My friend Adam suggested combining “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie and “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga. Here’s the result.
Let’s Just Dance
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Revival Revival vs Lady Gaga vs David Bowie
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The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording.
I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.
Fan Wars: Copyright vs. Mash-ups and Fan Fiction
Many mash-up artists seem unaware that their work implicates any rights at all, and copyright owners may be reluctant to alienate fans with copyright restrictions. Artists such as Girl Talk remain outspoken against copyright restrictions on mash-up culture. Individual copyright owners, such as the owners of Star Wars, have adopted terms of use for mash-ups.
Is fan and other mash-up activity important to enrich our culture? Are existing allowances for fair use adequate? Should mash-up artists and fan fiction publishers have any right (legal or moral) to complain when others copy and redistribute their work? What is a copyright owner or licensee to do when it has contractual obligations to third parties in connection with their contributions? How should these issues be resolved?
This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.
DJ Kool Herc likes to say that The Incredible Bongo Band’s version of “Apache” is the national anthem of hip-hop. Its famous drum and percussion break reliably put bodies on the dance floor through hip-hop’s prehistory and has been sampled untold numbers of times. Here’s the break:
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On the left is the record where the break first appeared, and on the right is DJ Kool Herc.
You could also call the Apache break the national anthem of drum n bass and all the other electronic microgenres based on sped up and scrambled hip-hop beats.
I don’t get to movie theaters much. But as part of the new family plan to enjoy ourselves on Christmas, I went to see Avatar in 3D with a bunch of relatives. I went in intending to dislike it, and came out having thoroughly enjoyed myself. So much for my hipsterish snobbery.
What’s interesting to me is how the movie is simultaneously so fresh and so derivative. Avatar’s freshness is in its breathtaking visuals, all the technogeekery of its making. It’s derivative in its plot, setting, characters, and all other non-technical content. It’s practically a mashup in movie form. In the spirit of my blog post parsing out all the sources of Halo, I figured I’d do the same for this movie. Here are some of the most obvious sources, similarities and resonances (There are some spoilers within, but the plot of this movie is totally predictable and the least interesting thing about it, so feel free to read if you’re planning to go see it.) (more…)
Turntablists use a record player to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. This new tool is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound of hip-hop. I wonder what else they have coming.
My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except for the fact of all of the sources being giddily combined together without any concern for logic. It’s like a perfect nerd mixtape.
Here’s my remix of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” featuring Barbara Singer, Nicole Bishop and Candida Haynes.
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Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again.
Everybody who posts on Craigslist wanting to start a band includes a list of influences. To me those ads all 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. This idea that sampling is uncreative flies directly in the face of all of my experience. Most sample-based musicians I’ve worked with are more inclined to artistic risk-taking than the ones who exclusively use live instrumentation. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about connecting with other people. Sampling, like its predecessors quoting and referencing, is a powerful connection method.
