Manu Dibango released “Soul Makossa” in 1972. He wrote it as the B-side to “Mouvement Ewondo,” a praise song for the Cameroonian football team on the occasion of the 1972 Tropics Cup. Language Log explains the chant-like lyrics:

The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

Duala is spoken in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, which has long been a musical hotbed. Since the 1960s, Cameroonian pop music has been dominated by a rhythmic style of dance music from Douala known as makossa. The Duala word makossa is often glossed as “(I) dance” (as in this article by Cameroonian linguist George Echu). The entry for makossa in the Oxford English Dictionary further explains that makossa is “derivative of kosa ‘to peel or remove the skin of (a fruit or vegetable)’; the name refers to the twisting and shaking movements of the dancer.”

Language Log quotes this excerpt of Dibango’s autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee:

On one side of the 45 I recorded the hymn [praise song]; on the other I recorded “Soul Makossa,” written using a traditional makossa rhythm with a little soul thrown in. In my Douala neighborhood, at my parents’ house, I rehearsed this second piece. The house had no air-conditioning, and the windows were wide open. All the kids flocked around. Hearing me rehearse, they fell over laughing. Unbelievable — how on earth had I concocted that mishmash? Poor makossa really took a blow. My father was astonished: “Can’t you pronounce ‘makossa’ like everyone else? You stutter: ‘mamako mamasa.’ You think they’re going to accept that in Yaoundé?” The Cup organizing committee reacted the same way. The march on side one they found “impeccable.” But the other side… “Really, Manu has gone nuts. What possesses him to stutter like that?”

The New York DJ and party promoter David Mancuso got his hands on “Soul Makossa” and played it incessantly at his loft parties. The song became an underground hit, especially when it started getting airplay on WBLS. The few copies floating around New York were quickly snapped up by other DJs. Several bands rushed out their own covers to fill the gap, most notably Baba Olatunji and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. Their versions are fun, but nowhere near as funky as the original. Finally, Atlantic Records released Manu Dibango’s version on one of their sub-labels, and it went so far as to crack the top 40 in 1973.

Soul Makossa quotes, samples and remixes

Quoting “Soul Makossa” became something of a trope in the early eighties, ranging from subtle references to the beat or bassline or horn line to full-blown quotation. My favorite example is by Nairobi featuring the Awesome Foursome.

This song just screams 1982, especially with those 808 cowbells. This song was itself sampled in many other songs, including Schoolly D’s “Mama Feel Good.”

Kool Moe Dee’s “Pump Your Fist” draws on “Soul Makossa” for percussion, the wah guitar stab and part of the main sax riff.

A more recent example: “Latinhead” by Dirty Beatniks.

Soul Makossa has also been sampled by Jay-Z, Geto Boys, Poor Righteous Teachers and A Tribe Called Quest, among many others. See a full list of samples.

Michael Jackson and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

By far the most famous musical descendant of “Soul Makossa” is Michael Jackson’s first single from Thriller, the best song on that album and a strong contender for the best song of the eighties, period.

I was at a hippie-ish wedding this past summer. People were having a good time, but not really dancing. Then “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” came up on the iPod and the party suddenly jumped off. Little kids, old folks, everyone in between, people were getting down. Say what you want about Michael Jackson as a human being, but there’s no denying the power of this song. It never fails to get people shaking their butts, across all ages, races, classes and cultural backgrounds.

The copyright-minded among you might well ask: did MJ steal the Makossa chant? Manu Dibango certainly thought so, and sued MJ, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement. The issue isn’t a cut-and-dried one for me, though. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two chants:

The most obvious difference is in the syllables, but there are musical differences too. Manu Dibango’s chant is a two-bar phrase sung/chanted entirely on the note G, over an unchanging G7 chord. Michael Jackson’s chant is a four-bar phrase with a call and response structure. He adds a two-note melody harmonized in thirds and a chord progression alternating between D/E and E7. MJ also uses a little more syncopation. I’d say that MJ’s chant is more of an adaptation than a direct theft.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” quotes, samples and remixes

Pop and hip-hop musicians quote MJ’s version of the Makossa chant incessantly. Some high-profile examples:

• “No Clause 28” by Boy George
• “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith
• “Cowboys” by the Fugees
• “Brooklyn Girls” by Charles Hamilton
• “Lost In The World” by Kanye West

People love to shout out the chant during live performances, too, everyone from Zap Mama to Jamie Foxx. Rihanna goes further than quoting MJ’s chant; she builds an entire dance track around a reharmonized sample of it. MJ’s song is in the key of E, but Rihanna’s producers put it in the key of F# minor. This is hip stuff; the same notes in MJ’s sunny and uplifting coda become melancholy in Rihanna’s track.

People quote other parts of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” too. Big Daddy Kane quotes the “Yeah yeah” part in “Warm It Up Kane,” listen at 1:32.

Other tracks quoting this phrase include “Vibin’ (The New Flava Remix)” by Boyz II Men and Busta Rhymes featuring Treach, Craig Mack and Method Man, and “Feels So Good” by Mase.

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz adapt big swaths of MJ’s song in “Startin’ Something.”

Björk has to be different, of course, so she (mis)quotes the opening line of MJ’s song in live versions of “I Go Humble.” And by the way, her MJ fandom was apparently reciprocal, if this radio show transcript is to be believed.

Visualizing the Makossa diaspora

Here’s a complete map of the genealogy of the Makossa chant; click to enlarge.

Putting it all together

Here’s a mashup I made combining several of the tracks mentioned above so you can get your makossa on.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Any noteworthy sightings of the Makossa meme that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Hat tip to Mike Devlin for coining the phrase “Makossa diaspora.”

Sampling and influence

Whenever you look posts on the Musicians Wanted section of Craigslist by people who are starting bands, they all include a list of influences. They read like wish lists of samples. Whether you end up recreating a sound live or using a sample directly makes little difference in terms of the mental creative process. Every band I’ve ever been in yearned unconsciously for sampling. We’d try for the feeling of Stevie Wonder in Talking Book, or fifties Miles, or Led Zeppelin IV.

Shared musical memes are shared DNA

The tribal associations of music operate at a more granular level than entire genres or performers. Any shared musical memes build a network of musical association that can create pathways for emotional connection. Chord progressions, melodic figures, scales, rhythmic figures, lyrical phrases — all the DNA of music draws on a finite pool shared across the world’s musicians, the way that the genomes of humans and mice and fruit flies and daisies all draw on the same basic set of genes.

When John Lennon uses the sad descending chromatic bassline in “Dear Prudence,” he’s signaling an affinity for every piece of music that uses that bassline, and everyone who’s felt the mood that the bassline evokes.

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

I’m not a big Sarah McLachlan fan, but I do like her song “Ice Cream.” It has a nice 6/8 groove with a lot of syncopation, a groove I associate more with sixties Coltrane than with unthreatening singer-songwriters.

I finally looked “Ice Cream” up on the web and learned that the drummer on the session, Guy Nadon, is a jazz musician who studied with Elvin Jones.

By sneaking a little Coltrane DNA into the unlikely host of a Sarah McLachlan song, Guy Nadon was able to reach across my general hipsterish resistance and move me.

Shared DNA creates family

Michael Jackson had been on my mind quite a bit before he died, and hasn’t been far from my thoughts much since then. I’m especially interested in the “mama se mama sa mama coo sa” chant at the end of “Wanna Be Startin Something.” By quoting Manu Dibango, MJ was throwing a sly wink to all the disco and afro-funk lovers who were hip to “Soul Makossa.” Whenever someone references or samples the chant, it’s a signal of inclusion to those of us who care about MJ.

Referencing doesn’t have to be explicit or conscious for it to work. I loved “Got Your Money” by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Kelis on the first hearing without knowing exactly why. Later I wasn’t too surprised to find out that the beat is a slowed-down sample of “Billie Jean.”

All music evolves from previous music. Sampling makes the chain of memetic inheritance more explicit than other musical memes.

Sampling is more emotionally evocative than quotation

Sampling is an more powerful tool for emotional connection than quotation, because in addition to the melodic or rhythmic figure that’s being activated in your memory, it’s all the subtle nuances of a recording that you may have heard hundreds or thousands of times. Samples can short-circuit the analytic parts of your memory and tap directly into the deep unconscious.

Permission and ownership

The simultaneous beauty and menace of sampling is that you don’t need anyone’s permission: not the performers, not the producers, not the composers or arrangers or copyright holders. Selling your sampled works might be another ball of wax, but if you just want to make mashups, all you need is the audio and a few pieces of inexpensive software.

Be brave, let people sample you

The recording artists I admire are the ones who invite new interpretations of their work. Jay-Z puts out remix-friendly versions of his albums with the isolated vocals on one side and the instrumentals on the other, with the express purpose of making it easy for anyone to repurpose them. The electronic music world has responded enthusiastically, so now you can hear Jay’s rhymes paired with the Beatles, Radiohead, Brian Eno and other unlikely-seeming musical combinations. When I was more of a hip-hop dilettante, Jay’s music was a little too intense for me. Hearing him combined with the safely familiar White Album was the gateway for me to be able to appreciate his work in its original setting. Being able to connect to Jay opens the possibility of connecting to his many fans, which has broadened my social circle noticeably.

Not everybody likes the connections formed by sampling

A lot of people are angry about the practice of sampling, and I’m not just talking about copyright holders. Plenty of people I know find sampling enraging, from professional musicians to the most casual listeners and everyone in between. Maybe these people are attached to their emotional associations to particular recordings and don’t want them invaded. I can see that. When I hear a song based on a sample before the original, I can’t help but think of the sampling track when I eventually do hear the original.

I heard “Crazy In Love” by Beyoncé dozens of times before I ever heard “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites, the source of the brass and cymbal samples. As a result, the Chi-Lites inevitably evoke Beyoncé for me. I think this is basically a good thing. You can’t keep a fence around your emotions, no matter how much you might want to. More complex associations force the possibility of more connection with other people, and you can never have too much connection.

The discussion continues

A couple of my musician friends shared some thoughts about this post on Facebook. Jeremy is a rock bassist, and Jesse is a jazz trumpet player.

Jeremy:

Nicely done! One of the best defenses / explanations of sampling in music that I’ve read. One thing worth exploring / defusing when it comes to the people who hate sampling is “the craftmanship argument.” To wit: people who say that sampling is not valid because the sampler did not play or write the sampled element. I don’t think that this is a valid argument against the practice of sampling, but haven’t exactly put together why…

Me:

Thanks dude! Your opinion matters to me. I think the craftsmanship issue is a critical one, and yeah, it’s tricky. There’s the puritanical equation of effort with quality, for one thing. For another, there’s the idea that learning an instrument is more effortful than copping a sample. On the first front, well, that’s such a deep-seated cultural assumption that people tend to not be open to debating it. I’ve spent years struggling against it. Sampling seems “easier” because the work is kind of invisible compared to woodshedding on an instrument. But the work is still real. You need to listen to a lot of music and do a lot of analyzing of it before you can identify good samples. There’s not much effort in the act of pulling and looping them, but there’s a lot of intellectual groundwork to be laid, and in the end I think it ends up being as much effort as running scales on guitar or whatever.

Jesse:

Going to weigh in here with my three cents 1) The structural information of the song: lyrics, melody, harmony, even certain iconic rhythms can be quoted and referred to by a band or a composer either indirectly as in a quotation or iteration or directly by doing a cover tune, let’s say. 2) This is a paraphrase from “This is your brain on music” – A study was done where a 2 second clip of pop tunes was played. Just from the “sound” (the sonic environment – the production elements: reverb, orchestration, warmth) participants could reliably pick the tune out of a multiple choice list. I experimented with this by the way. It’s fun. Drop your iTunes needle around. Anyway, I can spot any track of “innervisions” in under a second. 3) That feel of that sound is what sampling is doing as well. And, sorry, wether its artfully done or not, is quite different than the content of the song: its the context of the sound of the song that produces the resonance.

Me:

I guess it depends on the length of the sample we’re talking about. A one-beat stab buried in the mix is going to work differently on the listener than a complete phrase. It’s the difference between the kick drum from the Funky Drummer vs the entire four-bar loop. My post was more about the use of full-length phrases, since that’s what tends to be the most emotionally (and legally) controversial.

Jesse:

I guess my point was that actually copping the sound of a recording live or on another recording is just about impossible without sampling. There’s something that can be artful about it but ultimately there is an appropriation of some producers hard, hard work to create an iconic sound. To equate the effort of sifting through a library with taste and creativity with the effort of actually producing those iconic sounds from scratch is absolutely offensive. It’s just a straight up different art form and without accurate sourcing is enslaving in that it makes something work outside its consent and original purpose.

Oh and . . . the bomb squad was great at it Irony. So much fun.

Me:

I agree with you that the whole point of sampling is to use a recognizable recording vibe along with the recognizable melody, rhythm etc. I don’t find it offensive. You could just as easily think of it as a tribute, homage, humbling yourself before your source inspiration. That’s how I think of it. I do believe in accurate sourcing. The present brokenness of the copyright system drives samplers underground and encourages secrecy about sources. I think there’s another unspoken philosophical tension here about who owns a piece of art, the artist or the world. I side with the world. I feel like, I bought the record, I own it now.

Jesse:

I’m on both sides of it. It’s a good debate. Warhol comes to mind obviously.

Jeremy:

There’s also obvious parallels in sampling to collage art in the visual world, and found art. When you take a sample out of the original context, juxtapose it with new samples or original music, you create a new, hybrid context.

You can have bad sampling, just as you can have bad original composition. When someone hijacks an entire song and just redubs their vocals, well, that sets off a lot of alarms… I think there needs to be a new critical language to address what constitutes “artful” sampling vs. “artless” sampling.

Jesse:

This is an interview that shares Pat Matheny’s views on Kenny G. Vis artless sampling. Priceless. Good for the soul. Devastatingly brutal.

A snippet: “Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track “What a Wonderful World”. With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all – as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.”

Jeremy:

I had read this before – a friend, knowing my love for incendiary music writing, forwarded it to me. It’s great. “But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, f*cked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible…”

So I think we have a good working definition of what qualifies “bad” sampling.

Me:

Yeah. I’m not completely opposed to the idea of overdubbing your own sax solo on another recording, but ideally you’d be someone less lame.

Here’s my story of good sampling. We did a Revival Revival show and while Barbara took a break, I spun some of my instrumentals. On the Bittersweet Melody remix, I have a sample of the opening few bars of A Love Supreme. Two tenor sax players were at the gig, so after the sample had run a few times they both jumped in on it. They played it in more or less in unison a few times and then took off on this whole interlocking thing with the phrase transposed and displaced against the original. It was pretty magical, I wish we’d recorded it.

Guys, do you mind if I include some excerpts of this conversation in the blog post itself? I think non-FB users would find it interesting. If you’d prefer I didn’t that’s cool too.

Jeremy:

I’ve got no problem with that… it seems especially appropriate to throw some samples into the writing, if you don’t mind getting all “meta” with it. Personally, I have no problems with meta-whateva.

Oh, and I wish you had recorded that Revival Revival gig too! In my head it sounds awesome! Did you know the tenor players were going to do that?

Me:

No idea! One of them had been playing bass and a little sax with us regularly and the other was just there hanging out, I had never met him before. It was both of their first time hearing the track.

Jeremy:

Good frickin’ lord… real musicians just blow me away.

Me:

You’re telling me.

Jeremy:

Yeah, well, that’s what I’ve got effect pedals for… when you can’t wow ‘em with chops, confuse ‘em with expression-controlled delay trails.

There’s nothing going on in contemporary music that interests me more than the vibe of this track. The blend of electronic and tribal drums and Auto-tuned singing draws on the same sonic palette as “Love Lockdown,” which continues to be my favorite song of the 21st century, but “Lost In The World” is much bigger and denser.

Samples

The intro of “Lost In The World” is a long sample of Bon Iver’s “Woods.”

I don’t usually have a lot of patience for quavery-voiced indie folk, but I always enjoy an Auto-tuned a capella. Kanye was right to want to jump on it. “Woods” is a musical cousin of Imogen Heap’s “Hide And Seek” which I’m surprised that rappers haven’t taken more of an interest in sampling.

At this point there’s nothing too surprising about rapping over sampled singing, but I like this idea of layering tons of new sung vocals on top of samples. Aside from Bon Iver, the liner notes list Charlie Wilson, Kay Fox, Tony Williams, Alicia Keys, La Roux, Alvin Fields and Ken Lewis singing or chanting. Their voices are layered and processed into an otherworldly thickness. It’s an arresting blend.

The album’s liner notes say that “Lost In The World” samples the famous beat from “Think” by Lyn Collins and the JBs — listen at 1:25. I can’t really hear it under all the other layers, but I’ll take Kanye’s word for it.

This song was most famously sampled in “It Takes Two” by DJ EZ Rock and Rob Base, but it appears in about nineteen thousand other tracks too.

The line “Who will survive in America” comes from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1.” I assume Kanye drew inspiration from the congas for his tribal drums too.

This has nothing to do with anything, but in the New Yorker profile of Mr. Scott-Heron I learned that he and I went to the same fancy private school. Small world.

The lyrics

When it comes to pop, the production usually outweighs the lyrics in substance by a hundred to one. “Lost In The World” is special, though, because through much of the song, different lyrics are being sung simultaneously. That’s some pretty hip stuff. Bon Iver’s sampled part goes:

I’m up in the woods
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a still
To slow down the time

When the rest of the vocalists enter, they sing:

I’m lost in the world
I’m down on my mind
I’m building a city
And I’m down for the night, down for the night

Says she’s down for the night

I’m never alone
Down the time

I’m lost in the world
I’m down my whole life
I’m new in the city
But I’m down for the night

Down for the night, down for the night

Then we come to Kanye’s actual verse, which, meh. It’s a mostly a string of simplistic cliches, though there is one pretty remarkable line:

You’re my stress and you’re my masseuse
Mama se, mama sa, mama coosa

First of all, very nice internal rhyme. Secondly, Michael Jackson fans will recognize the quote from the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which is itself a quote of Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.”

What does it all mean?

In an essay in The Awl entitled “Understanding Kanye: Sweet, Sweet Robot Fantasy, Baby,” Mike Barthel describes Ye as turning himself (figuratively) into a robot.

Kanye had to fight to be taken seriously as a rapper, and he only succeeded once he started becoming a cyborg. A car accident in 2002 left him with a metal plate in his jaw, and instead of trying to cover up the unreal, he brought it to the fore, recording a song while and about how his jaw was still wired shut. The resulting single, “Through the Wire,” was his first hit, and the song that convinced Roc-A-Fella to give him an album deal. He had found beauty in a piece of machinery that would normally be hidden under a more believable imitation of the real. In so doing, he created a verbal analog of his most famous production technique, “Chipmunking,” in which a sample is sped up to match a faster beat and consequently raised in pitch as well. Chipmunking is a kind of joke about beatmaking; producers work to make a sample match their preferred tempo without changing pitch, but by exaggerating these seams, Kanye made the unnatural pleasing. He was learning the value of the mechanical in and of itself.

Anyone who traffics heavily in samples, as Kanye does, is going to confront the dissolving boundaries between “fake” manipulation of recordings and synths and “real” instruments and vocals. All hip-hop deals in that tension, and the best practitioners throw it in your face.

This influence of the mechanical floats in and out of his first two albums, though it fights with his natural tendencies toward the natural. You can hear the tension on “Slow Jamz,” a prime chipmunking track, when Kanye contrasts the unnatural speed and pitch of Luther Vandross with the biological abilities of Twista, someone able to imitate the hyperspeed feel of digital sound manipulation with natural verbal techniques.

When the other guest on “Slow Jamz,” Jamie Foxx, pops up on the second album’s “Gold Digger,” it’s to do the same convincing imitation of Ray Charles that he did in the movies. But after Foxx’s intro, we get the real Ray Charles, or maybe the “real” Ray Charles, since it’s a recording of a live performance that’s been cut up and rearranged. Foxx’s intro is a sort of signal to us that there’s more going on here than just sampling, but once you’re into the track, it’s easy to lose those issues given how closely the use of Charles’ “I Got a Woman” hews to rap conventions for sample use.

This idea of putting a real recording of fake Ray Charles up against a “fake” sample of real Ray Charles: very hip stuff.

It seems almost unkind to point this out, but between “Late Registration” and “Graduation” Kanye’s mother died after complications from plastic surgery. Technology had always served Kanye well before—in the form of his producer’s tools, it was the vehicle that took him from obscurity to the cusp of stardom—but now his mother’s own cybernetic changes had ended in death. The mechanical had turned on him.

The video for “Stronger” shows Kanye’s heart being surgically removed before he goes on an Akira rampage. Not too hard to figure out the emotional intent there. But the song is still a brag: “That that that that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.”

My friends are about evenly split on the album that follows, 808s And Heartbreak. I come down strongly in favor. The tension between organic and inorganic reaches a new pitch. On the one hand, there’s the pervasive Auto-tune and the clinical drum machines and synths. On the other hand, Kanye is liberated by the automated pitch correction to emotionally go for broke in his singing, knowing that anything he puts down will come out sounding musical. Mike Barthel shares my love for 808s And Heartbreak.

When he premiered his first track from the album, at the 2008 VMAs, the spot on his chest that was covered in bandages in the “Stronger” video was now filled. But instead of a real heart, he had a digital one, a pin made up of red LEDs blinking on and off, a crack running down the middle. The operation had been, at least on its own terms, a success. Kanye was now a full-fledged cyborg. On “Love Lockdown,” his voice was filtered through AutoTune with a sharp attack and a subtle bit of distortion to produce the sound of a human trapped, maybe unwillingly, inside a robot. The same effect was applied to almost all the vocals on the album, and while it was deliberately artificial, it was also, like he had said, stronger: where before he could only rap, now he could sing. The off-key caterwauling of “Drunk and Hot Girls” was now a precise tone full of a kind of electric soul. It wasn’t the raw emotion of humans, but the synthesis of emotional impulses and mechanical restraint, a computer’s inauthentic attempts at automatic expression which nevertheless sprung from a real human need to communicate.

And that brings us to the present. Kanye has all the money and fame and power a human being could ask for, but he’s still lost in the world. The alienation and self-doubt comes across loud and clear. But the power and confidence does too — all those singers, all those tribal drums, the angry defiance. This is a surprisingly challenging and avant-garde track for a supposed pop hip-hop album, a wall of sound spaced with yawning silences in pure digital black. If Kanye keeps putting out music like this, he can be as big a public nuisance as he wants.

Sampling lets you actively engage your record collection, iTunes library, etc

The vast majority of my musical experience has been through listening to recordings, and the same is true of everyone I know. The real pleasure of music is participation, and historically recorded music hasn’t been participation-friendly. It was a humongous deal for me to discover that I can interact with my record collection beyond deciding which song to listen to when.

Sampling has some of the same satisfaction of learning how to sing songs I like, or how to play them on the guitar. As with learning songs the old-fashioned way, sampling lets me remake recordings to my own tastes. I’ve learned through extensive experimentation that what I really like is to hear the song’s major hooks repeated in groups of eight at a medium slow tempo over an 808 drum machine playing a hip-hop beat. Sampling helped me discover that, and it’s transformed my approach to my own compositions too.

Expediency leads to spontaneity

I know a lot of drummers. Some of them are world-class musicians. But they aren’t usually available to me. If I just want to try out ideas over a certain beat, the logistics are a big problem. I don’t have a drum kit in my apartment, and if I did, it would drive my neighbors crazy. Even if that weren’t a problem, I don’t have the right mics or acoustic environment to do a decent recording of live drums. Meanwhile, I have a hard drive full of the best drummers in recorded history in every conceivable style, with an essentially limitless selection of others a few mouse clicks away on the internet. How could I possibly pass up the opportunity to practice and write along with Clyde Stubblefield or Questlove or Max Roach?

It isn’t just beats that can inspire new tracks or compositions. A short instrumental passage, a vocal phrase, a fragment of speech, a sound effect or atmospheric sound — any of those things can inspire new work. The effortlessness and immediacy of sampling creates such a wealth of possibility that the challenge becomes choosing from among all the new ideas. This is a much nicer problem than sitting there thinking, “I wonder what Duke Ellington’s brass section would sound like over this part? I guess I’ll never know.”

People get bored, computers don’t

A great way to write songs is to set up the basic groove on a loop and then let it play continuously for a few hours while you hang out, eat lunch, fold your laundry or play video games. The best creative work is done by your unconscious mind, and your unconscious mind likes to work while your conscious mind is busy doing something relatively uninteresting. This reality is an awkward fit with the reality of collaborating with other humans. Even if I could have a band at my beck and call, it would be completely wrong to ask them to loop a phrase identically for hours while I hung out eating oranges and reading my email. Fortunately, the computer has no objection to this way of working.

Freedom from permission

I don’t just mean legal permission, though that’s a thorny set of challenges in and of itself. For a lot of would-be samplers, the major obstacle is a sense of moral guilt. Many of us feel guilty “stealing” someone else’s idea. I resisted sampling for years out of guilt.

It’s strange to have so much power over sound. If I want a human to play the Funky Drummer beat exactly at a certain tempo for a certain length of time, I need to convince them to do it. If I just want to loop the Funky Drummer beat in Recycle, the computer is always happy to oblige me.

Should sampling make me feel guilty?

What do I owe another musician by sampling them? Let’s assume I’m not making any money off my work, just giving away copies to my friends. Is it cool if I do this without the original performers’ consent? There would be no hip-hop or electronica at all if everyone was “properly” hesitant to use unauthorized samples. I do try to get permission when it’s reasonably possible. Many of my musician friends have volunteered the use of samples of themselves with the understanding that if I ever make money from something, they get a cut. Meanwhile, if it’s just for experimentation or teaching, I’m free to use the samples as I wish. In a perfect world, this is the relationship I’d have with every recording artist.

Some copyright holders are only too happy to license samples, it can be a great source of income. But some musicians don’t like having their ideas altered and manipulated beyond the bounds of their personal taste, no matter how money it might make them. The Beatles, for instance, have never cleared a sample and are unlikely to change their minds. Meanwhile, if I’m sitting alone in front of my computer and I find a little slice of Beatles music that sounds great as a loop, Paul McCartney and his lawyers are nowhere in sight. It’s nearly impossible to resist the pleasure of sampling all that incredible music, and with a few pieces of software and some free time, anyone can do it. I respect Paul McCartney’s body of work like few others, and I consider it the sincerest form of flattery to sample from him. It’s too bad Paul McCartney doesn’t see it that way.

Samples have their own sonic and musical quality

Even if I could conjure any combination of musicians and instruments at will and had round the clock access to a flawless recording environment, I’d still want to be able to use samples. There’s a difference between a person playing a particular phrase repeatedly and the playback of a recorded loop. Even if a musician wanted to play a loop the way a sampler does, people can’t help but introduce slight variations of attack, subtle tempo changes, and all the other little nuances of live performance. In some styles of music, constant nuance and variation is a good thing. But sometimes you want the hypnotic, trance-like effect you get from identical looping. Electronica and hip-hop derive a lot of attention-grabbing power from the startling gap in a looped pattern, and the satisfaction when the loop returns right on time.

It isn’t just the musical content of the sample that creates its personality. It’s the recording itself, the particular interaction of the microphone and preamp and mixing desk and tape or digital medium. The magic of the Funky Drummer loop isn’t just in its beat — it’s the tape hiss, the equalization, the compression and reverb. A drummer might be able to recreate the musical performance, but not the exact sound.

In addition to their intrinsic sonic qualities, samples can be sonically manipulated in ways that live instruments can’t. I can instantly alter the pitch of a sample, stretch it out, filter sweep it, or rearrange its components in a different order. For maximum gratification, I love to hear live musicians and looped samples combined together.

Hearing a familiar sound in an unfamiliar context is exciting

Some of the coolest songs repurpose recognizable hooks, or even entire choruses, in new contexts. This technique is a foundation of hip-hop songwriting. Here are two examples that I like.

Janet Jackson ft Joni Mitchell – “Got ‘Til It’s Gone”

SWV ft Michael Jackson – “Right Here”

Shared ideas create community

By sampling Joni Mitchell, Janet Jackson invites all the Joni Mitchell fans into the room (and invites herself into consideration by Joni Mitchell fans.) When SWV samples Michael Jackson, they shine some of that Michael Jackson energy through themselves and out on us.

Individual ownership of music is a historical aberration

Ownership of ideas is a recent historical phenomenon, preceded by uncountable centuries of oral tradition in the public domain. Other world cultures don’t necessarily share our preoccupation with ownership. Even in capitalist America, we default to oral tradition in our daily lives. We have an intuition that you’re supposed to share music you like with people you like. It’s one of the basic ways we establish social bonds with each other. This custom isn’t going anywhere, no matter what copyright law might say. Sampling lets you share recordings you love, placed into new contexts, making new statements, while still connecting back to the past. This is a powerful emotional tool, and using it becomes irresistible once you get a taste of using it.

Sampling undermines our magical thinking about originality

It’s been my experience that there are no truly original ideas, only remixes and mashups of existing ideas. The completely original song is a legal fiction. It’s a useful fiction for managing intellectual property, but it’s problematic when it comes up against the collage-like nature of actually composing and improvising. The belief that new ideas spring magically into being from the ether reminds me of the once widely-held belief in the spontaneous supernatural generation of life. Now we know that all life on Earth evolved from previous life. Our ideas evolve according to the same Darwinian dynamics as the brains that produce and host them.

Sampling makes for a healthy intellectual culture

New ideas are always inspired by repurposing existing ideas. Copyright is supposed to motivate new ideas, but, as it’s presently enforced, it can have the opposite effect. When Disney transforms public-domain works into exclusive properties, that jams up the flow of ideas that made their wealth possible in the first place. There needs to be a free flow of ideas if ideas are going to keep evolving.

If sampling is so great, how is everybody supposed to get paid?

Our current copyright model emerged in the era of expensive printing presses, record pressing plants and so on. If a book was the only way to get access to the thoughts in the book, and the vinyl record was the only way to get access to the sounds on the record, it made to treat copies as valuable properties in and of themselves. In the computer era, copying is so routine and effortless that it’s impossible to meaningfully regulate it. You copy files every time you load a program from your hard drive.

Good ideas may still be scarce, but digital copies of them aren’t and probably never will be again. There has yet to be a copy protection scheme for digital media that couldn’t be cracked by any reasonably bright thirteen-year-old. In an interview with The Guardian, Brian Eno says:

I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate — history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.

What is this something else? Live performance? I use a laptop and samples for that too.

So how should the creators of my samples get paid? How should they get paid for any of the copying that goes into remixed and mashed up works? How do artists get paid for any kind of idea that can be rendered digitally if copying is so easy?

The question of how to make people pay for digital copies voluntarily haunts every creative professional. Sci-fi author Charles Stross lays out the problems in an articulate blog post here. The comments are full of intriguing suggestions that have some applicability to music.

I’m attracted to a model where we pay creators up front using the Kickstarter method or something like it, and having the copies just disseminate like dandelion seeds to raise interest in the next project. Giving away hours of stuff on the internet has made a lot of money for artists as diverse as the Grateful Dead and Lil Wayne. The fans want to show love to the artists. Maybe more musicians will just start asking the fans to donate directly via their web sites.

For most of human history, music was supported by the same invisible gift economy as any kind of mundane daily practice, like recipes or childcare routines or methods for opening coconuts. I’d like to see the gift economy make a comeback in music. Musicians are like religious leaders. Maybe the funding model should be more like church, where the fans view paying for music as a tithe. I’m a perfect customer for this kind of model. I’ve been looking to music for deeper meaning since I was a kid. I fill it with the reverent belief that I might have put into the spiritual world if I were inclined that way.

If I’m going to invest faith in my music, I need to know it’s on the up and up. It’s like when you meet a person, you want to know their connections, their family and friends. Knowing the connections creates trust. I want and am willing to pay for richer metadata along with my music files. I want context and background. My wish is for more liberalized sampling that comes with an ethic of explicit attribution. I buy music based on the basis of its being sampled in hip-hop or R&B songs all the time. I bought “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites when I found out that it was sampled in Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love.” I’d happily open my wallet for more access to a song’s guts. I want remix-friendly stems and karaoke versions. I want super-detailed liner notes that show me the whole musical supply chain. If I pay for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” by Michael Jackson, I want to be shown a link to “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango. From there I’d like some context on makossa as a musical and dance form. I want seamless integration with Allmusic and Wikipedia and Amazon reviews and Whosampled and Youtube.

I want sampling to be legally easier because it would make music more participatory, and thus more fun and interesting

If I really like a song, I want a playable Rock Band or DJ Hero version. I want interactive MIDI lead sheets with the chords, the melody and the rhythms. I want the lyrics annotated so I can click through to see explanations of slang or literary allusions. I want to see production details: who played or programmed what parts, what gear they used, what software, what plugins. I want to be able to hear the tracks one at a time and remix them or mash them up with other stuff I like. It seems like all this should be possible in the age of digital music.

Making your own music is good and good for you

It’s been pointed out to me that if anybody can remix anything, it’ll result in a flood of crappy remixes. This is true. It’s also good and necessary. Amateur participation is about process, not product. The singing in most church choirs is pretty bad. Most amateur bands are pretty lame. It’s still fun and healthy to participate in church choirs and amateur bands. It’s good for you to play basketball whether you play like Michael Jordan or like me (badly.) It’s good to cook your own meals, even if you’re no Julia Child. And it’s good to make your own music.

We still need the masters to light the way, to discover best practices and teach them to the rest of us. But leaving the whole process to the masters cheats us all out of an essential social and emotional vitamin. If sampling is what’s giving the most joy out of the tools we have at our disposal, then people are going to keep doing it. I hope we can all work out a better deal with each other over the permissions and attributions.

Manu Dibango

He wrote “Soul Makossa,” the inspiration for MJ’s chant.

“Soul Makossa” isn’t exactly the same as MJ’s version. Manu Dibango speak/sings “ma ma ko, ma ko sa, ma ko ma ko sa” on one note. MJ sings “ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa” as a sus chord resolving to a major chord.

Michael Jackson

Wrote “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” On the recording he sings lead and backing vocals, and he did some of the production and arrangement.

Quincy Jones

Produced the track, which in this context means he supervised the recording sessions, probably wrote the horn chart and did some other musical shaping. I have no idea what legal rights Quincy Jones has over the recording or composition, if any.

The other musicians

Along with MJ, the track features three synth and keyboard players, a guitarist, a bassist, a percussionist, a horn section and bunch of backing vocalists. Plus somebody programmed the drum machine. Legally, these folks aren’t entitled to anything beyond the union scale they got paid for the recording sessions, but my musician friends would say there’s an element of spiritual ownership.

Bruce Swedian

He was the lead recording engineer. He probably had some other engineers and assistants working with him as well, the internet doesn’t say. As with the backing musicians, he has zero ownership beyond what he got paid for the original sessions. His fellow recording engineers would stick up passionately for his spiritual ownership over the track, since it wouldn’t exist without him, and it wouldn’t have its arrestingly distinctive sound.

Sony Music Distribution

The label that presently puts out Thriller and, presumably, owns the master recording rights. There may be other co-owners, including MJ and his various financial partners and creditors.

BMG

The rights-management company that handles Sony’s publishing. Again, I’m sure there are other complex co-owners, from MJ on out.

Me

I paid ninety-nine cents for the mp4 on the iTunes store. I co-owned a cassette copy with my sister and stepbrother as a kid. I have a decades-long emotional relationship with the song.

Apple

They sold me the mp4 and the hardware I mostly use to listen to it.

My dad or stepmother

Or my stepbrother’s dad or whoever bought us the cassette of Thriller back in the eighties. Plus whoever they bought the cassette from (I’m guessing Sam Goody on 59th and Third), plus whoever was distributing Thriller on cassettes back then.

The situation only gets more complicated as I follow the chant’s path through my life. A few months ago I went with Anna and our neighbor to hear Zap Mama at Joe’s Pub. During one of her songs, she quoted MJ’s chant. Who owned that instance of the chant? Zap Mama? Joe’s Pub? Us, for buying tickets? Who owned the experience of me hearing the chant at Papaya King, or in Prospect Park, or on the computer network in my office? What about when the guy with the motorcycle was riding around Park Slope blasting “Soul Makossa” from his speakers and I mistook it for a remix of MJ?

What about the copy of “Don’t Stop The Music” by Rihanna that I bought from Apple? I assume that Rihanna’s producers and management paid some sort of licensing fee to Michael Jackson and/or his copyright holders to use the sample, or maybe they got a cut of my ninety-nine cents. They didn’t pay Manu Dibango anything.

Sampling makes people anxious because it raises so many questions about ownership. These questions are only going to get more complicated as technology evolves. The emotional questions are every bit as complex as the legal ones, if not more so. My feeling is, everybody who’s ever heard the chant owns it. Which means that no one does.

Here’s a mashup of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Soul Makossa” with many related and derivative works.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Update: within an hour of posting this, Otis Taylor tweeted me from a concert where Jamie Foxx was leading the crowd in the chant.

MJ never made a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” leaving a vacuum that the fans are only too happy to fill. This video even includes footage of MJ’s video game.

This MJ song has inspired a lot of fan art, maybe because it is itself fan art. The music industry likes to send lawyers after people who make fan art, which is dumb and self-destructive on their part. No fan art, no art.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is my favorite Michael Jackson song, against much stiff competition. Several of MJ’s most famous songs were written by Quincy Jones or Rod Temperton, but MJ wrote this one himself. It’s serious and personal. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s long, respectful article in GQ talks about MJ’s process:

By 1978, the year of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” — co-written by Michael and little Randy — ”Michael’s methods have gelled. He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts.

No wonder hip-hop musicians love MJ. Improvising into recording devices is where hip-hop comes from. MJ’s music is very electronic. There are places in “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” where different pieces of the lead vocal overlap, making it impossible for one person to really sing it live. All the backing vocals on the final version are overdubbed MJ.

Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts.

If he were a young guy now he’d probably be recording his siblings on his laptop using Pro Tools.

His art will later depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to hear his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier, Off the Wall-era demo of the eventual Thriller hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting.

The final version is produced by Quincy Jones, though MJ probably did most of the arrangement. The groove is based on a drum machine loop, with some Brazilian percussion on top. Three different guys are playing synths. The top-notch horn section plays with a perfection that makes them sound sequenced, but with full analog fidelity.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is a close musical cousin to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” They were written around the same time. DJs like to run them together at the peak of the night. Harmonically they’re extremely minimalist, using static mixolydian mode for the entire length of the song. That minimalism makes both songs sound fresher and more contemporary than MJ’s other disco material.

“Don’t Stop” has upbeat party lyrics that match its sound. “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is musically exuberant too, but the lyrics are mostly very dark and intense.

I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’
I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’

The tone goes from confrontational to helpless.

It’s too high to get over (yeah, yeah)
Too low to get under (yeah, yeah)
You’re stuck in the middle (yeah, yeah)
And the pain is thunder (yeah, yeah)

I took my baby to the doctor
With a fever, but nothing he found
By the time this hit the street
They said she had a breakdown

Someone’s always tryin’
to start my baby cryin’
Talkin’, squealin’, lyin’
Sayin’ you just wanna be startin’ somethin’

Normal pop songs were mostly not this serious in the early eighties.

You love to pretend that you’re good
When you’re always up to no good
You really can’t make him hate her
So your tongue became a razor

Someone’s always tryin’
to keep my baby cryin’
Treacherous, cunnin’, declinin’
You got my baby cryin’

This is the verse that gives me the most pause.

You’re a vegetable, you’re a vegetable
Still they hate you, you’re a vegetable
You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable
They eat off of you, you’re a vegetable

There’s the mysterious guest appearance by Billie Jean.

Billie Jean is always talkin’
When nobody else is talkin’
Tellin’ lies and rubbin’ shoulders
So they called her mouth a motor

This verse is probably directed at MJ’s father, who told the family around the time of this song’s writing that he had been having an affair and had fathered a child with his lover.

If you can’t feed your baby (yeah, yeah)
Then don’t have a baby (yeah, yeah)
And don’t think maybe (yeah, yeah)
If you can’t feed your baby (yeah, yeah)

You’ll be always tryin’
To stop that child from cryin’
Hustlin’, stealin’, lyin’
Now baby’s slowly dyin’

After all this anguish, MJ is still determined to keep a brave face, and for you to enjoy yourself. So he ends with uplift.

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl

No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you, help me sing it

And finally, the famous chant.

Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa

The chant is an approximate quote from a song by Manu Dibango called “Soul Makossa.” Manu Dibango’s song is mostly playfully riffs around the word makossa, a Cameroonian dance style. MJ was sued for the quote, but he probably didn’t mean any harm. The chant is a work of Manu Dibango fan art. Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop The Music” is fan art based on fan art. You could add another layer of recursion by doing a fan remix of the Rihanna song.

Plenty of people have sampled and quoted both Manu Dibango’s song and MJ’s.
The Rihanna song is especially interesting to me because it doesn’t just quote the chant, it reharmonizes it. MJ’s song is in E major. Rihanna’s song is in F# minor. This technique of taking a well-known melody line and writing a radically different harmony for it is widely used in jazz. The B minor and F# natural minor chords from Rihanna’s song are from the same E mixolydian scale as the E7 and D major chords in MJ’s, but they have a totally different emotional effect. (If you strum B minor and F# minor on guitar along with the end of MJ’s song, it sounds amazing.) Rihanna’s song is tragic and anxious. It picks up on the underlying tragedy and anxiety of MJ’s song. That’s quality fan art.

Here’s a mashup of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Soul Makossa” with many related and derivative works.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

This is a continuation of a post about Rhymefest’s MJ mixtape. The thought continues in a post about who owns the chant.