Sunday, January 17th, 2010
DJ Kool Herc likes to say that The Incredible Bongo Band’s version of “Apache” is the national anthem of hip-hop. Its famous drum and percussion break reliably put bodies on the dance floor through hip-hop’s prehistory and has been sampled untold numbers of times. Here’s the break:
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On the left is the record where the break first appeared, and on the right is DJ Kool Herc.
You could also call the Apache break the national anthem of drum n bass and all the other electronic microgenres based on sped up and scrambled hip-hop beats.
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Tags: apache, breakdancing, cold tech hot beats, copyright, dance, dna, double dee and steinski, drum n bass, drumming, evolution, funk, goldie, grandmaster flash, hip-hop, history, kool herc, mashups, memes, missy elliot, nas, pop, questlove, roots, sampling, seventies
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Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a DJ. It doesn’t take much more software than that to produce your own electronica. Some copyright holders and their lawyers are feeling a lot of anguish about this development. For the rest of us, I think it’s an exciting new opportunity, a chance to restore music to its rightful and natural state as shared property, a dynamic conversation anyone can be part of. (more…)
Tags: cold tech hot beats, dave brubeck, dj, dj earworm, django reinhardt, double dee and steinski, electronica, fan art, fugees, funk, girl talk, glenn gould, grandmaster flash, green lantern, hip-hop, jonathan lethem, kelis, ludacris, mashups, memes, michael jackson, mixtapes, mozart, nas, paul simon, pop, pro tools, radiohead, recursion, remix, sample maps, sampling, sasha frere-jones, wayne marshall, youtube
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