What is going on in this Noname beat?

Hip-hop in the post-Dilla era has been pushing the boundaries of rhythmic dissonance. The coolest and most mysterious groove I’ve heard in a rap song lately is “Sunny Duet” by Noname.

The rhythms here are bananas and I struggled for quite a while to figure out what was going on. I got very excited for a minute when I thought I realized that the hi-hats are playing a septuplet grid.

I was wrong, though, it’s not the hi-hats doing that rhythm, it’s the “doot doot doot” backing vocals. But I went to the trouble of learning how to do tuplets in Dorico and made the graphic, so you might as well enjoy it.

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Transcribing KRS-One

In my most recent dissertation interview with Toni Blackman, I asked how a non-rapper like me might approach rap songwriting with music education students. The best approach, of course, would be to just invite Toni herself to come in and teach it, but I wanted suggestions for what to do when that’s not possible. She recommended giving the students some scaffolding: rather than having them work from a blank page, have them write their own lyrics to an existing rap verse. Specifically, she recommended using KRS-One’s flow from his iconic first verse in “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight.)”

A rap flow isn’t just a rhyme scheme or a rhythmic structure; it’s a melody too. The pitches might not be confined to the piano keys, but they are specific nonetheless. Asking students to write this way is therefore much the same as giving them an existing melody and having them write new lyrics for it. Using this particular KRS-One song is especially appropriate, because it begins and ends with new lyrics written to the tune of Blondie’s “Rapture.”

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Brandon Bennett interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of conversation.

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Adam Neely video on rap covers

I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See the result here:

Seeing Adam’s process from the inside gives me great respect for his skills as an editor. He had a list of questions for the interview, but it was free-flowing and jumped around on many tangents. The tight and logical sequence of ideas you see above is the result of postproduction. 

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Toni Blackman interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a quarter worth of audio.


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Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio.

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Children of Production

My four-year-old daughter is currently super into “Children of Production” from Parliament’s classic 1976 album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, their followup to Mothership Connection. If that album called down the holy mothership, this one introduces you to its occupants. This is the kind of groove that sounds effortless until you try playing it.

Here’s a live version, a bit more spaced-out:

On the studio version, the groove announces its subtle strangeness in the very first half second of the track. It begins with Jerome Brailey’s drums, Bootsy Collins’ bass, and (I assume) Bernie Worrell’s electric piano bumping together on the downbeat. Except they aren’t playing the downbeat, they’re playing the sixteenth note before the downbeat. The downbeat itself is silent! Then the rest of the band kicks in on the eighth note after the downbeat. That is a lot of rhythmic information to pack into a single beat’s worth of musical time! Let’s unpack.

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Remixing the Grateful Dead

There is no corpus of music I know better than the albums and concert recordings of the Grateful Dead. Some people memorize the works of Shakespeare; I, for better or for worse, spent my youth memorizing the works of Jerry. This puts me in a great position to sample and remix them. However, while I’ve learned approximately all of the Dead’s songs on the guitar, until recently I hadn’t done much with their recordings. As it turns out, the Dead are hard to sample. Their music is full of cool ideas, but they didn’t often realize those ideas cleanly in sound. This did not stop John Oswald from making his breathtakingly ambitious Greyfolded album, and it didn’t stop me. But it is a challenge.

When I was analyzing “Help on the Way->Slipknot!->Franklin’s Tower,” I started by warping out the recording in Ableton Live. In other words, I aligned the track to the bars-and-beats grid, which makes it easier to loop and annotate sections of it. Once you’ve got a track all warped out, then remixing it becomes effortless. So I did, and it was so much fun that I felt inspired to do a bunch more Dead songs. My self-imposed rules: use drum machines and breakbeats, but otherwise only use samples of the Dead and their side projects. Here are the results:

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My favorite Jerry Garcia riff

Before he wrecked his brain with heroin in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia was my favorite guitarist in the world. I was so saturated in his music during my key guitar-learning years that now everything I play tends to sound like him, up to and including Bach violin partitas.

Here’s my single favorite four-bar passage of Jerry’s, from “The Music Never Stopped” on Blues for Allah. Listen at 3:47.

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