Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s possible to splice different performances together with tape to make a seamlessly perfect one, but it’s a labor-intensive process. One way around the tradeoff is to have the best musicians in the world. The Beatles knocked out their early albums in a matter of hours. Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue took only two days of live recording. These kinds of heroic feats of musicianship are only possible if you’ve spent years playing together professionally, like the Beatles, or if you put in many hours of a day of disciplined practice, like the guys in Miles Davis’ band, or ideally, both.
Another method to get lively yet polished recordings is to use ferocious discipline to create the illusion of spontaneity. Michael Jackson was able to give his performances on Thriller so much polish by recording take after take after take, all at the same level of manic intensity, with his grunts and screams arrayed precisely and intentionally. I can admire the focus he was able to bring to bear over long hours of tedious studio labor, but the psyche that produced his work ethic isn’t something I’d wish on myself or anyone else.
The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.
I found this picture of Herbie Hancock on a stranger’s blog.
There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of Herbie and Quincy Jones demonstrating Herbie’s Fairlight CMI in 1983. Continue reading “A synthesizer is like an axe”
It includes the original recording of “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer”, but there are some contenders.
The compilation is named for a breakdown section that appears in “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” James Brown quiets the band down to handclaps, footstomps and congas played by Johnny Griggs. After he raps a little, James Brown cues drummer Clyde Stubblefield back in, followed by bassist Bootsy Collins and the rest of the band.
James Brown wasn’t intentionally trying to create a perfect batch of hip-hop samples in the late sixties and early seventies, but he couldn’t have succeeded any better if he had been. “Give It Up” has been sampled by everybody from PublicEnemy to Everlast to Duran Duran to Miles Davis. It takes a powerful piece of music to inspire so much new work in such a variety of styles.
There’s an ugly history of racial slurs for African-Americans around jungles. James Brown made it a point to reclaim jungle imagery in a context of joyful pride. He has several songs that include a break where it’s just the congas and his chanting about being in the jungle, brother, swing on the vine, check out your mind. The history of agriculture and high tech societies is short. The stone age was long. We’ll never know exactly what music sounded like in the Stone Age, but I’d bet that James Brown’s jungle breakdowns give us a good idea.
It’s wrong of white racists to degrade black people by comparing them to monkeys because it denies the fundamental similarities that we all share with our primate cousins. As I try to imagine how our more monkey-like ancestors first started inventing music, I think it’s reasonable to assume they started with rhythm, with clapping their hands and stomping their feet. I’m convinced by Steven Mithen’s theory in The Singing Neanderthals that dance was the precursor to walking on two feet.
Rhythm is the most fundamental component of music. Every other aspect emerges from it. Pitches are very fast rhythms. If you play a series of clicks faster and faster, eventually they appear to fuse into a whir, then a thrum, then a low-pitched tone. The faster the clicks, the higher the pitch. Combining different pitches gives you melodies and harmonies.
Clapping your hands, stomping your feet and chanting are the easiest entry points to music making, and they never get old. With all of our technology, we still aren’t tired of that Stone Age sound. I’m thinking about Queen and “We Will Rock You”, about Lil Mama and “Lip Gloss”, Michael Jackson and the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”
A few years ago I went hear Questlove do a DJ set. He devoted the entire last third of it to the “clap your hands” break, looping it, processing it, chopping it up. It was mesmerizing. Swing on the vine, check out your mind!
We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re trying to do it by mechanical means. Our great-grandparents would have been astounded at how cheap and ubiquitous timekeeping devices have become. In my apartment alone, I can get accurate time measurements from two computers, the cable box, two cell phones, a drum machine, a metronome, an ipod, a thermometer with a built in clock, and a digital camera. Probably the least reliable timekeeping device in here is our analog clock.
Before the explosion of cheap electronics, most people had no external way to keep time so accurately. Before the industrial revolution, there wasn’t much need to. The only reason you would have needed precise timekeeping was for music and dancing. Continue reading “Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.”
It’s no accident that music and games share the verb “to play.” Both music and games are semi-structured forms of social learning. As far as I’m concerned, the most exciting thing happening in the video game world is the explosion of music-based games like Dance Dance Revolution.
Biz Markie. Who doesn’t love him? Our broken intellectual property system, that’s who.
Biz belongs to the period in the late eighties and early nineties that many hip-hop heads refer to as the golden age. The tracks of this period were dense with samples and quotes, most of which were used without permission. Biz was no exception.
The golden age came to an end in 1992, when Biz was sued for illegally sampling “Alone Again (Naturally) ” by Gilbert O’Sullivan.
“Alone Again (Naturally)” is a fine song, but it’s not spectacularly original. The chord progressions, melodic motifs and verbal imagery are all popular music boilerplate. The rhyme schemes are mostly cliches like cried/died. Gilbert O’Sullivan was the first person to use this exact combination of standard musical modules, but the modules themselves can be heard in zillions of other songs. I’m giving you all this music criticism because I think it’s ironic that Biz could be sued for stealing from a song that is itself assembled from other pre-existing ideas.
Here’s the song Biz was sued over.
Biz uses a loop of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s piano and a quote from the chorus. He also uses the frequently-sampled beat from “Impeach The President” by The Honeydrippers. Biz’s song follows the time-honored hip-hop strategy of semi-ironically quoting a well-known chorus and writing new verses around it, all over a funkier beat.
Biz’s label, a subsidiary of Warner Bros, attempted to get clearance to use the piano sample from Grand Upright Music, Gilbert O’Sullivan’s publishing company. When Grand Upright denied the request, Biz and his people went ahead and used it anyway. In response, Grand Upright Music filed an injunction. The decision in Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. ruled emphatically in Grand Upright’s favor. The decision was the death knell of sample-intensive hip-hop at the commercial level. Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy began his opinion in the case by quoting the Bible:
“Thou shalt not steal.” has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization. Unfortunately, in the modern world of business this admonition is not always followed. Indeed, the defendants in this action for copyright infringement would have this court believe that stealing is rampant in the music business and, for that reason, their conduct here should be excused. The conduct of the defendants herein, however, violates not only the Seventh Commandment, but also the copyright laws of this country… [I]t is clear that the defendants knew that they were violating the plaintiff’s rights as well as the rights of others. Their only aim was to sell thousands upon thousands of records. This callous disregard for the law and for the rights of others requires not only the preliminary injunction sought by the plaintiff but also sterner measures.”
Judge Duffy concluded by referring the matter to the US Attorney, recommending prosecution of Biz et al for criminal copyright infringement.
This ruling makes me sad for several reasons. First of all, Judge Duffy wasn’t in complete possession of the facts. If you choose to define sampling as “stealing,” then stealing was in fact rampant in the music business, and not just among hip-hop artists. Rock and roll was built on uncredited borrowing from blues and R&B musicians. The Beatles used unauthorized samples of copyrighted materials in their artsier tracks like “Revolution 9.” Experiments with tape collage by the classical avant-garde go back to the fifties.
I also take issue with Judge Duffy’s equation of sampling and stealing. There has never been a wholly original piece of music. For that matter, there has never been a completely new idea of any kind that didn’t draw extensively on its intellectual context. Sampling is a novel technological practice, but it’s a seamless extension of the way music has always been made. All creativity consists of recombining and repurposing fragments of existing works into new ones. I would go so far as to say that there is no other kind of artistic practice.
I’m not completely unsympathetic to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s position. I wish that some kind of licensing or profit-sharing agreement could have been reached in this particular case. But where does it end? Would we require Gilbert O’Sullivan to pay every previous user of his harmonic and melodic cliches, and every previous user of the cried/died rhyme? Would there be any kind of art at all if we did?
Meanwhile, I detect more than a tinge of racism in Judge Duffy’s ruling, and in the cultural consensus that produced it. This article from the UCLA/Columbia Copyright Infringement Project is sympathetic to Biz’s legal position, but it slips in some ignorant music criticism:
[A]part from the gibberish chanted over O’Sullivan’s ostinato, there is nothing original in Biz Markie’s song or his recording except his performance of it.
Biz doesn’t enunciate his rhymes very clearly, but there’s a big difference between mumbly delivery of slang and “gibberish.” Maybe the slight wasn’t have a racial motivation, but it’s hard to imagine why else the writer would be so dismissive of the hip-hop art form.
Personally, I value Biz Markie’s music much more highly than Gilbert O’Sullivan’s. I resent the chilling effect that copyright law has on sampling culture, which I regard as the a rich and vibrant method of musical expression. A big part of the pleasure of hip-hop is encountering a familiar sample in a new song. It mixes the warm thrill of recognition with the strangeness of a novel context. Hip-hop has this wonderful ability to make well-worn cliches fresh again.
Even when it’s unauthorized, sampling generally helps the sampled artists more than it harms them in the long run. It keeps the sampled artist culturally relevant to new generations of listeners who otherwise wouldn’t care. I would never have even heard of Gilbert O’Sullivan if Biz hadn’t paid him the compliment of sampling him.
Just for fun, here’s Biz’s best-known song. Like “Alone Again”, the chorus quotes an older song, “You Got What I Need” by Freddie Scott.
People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly they used it as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first musicians to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated control surface.
