How Long Do You Have To Wait?

When is the right time to break the rules?

Not the written ones—I’m talking about the unwritten rules, the unspoken boundaries, the rules that everybody recognizes without declaring them.

When do you break those? How long should you wait?

Take sampling in hip-hop, for instance. Back in the early '90s, there was this unwritten rule:

A producer had to wait a generation—about 20 years—before sampling a track. Long enough for the original to fade from collective memory, to become raw material rather than recent history.

But then came EPMD's "Crossover" in 1992, and everything changed. Questlove got the story out of Erick Sermon in an interview. He asked him about how he did the unthinkable, when in 1992 he sampled Roger Troutman's 1991 quasi-hit, "You Should Be Mine." You can and should press play on this for a minute, and listen for the sample right at the 58-second mark, clear as day, begging to be a declaration of independence from the old ways.

So right there, in 1992, on EPMD’s album Never Personal, the world heard what it sounded like to declare yourself permissioned.

It started a wave of conversations between Questlove and his friends. It sparked a revolution in the community, carrying all the way to young producers like J. Dilla who would later tell Questlove (paraphrasing), “Even if it was out yesterday, you can flip it.”

It’s funny how cultural norms work. It’s funny how immutable they seem until someone creates something so undeniably great that it forces the rest of us to question why those boundaries existed in the first place.

That’s the thing about great art.

It doesn’t just push boundaries.

It questions whether they should have been there at all in the first place.

Maybe the real question isn’t how long you should wait.

Maybe it’s why wait at all?

Don’t crossover, Breakout.

Tell ‘em EPMD: