Kid-friendly hip-hop recommendations

Good bets in general:

  • De La Soul
  • Biz Markie
  • Eric B and Rakim
  • DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
  • Everything before 1985 (Sugarhill Gang, Spoonie G, Treacherous 3, Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy)
  • Current pop radio hits aimed at pre-teens are usually fine for little kids too, ie Willow Smith, Black Eyed Peas etc, though these may get on your nerves
  • Instrumentals — I especially recommend J Dilla and 9th Wonder

Here are all the hip-hop tracks in my collection that I can certify to be kid-friendly, profanity-free, and most importantly, good music! Continue reading “Kid-friendly hip-hop recommendations”

Why does listening to music sometimes make you feel high?

I’ve been lucky enough to experience heightened and altered consciousness from music making, listening and dancing. Chasing that feeling motivates me to keep making and studying music, in spite of the lousy pay.

I’m reading a wonderful book right now by William Benzon called Beethoven’s Anvil. Benzon looks at the state of brain research and uses it to guide conjectures about the evolutionary functions and origins of music. One of his most interesting ideas is that music, at its best, is a kind of waking dream.

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The Amen Break

If you had to name the most influential drummer in contemporary music, who would you pick? If you’re a rock fan, you might go with Ringo Starr, John Bonham, or Keith Moon. A jazz fan might choose Max Roach, Elvin Jones, or Tony Williams. You probably wouldn’t think to name Gregory Cylvester Coleman. But he’s as strong a candidate as anyone.

The Winstons

Coleman was the drummer in a sixties soul band, The Winstons. His claim to fame is a five and a half second break in an obscure song called “Amen, Brother,” the B-side to the minor Winstons hit “Color Him Father.” That doesn’t sound like much of a case for Coleman’s importance. But his short drum break is widely considered to be the most-sampled recording in history, ahead of “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache” and “Cold Sweat” and all the rest of the classic breakbeats.

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

Here’s a visualization I made of the famous break:

Amen Break - polar coordinates

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What goes on neurologically when a song gets stuck in your head?

The phenomenon of annoyingly persistent earworms is a great introduction to the meme theory: the idea that songs (and all other forms of cultural expression) are self-replicating informational “viruses” that use the mind as their host, the way DNA viruses use living cells and software viruses use computers. The best overview of this theory is Susan Blackmore’s book The Meme Machine.

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Jay-Z and Alan Lomax

Why does folk music collector Alan Lomax have a copyright interest in “Takeover” by Jay-Z?

Alan Lomax, hip-hop composer?

I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as epic a copyright failure as the Biz Markie lawsuit or the story of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but it’s still pretty absurd.

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How do you know what key you’re in?

It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can be full of key changes. So a lot of the time, you aren’t trying to figure out the key for the entire song; you’re figuring out keys for particular passages.

The good news is that while figuring out keys is complex, it’s not impossible. Before you can do it, you need to know what all the possibilities are, and you need some tools to help you in your analysis. I’m assuming here that you don’t have sheet music of the tune you’re trying to figure out, but you do have an audio recording. You’ll want a program that can loop and slow down different sections. I recommend Transcribe for this purpose. Audio editing tools like Ableton Live and Pro Tools work too.

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Samples and community

The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about connecting with other people. Sampling, like its predecessors quoting and referencing, is a powerful connection method.

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How do you have a career as a musician?

The odds of your making a living performing your own material are small, vanishingly small. But there are a lot of ways to make a living in music. If you do succeed at the singer-songwriter path using the tips listed in the other answers, mazel tov. In the likelihood that the singer-songwriter-musician thing doesn’t pay the bills, ask yourself which aspects of the music world you like and which you don’t. That will help you broaden your options and make it likelier you’ll wind up doing work you enjoy.

I have one friend who’s a full-time professional singer-songwriter, touring on the lesbian folk circuit. She puts out albums once in a while but those aren’t a major source of revenue; they seem mostly to serve as souvenirs from her gigs. She supplements her touring income with some freelance non-musical work around the sides. Her life is possible because a) she’s just unbelievably good at what she does, b) she’s well-connected to a warm circle of fellow singer-songwriters who form a mutually supportive scene, and c) she doesn’t mind living on the road for long spans of time. I did a little light touring with a band that she was also in, and it just killed me. I couldn’t take it, even for a few days at a time. I need to be close to home. So no touring musician life for me.

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What is the creative process like when writing a song?

I’ve tried a variety of different songwriting methods. I’ve written a set of lyrics and then tried setting them, or been handed a set of lyrics and told to make them work. I’ve come up with melodies and then set lyrics to them, found chords for them and so on. I’ve worked out basslines or chord progressions and then built on top of them. I’ve worked stuff out on paper, on instruments or in my head. I’ve moved the entire process into the computer, building tracks out of loops and MIDI sequences, sometimes playing stuff in via the keyboard but more often just drawing stuff straight in with the mouse.

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Probability

Probability is a deeply weird and disturbing topic. The harder I look at it, the weirder and more disturbing it becomes. I find the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be the least weird and disturbing way to think about it.

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