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Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.

DJ Kool Herc was one of the first DJs to remix tracks on the fly using turntables and a mixer. Rather than playing songs from beginning to end, Herc isolated and repeated the hooks and breaks. The break in a dance song is the section where all of the instruments drop out except the drums, percussion and maybe the bass. In disco and funk songs, the break is the energetic peak moment, when the dancers really get down. Herc discovered that by isolating and looping, say, the break from “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, he could bring the dance floor to ecstatic new heights.

To loop a break, you need two copies of the same record, one on each turntable. While the break plays from the left turntable, you cue up the beginning of it on the right one. At the end of the break, you quickly crossfade to the right turntable. While the break plays from there, you cue up the first copy to the beginning of the break on the left turntable. In theory, you could loop a break like that indefinitely.

Along with Herc, the first generation of hip-hop DJs also included Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, whose dense vinyl collages prefigured the mashup movement. Hear the prehistory of the mashup in “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel.”

It’s relatively easy to put a collage like this together on the computer, but it takes delicate timing and tons of practice to do it using vinyl.

Turntablism broke into mass consciousness when Grand Mixer DST appeared with Herbie Hancock on “Rockit” in 1983. The first turntablist I had a relationship with was Jam Master Jay, from his work with Run-DMC in tracks like “Peter Piper.” More recently I got hip to DJ Premier, who produced my favorite Nas track, “Nas Is Like.” Hear Primo on Gang Starr’s “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration.”

As jazz gave birth to technical and esoteric styles like bebop, so turntablism has its own highbrow virtuosos. DJ Rob Swift is a leadng member of the artsier school of turntablism. He’s more of an abstract improviser than a sequencer of recognizable hooks and grooves. Hear Rob Swift scratching a series of records, starting with the Funky Drummer bonus beat reprise.

Here, Rob Swift demonstrates a turntablist notation system (thanks Nick Seaver):

See more scratch notation, courtesy of Wayne Marshall.

Speaking of the Funky Drummer, see an amazing freestyle by Mos Def, Black Thought and Eminem over a DJ scratching the Bonus Beat reprise.

DJs have done most of their collaboration with emcees and electronica producers. They’ve been slower to work with traditional instrumentalists — there’s a lot of new musical vocabulary that has to be learned on both sides. It’s beginning to happen, though. In my hippie-ish youth I enjoyed going to see DJ Logic scratching it up with jam bands. And Youtube loves this video of a violinist getting down over a few different records, including the instrumental of “Check The Rhime” by A Tribe Called Quest.

Vinyl and the gear to play it are heavy, bulky and expensive. If I ever start DJing seriously, I’ll probably opt for vinyl emulation software. It doesn’t necessarily have the same touch as vinyl, but it would be pretty awesome to be able to scratch anything in my iTunes library.

Using a turntable, you can simulate unearthly speech sounds by rapidly scratching the record to and fro. The circle becomes complete when beatboxers emulate the sound of DJ scratching with their mouths. Enjoy Rahzel beatboxing a set of Wu-Tang songs.

Any more videos, links or other turntable-related goodness I’m missing? Hit me up in the comments.

Update: great blog post on classical musicians’ experiments with turntablism pre-1950.

Computers can pseudorandomly generate playlists. That’s also what human DJs do. So does that mean that human DJs could someday be replaced entirely by laptops? So far, nothing an individual computer can do comes close. Computers can take a batch of songs and play them in a random order, and that can sound okay when you carefully pick the batch of songs. But you, the human making the playlist, are still doing most of the intellectual heavy lifting.

Internet radio stations come closer to mimicking human DJs than standalone computer software like iTunes. Internet radio stations like Pandora try to sequence tracks semi-randomly, semi-automatically in a way that you’ll enjoy. Internet radio draws on big databases filled with metadata on what makes one song like or unlike another song.

A good database like Pandora’s isn’t a simple spreadsheet layout. Pandora draws on a giant online database called the Music Genome Project. It sprawls along dozens of information dimensions and was assembled laboriously by hand by a panel of musicians and DJs and programmers and executives.Instead of grouping tracks into unambiguous genres like iTunes annoyingly does, Pandora uses non-exclusive tags, in a process that I imagine works a lot like Delicious or Flickr tagging.

To listen to Pandora, you start by typing in the name of a song, artist or genre. Pandora then has some quasi-random process by which it serves up tracks that match as many tags with your starting point as possible. You can give each song a thumbs up or thumbs down, and as it accumulates your votes it makes better guesses as to what you’ll like. Sometimes these guesses are on-point, and sometimes they miss completely.

I started my Pandora adventure by giving it something easy: “Jesus Walks” by Kanye West. It played me some of Kanye’s hits, then some of his more obscure tracks, then tracks by other artists where he does guest verses. Then it segued into Common and Jay-Z. So far, so good. I tried Gang Starr, and Pandora was similarly successful, lining up a string of golden age hip-hop classics. Then I tried giving it Thelonious Monk solo piano. It did better than I expected, playing quality fifties bebop, heavy on Sonny Rollins. Monk’s music might be peculiar, but I guess there’s so much jazz writing out there that the Pandora people had plenty of help giving nuance to their descriptive tags.

So Pandora does great with well-defined genres and styles. But it doesn’t do so hot with outliers and edge cases. In response to Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, it serves up “Cantaloupe Island,” okay, but then it follows with some lame New Jack Swing, then, jarringly, “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco. I wanted early hip-hop and electro. After its few weak stabs at jazz, Pandora gave me synth pop. I understand why it did that, but it’s not what I was looking for.

Pandora did even worse with Björk.

In response to “Jóga,” Pandora served up one so-so Goldfrapp song and then a bunch of bland electronica with anonymous-sounding female vocals. Some of Björk’s music resembles the stuff you hear in the lobbies of hip hotels. Some of it wildly doesn’t. If you’re after artists who sound like Björk, there aren’t any. There are artists who sound totally unlike her but appeal to the same people, namely me, because they’re weird and experimental sometimes and make you want to dance sometimes.

So Pandora fails at Björk. In fairness to the people behind Pandora, her supposed genre or style is a terrible predictor of whether you’ll like her or not. Plenty of people I know who love dark, moody electronica can’t stand Björk. Most of the jazz musicians I know adore her. Every jazz group I’ve ever been in has played at least one of her tunes. NYC has a seventeen-piece big band that plays nothing but her music. Björk might seem like an odd fit for hip-hop lovers, but Timbaland sampled “Jóga” on a Missy Elliot remix and the Wu-Tang Clan namechecks her.

My initial reaction to Björk as a college student was: immediate, strong dislike. It took me years of constant exposure from my sister and friends to change my mind. Now Björk occupies a prominent spot close to the center of my musical affections, close to Coltrane. Who, now that I think about it, I also wasn’t too wild about on the first hearing. People are weird and unpredictable in the evolution of our likes and dislikes.

Pandora fails with Björk for the same reason Netflix has a hard time with Napoleon Dynamite.

The computer world has shown great ingenuity in the past few decades at creating bigger and more intricate databases. But there are intrinsic limits to the kinds of information a database can represent. Computers are good at two things: strictly following unambiguous instructions, and producing total randomness (or pseudorandomness that’s close enough to random to fool us humans.) Computers aren’t so good at blending the random and the structured.

I think we can expect computer DJs to continue to get better at predicting our predictable tastes, and to not make much progress on the unpredictable ones. Pandora might do a better job making playlists than people who aren’t very serious about music, but I don’t think that computers will ever have anything on professional club DJs. There are too many variables to quantify.

What’s most interesting to me about quasi-random database managers like Itunes shuffle and Pandora is the way they inform my own selectional process. I love shuffling within my own carefully cultivated playlists. The real value is the way the computer gives me unexpected items to choose from, which I then apply human emotional intelligence to.

My friends in the academic music world are very interested in algorithmic composition right now, where the computer generates semi-random strings of notes within certain rule sets. I find nearly all of these compositions to be unlistenable. I do enjoy trying out random MIDI sequences as a source of inspiration, but the real music-making happens in my rejection of most of those sequences, and my editing and adaptation of the best ones. So it goes at the playlist level too.

Glenn Gould wasn’t necessarily being prophetic. He was just paying attention to the long history of music before the relative eyeblink of the twentieth century. The always perspicacious Wayne Marshall says:

Only in the relatively recent past — within the last century — have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice — that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people — demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.

I’m a child of the cassette era. I loved making mix tapes in high school, for myself and whoever among my friends would listen. It was a pain, but still worth it. I still remember burning my first CD, sequencing the tracks with Toast before the half-hour long burn session during which the computer couldn’t do anything else. I’ve said farewell to albums with little sadness. It’s nice to listen to Graceland or Abbey Road in their original sequence, but for the most part, I do a better job of sequencing tracks for my own needs than anyone else can.

What’s true at the multiple-song level is even more true within a single song. Writing a song is really sequencing together a “mixtape” of licks, scale fragments, chord progressions and beats. When I learned how to play the guitar, I became free to string together whatever song fragments I could get under my fingers. It was fun being able to freely collage songs together, constructing segues and suites. All “new” compositions are really mashups you make in your head. Any creative undertaking is less like conjuring out of thin air and more like making a salad. As a sampler and remixer, my freedom of musical choice is total. Making mashups is a delightful blend of writing songs and putting together mixtapes, except that the pieces of music are shorter and layered simultaneously.

Mashup and remix culture isn’t new. Club DJs have been mashing up songs on the fly for decades, intermixing hot dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other well-known dance tracks. Girl Talk has nothing on “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” or Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. Creating popular music is a ruthless evolutionary process. You sort through idea after idea, looking for the hooks. The best mashups take the Darwinian process to the next level, mating the hooks together into ultrahooks. My favorite mashups of the moment are the United State Of Pop mixes by DJ Earworm. He takes the top twenty-five singles from a given year and boils them down into single, devastating tracks.

United State Of Pop 2007

United State Of Pop 2008

There are plenty of other high-concept mashups like these, and some of them work as music, but a lot of them are gimmicky and annoying. In order to work, there has to be some musical resonance between the source tracks. The more unexpected the affinity, the better. My favorite Earworm mashup combines Django Reinhardt’s performance of “Brazil” with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.”

Brazilian Diamonds

Who would have guessed that the bouncy rhythms of South African pop as filtered through the mind of a Jewish folksinger from Queens would mesh so well with the bouncy rhythms of samba as filtered through the mind of a Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist? This kind of discovery is only possible via a lot of trial and error. The growing ease and plummeting price of audio editing makes trial and error a lot less onerous than it used to be.

One of the great pleasures of sample-based music is encountering something familiar in a strange context. Sometimes the recontextualization can be jokey, like Ludacris’ ironically grandiose “Coming 2 America” which combines quotes from the Eddie Murphy movie with themes from both Mozartâ’s Requiem and the last movement of Dvorak’s New World symphony. Sometimes it’s playful without being jokey. Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from his opera The Magic Flute shows up in “Like You” by Kelis, and it makes me wonder why every R&B song doesn’t include coloratura soprano.

The mixtape-mashup analogy isn’t perfect. Mixtapes are linear, with each song usually appearing once. If you make a mashup in this linear way, with each sample appearing only once, it will probably be annoying. Within the parameters of a song, repetition is crucial to enjoyment. This is why Girl Talk gets on my nerves. He runs a sample four or eight times and then forgets about it. His tracks are too much like watching someone else flip channels on TV for my tastes.

I’m especially interested in musicians who use samples of themselves as the basis of new works. The first Nas song I heard was his biggest hit, “Nas Is Like.” The chorus is based on samples of his earlier song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.” When I heard the original, it sounded like it’s full of samples of “Nas Is Like.” This confusion of time sequence is one of the central pleasures of sample-based music for me. The meta-recursive hip-hop prize probably belongs to the Fugees, whose song “The Score” includes samples of every other song on the album of the same name.

The mashup doesn’t belong exclusively to music. The video mashup is coming excitingly into its own. I would have expected that combining two songs in 5/4 time might be too clever, but in this case it works:

The video mashup’s answer to DJ Earworm is Kutiman, who stitches together multiple Youtube videos. Check out “The Mother Of All Funk Chords”:

Jonathan Lethem’s essay on literary mashup culture, “The Ecstasy Of Influence,” is itself an amazing literary mashup. There are visual mashups too, I have a collection of them on Flickr. An intriguing random visual mashup maker is the Ad Generator. Its makers explain: “Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.” It works uncannily well.

The fan-made advertising mashup shows the potential to become an entire new artistic style unto itself. Dig this trailer for an as-yet nonexistent Green Lantern movie made entirely out of pieces of other movie trailers:

Sasha Frere-Jones says in his essay 1 + 1 + 1 = 1:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.

This very blog post is a mashup of Glenn Gould and Wayne Marshall and DJ Earworm and Grandmaster Flash and Kutiman and uncountable others. I know there are plenty of copyright holders out there that regard any kind of derivative work as stealing. I think it’s a misplaced form of anxiety. I think mashups are natural, healthy, and the best vector to get your ideas circulating through the memepool long after you’re gone. As I was writing this post, I discovered someone did a version of my Michael Jackson sample map with Michael Jackson on it, and I couldn’t be more flattered.

Long live DJ culture, across whatever media!