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!

Records I Can’t Sample

Me vs Michael Jackson vs Herbie Hancock vs Missy Elliot vs Kanye West vs Fab Five Freddy

mp3 download, ipod format download

Synth strings played on video game controller MIDI.

Just about every music purchase I made in the past year was to get high-quality samples. I use my CD collection as a valuable hard-copy backup of a vast, well-recorded sample library. For just about any song except the major masterpieces, I’d much rather listen to the hook repeated endlessly over a hip-hop beat than the song itself. Reason and Recycle are only too happy to oblige me. Being able to effortlessly homebrew my own dance music has given me some insight into how good it must feel to make your own cheese or wine or shoes or sushi or computer programs.

I’m writing a book, and one of its subjects is the evolutionary theorist Susan Blackmore. She’s one of the most articulate exponents of the theory of memes, self-replicating units of human behavior that use our minds to spread themselves, the way our genes use our bodies to spread themselves. By this theory, songs use musicians to breed and use fans to disseminate, the way dandelions use the ground and the wind. My own musical experience bears the meme theory out strongly. I’ve never had an original idea. I’ve written dozens of songs, and all of them have been collages. My bebop heads are collages of Duke Ellington licks over Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus chord changes. My rock writing takes its entire left hand from Jerry Garcia and the right hand from David Byrne. My approach to computer music draws more broadly, but centers recognizably around M.I.A., Missy Elliot and Run-DMC. My best tunes are the ones that hybridize the richest diversity of sources, or the ones that most closely clone another successful idea, my own or someone else’s.

When I was an angry, confused teenager, I let myself be convinced that ideas are property, that it’s possible to steal them and thereby harm their owner. I listened to strongly opinionated musicians and critics hold up originality as the main criterion of artistic worth. Then I got out into the world and did a lot of playing and interpreting and composing of my own, and at the end of the day I’ve come to feel that to assert ownership of a song is like trying to assert ownership over a person or an animal or a place. You can have a close relationship with a song, you can be present at its birth and you can give it nurture,  but once it grows up, you can’t control it. Why would you want to?

Rick Prelinger wrote a manifesto called On The Virtues Of Pre-Existing Materials. He’s talking about books, but his argument applies just as well to music. It’s so good that it’s worth quoting at length:

Why add to the population of orphaned works?

We live in a tremendously media-rich society. Every year Americans throw away more text, sound and image than most other nations create. We’re the world capital of ephemera, and much of it has no active parent.

Don’t presume that new work improves on old. The ephemera we produce tend to manifest ideas that fix themselves over and over again in different media. What this suggests to me is that we might be more open to letting old works speak, that our task might not be so much to make new works but to build new platforms for old works to speak from. This might mean that we weave using others’ threads, that we take positions as arrangers rather than as sculptors.

The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful. So much of what we make rests on work that’s come before. Let’s admit this and revel in it. Though it might make some people nervous, it actually cushions us in a genetic continuity of expression, and what could be more reassuring?

The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers. We add meaning to culture by remixing it. Putting something in a new context helps you see it with new eyes; it’s like bringing your partner home to the parents for the first time, or letting a dog loose to run in the waves.

Some writers, like John Updike and not like Jonathan Lethem, fear the emerging mashed-up book. They hope their texts won’t be scrambled or altered, that they’ll always retain the same identity and continuity, and follow the same course. But rivers, like information, route themselves around obstacles, and the bends in rivers are where adventures happen. We’ll find new ways to experience and value old works as a consequence of mixing them into newer ones.

We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too. It may be vain to hope that our works survive into the future and will be seen and listened to, but still we hope so. If we want to encourage those not yet born to think historically, we need to begin by thinking historically ourselves. This inevitably pushes us into the territory of preexisting materials.

Quilting is an early form of sampling. A patchwork quilt combines preexisting fabric from many sources. Quilting relies on what geeks call interoperability – the ability of elements to fit into a matrix and function together. That’s what makes the Internet work – machines and networks can talk with one another and freely exchange bits.

Update: Wayne Marshall quotes me in his post about Beatles Rock Band. He has this mashup of Shaggy and the Beatles that I hadn’t seen before and is a good one.

There’s a group of evolutionary biologists who think that our ideas, beliefs and behaviors are evolving according to the same rules of natural selection as our genomes. Susan Blackmore’s theory of memes draws an analogy between the way songs replicate themselves using musicians as hosts and the the way that genes for purple feathers use finches as hosts. My experience confirms her theory strongly. Musical ideas come over me. I don’t “create” them. Writing a song is like making breakfast. I have an urge to make breakfast, and based on that urge and what I have in my kitchen, breakfast emerges. I can make breakfast while half-asleep and barely even conscious of what I’m doing. Songwriting works exactly the same way. It emerges out the collective social consciousness, spontaneously and usually with little intentional input from the musicians involved.

The meme theory of music takes some getting used to. It’s conventional for us to imagine that we control our ideas and use them to our benefit. The reality is that ideas have a life of their own. Sometimes having an idea benefits you. Sometimes it harms you. Evolutionary biology is full of illuminating parallels. The relationship between musicians and songs is like the relationship between figs and fig wasps. Sometimes the relationship is mutually beneficial, but very often it’s mutually parasitic, with each side mindlessly exploiting the other for short-term benefit. It seems to be mostly a matter of luck who benefits from musical ideas. The memes have rewarded Björk and Lil Wayne with money, fame, critical adulation and, I imagine, a sense of personal satisfaction. The memes mostly rewarded Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker with material hardship, social ostracism and ill health.

If I’m going to sit down and write a song, it works best if I relax and let the memes themselves do the work. It’s mostly a matter of being relaxed and in the moment. Whenever my brain isn’t busy, it occupies itself by playing fragments of tunes, turning and twisting them, sometimes finding new combinations, sometimes just looping some phrase over and over. Your brain probably does this too; it seems to be a human universal. People mostly just ignore these little tunes as they come and go, or whistle them absently, or hum them, or tap them out with their fingertips. To be a musician, the challenge is to pay attention to your memes, and to memorize or otherwise store the interesting ones as they flicker in and out of awareness. Repeating them to yourself helps, since rehearsal is the way that short-term memories gets turned into long-term ones. As the neurobiologists like to say, neurons that fire together, wire together.

I’m an experienced enough musician that I can compose a song entirely in my head or on paper. It works better, though, to involve the rest of my body in the process. I get the best results if I start with my voice, or tapping my foot, or putting my fingers down on an instrument, since the brain does a lot of its thinking with the motor areas. It works even better to get an instrumental track together and then improvise over it while recording. Songwriting by jamming, playing around, tossing an idea around in a repetitive way, alone or with some people I know well — these are all highly effective strategies. I mostly want my prefrontal cortex out of the way for this efflorescence of ideas. I only bring my full consciousness to bear later for the pruning: the editing, the rejection of possibilities and alternatives.

If it’s not the musician’s conscious mind that’s having the ideas, where do they come from? The evolution people say that the memes assemble themselves in our heads, the way embryos self-assemble in the womb or egg, following whatever combination of genetic instructions are floating around. Every piece of music shares the same basic set of melodic and rhythmic motifs, scales, and chord progressions with most of the other music of its time and place. Different Mozart sonatas all operate within the tight stylistic constraints of Baroque-era Europe. Different Wu-Tang Clan tracks all operate within the tight stylistic constraints of nineties East Coast hip-hop. All musical memes are unique, the way all humans and marine snails are, but like humans and marine snails, all pieces of music are narrow variations on pre-existing and broadly similar themes.

In recent years and in Western countries, we have this rule that if you write a meme down first and copyright it, then you own it. This system has a lot of problems. What the composers are writing down is a collage, an amalgamation of whatever tunes they’ve been hearing a lot lately. Jonathan Lethem’s entertaining essay called The Ecstasy Of Influence is both an eloquent presentation of the meme theory and a test case in and of itself, since it’s comprised entirely of quotations and paraphrases of other writers’ ideas. This blog post that I’m writing is an amalgamation of Jonathan Lethem’s and Susan Blackmore’s ideas. My “original” tunes are an amalgamation of whatever has been getting the most airplay in my environment. For any musician, you can see the source of all of their ideas in their record collection or local folk tradition or church hymnal. It’s impossible to accurately and meaningfully separate a single person’s ideas from the memetic environment. All inspiration is based on imitation.

You might be thinking, okay, maybe there’s no originality in popular or folk music, in the middle of the road, within genres. But what about the real mavericks and weirdos? What about Thelonious Monk, Bill Monroe, Igor Stravinsky, Sonic Youth or Cecil Taylor? I would say, even the mavericks are imitating. The avant-gardists and adventurers are floating in a smaller and more personally-defined memepool than the rest of us, but no one operates in isolation. Thelonious Monk had nearly all of his ideas in the context of a small set of song forms borrowed from showtunes and blues. Bill Monroe was effectively fusing two existing genres, appalachian and blues, and all of his songs follow a narrow set of conventions, though it’s a regionally idiosyncratic set for sure. All musicians have their community of inspirations and critics, even if it’s a small circle.

Okay, fine, you say, everybody is plagiarizing from everybody, but we can agree that Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday,” right? Even if that just means it happened to coalesce in his head first and not in someone else’s? I would say, that’s not what we usually mean by writing anymore. A more accurate word for this activity is transcribing. We don’t think of court stenographers as writing the trial. Composition is basically just transcribing the contents of your unconscious. Paul McCartney says the chords and melody to “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. He woke up, rolled over, grabbed his guitar and his notebook, and out it came. Everybody has cool ideas in dreams; what makes Paul McCartney special is that he keeps a guitar and a notebook next to his bed, so he’s able to get this kind of gift from the memes under his fingers, rehearsed into long-term memory and written safely in the notebook in the brief interval before it dissipates irretrievably. How many people are that careful to keep records of their thoughts? I’ll bet if you know anyone who’s that attentive to themselves, they’re probably really good at creative work.

The most creative musicians are the ones who crank out lots and lots of new combinations of their existing memes. The more combinations you try, the more likely you are to find a successful one. The mediocre musicians I know are usually very hung up on a small set of ideas that they fiddle with incessantly. The really good ones crank out a song in a few hours and move on. There’s nothing wrong with polishing up and refining a successful idea, but to get to that successful idea, the best strategy is to try out a lot of diverse variations and let them battle it out for your scarce attentional resources.