I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In this post, I demonstrate the idea using two dance floor classics. “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players (1975) is from …
Continue reading “Love Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops”
One of the most complicated copyright situations covered in my Musical Borrowing class is the landmark sampling lawsuit Newton v. Diamond. “Newton” is jazz flutist and composer James Newton (not to be confused with the film composer). “Diamond” is Michael Diamond, aka Mike D of the Beastie Boys. The song at issue is the Beasties’ …
Continue reading “The Beastie Boys, James Newton, and phonographic orality”
I have “Bemsha Swing” on the brain for no special reason. It’s one of Thelonious Monk’s most persistent earworms, and every once in a while it wakens from its dormant state to occupy my music circuitry for a week or two or three. When I am jamming on the guitar, my fingers constantly find their …
In order to shop at the Park Slope Food Coop, you have to do a monthly work shift. I do two a month, one for me and one for my wife, who is much too busy earning most of our money to do her own shifts. I work early mornings on the Receiving squad. As …
We are talking about Jamaica’s remix culture in Musical Borrowing class and how it challenges Western concepts of authorship and ownership. The class is reading the opening chapters of Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power by Larisa Kingston Mann, which connects Jamaica’s ethos of communal musical creativity to its …
Continue reading “Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires”
For the hip-hop unit in the Song Factory class at the New School, I want to start things off by clarifying the difference between hip-hop and rap. People use these terms interchangeably, but they really describe two different things: hip-hop is a culture, and rap is a musical expression of that culture. But rapping is …
After reading Dilla Time, I did a deep dive into Dilla’s preferred sample sources, including the Detroit Emeralds. Here’s one of their nastiest grooves: I combined that opening groove with Charles Mingus and Vassily Kalinnikov to create one of my favorite of my own tracks: Mingus Kalinnikov by Ethan Hein According to WhoSampled.com, “You’re Getting …
I am very attached to Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and somehow managed to not even hear Gladys Knight’s recording until late in life. I recognized immediately that Gladys’ version is a banger, but it took me a while to relax my preconceptions and warm up to it.
Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and …
Continue reading “Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education”
I applied for something that asked for a ten page summary of my doctoral dissertation. Maybe you would like to read it, rather than the full 300 pages? Learning Something Deep: Teaching to Learn and Learning to Teach Hip-Hop in New York City (summary) Image: Toni Blackman leads a middle school songwriting workshop In this …
