Children of Production

My four-year-old daughter is currently super into “Children of Production” from Parliament’s classic 1976 album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, their followup to Mothership Connection. If that album called down the holy mothership, this one introduces you to its occupants. This is the kind of groove that sounds effortless until you try playing it.

Here’s a live version, a bit more spaced-out:

On the studio version, the groove announces its subtle strangeness in the very first half second of the track. It begins with Jerome Brailey’s drums, Bootsy Collins’ bass, and (I assume) Bernie Worrell’s electric piano bumping together on the downbeat. Except they aren’t playing the downbeat, they’re playing the sixteenth note before the downbeat. The downbeat itself is silent! Then the rest of the band kicks in on the eighth note after the downbeat. That is a lot of rhythmic information to pack into a single beat’s worth of musical time! Let’s unpack.

Continue reading

Mothership Connection

In high school, my friend Aubin, who was much cooler than me, told me I needed to go listen to some Parliament. I bought a cassette of The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, probably just because of its title. I liked it immediately, how could you not? But thirty-ish years later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around its implications. George Clinton’s playfulness can easily mislead you into thinking he’s a clown, but he is really more like a prophet.

There’s plenty of good analysis out there of the P-Funk mythology and its place in Afrofuturism. That is fascinating and important material. But I don’t see enough written about the actual music. So here I will do my part to rectify the imbalance, starting with the song that calls down the landing of the Holy Mothership.

For proper context, check out this live version of “Mothership Connection” from Halloween 1976–start at 37:25. It’s almost twice as long as the studio version, even though the tempo is faster. The lead vocalist is the incredible Glenn Goins, who died of cancer just two years after this was filmed.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading