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 produce gets unloaded from trucks outside, we break down the pallets, bring everything into the basement, and organize it into the various walk-in coolers. One of the Receiving coordinators plays music from a mammoth Spotify playlist called Sea of Liquid Love, over 1,900 tracks spanning hip-hop, electronic dance music, reggae and other groove-oriented styles from around the world. During my last shift, “Can I Kick It?” came up in the rotation, and in spite of the fact that we were schlepping boxes of vegetables around before dawn, everybody lit up. Why is that track so great? How did these guys, all of whom were younger than twenty years old, record such an all-time banger?

Before I try to answer the bigger questions, let’s take a look at the samples in the order of their appearance in the track.

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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 postcolonial history. We spent today listening to this delightfully titled dub classic by Scientist to warm up for the discussion.

The album consists of remixed (versioned) reggae songs released in 1981. Many of these songs are sung over remixes (versions) of instrumentals from yet other reggae songs. Scientist created his versions by playing the multitrack tape of each song through a studio mixing desk and re-recording (dubbing) them down to two-track. During recording, he performed various manipulations on the mixing desk: changing the levels of the tracks, muting and unmuting them, and applying audio effects, most notably Roland Space Echo. He carried out these manipulations in real time, with an improvisational approach, giving his versions an unpredictable structure.

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Rap before hip-hop

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 also a musical technique, one that long predates hip-hop. Rap appears in every style of popular music descending from the African diaspora. I list examples from several of those styles below. You might debate me on whether some of these examples count as “rap” or not. Is it rap when you sing rhythmically on one pitch, or on a narrow range of pitches? Rap more often uses wider pitch contours. Are we counting any spoken word with musical accompaniment, or does the speaking have to be rhythmically structured in a specific way? Does it have to rhyme? We will be discussing all that in class.

Blues

John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen” (1948)

Hooker raps a couple of short verses amid a mostly sung tune, and they are haunting. He is not exactly following the rhythm of the guitar part, but he’s also not using natural speech rhythm; it’s somewhere in between.

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You’re Gettin’ A Little Too Smart

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:

According to WhoSampled.com, “You’re Getting A Little Too Smart” has been sampled in a couple of hundred rap songs. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out which part everybody was sampling. Was it the second bar? If so, how did they get the bass out? Or was it the break after the first chorus? But then how did they remove the reverbed-out cowbell and clave?

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Gladys Knight heard it through the grapevine

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.

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Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education

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 Marlon Richardson, aka UnLearn the World (another devastatingly great freestyle rapper). Several other emcees showed up, including one of my main hip-hop peer educators, Roman The Mafioso, pictured below.

After the panel, all the emcees got into a cypher. At first they were rapping over a DJ, while a few NYU kids tried to play along on saxophones and piano. Then the DJ paused and folks tried rapping over just the NYU music students’ instrumental accompaniment. Roman gently trolled the NYU kids: “Keep it steady, keep it steady.” They did better when Steff Reed jumped on the piano and replaced their uncertain jazz with thumping gospel. Listening to this, I felt what I always feel in a cypher: that freestyle rap is the most advanced and sophisticated form of music I have ever heard in my life.

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Dissertation summary

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 dissertation, I present a narrative of learning to teach hip-hop, and of teaching to learn hip-hop. I document my process of learning hip-hop music education methods from practitioners, and of teaching music education students with those methods. The narrative begins with my inquiry into how hip-hop might best be included in school music programs, or more specifically, into the preparation of pre-service music teachers. I profile three hip-hop educators: teachers and teaching artists whose practice uses hip-hop music, aesthetics, and values to advance social justice goals. I then discuss putting these educators’ approaches into practice in a music education course that I taught at New York University. I examine the experiences and perspectives of students in this course in order to assess its effectiveness. Finally, I use all of the above to inform my proposed suggestions for the roles that hip-hop might play in university-level music education programs generally.

Throughout the study, I ask the following questions: What is hip-hop music education? What are its goals? What are its methods? How do we practice it ethically? In order to answer these questions, along with additional related and emergent questions, I situate the study in the larger context of popular music pedagogy in high schools, in teaching artist practices in school and community settings, and in the university programs that prepare teachers to do this work. I explore the role that hip-hop methods can play in the preparation of pre-service music educators. In particular, I examine the ways that hip-hop music education can support critical praxis and challenge the white racial frame of American music education.

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Polymeter vs polyrhythm

As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in this image:

Here’s the most concise way I can put this into words:

  • In polymeter, the grid lines are aligned, but the downbeats aren’t.
  • In polyrhythm, the downbeats are aligned, but the grid lines aren’t.

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New Orff arrangements with Heather Fortune

Heather Fortune and I are delighted to announce the publication of 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensemble, available now from the good people at F-flat Books. If you teach elementary music, you should check them out!

We discuss the process behind and purpose of this music on F-flat’s podcast:

The arrangements grew out of a series of groove-oriented instrumental method books that Heather and I are working on. As we were building our collection of grooves and patterns, Heather realized that some of them would work well as Orff music. I wrote the (very silly) lyrics. The pieces are structured around repetitive grooves that build gradually in complexity – read more about that idea here. You can play them as through-composed pieces, or you can use them as modular kits for assembling your own music.

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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 Taylor-curious to being a full-blown Swiftie. We’ve been listening to the greatest hits together, and so far, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is the one I like the best. It’s from Taylor’s 2012 album Red, and it was her first number one Billboard hit. She co-wrote and co-produced it with Max Martin and Shellback.

Taylor also released a version for country radio. It has the banjo mixed louder, it lacks the backwards guitar parts and synth swooshes, and the drums don’t have such a conspicuously electronic timbre. I think the pop version is better. 

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