I believe in using music as a tool for analyzing and discussing music. To that end, I wanted to try interviewing a musician about a song of theirs, and then do a remix of the song that incorporates the interview. A rapper named Anna Diorio a.k.a. Happy Accident volunteered to participate. We discussed the writing and production of her song “A Man’s World.”
https://soundcloud.com/thetruthfairy/a-mans-world
We talked for over a half hour, and I edited the interview down to a few selected phrases. I placed these over spliced-together sections of the song and its instrumental version, along with some of its quotes, samples, and influences.
Hip-hop is a good genre for this kind of remix-as-ethnography, because its aesthetic is based on the cutting and splicing of audio. While the edited interview is choppy and fragmented-sounding by itself, it sounds perfectly natural with some tempo-synced delay over a beat. It would be much harder to make this method work organically in the context of jazz or country.
I got this idea from a few different sources. First of all, rap and dance music producers have been using interviews in their music for decades–“Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb is a case in point. The most creative DJs will use their sets to do musical ethnography too, for example by mixing together a rap song and the soul song that it samples. Questlove is a master of this technique. Any sample-based song is a kind of musical ethnography or criticism; it seems only logical to make the connection explicit. This idea is also the basis for my megamixes.
I would like to do an ongoing series of these interview/remixes. If you make hip-hop or music in a related genre and you’d like to participate, please be in touch.