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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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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Songs in film and television

As my Song Factory course at the New School comes to its conclusion, we are moving past the specifics of particular genres and eras and into larger questions about the cultural life of songs. This week we are discussing songs in movies and TV shows. The conversation deliberately will not include scores or musicals, interesting though those are; instead, we will focus only on soundtracks. We will start off by distinguishing between scores and soundtracks: scores are custom-created for the film or show, while soundtracks are compiled from existing music. They are created by different people, too; scores are written by composers, while soundtracks are selected by music supervisors.

Next, we will explore the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Diegetic music is part of the characters’ reality: songs playing on a car radio or home stereo, or a musical performance taking place. Non-diegetic music, on the other hand, is not part of the characters’ reality, it exists “outside” it. Nearly all film scores are non-diegetic, but soundtrack songs can work both ways.

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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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Sampling and semiotic democracy

Thomas Wuil Joo. A Contrarian View of Copyright: Hip-Hop, Sampling, and Semiotic Democracy. 44 CONN. L. REV. — (2012)

As both a fan and a producer of sample-based music, I’m naturally sympathetic to Lawrence Lessig and the free-culture movement, a group of legal scholars advocating reforms to copyright law that would make it easier to sample, remix and mash up the works of others. The free-culture adherents believe that copyright law exceeded its original purpose to “foster the Useful Arts and Sciences,” and that now it mostly stifles less-powerful creators while benefiting more-powerful entities. A narrative has emerged in this movement implicating the high-profile sampling lawsuits of the 1990s like Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records and Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films in suppressing sample-based hip-hop and related collage-like popular music.

Lessig and company think that sampling and remixing of popular culture can empower us, enabling us to take ownership over the products of the dominant culture industry and enhancing “semiotic democracy.” Copyright law inhibits recoding and is grossly overbalanced in favor of large corporate entities and other powerful actors. In particular, so the narrative goes, marginalized hip-hop artists have suffered under the heavy hand of lawsuits and exorbitant licensing fees.

Is the free-culture movement right?

Thomas Joo challenges the free-culture movement’s assertions both theoretically and empirically. He analyzes the infamous lawsuits and finds only reinforcement of a longstanding status quo. He provides extensive evidence that commercial hip-hop artists of the “golden age” (the 1980s and early 1990s) were perfectly aware of the requirement that they license their samples, and that they were able to produce and profit from their music nonetheless.

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