As of this writing, you can download a big collection of isolated Beatles multitracks from the Internet Archive. These multitracks have been in circulation for a while, but due to their complete illegality, they can be difficult to find. The Internet Archive is a stable download source, but we’ll see how long it takes for …
Category Archives: Copyright and Authorship
The Beastie Boys, James Newton, and phonographic orality
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’ …
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Can I Kick It?
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 …
Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires
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 …
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We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
I was not expecting to write a post on here about Taylor Swift. I have nothing against her and wish her the best, I’m just not her target audience. But when you have kids, you find yourself in all kinds of new situations. Ever since my daughter started second grade, she has gone from mildly …
Musical Borrowing syllabus
This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School for the first time. Here’s my syllabus. It will probably evolve as we go, but this is the initial plan. This course on “non-original” music explores how frequently existing compositions have been appropriated and adapted into new works, and how these …
Dies irae
This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School. For the plainchant part of that, my example is the Dies irae sequence, which is to Western European classical music what the Funky Drummer break is to hip-hop. Dies irae (Latin for “the day of wrath”) is a medieval poem describing …
Watermelon Man
As part of my current J Dilla binge, I was excited to find a track where he flips a Herbie Hancock sample (no, not “Come Running To Me“, though that one is great too.) This sent me down a rabbit hole with “Watermelon Man.” This track has had quite a journey, both in its prehistory and …
Hear J Dilla flip a Gary Burton sample three different ways
While I await my copy of Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, I’m listening to lots and lots of James Dewitt Yancey. As I was poking around WhoSampled.com, I noticed that Dilla used a sample of Gary Burton in three different tracks in three consecutive years. It’s five seconds into Burton’s 1967 recording of Carla Bley’s …
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Boogie Chillen
Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made. The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty …