The Beastie Boys, James Newton, and phonographic orality

One of the most complicated copyright situations covered in my Musical Borrowing class is the landmark sampling lawsuit Newton v. Diamond. “Newton” is jazz flutist and composer James Newton, not to be confused with James Newton Howard. “Diamond” is Michael Diamond, aka Mike D of the Beastie Boys. The song at issue is the Beasties’ “Pass the Mic” (1992).

The flute sample in the intro and throughout comes from James Newton’s piece “Choir” (1982).

If you want to sample legally, you need two separate licenses: one from the owner of the audio recording (typically a record label) and one from the owner of the underlying song or composition (typically the songwriter or composer, or their publisher.) The Beastie Boys got permission to use the recording of “Choir” from James Newton’s label, ECM, and paid a license fee. They did not, however, seek permission from Newton himself. ECM didn’t ask Newton either, and he didn’t even find out about the sample until eight years later, at which point he sued the Beasties for copyright infringement.

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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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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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Musical Borrowing syllabus

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School for the first time. Here’s my syllabus. It will probably evolve as we go, but this is the initial plan.

This course on “non-original” music explores how frequently existing compositions have been appropriated and adapted into new works, and how these borrowings challenge conventional notions of originality and authenticity. The course provides historical perspectives on musical borrowing from the Renaissance through 19th-century paraphrases and 20th-century cover versions to debates about sampling and plagiarism cases today. It explores the evolving cultural, philosophical, legal, and economic considerations around the phenomenon of musical borrowing. Students engage with these topics through guided listenings, readings, response papers, quizzes, class presentations, and creative projects, with a final research/analysis paper on a recent/current case of musical borrowing. A basic knowledge of music theory and some ability to read music notation are helpful but not required for this course.

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Dies irae

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School. For the plainchant part of that, my example is the Dies irae sequence, which is to Western European classical music what the Funky Drummer break is to hip-hop. Dies irae (Latin for “the day of wrath”) is a medieval poem describing the Last Judgment from the Book of Revelation. Its first musical setting was a Gregorian chant in Dorian mode from the 13th century.

Fun fact! In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the self-flagellating monks are chanting the last few lines of the Dies irae sequence.

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Watermelon Man

As part of my current J Dilla binge, I was excited to find a track where he flips a Herbie Hancock sample (no, not “Come Running To Me“, though that one is great too.) This sent me down a rabbit hole with “Watermelon Man.” This track has had quite a journey, both in its prehistory and in its afterlife.

I love that whenever Herbie tries to do something cynically commercial, it always ends up being an iconic work of art. “Maiden Voyage” was written for a Fabergé ad. “Rockit” was a last-ditch attempt to keep from getting dropped by a label. And “Watermelon Man” was meant to be ear candy to attract more listeners to Herbie’s debut album as a leader.

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Hear J Dilla flip a Gary Burton sample three different ways

While I await my copy of Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time, I’m listening to lots and lots of James Dewitt Yancey. As I was poking around WhoSampled.com, I noticed that Dilla used a sample of Gary Burton in three different tracks in three consecutive years. It’s five seconds into Burton’s 1967 recording of Carla Bley’s tune “Sing Me Softly of the Blues.”

Here’s my transcription:

Presumably Dilla was drawn to this sample due to a combination of its harmony, rhythm and timbre. The sample’s basic harmony is a V-I cadence, B7 resolving to E. However, the B7 is really a bar each of B7b9 and F7(#11). These chords contain the not-very-E-major-ish notes C and F, respectively. Meanwhile, the E chord is actually E9sus4. That adds up to a lot of abstraction and ambiguity. The rhythm in the first bar of the sample is complex, too, a polyrhythmic-sounding half note triplet. The last note of the triplet extends into the rest of the bar, further blurring its metrical function. The timbre is pillowy and indistinct, thanks to the vibraphone’s inharmonics and the soft attack of the mallets.

Let’s dig into the sample flips!

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Boogie Chillen

Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made.

The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty impressive for a song whose only percussion is Hooker’s foot stomping on a miked-up shipping pallet. When I was an ignorant teenager, I assumed that Hooker recorded this way because it’s how he was used to playing on his back porch in Mississippi. In fact, Hooker usually played with a band at the time, and he only recorded solo at the suggestion of his producer, the breathtakingly sleazy Bernie Besman.

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Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar!

The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.”

But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the ones in “Freedom ’90.”

Let’s unpack!

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Songs vs Grooves

Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves.Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove.

In structural terms, a groove is a small musical cell that repeats indefinitely. A song is a hierarchical organization of smaller cells that form a linear sequence with a beginning, middle and end. The lack of large-scale structure in a groove makes it effortlessly malleable and extensible. Want to make it thirty seconds longer? No problem. Want to make it thirty minutes longer? No problem. Songs are not so flexible. If you wanted to make “Yesterday” longer, would you… make up more verses? Repeat the bridge again?

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