The Ritual Returns of Sampling and Intertextuality

By Alexia Heasley

There are certain songs I listen to religiously. They replay in my mind as laypeople recite  prayers in confession. Repetition and renewal institute their authority, providing them with a  greater meaning than one listen or one recital can offer. While the song utters the same lyrics  and recurring instrumentals every time, it feels that something has shifted. Perhaps it is within  myself that something has shifted if the sound is the same each time. 

Sampling depends on this dedication to repetition and return, the willingness to revisit  established sounds and offer them new contexts and meaning. While many musicians use  sampling as a sort of shortcut for their instrumentals, borrowed from familiar genres and time  periods, the American band TV Girl retrieves their samples from less conventional sources.  Their 2016 track Taking What’s Not Yours opens with a sped-up sample from the 1992 anti copyright infringement campaign Don’t Copy That Floppy, run by the Software Publishers  Association. Ironically, the borrowed lyrics are ‘Thievin', stealin', takin' what's not yours’, to  which I assume the band shared an amused laugh when they first proposed the idea. While  the initial campaign is obvious, encouraging young people not to illegally transfer media onto  private copies, TV Girl has reintroduced the message to an audience of young people who  might be starkly unaware what a floppy disc is and how one goes about copying it. Through  the recycled sampling of the phrase, TV Girl grants it a new life and meaning to be  interpreted by thousands of new listeners, now applied to their subsequent lyrics of heartache  and emotional theft. 

This same practice appears in literature. Certain sentences or rhythmic poetries can only be  truly revealed through repetition. The first reading establishes sound, the second establishes  pattern. By the third, this repetition has become ritualistic. Whatever meaning accompanied  the first reading has now been internalised, shifted, and regurgitated through the mind, once  

more given new life and meaning. The words stop being read in a linear fashion, they are  now circular, folding in on themselves as the reader follows along. Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein (1818) uses an array of biblical references in its story of creation to give the  novel greater depth and authority through its literary predecessor. Indeed, it equally  references Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), who two hundred years prior had laboured over the  precise biblical references that would defend his extended narrative. 

Sampling and intertextuality are both acts of reference, but they are not limited by their  gestures to the past. They instead serve as invitations to the past to rejoin us in the present  and find purpose once more in a new context. Frankenstein’s language and structure  repeatedly return to earlier moments, stressing the importance of returning to a thought again  and again, lingering until either it changes or you do. The opening two lines of Taking What’s  Not Yours are repeated sixteen times throughout the song, driving the irony of its sampling  home and ending the song in a rhythmic circular motion. Meaning emerges from the 

endurance of the lyrics being structurally repeated so they surround and engulf the verses  between. 

Returning to the same book works in the same fashion. After reading a text for the first time,  you don’t often return for the plot the second time but to sit inside the sentences you didn’t  notice at first, to hear how your voice fills the syllables so differently years down the line.  The text remains unchanged but the changes within yourself make this act of rereading a  form of sampling in itself. The ritual of return allows you to find new meanings in old  references. Where Shelley refrains from explaining the theological weight her sentences  carry, the repetition and familiarity do the work for her.

We often imagine meaning as  something that finally makes sense at the end of a completed work, as if revelation belongs to conclusion alone. Ritualistic repetition suggests otherwise, asking for commitment in return for meaning. Sampling and intertextuality redefine creativity as something that is continually reanimated rather than having to be wholly original. Whether in a sampled lyric, a biblical allusion, or the rereading of a familiar novel, return preserves the past and then transforms it to ensure our past materials are not forgotten, gathering new meanings through changing contexts and artists. The same chord structure plays, the same sentence appears, but each repetition creates new paths of possibility. Repetition is never about reducing one piece by duplicating another, it is a ritual practice through which music and literature preserve memories and reinterpretation. Meaning resides in the enduring cycle of changing contexts and return to creativity.