A little context: Steve is a frat-boy lawyer, a Republican, not straight-laced but not someone you think of as a dancer. This strip exactly carries the power of Michael Jackson to cross cultural barriers. It also gets at some of the sadness of white culture: that you can only dance and express yourself in secret, and if you get caught, it’s cause for shame. A lot of my musician friends and other creatives need to bludgeon their shame reflexes into submission with drugs and alcohol. We’d be happier and healthier if we could feel free to get our Billie Jean on without inhibition.

For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association.

I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. I’ve been here:

In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.

Seinfeld is comfort food for me. It simulates hanging out with Mom, the Kramer clan and the majority of my schoolmates. It’s like how King Of The Hill and Garrison Keillor simulate my dad’s family. But Seinfeld has some authenticity problems. Like, we’re supposed to believe that George, Elaine and Kramer aren’t Jewish. Frank and Estelle Costanza are supposed to be Italian? Whatever. Cosmo Kramer? More like Schlomo Kramer. My sister’s nickname for the changing of Jewish names and identities to fit into America is the semantic nosejob.

A few other fakinesses of Seinfeld: the slap bass riff on the soundtrack is a sampling keyboard. Aside from a few outdoor establishing shots, the entire show was shot in Los Angeles, even the street scenes.

But for all its TV fakiness, Seinfeld is sometimes remarkably psychologically truthful.

Sometimes it even has Buddhist wisdom.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.” This kind of confident embracing of one’s own self with all its shortcomings is a powerful thing. It’s the basic psychological strategy at work in Barack Obama’s confessional writing. It conveys and inspires inner strength.

Lil Wayne and I have some differences of style and taste: about facial tattoos, about drinking cough syrup recreationally, about jewelry on one’s teeth. But we agree about music. He brags constantly that he’s the best rapper alive. I think he makes a pretty good case.

It wasn’t even Lil Wayne’s rhymes that caught my ear in the first place, it was his tracks. His music sounds fine on regular headphones or speakers, but it reveals its true power in the club or in a car with a good system. The tempos are slow, the beats are minimalist, and there’s plenty of space around every sonic event. On the big hits, like “A Milli” and “Lollipop”, an 8o8 kick drum is the only sound in the low register. There’s usually no bass guitar or even bass synth – the tuned 808 kick carries the bassline. The vocals, snares, hi-hats and synths are all up in the high frequencies. The midrange is totally empty.

Emptying the midrange adapts Wayne’s music perfectly to its natural habitat: cars, parties, clubs, subway trains and other noisy, less-than-ideal listening environments. In a club or a party, the midrange is full of people talking. In a car or train, the midrange is full of engine and wind noise. Keeping the music’s midrange empty means that it doesn’t have to compete with the ambient sound. The songs can sound huge and full and totally present without blowing your eardrums or your speakers out. Another benefit of the empty midrange is that it leaves room for you to enjoy the upper overtones of the kickdrum. Even severely compressed and played through computer speakers, Lil Wayne’s music sounds pretty damn hot:

The weird vocal sample the song is named for comes from “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo (Vampire Mix),” a remix of the Tribe Called Quest song by Fatboy Slim. The original Tribe song has a sample in it of “Funky” by The Chambers Brothers. That makes “A Milli” a remix of a remix of a remix. Recursive!

I’ve been drawn to the musicality of hip-hop since I was a kid, but at times I’ve been scared off by all the angry and confrontational language. As a kid, I could mostly enjoy with Run-DMC. Sometimes I found them a little bit scary, but mostly they made sense to me. My friend Elbert played me some Public Enemy in ninth grade, and I felt like it wasn’t meant for me, but I liked it. When we got into the nineties, that’s when I lost touch with hip-hop. I wanted to like the Wu-Tang Clan and the west coast gangsta rappers, but I got scared away.

It took me several more years to realize that I wasn’t supposed to be taking all the imagery literally. I didn’t understand that rappers, like rock singers, are often playing characters or doing standup comedy. It makes sense that Ice Cube has made such a smooth transition from gangsta rap to family comedies. Hip-hop has a lot of theatricality and irony to it, and even a liberal, open-minded white guy like me can lose sight of that. I fell into the bad habit of underestimating the intelligence of hip-hop artists and didn’t allow for the possibility of multiple or opposite meanings to what I was hearing. Imagine if you were plunked down in America without any cultural context and someone showed you an episode of South Park or Family Guy. If you didn’t realize they were kidding, you’d probably be horrified. That’s pretty much what my first reaction was to the dirtier hip-hop styles.

I’m glad I let go of my moral objections to Lil Wayne. He’s crude a lot of the time, but he’s never dumb, and he’s capable of dazzling verbal virtuosity. There’s the famous line in “Lollipop” that everybody quotes, it’s like what Cole Porter would be writing if he were a young guy right now:

Safe sex is great sex. Better use a latex,
’cause you don’t want that late text, that “I think I’m late” text.

Lil Wayne’s high opinion of himself extends to his choice of samples. He samples several of his own tracks for his song “I’m Me.” Again: recursive.

Like his frequent collaborators T-Pain and Kanye West, Lil Wayne likes singing with Auto-tune.

If you haven’t been listening to a lot of hip-hop lately, “Lollipop” represents the state of the art well. The synths are gridded out exactly in a sequencer so as to sound totally posthuman. Wayne plays a little electric guitar with a sloppiness that balances the synths’ unearthly perfection. There are big yawning digital silences in the rhythm that are as powerful as the beats themselves.

The Auto-tuned robo-vocal style inspired me to sing more on my own tracks, which is a minor miracle, because I am not a singer. The sign of a real master musician is when they fill me with an intense, competitive desire to go apply their tricks to some new music of my own.

I think Lil Wayne’s music is healthy for nerdy white people like me. Having a sense of humor about the human body and its functions is the right attitude. Natalie Portman kind of says it best, when she’s asked what song reflects her current state by Interview Magazine:

PORTMAN: Really, really obscene hip-hop. I love it so much. It makes me laugh and then it makes me want to dance. Those are like my two favorite things, so combined . . . I’ve been listening a lot lately to “Wait (The Whisper Song)” by the Ying Yang Twins, where the lyrics are like, “Wait ’til you see my dick” – which is just amazing because it’s whispered. [whispers] “Wait ’til you see my dick . . . ” [laughs] Crazy. So I just listen to it like I’m a five-year-old, like, “Oh my god! I can’t believe he just said that!”

When she rapped on Saturday Night Live, she was kind of kidding, kind of not.

In some ways this could be a Jewish thing. Like Natalie, my mom and the majority of my relatives are in the tribe. I went to a mostly Jewish elementary and high school. My Jewish side finds America’s puritanism weird and lame. I also have a midwestern protestant side I inherited from my dad. This side of me thinks prudishness is lame, but also Not Optional. So there’s some internal conflict. It can be like Jon Stewart vs Hank Hill in my head. Lil Wayne is a good ally in my struggle to keep Hank under control.

But then, Lil Wayne may have more in common with Hank Hill than we realize. He carefully cultivates the image of a stoned slacker, but that performance masks an intense work ethic. It’s significant that the “A Milli” video shows Lil Wayne doing his job. He records new material almost every night. I can’t think of any recording artist who’s been more prolific than he has. Almost everything he records, he makes public. Some of it gets sold commercially, the rest he gives away on mixtapes and the web. He puts out so many tracks that Vibe could write an article called “The 77 best Lil Wayne songs of 2007.” He talks about his process a little in Rolling Stone:

You never write down your rhymes. Do you ever forget good stuff?

I do that a lot and it sucks. That’s why I keep the studio with me everywhere I go. I can just hook up the studio straight to my laptop and start recording. I don’t memorize lyrics like a speech. I just go to the studio and think of it right there. I just let the beat play a trillion times and I go in there and record four bars or whatever I thought of so I can get it off my mind and start thinking about something else. That’s why I do my songs so quick.

I think any creative person could learn a lot from the Lil Wayne strategy. Computer recording encourages improvisation. Improvising is a bottomless source of new ideas. Creativity is evolutionary, you need to have a lot of failures to naturally select out the hits. The wider the diversity of your failures, the more hits you’ll produce. That’s why Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones recorded hundreds of demos so they could narrow them down into the songs on Thriller. Lil Wayne takes the idea up a notch by releasing everything for public consumption and letting the fans decide what works and what doesn’t. I’d guess this demanding routine keeps him from ever getting hung up, from getting too precious. He probably gets things right in a very few tries. Keeping your ideas under so much evolutionary pressure makes them definite. As Lil Wayne says in “Shoot Me Down”:

My picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition of definition.

He’s definite enough to have sampled the Beatles and gotten the copyright smackdown for it. (Thanks to Sasha Frere-Jones for pointing me to this.)

The comments on this video are hostile. I can understand not liking the music, but the anger is way more intense than that. I can’t imagine having so many people that angry at me. If Lil Wayne can keep his confidence up in the face of so much scrutiny and resistance, I don’t see how any creative person has any excuse not to step up their game.

Here’s my mashup of Lil Wayne and Björk.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

To download, right-click or option-click the link and save the file to your desktop.

The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.

The Gregory Brothers also produce straight R&B tracks. With all possible respect, I don’t find their serious music to be anything special. It’s when they submerse themselves in TV that they shine the brightest. The internet doesn’t have a lot of info about their production techniques, all I could find was an interview where Michael Gregory says:

Logic Express was a godsend for composition–it has an enormous sample library. I use it for all my audio now. For vocal processing, auto-tune and melodyne plug-ins come in super handy. I use Final Cut Express for all the editing, but the capture feature is somehow rubbish, so iMovie gets called in for that.

So there’s a lot of very sophisticated computer software at work, though with a charming zer0-budget lameness of video compositing and audio mixing. I imagine when they wind up on Comedy Central or wherever, the production values will get a little more slick.

Musically, these videos are working for me. If they slowed the tempos down and found some heavier kick and snare sounds, they’d be ready for the radio. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My own experiments with Auto-tune show any kind of human speech as pretty tonal to begin with. When you automatically tune someone talking to the closest piano-key pitches, it makes it easier to make out the melodies that were already present. The Gregorys do a lot of further manipulation and harmonizing, but their best moments come from unintended speech melodies, like Joe Biden shouting “God bless America”, from space.

Some languages are more tonal than others. Chinese uses pitch to differentiate words semantically, the way English uses combinations of vowels and consonants. The same string of phonemes spoken at different pitches in Mandarin might have completely different meanings as words. Even in English, we use pitch to communicate punctuation, emotional stance and other metadata. Read this out loud to see what I mean:

Okay?

Okay.

Okay…

Okay!

Speech has a lot of profound overlaps with music, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to draw the line between them. This is I why I’m convinced by the theory that music is the evolutionary precursor of language, the bridge between monkey calls and our present communications systems.

By quantizing and digitizing information, you make it easier to memorize and replicate it. I find myself humming phrases from the Gregorys’ videos the way I hum Andrew Lloyd Webber. Digitized sound information is easier to memorize, store and copy. The subtle nuances of Katie Couric’s speech with all the pitches on a continuous spectrum are difficult to remember and imitate, but once it’s Auto-tuned, it becomes effortless. Digitizing data in any medium makes it much more robust across many generations of copies. DNA is a digital medium – the G, A, T and C of your genes can be logically expressed as ones and zeros, and ones and zeros can be replicated flawlessly and endlessly.

I find Auto-tune bottomlessly entertaining to listen to. Jay-Z and many of my friends say they’re tired of it, but I’m not. I can understand why you might be getting a little burned out on it if you listen to pop radio. However, there’s a lot of resistance out there to Auto-tune that’s too deep and intense to just come from jadedness with a music fad. The Time magazine article about the Gregorys allows that Auto-tune “isn’t always a way to cheat.” I find that funny. How can Auto-tune be cheating? How can you cheat at music? It’s not a competitive sport. I prefer to think of music as more like a game. You can play better or worse, but there aren’t really winners and losers. We’re adept at coming up with systems of rules for music, but we get carried away with that. Who cares how you make it so long as it sounds good?

If Auto-tune causes you distress because you care about authenticity in your music, I can understand that. I resisted “fake” music through most of my teens and twenties. Now I regret all the effort, but I guess I had a point. I was worried that someone was trying to put something over on me. I gave up my desire for authenticity after it became clear that it’s an impossible dream. There is no authenticity anywhere.

Ever since the sixties, we urban elites have fetishized the bluegrass of the forties as a pure folk form. But Bill Monroe wasn’t some naive backwoods hick. He designed his music deliberately for its commercial appeal to a particular audience. For instance, all that intense treble was there to cut through radio static and low-tech mics and mixing desks. This doesn’t make Bill Monroe’s music any less truthful or good. I commend him for finding a way to reach a mass audience with such idiosyncratic, regionally specific music.

I don’t think there’s anything magical or transcendent about good music. It’s like good food, if you make it with care and attention, then it makes people feel good. Sometimes you’re cooking for yourself, sometimes you’re cooking for anyone who walks in the door, sometimes you’re cooking for paying customers. It depends on the situation which recipes are going to work the best.

The half-life for “bad” inauthentic pop music to decay into “good” authentic art music seems to about one generation. The analog synths and drum machines that sounded so fake and lame in the seventies and eighties are cherished vintage gear today. Even the digital samplers of the eighties have attained authentic status because of the digital crunchiness you get from the low sampling rate. I’ll bet you anything that future hipsters are going to fetishize Auto-tune once the pop mainstream has safely abandoned it.

Potentially the most offensive but also the least ironic video by the Gregorys is this one:

Here’s the mp3 if you want to download it. It makes me a little uncomfortable, especially the greenscreened backup singer thing, which feels disrespectful. But I can’t argue with the message. I’d like to hear a producer with more chops do a version of this, maybe at a mellower tempo with less embellishment. Imagine turning on the news and seeing that speech. Either version.

You can’t ask the computer. Computers fail when you ask them questions with no unambiguous answer. Dividing by zero is just such a question. Folklore suggests that asking the computer to divide by zero makes it spectacularly explode or something. In reality, it returns an error message or the reply Not A Number, or it gives a wrong answer, or the program terminates, or sometimes the machine falls into an infinite loop.

The internet’s favorite divide-by-zero error is the one that temporarily crippled the USS Yorktown, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser that was the test bed for the Navy’s Smart Ship program. When a crew member typed zero into a database field, the computer tried to divide by it, crashing the system badly enough to cripple the ship’s navigation systems for several hours.

Humans are smarter than computers in some ways, and we’re capable of coming up with creative answers to seemingly unanswerable questions. So what do you get when you divide something by zero? My answer draws heavily on the entertaining wikipedia article. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we’re dividing one by zero. The math people have a crafty method for dealing with problems you can’t approach directly. You can edge closer and closer to the problem and see if you converge on an answer. So instead of dividing one by zero, you could try dividing it by smaller and smaller numbers that approach zero. One divided by one tenth is ten. One divided by one one-hundredth is a hundred. One divided by one one-thousandth is a thousand. Since one divided by one one-gazillionth is one gazillion, logic suggests that one divided by zero is going to be infinity.

It makes sense, but there’s a problem. We’ve been approaching zero from above, but we could just as easily approach it from below. When you divide one by negative one tenth, you get negative ten. One divided by negative one one-hundredth is negative one hundred. One divided by negative one gazillionth is negative one gazillion. So you could just as easily say that one divided by zero is negative infinity. Both infinity and negative infinity are equally valid answers. Here it is as a graph.

Some people interpret this graph to say that infinity and negative infinity are the same number. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Let’s say that instead of being on the computer screen, the graph was drawn on a globe. Imagine the number line wrapped around the equator. Say the spot where the Prime Meridian crosses the equator is zero. If you’re in a rowboat bobbing in that spot in the Atlantic Ocean, enjoying the warm breeze, you can think of the positive numbers as going off along the equator to the east, and the negative numbers going off to the west. Infinity is the farthest possible point away from you on the equator to the east, and negative infinity is the farthest point away from you to the west. On the Earth, positive and negative infinity are the same place, the International Date Line in the Pacific. For this image to be totally accurate, the Earth would have to be infinitely large, but the math guys bracket that. By this thinking, one divided by zero does have a single, unambiguous answer: this mysterious number called unsigned infinity.

When you type “divide by zero” into Google images, you get a lot of stuff like this:

Our European-descended philosophical assumptions are at work here. Western thinkers prefer clear, unambiguous, yes-no dichotomies. Paradoxical and multiply-determined truths make us anxious. Some of the internet cartoons show dividing by zero ripping holes in the space-time continuum, forming black holes, or making your head explode. That much hyperbole has to conceal some pretty intense anxiety. I know these pictures are jokes, but I agree with Freud, on some level there are no jokes.