Her staggeringly ambitious album The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) is reason to be optimistic for the future of music. The big single is “Tightrope,” featuring Big Boi of Outkast, and the video is worth watching just for the shoes:

The ArchAndroid is not very sample-heavy. Actually, it’s remarkable how much varied live instrumentation it uses. But the few samples in there are killers. The first one that jumped out at me is in “Locked Inside.”

Fifteen seconds in, there’s a sample of the drum intro to Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You.”

There are some classical music references too. The Suite III overture quotes Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” And for me personally, the most surprising and evocative sample comes at the end of “Wondaland.”

The choral singing is an excerpt of “Alleluia” by Randall Thompson.

This piece of music is a choral cliché but for good reason, it’s a beauty. Wikipedia says it was commissioned by the Tanglewood Festival as a fanfare to kick off the festivities in 1940. Randall Thompson didn’t feel very festive, what with the war and all, so he wrote a moody and pensive piece instead. He meant for it to be sung slow, and while conductors rarely obey his tempo instruction, it still has an introspective wistfulness when sung fast. The whole text is the word alleluia, repeated like a mantra, with a single amen at the end. Thompson said that he thought of it as

a very sad piece. The word “Alleluia” has so many possible interpretations. The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made to sound joyous. It is a slow, sad piece, and…here it is comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The first time I heard it was the night before I graduated from college. It was a weird night. I felt like a huge blowout party would have been the symbolically appropriate thing, but I didn’t know of any, and I wouldn’t have had much fun if I had gone to one. I felt really strange that night. I’ve since learned that feeling depressed or anxious the night before a graduation is pretty ordinary, especially if you have a complex family. (One of my friends with an even more complex family than mine told me later that she spent the night before her graduation tripping out of her skull; it shocked me then, but it doesn’t now.) I had my entire nuclear family assembled for the occasion, which was a rarity. There was my sister, my mom and stepfather, that was usual. There was also my dad and younger stepfather — having them in the same place as my mom and stepfather was strange. My grandmother was there too, and it was really surreal having her and my dad together. I can’t even think of another occasion when this specific combination of my loved ones was together. Maybe one or two of my birthdays when I was a kid? Certainly it had been a long time. To compound the intense feelings, my stepmother had died seven months before, and that was still hanging over all of us.

So the night before graduation, I felt out-of-body, not depressed exactly, I didn’t even know what that meant yet, but definitely not all present. I had some friends singing in the choral society, so I went to hear them. They sang “Alleluia” and it snapped me right into focus. It was so beautiful I couldn’t believe it. The evening got better, too. Wynton Marsalis was our graduation speaker. After the choral concert, someone grabbed me and told me Wynton was jamming with an alum in one of the music classrooms. He ended up treating us to a bunch of impromptu standards, with this random guy accompanying him gamely, it was pretty magical. Jazz got me through a lot of other difficult emotional stretches in the years following.

Anyway. Years later, I pick up this album by an R&B singer I’ve barely heard of, and there’s this huge walloping mass of associations waiting for me. This is why I love sample-based music. It creates dense webs of association and meaning, and that’s what music is all about. Ms Monáe packs a lot of ideas into this album, it’s wildly dense with them, and you may well find some surprises in it of your own.

Muppet Silly Songs came out in 1984. I was in fourth grade. I think my dad got it for us. He had us on Wednesday nights, when the Muppet Show was on, and I associate the Muppets with him. It must have been weird originally to have him living in his own apartment a few blocks away from us rather than under the same roof, but by fourth grade it had been a few years and the whole thing felt normal. The next year Dad met my stepmother and moved to Roosevelt Island, still in NYC but a much longer and more complicated trip than a walk down 181st street. So Muppet Silly Songs represents the end stage of a happy time for me. A lot of complex feelings there.

I’m at the age where if I were going to be a rock star, it would have happened a while ago. My musician contemporaries are dealing with the end of the rock star years in different ways. Some continue to rock, though maybe on a schedule limited by careers and families. Some move into teaching or music therapy or just set the whole enterprise regretfully aside. And some move into making music for kids. Kimberly West and Daniel Cole, two singers I used to play lead guitar for, have reinvented themselves as a kids’ group called the Rock Doves. It’s an idea that appeals to me. I have some ideas for songs about math and science aimed at geeky kids like myself in the pipeline.

What makes for good kids’ music? First and foremost it has to be good music, period. As a kid, I couldn’t have explained to you why I liked Michael Jackson or the Beatles, but I knew that there was something truer and more important about their music than other stuff I was hearing. The Muppet people know from good music. Behind their silly delivery they had strong tunes with catchy melodies. They drew on a wide palette, centering on showtunes but bringing in everything from jazz to country.

I can see the roots of a lot of my present interests in Muppet Silly Songs. Both “The Rhyming Song” and “I’m My Own Grandpa” are strongly recursive. In “The Rhyming Song” the joke is simple: the song doesn’t rhyme, at all.

“I’m My Own Grandpa” is a more ambitious joke, a logical pretzel knot that wouldn’t be out of place in Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The Muppet guys loved Tin Pan Alley songs. In their version of “Who?” by Jerome Kern, the question in the title is asked by an owl.

The album also includes Kermit The Frog’s rendition of “Lydia The Tattooed Lady.” The Muppet Wiki informs me that it was written by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg (who also wrote the songs in The Wizard Of Oz) for the Marx Brothers movie At The Circus. Kermit’s version is less saucy.

As a kid I had no idea what the lyrics were talking about, I just liked the complex rhymes. (I guess it warmed me up for the brainy hip-hop I like now.) Shortly after graduating from college I moved back to New York City. I went to a party at my older stepbrother’s place in the Meatpacking District, and then on my way home roamed around the West Village. It was summer, a warm night, people were out. A guy in a bunny suit rode by on an enormous tricycle singing “Lydia The Tattooed Lady” and I felt that weird mixture of adult sophistication and childishness that I feel often in NYC. It’s the way I feel now, listening to Muppet Silly Songs. Not a comfortable feeling, but one I like.

You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person

Each new song is built using the same modular components as the other songs of its time and place, the way that all humans share the same genetic toolkit. My sister and I are like two different songs from the same album by the same band. My cousins are like songs on different albums by bands with overlapping members. Here’s a diagram of my entire extended family – parent/child relationships are green and spouse/partner relationships are red.

The ancestry of music is more complicated than the ancestry of humans. A better model for music is the evolution of microbes, with a lot of horizontal gene transfer happening. Biologists use the term “gene cassettes” to describe the semi-self-contained hunks of DNA that bacteria swap back and forth. The analogy to music fans spreading memes by passing tapes around couldn’t be any more perfect.

Some musical relationships do conveniently lend themselves to family tree-like representation. The practice of sampling and quoting existing songs creates a particularly clear and unambiguous set of relationships well-suited to network diagramming. The internet has several handy sample databases, including the Rap Sample FAQ, Whosampled.com and Wikipedia. I’ve been hard at work the past year or so making sample maps visualizing the more interesting chunks of data.

See all of my sample maps here.

Sampling is the easiest set of relationships to diagram, but I could draw similar charts for use of particular scales, chords, rhythmic figures, melodic motifs, rhyme schemes, combinations of instrument sounds, and all the other memetic nuts and bolts of music.

A few really successful memes make up most of the music we hear

Some musical memes are better at getting themselves copied than others, the way genes for color vision or opposable thumbs are good at getting themselves copied. Here in America, the most successful memes include the backbeat, the one-four-five chord progression and the blues scale.

To illustrate just how widespread a musical meme can get, here’s a video called “Four Chords, Thirty-Six Songs.” In the key of C, the four chords are C, G7, Am, F. (Some coarse language towards the end.)

The video barely scratches the surface of all the songs, famous and not, that have used those four chords. So why is this chord progression such a big hit? For one thing, it’s easy to play on piano or guitar or whatever. For another, the four chords sound good in any sequence or combination, spaced out on any harmonic rhythm. They have a wistful yet still uplifting mood that suits a variety of musical statements in a variety of styles.

Computers make recombining and resequencing the memes effortless

Pre-computer, composing and recording a song was a slow and effortful process. You wrote the song out or memorized it. Then you got a band together and they read the song, or you repeated it to them until they memorized it. Then you rehearsed it a bunch, and then recorded it from beginning to end. Sometimes you had to record many takes to get a good one. To get a polished, professional-sounding result generally required expensive gear operated by highly specialized engineers.

You can still operate that way if you want, but computers offer some faster and easier alternatives. I prefer to write by improvising into the sequencer or digital audio editor, picking the best patterns and editing them into shape. The computer gratifyingly collapses improvising, composing and recording into a single act. Making music electronically is like being able to type out any DNA sequence you want and immediately seeing how it will look as an organism. You can skip the tedious embryonic development of notating, rehearsing and memorizing. Technologies like MIDI, sampling and pitch-detection software let you read any existing musical genome and resequence it to your heart’s content.

All this freedom is positively alarming to some of the musicians I know, who view it as evil or immoral in some way. I find that the computer eliminates some of the labor, but doesn’t do the imaginative work for you. The computer makes it effortless to spin out ideas, but you still need to select among them and decide which are the good ones. The creative act itself stays the same as it always has been; there’s just less friction.

Towards a unified theory of musical evolution

A genome is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating the proteins and other structures making up an organism. A group of memes (a memeplex, as Susan Blackmore puts it) is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating performances and recordings. What makes a song likelier to get itself heard, and eventually copied or adapted? Exact copying of previous generations of songs is a bad long-term strategy. Tastes change, like the way the environment changes for organisms. A meme that was successful yesterday may not be successful tomorrow.

Total originality is a bad strategy too. It’s easy to be original, to create a piece of music with no precedent or borrowing from anything existing. Bang randomly on a piano and you’re probably going to play something that’s never been played before. It’s likely that your random banging will mostly be annoying. Chances are, a random DNA sequence won’t make for much of an organism either.

To be liked enough to be copied and imitated, your song will need to be substantially familiar. Forming an emotional connection with the listener requires a lot of shared vocabulary and associations. What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator. Most mutations will make it harder to get copied, but a lucky few improve your chances dramatically.

See a version of this post on Quora.

A big part of my sadness is due to the early death of my dad, who loved Christmas and celebrated it with a total and unironic enthusiasm. Among his fellow investment bankers he presented a Frasier-like highbrow persona, opera-going and cosmopolitan. But he showed his midwestern roots in his lifelong devotion to Garrison Keillor, his love of fireworks and especially his fondness for Christmas kitsch. We stopped going to church after Grandma died. Dad didn’t inherit any of her religious fervor. Or did he? He took Santa Claus and the tree seriously. He loved to play Santa at office Christmas parties and signed half the cards on gifts to us “from Santa” into my college years and the one December past them that he lived. As a little kid I thought it was terrific, but the older I got, the more difficult it got. The holiday ritual I liked the best was the Elvis Christmas Album.

The high point is “Blue Christmas” – how hot is that? The male choir is due for a comeback.

We were listening to it on cassette when I was a kid. Later on when I met Anna it turns out her family had an Elvis Christmas Album ritual too (I guess a lot of people do.) She had the CD reissue that includes Elvis singing a few gospel tunes, including “Peace In The Valley”, which I dimly remember from church and which I love to pieces. What a chord progression.

On a more intellectual tip, Dad made an annual ritual out of watching his VHS copy of maybe the best ever adaptation of A Christmas Carol, the 1984 TV one with George C Scott as Scrooge. This is the one with the scrupulously accurate period clothes, furniture and so on. Here’s the scariest scene.

Our VHS cassette was a magnificent unintentional 80s time capsule. Before the movie started there was a snippet of CBS news, Dan Rather giving an update on something Gorbachev-related, right at the peak of the Cold War, when we were all terrified of the USSR. The broadcast was sponsored by IBM, and their ads featuring their then-new smoking hot 80286 processor-based PCs got more and more comical with the passage of time. But as the situation with our stepmother’s health deteriorated, this tape became sad. After a particularly ugly bout of fighting one year, Dad went into the den to watch it by himself. During the short interval between when she died and Dad did, I don’t really remember what happened with the Christmas Carol ritual, but whatever it was, it didn’t get easier. Eleven years later I doubt I could bear to watch it through.

If you know me, you might be wondering where my Jewish mother and the rest of the tribe fit into all this. Mom actually loves Christmas and celebrates it every bit as intently as Dad did. The deal when we were kids was that Dad got us through Christmas Eve, and then dropped us off that night so we could wake up and do Christmas morning with Mom and Ralph. This handoff was sometimes the occasion for the playing out of ugly custodial business. Post-Dad, Mom wanted to carry on with traditional Christmas as usual, maybe feeling a little relieved not to have to compete for attention. But it hasn’t worked out that way. For most of my twenties I preferred to just not have anything to do with any of it. Thanksgiving, yes, by all means, I never miss it, I love the family togetherness and all that. Christmas, on the other hand, just carried too much emotional freight.

My effort to reclaim the culture of late December for myself began with the Ellington Nutcracker. I found out about it from the Amherst jazz ensemble, who played big chunks of it in a concert one year. I almost fell out of my seat. Sam Woodyard’s hand drums in “Sugar Rum Cherry” are the sexiest thing imaginable. (They make a great sample.) Amherst hosted an Ellington symposium a couple years after I graduated. Stanley Crouch gave a talk about sixties Ellington, and he had this to say about Sam Woodyard:

Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard!

This year my sister is back in NYC for the first time in many years. We’re going to do the big Christmas Eve thing at our house, combining it with Anna’s birthday. My mom and stepfather are even coming. This will be the first time ever, and I mean ever, that they’ve been willing to do Christmas on our turf. We’ll play the Ellington Nutcracker and some Elvis, and I expect that I’ll be maudlin and depressed for part of it, but hopefully not too much. And having written this, I’m already feeling more optimistic about the whole thing.

Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents and grandparents. In particular, Don Draper is a window into our emotionally inaccessible fathers. For me, the generations don’t line up exactly right – in 1963 my dad was only 21 – but it’s close enough for some intense emotional resonances. I feel like I’m looking through a magic window into events that the old photo albums only hint at.

My dad and Don. There’s so much overlap. Both were authority-resistant guys disguised by suits and corporate jobs. Both underwent name changes and had complex parentage. Both earned a lot more money in New York City as adults than they grew up with in middle America. Both were divorced parents of young kids.  Here’s a more detailed rundown of the similarities and differences.

Name changes
Don changed his name from Dick Whitman as a young adult, voluntarily, to escape an abusive family and general abject misery. My dad’s name change was involuntary and happened when he was an infant. He was born John Arthur Rammer, and was given up by his birth parents when his biological father had to go fight world war II. He was named Michael Hein by his adoptive parents, Milo and Phoebe, who raised him in a stable and relatively loving environment. Still, Dad never quite resolved the issue of his adoption. Like Don, he had problems with commitment, with authority, with connection and a sense of belonging. Like Don, he was a smart and talented guy whose rise up the corporate ladder was slowed at times by an unwillingness to be a team player.

Divorce
Again, not quite the same circumstances. My mom is much more Peggy Olsen than Betty Draper.

To my knowledge, Dad never cheated on her (though he did have some serious infidelities in his subsequent relationships.) But there’s some overlap. My sister and I were about the same age as Sally and Bobby Draper when our respective parents split. I don’t remember this scene from my own childhood but it remembers me. With us and the Drapers, it was a similar slow build to a swift and matter-of-fact resolution.

Politics
Dad was younger than Don and more liberal. He went to civil rights marches and in youth was kind of a rabble-rouser, at least by Wisconsin standards. Like Don, he was intrigued by the counterculture but not a member of it.

Fashion
Dad wore standard-issue gray suits to work, not quite as dapper as Don but presentable. On the weekends he lapsed somewhat into his Wisconsin roots: jeans, sweatshirts with cows on them, caps with logos of machinery makers worn without irony. Hard to imagine Don wearing any of that stuff.

Smoking
Dad smoked a pipe in the office, back when that was still allowed. In that regard he was a little more like Paul Kinsey.

Dad wasn’t a cigarette smoker that I’m aware of, though Grandma and Grandpa were. Grandpa eventually quit after jaw cancer, but Grandma was a Draper-level chain smoker until she died.

Drinking
I never witnessed Dad pounding back hard liquor like Don; he was more of a glass or two of wine with dinner kind of guy.

Recklessness and risk-taking
My dad shared Don’s fondness for reckless driving. Dad rode a motorcycle; Don was a half a generation too early for that. Dad didn’t drive drunk that I know of but he did love speeding. He also loved fireworks, which I could imagine Don having a thing for too.

General emotional inaccessibility
I saw Dad bury both of his parents and his second wife and I never saw him shed a tear. I barely remember him ever even mentioning his emotions, much less frankly discussing them. Very Don Draper in that respect.

A couple of other weird similarities between the Mad Men universe and mine. Dad had an accordion and did a little playing. Not as well as Joan, but still.

Any TV show you want to make that functions as an alternate-universe documentary about my family and friends, I’ll obsessively watch it. King Of The Hill has that quality for Dad’s midwestern ancestors. Seinfeld is a window into Mom’s Jewish relatives. Six Feet Under captured some of my family dynamics early on before it exploded into ridiculous melodrama a few seasons in. It’s lonely in modern life. Our tribes are scattered. If I have to use TV as a way to stay in touch, evidently I will.

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.

Every Thanksgiving, or every other, the whole mishpokeh gathers at my mom and stepdad’s place in Vermont. We have a good time eating and hanging out, watching football on TV and taking walks on the dirt roads. In the past couple of years we’ve started reintroduced video games into the mix. Katamari Damachy was a hit with some of my younger cousins. But Dance Dance Revolution turned out to be the really big smash. It was my sister’s then-boyfriend, now-fiance who had the idea, and he deserves mad props for thinking of it. The whole clan got involved, from the toddlers up to the seniors.

Serious competition in DDR takes coordination and some athleticism, but if you just want to play for fun, just about anybody can give it a spin and enjoy doing it.

It bums me out that there are so many families like mine who deprive themselves of the essential social vitamins of group singing and dancing. If DDR can get us out of our shells, I say bring on the DDR.

My parents and stepparents loved music when I was growing up, more as spectators than participants.

My mom and stepfather had a lot cool stuff in their collective record and CD collection: Beatles, Motown, Paul Simon, Duke Ellington. They were into the idea of people playing musical instruments in an abstract way, but didn’t partake themselves. They were generally supportive of me and my sister’s efforts, without quite knowing how to involve themselves. Mom is more into musical instruments as decorative objects than functional ones, like the antique pump organ in the living room or the Mongolian horsehair fiddle hanging by the dining room table. Mom and Ralph keep an admirably open mind about new sounds, and have faithfully trooped out to hear us all play in some really avant-garde bands, for which, bless their hearts.

With my dad and stepmother the situation was more complicated. They had a lot of classical music recordings that they listened to regularly. They also kept a lot of musical instruments around the house, which they just about never touched. My dad in particular would have been a natural musician. He loved listening, his tastes ranged from Beethoven to Elvis, he was a natural mathematician and aesthete and had a vivid imagination. When I was a kid, I couldn’t figure out why he would have surrounded himself with musical instruments without wanting to use them.

Things with Dad and Giovanna were tense. They had a complicated relationship from the beginning and as Giovanna’s health deteriorated, it only got more complicated. Anna asked me recently if Dad and Giovanna ever danced. She might as well have asked me if they ever performed animal sacrifices by the light of the full moon. They came from non-dancing households and weren’t in the right emotional place to break with tradition.  As an adult I understand better, but it still makes me sad to think about it.

The centerpiece of Dad and Giovanna’s collection of unused instruments was a beautiful Yamaha digital keyboard with eighty-eight weighted keys, a variety of realistic-sounding patches and an assortment of rhythm loops. It could even walk bass if you played a note or chord. They had some introductory piano methods and approachable classical scores piled up on it, but only aspirationally. I don’t remember Dad or Giovanna so much as switching the keyboard on. When they weren’t around I’d play around with it. I even tried taping some wild synthesized generative freebop. The keyboard is the big one in the photo above. It’s an anchor of my home studio. It makes a great MIDI controller, and some of its built-in sounds are gorgeous.

Dad had an accordion that he did play a little bit. My sister’s fiancé has it now. Giovanna had a beautiful small Celtic harp. This was understood to be off-limits to anyone but her, but as with the piano, she never once touched it. Same with the dulcimer, which I claimed after they died. I tried some strumming around on it that sounded okay. The best results came from sampling it, slowing it down and reversing it.

After Dad died and we were going through his stuff we discovered Grandma’s alto sax. There’s a photo of her when she was young with the alto slung around her neck. This is not the humorless old lady who scolded us for taking the Lord’s name in vain. I’m curious now to hear what kind of music she played on that saxophone. What kind of music did they like in South Dakota in the late Depression years? In addition to his billion classical CDs, Dad had one album by Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys. He never played it for us or mentioned it, we found it after he died. Who knows, maybe Grandma was playing western swing. I wish I could ask them about it.

Dad and Giovanna also kept us kids well-supplied with music toys. We had a series of little synthesizers, including the red Yamaha keytar so beloved by hipsters like the Autotune The News people and Brian on Family Guy. Seth McFarlane’s sense of humor is like what I imagine my dad’s unfiltered stream of consciousness might have looked like.

In my teen years Dad and I drifted further out of touch, but he continued to have a way of anticipating my interests. He gave me a cassette of Howlin’ Wolf in high school. In college he heard me talking about Miles Davis so he steered me into Gil Evans. He found me some live radio performances by the Duke Ellington Orchestra that doctors should be able to prescribe as mood elevators. I’m looking forward to playing Ellington for my kids. As we plan the family of our own, my hope is that we do more participating, less spectating.