Sampleface is 1 today and the editor-in-chief has some things to say.
At 12:00am on Monday 1st October 2012, something happened. Sampleface was officially “born”. It technically started back in September but the original date is hazy as I had changed one of my old personal blogs – Live & Unplugged – so I take it from 1st October. And so we’re here. It’s something of a cliché but I never expected it to take off the way it did. I can’t take credit for the name or the premise behind it; that goes out to Blaise aka Sub-Conscience. An explanation of “sampleface” can be found here but in a nutshell, it’s the face you make when you can hear a sample in a track, ie. you hear a loop or a drum break and think “yeah, I could sample that”. It’s something anyone can get regardless of production abilities and that goes to show how far sampling culture can go. I wanted to put a focus on that for the site as I didn’t feel any hip hop blogs (or music blogs for that matter) put an emphasis on it. But I didn’t want to stop there.
I wanted the hip hop culture to resonate with people a lot more – less about news, more about the roots and their role in the music and sampling past, present and future. That’s another subject I don’t feel gets enough limelight in publications. My goal with Sampleface was to enrich and share fantastic music and news and I feel that we have achieved that as a team. I’ve talked about me, myself and I for the past few sentences but the team has made this site what it is today. Culture is all about community and that’s what I’ve tried to push by adding to the team and making Sampleface a “we” rather than “me and everyone below”. I just want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed and for all the good music we’ve all covered.
But I don’t want to rest on my laurels. We’re still growing and I would like this month to be the start of bigger and better things. I’m currently working on putting out a Wikipedia network for artists and obscure albums to have an encyclopaedic platform. You won’t see (m)any pages about, say, Knxwledge or Big Groove or The Auracle or DarkoTheSuper so that would be good from a knowledge point of view. I would also like to set up a message board for people to keep the interactions going outside the main site, where producers and rappers could maybe collaborate and just talk about music and sampling. More video content, more long form articles, more reviews and more music.
So to everyone following on Facebook and Twitter, the email and feed subscribers and last but not least the team, I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your support.