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.”

Here are my favorite basslines of the last fifty years, across genres.

John Coltrane – “My Favorite Things”

Simple, hypnotic, effective. Read more.

John Coltrane – “Equinox”

Another devastatingly simple groove.

Duke Ellington – “Half The Fun”

Paired with an incredible Sam Woodyard drum part. I love sampling it:

Nature Boy megamix by ethanhein

Duke Ellington – “Fleurette Africaine”

Charles Mingus’ strumming on the intro might be the most beautiful few bars he ever played. Hear a mashup I did of this tune and some other jazz classics:

Autumn Leaves by ethanhein

The Beatles – “Dear Prudence”

I could have chosen any of a dozen Beatles tunes here, I love those McCartney lines. But this one has the most emotional power for me. Here’s a blog post about it, and here’s a mashup I did of “Dear Prudence” with “Never Can Say Goodbye” by the Jackson 5:

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time”

From my favorite of Miles’ funk albums. Read a blog post about it.

James Brown – “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)”

Pretty sure that’s Bootsy Collins playing bass, and he kills it.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon”

Here’s a visualization I made of this loop.

Talking Heads – “Once In A Lifetime”

Read more about this track, and check out the megamix:

Once In A Lifetime megamix by ethanhein

Michael Jackson – “Billie Jean”

Of course.

Janet Jackson – “What Have You Done For Me Lately”

The song that made the Latelybass sound famous.

Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes”

Bakithi Kumalo on the fretless makes this tune for me.

Michael Jackson – “Remember The Time”

Love those Teddy Riley sequenced lines.

Digable Planets – “Rebirth Of Slick”

The bassline is sampled from “Searchin’” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, but the Digables flipped it into something new.

Black Sheep – “The Choice Is Yours”

Another creative flip of a jazz sample, from McCoy Tyner’s recording of “Impressions.”

Morphine – “Buena”

No embedding; click the image to hear the song:

Two-string slide bass and baritone sax!

Daft Punk – “Around The World”

Never get tired of this one.

Kanye West – “Love Lockdown”

Kanye has been using tuned 808 kick drums to play his basslines lately, which is a dazzlingly hip idea. The kick and the bass are supposed to be in tight sync anyway; why not just fuse them into a single part? I know he’s a ridiculous human being in a lot of ways but the man knows how to put a track together.

Let me know if I missed anything critical, I’m sure I did.

Original post on Quora

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Bitter Sweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

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.

It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing the tracks were swiftly taken down by the Stones’ lawyers, of course, but as of this writing you can still download the stems in multitrack Ogg format. You can open and edit the Oggs in Audacity, and export pieces in other formats.

Whenever a guy like me hears “isolated tracks” I know it’s remix time. So here are some samples from “Gimme Shelter” along with various other sounds, enjoy.

Rock With Shelter

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Shelter Guitar

Me vs the Rolling Stones vs Michael Jackson vs Glen Velez vs Britney Spears vs Charles Mingus

mp3 download, ipod format download

There’s such a business opportunity with these kinds of isolated tracks. I haven’t bought too many recordings lately, but I’d happily plunk down money for easily-remixable stems, especially if they came pre-sliced in Recycle format. I doubt the Stones would be interested in selling such a thing, since they have plenty of money already, but I could see this being a great revenue stream for younger, hungrier bands. A big part of the reason people like music-based video games is that they get you inside familiar songs in a new way — you’re focused on the guitar or bass in a way that casual listeners rarely do. I could see the Guitar Hero generation eagerly embracing a simplified version of Ableton Live or Reason.

Anyway, “Gimme Shelter.” The female vocalist on the track is Merry Clayton, and she kills it. Aside from this song, she’s had a colorful career. She’s sung on various movie soundtracks, and did backing vocals on songs as diverse as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos. During her solo verse on “Gimme Shelter,” her voice cracks on the word “shot” from the last line, and then again on the word “murder.” That’s the kind of total emotional commitment that grabs the listener hard. On the isolated vocal you can clearly hear Mick give an appreciative “Yeah!”

The isolated tracks highlight how sloppy the Stones were even at their absolute best. The Dangerous Minds post describes Charlie Watts as sounding like “a human metronome here.” This is completely wrong. I put those drums on the grid and can assure you that Charlie Watts’ time is all over the place. So are the rest of the Stones. That’s the point. Sloppy chic runs directly counter to the musical sensibilities of the digital audio era. I sincerely doubt that any producer would permit such raggedy playing onto a commercial release in this day and age.

I’m no big lover of willful sloppiness. The Stones’ superficial casualness on their best stuff is underpinned by a very disciplined sense of groove and restraint. Later in their career, they got genuinely careless, and that’s when they started sucking. It’s a fine line between insouciant confidence and plain indifference. On “Gimme Shelter” the Stones walk that line perfectly.

Mick Jagger is amusing and everything, but Keith Richards is the Stones’ main point of musical interest for me. He plays simple, well-worn cliches, but he has a totally distinctive touch and approach that keeps his licks fresh all these decades later. Keef gets some of his signature sound from an unusual guitar tuning. He tunes to open G, which is common enough for slide players, but then he takes the low E string off, so he’s left with D G D B D. (On “Gimme Shelter” he has a capo on the second fret.) If you’re a guitarist, try it sometime, it’s fun. Here’s a detailed guide to Keef-style guitar.

Keef supports my assertion that songwriting is not about having original ideas; it’s about recombining existing ideas. When asked about his songwriting by Guitar World, here’s what he said:

Personally, I don’t consider that you create or write anything. The best way to think about it, for me anyway, is that you’re an antenna. I sit down at an instrument-guitar, piano, bass or whatever-and play somebody else’s songs. And usually within 20 minutes, more or less, suddenly something’s coming. And that’s when the antenna goes up. [He wets his finger and raises it in the air.] Incoming! So you get this sort of gift. You work it up a bit and then transmit it. The idea that “I wrote that,” or “I created that” is an overblown artistic sort of thing that people love to put on writing songs. It can screw you up. If you think that it’s all down to you, you’ve got another thing coming.

Words to live by. Too bad the Stones lawyers are so sampling-unfriendly. If Keef was a young up-and-comer right now I bet he would skip the imitation of his blues heroes and just sample them directly.

Music evolves in much the same way life does. DNA gets copied when cells divide and replicate. Music gets copied from mind to mind when people hear it and want to reproduce it. All musical learning begins with imitation of other musicians. I’d go so far as to say that all learning boils down to imitation. Primates and other smarter animals learn by imitation too.

As music gets copied from one person’s mind to another, it sometimes mutates. Think of learning an existing piece of music as being like asexual reproduction. Usually the two child cells are exact clones of the parent cell. Mutations are errors that result in inexact copies. Usually mutations harm the child cells’ ability to survive and reproduce, but every once in a while the mutation is advantageous.

Imagine that you know how to sing “Amazing Grace” and that I want to learn it. Say we can’t read music and don’t have any recordings. You’ll repeat the song to me until I can successfully copy it by imitation. Maybe I won’t quite nail the melody completely, and will remember it with one or two notes changed. This mutation will probably make my version of “Amazing Grace” less compelling and memorable, and other people will be less interested in learning it from me. But maybe I’ll have stumbled on an improvement. My version might even spread and eventually crowd out the original.

Musical imitation doesn’t just have to happen at the scale of entire songs. It can happen at smaller scales, at the level of riffs and chord progressions and rhythmic motifs. This kind of modular recombination is especially common in improvisation-based music. When someone combines so many small pieces of existing tunes into a hybrid that bears little obvious resemblance to any of the source material, we call the process “composing” or “songwriting.” Writing music is closer to hybridizing and selective breeding than creating a new lifeform from scratch.

The evolutionary view of music creation has practical benefits. If you want to arrive at the best new ideas efficiently, the best method is to have a lot of ideas compete for your attention. Most new mutations and hybrids will fail, but if you throw enough combinations of musical DNA together, eventually you’re bound to get lucky with something that survives, thrives and spreads itself. Shorter generation times speed up evolution — the more copying and breeding you do, the more chances there are for fruitful errors.

This is why Michael Jackson recorded hundreds of demo songs for Thriller. He wanted an album where every song was good enough to be a single, and knew that would only be possible if he had many albums’ worth of material to choose from. This is also why Lil Wayne records new material just about seven days a week. On the flip side, I’ve known many lesser musicians who obsessively fiddle and tinker with the same ideas, year after year, missing out on the chance to work through broader sets of possibilities.

My view of the positive value of copying and imitation in music is directly at odds with copyright law. Our legal culture operates from the assumption that copying is evil, a crime in need of punishment. In his infamous ruling in the Biz Markie sampling case, Judge Kevin Duffy began his opinion by quoting the Bible: “Thou shalt not steal.” This culture is the result of judges and legislators not being familiar with how music actually gets made. Legal professionals have a lot of experience writing text, and so it’s not surprising that the laws around plagiarizing writing are much looser. The law grants wide latitude to quote, paraphrase and restate existing ideas in written form. Maybe if more judges were musicians, there would be wider freedom to perform these necessary acts in music as well.

I got some validation for my opinion from Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise Of Copying. True to his message, he’s made the book available for free download in PDF format. Click the image to help yourself.

Boon’s book deals with the grating cognitive dissonance between our society’s outspoken ban on copying and the reality of doing any kind of creative or intellectual work.

[University students] are encouraged to learn through the act of repeating information, quoting, appending citations, in the traditional academic way; but with access to the Internet, to computers that can copy, replicate, and multiply text at extraordinary speed, they are also exhorted not to imitate too much, not to plagiarize, and to always acknowledge sources. They are ordered not to copy—but they are equally aware that they will be punished if they do not imitate the teacher enough!

Can we really identify an area of human activity outside copying which would make it possible for us to choose or decide whether to copy or not? I will argue that there is no such area, that we are always entangled in the dynamics of mimesis, and I write “in praise of copying” as an affirmation of copying rather than as an ethics.

We presuppose originality as the norm, and that copying deviates from that norm. The reality is the opposite — copying is normal, and ideas that are genuinely disconnected from what has come before are radically unusual. Truly novel ideas are easy to produce and are usually worthless. You can effortlessly create novel musical ideas by banging on a piano at random. To sound good, you have to stay close to the cliches.

Some classic songs based on obvious copying

The Beach Boys got the guitar riff in “Surfin’ USA” from Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Chuck Berry got the opening riff of “Johnny B Goode” from “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman” by Louis Jordan. The Beatles admitted to learning the guitar riff in “I Feel Fine” from Bobby Parker’s 1960 song “Watch Your Step.” Led Zeppelin is famous (notorious?) for borrowing very heavily from American blues musicians, lifting riffs and lyrics freely. For instance, they adapted “When The Levee Breaks” by Memphis Minnie for their own song of the same name. Appropriately, the drum intro from Zep’s song has been sampled in uncountable hip-hop, techno and pop songs.

Michael Jackson was a brilliant synthesist of ideas appropriated from the world around him. He mostly drew from James Brown and Motown, but he wasn’t afraid to tie in rock and electronica and Afropop and hip-hop and much else. My favorite song of his, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” gets its climax from a Manu Dibango song. Michael told Darryl Hall during the “We Are The World” session that he had stolen the “Billie Jean” bassline from Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That.”

Darryl Hall isn’t too bitter; he says he stole the bassline too, though he didn’t specify where he got it from. The KLF observe that the Billie Jean riff is a widely used dance music trope, and I believe them, but unfortunately they don’t give specific examples either.

Michael Jackson, who we cited earlier on for not being that adept at coming up with the killer Number One hit choruses, CAN come up with the bass lines. “Billie Jean” was the turning point in Jackson’s career. That song, on his own admission, took him into the mega stratospheres where his myth now reigns. The fact is, “Billie Jean” would be nothing without that lynx-on-the-prowl bass line; but he wasn’t the first to use it. It had been featured in numerous dance tracks by various artists before him. Jackson and Quincy must have been hanging out around the pool table in their air conditioned dimmed light atmosphere, L.A. studio one evening wondering: “What next?” when one of them came up with the idea of using the old lynx- on-the-prowl standby. Without making that decision back in 1981 there would have been no Pepsi Cola sponsored jamboree in 1988.

Does this make the “Billie Jean” bassline less awesome? Or more awesome? I find that its status as a communal property gives it a web of associations that makes it a richer work of art.

Here’s a thorough listing of similar musical borrowings and appropriations (or, if you insist, thefts.)

A tritone is the interval between the notes C and F#. It’s also known as the flat fifth or sharp fourth. It’s two minor thirds, three whole steps, six half steps, or half an octave. On the piano, count six keys up or down. On guitar, count six frets.

The tritone is the heart of the entire western tonal system. The clearest way to define the key center of a piece of music is to look at how tritones create tension and resolve it. Tritones are also central to the sound of the blues, from which most of the music I like flows.

Tritones are irrational

Music is really just a performative version of math, specifically, the math of harmonic oscillators. Pitches are another name for the frequencies of the oscillators, and harmonies are ratios between the frequencies. In the equal temperament system, the ratio of the frequencies in a tritone is one to the square root of two.

The intervals that we in the western world consider to be most pleasing and consonant arise from the lower harmonics of vibrating strings, which are simple ratios of whole numbers. So for instance, the ratio of the pitches making up a perfect fifth is three to two. The ratio of a major third is four to five. The more complex the ratio, the more dissonant the sound is.

In the modern western tuning system, tritones are based on the ratio of one to the square root of two. The square root of two is an irrational number. When you hear a tritone, your ear can tell that something weird is going on. (The pedants out there might well interject that in equal temperament, all of the intervals are irrational. This true, but our ears tend to correct them to the closest ratio of small whole numbers. We can’t do that with the tritone.)

A few fun facts about the square root of two. You can express it as an infinitely nested repeating fraction like so:

You can also express it like so:

Fans of imaginary numbers will be geekily delighted to learn that you can express the square root of two as:

Isn’t math fun?

Tritones define keys

In the western classical tradition and the pop descending from it, the tritone serves a specific purpose: it defines what key you’re in. Every major scale has a tritone between its fourth and seventh notes. In the key of C, the tritone lies between F and B. The dominant chord G7 includes this tritone, giving the chord a feeling of tension and suspense.

You resolve the tension in G7 by changing the notes in the tritone to adjacent scale degrees that feel more settled. Think of the tritone as a question, and the resolved tonic chord as the answer. It’s a relief to feel the F and B in G7 shifting to the E and C in C major.

Tritones don’t have to resolve

Blues, jazz and other African-flavored American music all use chords with tritones in them both as questions and answers. In a blues tune, all the chords might be dominant. A blues tune in C can use C7 as its home base. Plenty of blues and jazz tunes use a single dominant seventh chord as their only chord.

The Mel Bay book Chord And Progressions For Jazz And Popular Guitar gives the hip suggestion of accompanying blues tunes using nothing but tritones. This chart shows the tritones you need to play blues in C.

Blues and jazz commonly use tritones in their melodies too. In addition to the one between the third and seventh of a dominant chord, there’s also the one between the root and flat fifth (a feature of the blues scale), and the one between the flat third and natural sixth.

Sixties jazz gets even more tritone-heavy through use of the melodic minor scale and its modes. These scales get their dark and mysterious vibe from their two tritones. In C melodic minor, the tritones are between C and Eb, and between F and B. Here’s C melodic minor as represented by Auto-tune:

Jazz composers are especially fond of prominently placed tritones. Here are three examples of tunes that begin their melodies with them:

• “Blue 7″ by Sonny Rollins
• “Sid’s Ahead” by Miles Davis
• “Raise Four” by Thelonious Monk

Dominant chords share their third-seventh tritone with the dominant chord whose root is a tritone away. G7 and Db7 both contain B and F. Jazz musicians will freely substitute G7 and Db7 for each other to liven up a pop tune’s chord changes. Instead of playing D-7, G7, C, a jazz guitarist or pianist will frequently play D-7, Db7, C. Then you get that nice chromatic descending bassline. Hip! For even more happening results, try the Ab melodic minor scale over the Db7.

Tritones in pop

Blues and jazz aren’t the cultural force they once were, but the tritone is alive and well in America’s musical culture. Michael Jackson kicks off the vocal melody to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” with the tritone between D# and A.

Used in a bassline, tritone leaps give a feeling of being wrong-footed, like when you stumble on a staircase because you’ve lost track of the number of steps. The chorus of “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder uses a tritone leap in the bass. It’s on the line “You can feel it all over.”

On the word “you” the chord is the tonic, B major. On the word “over,” the chord changes to a very unexpected F minor. Then Stevie moves back into familiar territory with a tamer C# minor to F#7.

“Woo-Hah!!” by Busta Rhymes uses a similar tritone leap in the bass through the entire song. In the looped sample, the bass jumps alarmingly from Db to G, before reassuringly going to Ab and landing back on Db. The song starts a minute in:

Finally, the Simpsons theme song is loaded with tritone action, both in the melody and its accompaniment.

The bassline throughout is root-tritone-root-tritone, a demented twist on the standard marching-band pattern, root-fifth-root-fifth.

Come on music nerds, I know you have more examples. Let’s hear them in the comments.

The rest of the photos in this post were taken by my sister at the party.

The other thing that happened is that I discovered the Michael Jackson a capella archive on Hip Hop Is Read. A capellas are versions of a song with just the vocals isolated (though the MJ ones include some instrumentation too.) Getting access to these things set me off on a furious wave of sampling and remixing. Enjoy the results below.

The a capella for “Jam” has this awesome electronic percussion which sounds great over the breakdown section from “PYT.” So that was a no-brainer.

ABC Jam by ethanhein

“Jam” vs “ABC” vs “PYT” vs “Blame It On The Boogie”

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My friend Julia observed that a lot of the a capellas are for MJ’s relatively lame last few albums. She thought it would be interesting if I showed those songs some tough love, as she put it. It felt like a good challenge. I’m less familiar with that late period stuff, so it was easier to hear the vocals as musical raw material without being hung up on their original context. I think this is by far the best of the three tracks I did, it has the most of myself in it. For percussion, I used drums from “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” along with an atmospheric beat by Aphex Twin and some hand percussion by Glen Velez.

Like A Comet by ethanhein

“Gone Too Soon” vs “Earth Song” vs “HIStory” vs “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” vs “Weathered Stone” vs “Golden Seal”

My fantasy for the future of music is that every song gets released in stem format with all of the tracks separated out and conveniently sliced at all the rhythmic events. At this point I mostly view legal high-quality downloads and compact disks as a way to get access to decent-sounding samples. MP3s get a little crunchy with all the compression and decompression. What do you say, copyright holders? Want to make life easier for me? Or do I need to keep scrounging stuff off the web?

I really feel like recorded music belongs more to the fans than the recording artist. It’s weird and creepy the way music fans want to possess their idols — I’m as guilty of this as anyone. But there’s no harm whatsoever in wanting to possess recordings. The desire to repurpose the ideas that excite you is where all art comes from.

The greatest curse and blessing of Michael Jackson’s life was the insane degree to which he belonged to the fans. He never had a chance of developing a personality independent of his absurd fame. In the aftermath of his death, the saddest thing I heard anyone say on TV was when his friend Gladys Knight observed (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

We did this to him. We made him so famous. We just kept taking little pieces of him. Look what we did.

The only good thing about MJ’s untimely death is now we can focus our desire to own him where it belongs, on his music. Legally, ownership of the songs still belongs to MJ’s estate and creditors, but emotionally, we the fans are in charge of MJ’s legacy. I hope we’ll treat it well.

Nas has a great flow full of powerful imagery, but what truly sets this track apart for me is DJ Premier’s production. It’s a complex web of samples and scratches that tie together so seamlessly as to be much greater than the sum of their parts. A lot of the samples are from other songs by Nas himself. Here’s a diagram of all the samples, click to see it bigger:

Primo tells the story of the track, including the serendipitous discovery of the killer orchestral string sample, in The 14 Deadly Secrets by DJ Premier:

A transcript:

The day I made this record, I was at my house in Long Island, and I found this old record that I was gonna throw away. It was a ten inch record from a Lutheran church, and it was pink with a black fish on it. And I was gonna throw it in the garbage, ‘cuz it didn’t look like it had anything hot on it. But somethin’ told me “before you throw it away, put it on the turntable, see if you can find something on it.

And I found that sample of “Nas Is Like”, and I broke it into 3 parts, scratched it live to the drumbeat that I already had, with the little chirpin’ birds and from there, “Nas Is Like” was born, man…

The birds twittering during the intro beat are from “Why” by Don Robertson. And here’s the Lutheran record Primo’s talking about, “What Child Is This.” Very unlikely hip-hop source material.

Most of the lines in the chorus come from Nas’ breakout hit “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” The “life or death” line is at 0:32, the “Nas is like” that gives the song its title is at 0:44, and the “half man half amazin’” comes in a few seconds later. “My poetry’s deep, I never fell” is at 2:41.

“It Ain’t Hard To Tell” includes some hot samples of its own, including the synth intro from “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson and a saxophone riff from the much-sampled “NT” by Kool & The Gang (listen at 3:12.)

The other source for the “Nas Is Like” chorus is Nas’ “Street Dreams” from 1996. Samples are at 3:16 (“I’m a rebel) and 3:18 (“no doubt.”)

This track is also a composite of different memes – it quotes “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics and samples its beat from “Never Gonna Stop” by Linda Clifford.

Maybe the most inventive sample in “Nas Is Like” is a single syllable from “Nobody Beats the Biz” by Biz Markie. It’s the line “highly recogNIZED as the king of disco-in’” at 2:06. Out of context, “NIZED” sounds like Biz is saying “Nas.” That might be the single most creative sample usage in hip-hop history.

No wonder DJ Premier loves Biz — both like using a lot samples and allusions. Biz’s chorus is a play on a commercial jingle that’ll be familiar to anyone from the NYC region who grew up in the eighties (or has watched Seinfeld.) Biz also samples the drums from by “Hihache” by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band, “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller and, to heighten the self-reference even more, one of his own classic tracks, “The Def Fresh Crew” with Roxanne Shanté.

To add yet another layer of reference, there’s a bit in here where Biz quotes the jingle for Meow Mix! Biz is so much bigger than copyright law.

Nas does a lot of bragging in his rhymes. I learned excessive self-deprecation as a virtue from both my Jewish and middle American Protestant sides, so swagger feels deliciously subversive for me. There’s nothing more balling than sampling yourself in your own songs. Any sample-based song carries a dense web of associations, and I love the complexity that gets introduced when people sample themselves, or when they sample tracks containing samples, or best of all, both. “Nas Is Like” has a complex family tree, a set of allusions to allusions to allusions. This is as it should be. Fundamentally, all music is built of reshuffled bits of other music. Hip-hop makes this fact an explicit part of the music’s message, and that’s the biggest reason why I love it.

Hear a mashup of “Nas Is Like” with “It Ain’t Hard To Tell,” “Human Nature” and “Right Here” by SWV.

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein