried about liability.
Meanwhile, you already had 10,000 copies ready to go.
Dust Yes, and that was the main problem. We had a whole bunch of units pressed up, and we couldn't really go back and fix the sample glitches. So we had to actually clear the samples before releasing it. It was really hard for the lawyers [at our label]. They had never really had to deal with this before.
Are people at the label upset?
Manchild Gotee has been very supportive; they're sticking with it. Another label would've said, "Let's just shelve this and move on." But they really believe in the record, and that's why they're taking a chance on it. The frustration they feel is the same one that we feel. It's not a case of this big corporate giant trying to hold the little guy down. They're really trying to protect us.
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