Sampling built hip-hop, and it also built a legal minefield, which is the tension this film sits inside. Public Enemy's Hank Shocklee describes assembling tracks out of hundreds of layered sounds, treating old records as raw material the way a collage artist treats magazine clippings. George Clinton and Clyde Stubblefield, the drummer whose Funky Drummer break has been looped on more records than almost any other piece of music, talk about hearing their own playing turned into someone else's hit, sometimes with payment and sometimes without. De La Soul's run-in with The Turtles over an uncleared sample sits in the film as a case study in how quickly borrowing can become a lawsuit. Producers, DJs, and entertainment lawyers take turns explaining what sampling actually costs to clear, and how that cost has pushed some artists toward original playing instead of crate-digging. The film does not settle whether sampling is theft or a legitimate art form built on reuse; it leaves that argument where it found it, unresolved and expensive.