Thursday, February 11th, 2010
When I was younger I was obsessed with authenticity in music. I wouldn’t even play electric guitar because it felt too easy, like cheating somehow. I expended a lot of energy and attention trying to figure out what is and isn’t authentic. Now, at the age of 34, I’ve officially given up. I doubt there’s even such a thing as authenticity in music, at least not in America. There’s just stuff that I enjoy hearing, and stuff I don’t. But the concept of authenticity meant a lot to me for a long time, and it continues to mean a lot to many of the musicians and music fans I know. So what is it, and why do people care about it?
At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.
Sixties Motown
When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.
In the eighties my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. (more…)
Tags: acoustic, alicia keys, authenticity, autotune, bebop, big chill, bill monroe, bluegrass, blues, cold tech hot beats, coltrane, electronica, emotion, harmonica, herbie hancock, howlin wolf, jay-z, jazz, judaica, klezmer, led zeppelin, lipsynching, michael jackson, motown, nyc, purists, rnb, sampling, soul, synths, thelonious monk
Posted in autobio, music | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
Sample-based music isn’t stealing. It’s valuable and important. It shows the way toward a future for recorded music that’s more in continuity with music’s past. Recordings are cool and everything, but they encourage passivity. If I buy a recording, I can listen to it or dance to it, both fine activities, but what if I want to go further? What if I want to engage with it, converse with it, customize it or adapt it to my own needs? According to the law, I can’t. This flies in the face of the uncountable centuries of music practice that predate the invention of recordings. Before recordings, if you wanted to hear music, someone needed to play or sing it. To learn how to play or sing, you have to learn and interpret a ton of music by other people. The normal method for passing music along for nearly all of human history was by oral tradition, and a lot of adaptation and reinterpretation was an inevitable part of this transmission process.
In the modern world, most of the music you encounter is in recorded form. Adapting or customizing music is going to continue as it has for uncountable centuries. To adapt or customize a recording usually requires sampling. As it stands, the law is in the way. We need open-source music like we need open-source software.
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Tags: amazing grace, blues, cold tech hot beats, copyright, folk, google, improvisation, internet, jazz, kanye west, learning, memes, music, music theory, opensource, sampling, transcribing
Posted in music, software | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is, as far as I’m concerned, the very embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock.
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John Bonham’s staggeringly heavy drum performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse in England. Bonham played a brand new drum kit at the bottom of a stairwell, recorded by microphones placed three stories above. This arrangement made for a big and powerful, yet oddly diffuse and distant sound. To make it even more humungous, the band slowed the tape down a little, lowering the pitch and giving the track a thick, sludgy quality. Zeppelin only ever played “When The Levee Breaks” live a couple of times. On the recording, the tempo is seventy beats per minute, and it’s hard to maintain a heavy groove when you’re playing that slow. Also, it’s impossible to replicate the pitch-shifted timbre acoustically. It’s almost as if “Levee” was meant to live in the electronic realm. (more…)
Tags: bjork, blues, cold tech hot beats, drumming, electronica, hip-hop, history, led zeppelin, music, pitch shifting, pop, recording, rock
Posted in music | 2 Comments »
