Scratching “This Is America”

One of my projects for this summer is to realize my decades-old ambition to learn how to scratch. I borrowed a Korg Kaoss DJ controller from a friend, downloaded Serato, and have been fumbling with it for a week now. The Kaoss DJ leaves much to be desired. The built-in Kaoss Pad is cool, but otherwise it’s too small and finicky. I will definitely want to upgrade to something with big chunky buttons and more haptic feedback in general. Still, the Kaoss DJ is enough to get started with.

For my first serious remix, I thought I would take on Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”–I have the acapella and the instrumental, and it feels like a timely song. I put the instrumental on one deck and the acapella on the other, and did my best to improvise a mix in real time. If you want to hear the result, email me.

I mostly approached this as “soloing” with the acapella, using the instrumental as my “rhythm section.” But I did some improvising with the instrumental too, by looping, and by jumping around between cue points. I don’t consider this to be a polished work of art or anything, but I discovered some pretty cool sounds even at my basic skill level. So I’m excited to see where this leads.

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Separating children from their parents at the border is morally wrong

Call your representatives, especially if they’re Republicans. Demand that this stop. “But what about Obama?” He’s not the president anymore. “But what about the laws?” This isn’t a law, it’s a policy instituted very recently, which can be reversed in an instant by Sessions or Trump. “But what about illegal immigration?” No harm done by illegal immigration can possibly outweigh the harm we’re doing to these kids and their parents. “But what about the Democrats?” I don’t want to hear any ignorant both-sides-ism. We are all morally culpable, but the people who control all three branches of the federal government are the most culpable. Call them.

Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it

A gentleman named Myron Magnet, whose muttonchop sideburns have to be seen to be believed, has this to say:

What is keeping down American blacks today is not racism, oppression, or lack of opportunity. That’s over. Black Americans are now free. What holds them back is the ideology of “authentic blackness”—a black identity rooted in the urban underclass culture of hatred of authority (especially of the police, the teacher, and the boss), indifference to learning, misogyny, sex stripped of love or commitment, hustling, resentment, drug trafficking and using, tolerance of lawbreaking, and rage, rage, rage, the hallmark of keeping it real. That’s the message rap hammers home constantly with its mind-numbing rhythm.

I have heard this idea voiced by many conservatives. There are many different ways to demonstrate that racism is alive and well, and that black people who resent authority are well motivated. The clearest proof is America’s horrifying prison system.

Pager 2007 p 21
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Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live

This video recently made the rounds on Facebook:

I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I would do the same thing with this one.

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The orchestra hit as a possible future for classical music

In my paper about whiteness in music education, I tried to make a point about sampling classical music that my professor was (rightly) confused about. So I’m going to use this post to unpack the idea some more. I was arguing that, while we should definitely decanonize the curriculum, that doesn’t mean we need to stop teaching Western classical music. We just need to teach it differently. Rather than seeing the canonical masterpieces as being carved in marble, we should use them as raw material for the creation of new music.

When I think about a happy future for classical music, I think of the orchestra hit in “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, a sample that came packaged with the Fairlight CMI.

Fairlight CMI

The orchestra hit is a sample of “The Firebird”by Igor Stravinsky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wbkKWrUD-A

This sample is the subject of an amazing musicology paper by Robert Fink: The story of ORCH5, or, the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine. Continue reading “The orchestra hit as a possible future for classical music”

This Is America

If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog, then by now you’ve probably seen the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” If you haven’t seen it, watch now. Be warned that it’s upsetting.

Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, is best known as a comedian, a writer, and an actor. He’s an intelligent and creative guy, but he’s wasn’t a likely candidate to make the most political music video of the decade. I’m not going to write about the video, because plenty of other people who know more about it have done so already. Instead, I want to talk about the song itself, which is fascinating in its own right. It was produced by Glover and Ludwig Göransson, who, aside from his work with Childish Gambino, is mostly known for scoring films and TV shows (including Community, which is how he met Glover.)

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Teaching whiteness in music class

Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem.

Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post.

Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton, 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge. Meanwhile, musicians with a hip-hop background find their skills and knowledge to be of little value to institutional gatekeepers. Kendrick Lamar is a good enough musician to merit a Pulitzer Prize, but he would not be accepted into most undergraduate music education programs (Kruse, 2018).

Biz

Why is it so important that music education embrace hip-hop when students are already immersed in it outside of school? There are three main reasons. First, if music educators wish to foster students’ own musical creativity, then students must be free to create in the styles that are meaningful to them. Second, while many young people enjoy listening to hip-hop, few know how to produce it. Third, and most important, music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. The Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value. While the white mainstream loves hip-hop, America showers the people who created it with contempt (Perry, 2004, p. 27), and sometimes violence. By affording Afrodiasporic musics the respect they deserve, we will teach students to similarly value the creators of those musics.  Continue reading “Teaching whiteness in music class”

Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher

In this paper, I discuss a rap cypher held during a session of NYU’s CORE Music Program on March 3, 2018. A cypher is a group performance where rappers take turns performing improvised verses. Freestyling is to rap what jam sessions are to jazz: an improvisational form that demands both technical proficiency and a relaxed, casual confidence. I chose the cypher as the subject of ethnographic study because it crystallizes so much of what I love about rap generally. Freestyle rap in particular is an underappreciated art. While hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and possibly in the world (Hooton, 2015), the American music academy does not afford it much respect. I have heard a demoralizingly large number of musicians and educators opine that rap is not music at all. While I do not believe that rap needs academic validation, it is important to me that my fellow educators understand and appreciate the beauty of this music, so if they will not embrace it, they might at least do less to impede it.

Few rap haters will admit to being motivated by racial or class animus. Instead, they point to rap’s supposed lack of melody, or the programmed and sampled beats. Along with electronic dance music, rap in its instrumental aspect is the most repetitive popular form in American history, and schooled musicians are socialized to be contemptuous of repetition (McClary, 2004). Improvisation likewise has a low status in academic settings, because spontaneous musical expression supposedly has less significance than composed works (Nettl, 1974, p. 3). However, closer engagement with improvised rap quickly reveals its depth. For example, the predictability of the beats is a necessity to support the complex play of text, pitch, rhythm and timbre in the emcees’ flow. Only by evaluating the music by its own value system can we recognize its beauty. Continue reading “Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher”

RIP Cecil Taylor

When I was nineteen, I was flipping channels on TV late at night, and I stumbled on this:

I had no idea what I was seeing, but I was spellbound. I still can’t exactly verbalize what this music means to me, but I know it means something.

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Big thoughts on music tech

A student interviewed me for a class project on “the impact of music technology on the music industry.” Her questions and my answers follow.

How did you get interested in music technology?

I got interested in music technology the first time I touched an instrument. So did you! I don’t think we should even have a subject called “music technology”, because it properly includes every aspect of music other than unaccompanied singing. Saxophones and pianos are no more “natural” or non-technological than computers. For that reason, I don’t do much teaching about technology in class; I teach the creative processes of music production, specifically, recorded music of the African diasporic vernacular tradition, what the music academy calls “popular.” I talk about that because other college courses don’t, and I think it’s important for music educators to know how to make the music that their students like. I have the freedom to do that because there is no standard way to teach music tech – when I was hired, I was told to pretty much do whatever I saw fit.

Bouncy Synth - Ableton Arrange View

I got interested in recording technology when I first tried recording myself with a tape recorder at age six. I got interested in learning how to do it well when I was in college, and my folk band went into a studio. We spent a bunch of money and got back a result that was so-so. It became clear that my money would be better spent on a computer, an interface, some software and a couple of microphones. This was in the late 90s, when the price of all of those things was falling dramatically, and it was becoming possible to get professional-sounding results in your apartment without spending tens of thousands of dollars. At first I was only interested in recording voices and live instruments. I started programming drums, samples, and synth parts as placeholders for “real” instruments. But then I got interested in making those sound better, because so much of the music I like uses synths and samples. The world helped push me in that direction, since there’s a lot more demand for producers than for guitarists. Continue reading “Big thoughts on music tech”