By Ian Ferguson
Hip-Hop has long depended on sampling and remixing beats for its instrumental tracks; why should its vocal tracks be any different? Commercial rappers bring home the bling, and for what? For spending torturous hours, pen in hand, slaving over rhyme to earn the accolades “best rapper alive” (Lil Wayne) or “Hova” (Jay-Z, as in Jay-Hova, Jehovah, God)? Judging from the numerous Swagger Jacker remixes posted on YouTube, probably not.
In urban slang, a swagger jacker is a person who steals someone else’s syle, flow, lyrics, or ideas and passes them off as their own. The two most notorious alleged swagger jackers (or at least those most dissed as biters, synonymous with swagger jacker, in cyberspace) consistently fill arena seats and stand at the highest heights of the hip-hop hierarchy: Lil Wayne and Jay-Z.
When Lil Wayne raps, “Some say the X, makes the sex spec-tacular, make me lick you from yo neck to yo back, then ya, shiverin', tongue deliverin', chills up that spine, that ass is mine,” he reanimates Notorious B.I.G.’s voice from the dead, biting off of the song “Fuck You Tonight.” Or when Jay-Z raps, “Gather round hustlers that’s if your still livin' and get on down to that ol’ jig rhythm,” he’s rapping what Slick Rick rapped back in 1987.
Jay-Z seems to be the more complex supposed swagger jacker of the two. On the one hand, his parent label Universal is one of the heaviest hitters represented by the RIAA’s crusade against copyright infringement. He himself was sentenced to three years probation for stabbing a record executive who allegedly bootlegged Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter in 1999. (And you thought the court rulings against file sharers were rough.) On the other hand, Jay-Z has repeatedly released a cappella versions of his albums in the hopes that DJs will remix the hell out of them.
In many ways, swagger jacking isn’t so cut and dry. When does biting cross the line from quoting legendary lyrics for a knowing audience to straight theft? In a postmodern world, arguably all cultural texts are dependent on external sources. However, if you’re going to endorse intellectual property copyrights and the repressive legal sanctions, you had better not have your own hand in the cookie jar whose lid you’re trying to slam.
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