And here’s the full song — contains much explicit language.

The hook samples the line “Biggie Smalls is the illest” from “The What” on the same album. It’s twenty-three seconds in.

Sampling is a severely underappreciated songwriting tool. Even if you have moral or legal issues with sampling from others, sampling from yourself is still a good idea. Biggie’s line about himself being the illest is just part of a verse in “The What.” The producer on “Unbelievable,” the great DJ Premier, was smart enough to recognize that Biggie’s line could stand on its own as a hook. DJ Premier also produced “Nas Is Like,” and built its chorus through similar means.

The word “Unbelievable” itself comes from R Kelly, sped up a little and raised in pitch to sound female. Listen at 0:58.

Sampled vocals aside, the chopped-up keyboard part is the most musically sophisticated aspect of the track. Its original source is “Remind Me” by Patrice Rushen — I’m pretty sure it comes from the end of the solo section around 4:10.

Premier chopped up this little keyboard phrase and resequenced it beyond recognition. The result is a hip angularity that a normal keyboard player would probably not have arrived at organically.

The beat in “Unbelievable” is an old standby, “Impeach The President.”

The string ambiance in the background comes from the very odd Quincy Jones song “Kitty With The Bent Frame.” Listen at 1:08.

Quincy’s record is a favorite for hip-hop producers looking for an uneasy mood.

Here’s a diagram showing the sample genealogy of “Unbelievable.”

The meaning of self-sampling

Like I said above, self-sampling is so interesting to me because it’s recursive, self-referential. Most of the music we like is full of self-reference, and generally, the more self-referential it is, the more structured and meaningful it feels. Even simple-seeming nursery rhymes can be recursive and self-similar. Here’s a visualization by Lee Byron showing self-similarity in the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

Self-similarity makes for compelling visual art, too. One reason we find nature attractive is its rich fractal self-similarity. Here’s a leaf I photographed in my neighborhood; notice how the same veiny structure repeats itself at different size scales:

Even very simple recursive mathematical equations can produce stunningly complex, biological-looking forms, like the classic fractal known as the Mandelbrot set.

Recursion isn’t just attractive. It’s fundamental to computer science — self-reference is a key programming technique. Recursion may be essential to the very nature of consciousness itself. Some neuroscientists think that your entire sense of self emerges out of recursive self-referential loops as your brain represents different parts of itself to itself.

No wonder recursive music is so fascinating. Keep on sampling yourselves, musicians; let’s see what other recursive truths we can uncover.

The tune has no chord changes, just a straight-ahead funk groove in B flat. The angular melody is mostly fourths jumping up and down by whole steps or half steps. It’s tough to memorize, but then once you get it down, it can stay stuck in your head for weeks.

As befits such an eccentric yet popular song, Eddie Harris was an eccentric yet popular guy.

Harris had the first gold jazz record, an arrangement of the theme from the movie Exodus. He also had a hit with Swiss Movement, led by Les McCann. Harris invented a variety of odd instruments, and in 1975 he even released a standup comedy album, The Reason Why I’m Talkin’ S**t. He also subconsciously impacted my entire generation by writing a lot of the music on the Cosby Show.

“Freedom Jazz Dance” has been performed and recorded many times, but Miles Davis basically owns the tune after the rendition he did on Miles Smiles.

Here’s a chart of Miles’ solo; click to see it bigger. Check out how much space he leaves between phrases.

Miles’ version has been sampled by a few hip-hop artists. You can hear fragments of the solos throughout “I Thought Ya Knew” by Ed OG and Da Bulldogs.

Miles’ recording was also sampled by Fu-Schnickens in their Bugs-Bunny-referencing track “Creepin’ Up On Ya.”

Miles’ estate has been fumbling with attempts to keep the man relevant. So they released a strange remix EP that includes a frenetic couple of minutes of snippets of “Freedom Jazz Dance” along with Miles’ verbal instructions to the band from the studio outtakes, and then a quick, slightly awkward rap by Nas. It’s not a totally successful experiment, but it’s pointed in the right direction. It’s especially amazing to hear Miles sing parts of the melody.

Here’s a mashup of all the tracks mentioned above.

Freedom Jazz Dance megamix by ethanhein

Any recommendations for more recordings, samples or references to “Freedom Jazz Dance” that I should know about? Hit me in the comments.

Now that mashups are so common, this track doesn’t sound particularly remarkable. But in seventh grade it was startling to hear a house music track full of random samples. “Pump Up The Volume” was part of the same UK dance music movement that spawned the KLF’s “Doctorin’ The Tardis” and “Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite. I wasn’t enough of a hip-hop head in 1987 to recognize where the phrase in the title comes from, but now I do, it’s from “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B and Rakim. Listen at 0:43:

It makes sense that I first encountered Rakim Allah in the context of a sample, because he and Eric B pretty much wrote the book on sample-based music. “I Know You Got Soul” is named for the Bobby Byrd song, written and produced by James Brown, that you hear looped throughout the track. Sampling James Brown has become a basic part of the musical toolkit, but it wasn’t such an obvious choice back in 1987. Stetsasonic said it best in their song “Talkin’ All That Jazz:”

Tell the truth, James Brown was old
’til Eric and Ra came out with “I Got Soul.”

Now, thanks to eighties hip-hop, James Brown will be cool forever. Sample-based music is supposed to be “fake,” but paradoxically, sampling made funk authentic again after disco had turned it corny. Michael Krimper observes in his blog post Future Funk: Searching For The Lost Groove that by removing music from its original social context, sampling frees it to be heard and experienced in new and unexpected ways.

The aesthetics of the hip-hop beat — one of recycled recorded sounds and reinvented roles for samples clips repeated on loop — spawned a whole new social practice of archiving. A new culture of crate diggers, both collectors and enthusiasts, grew obsessed with finding and archiving dusty, lost vinyl from a previous generation… It’s almost as if these producers began, nearly 20 years later, where the previous musicians had left off. Those funk sounds, once dulled down by over-saturated commercial mediation, became fresh again and pregnant with a wave of creative potential. The early hip-hop generation didn’t grow up during the golden age of the funk era, but they listened and absorbed at home as children. They grew familiar with the sounds without enduring the same forces of marketing as their parents. Maybe that opened up enough free space for them to imagine the music differently.

Eric and Ra have a futuristic electronic sound based almost entirely on samples and turntable scratching, but its futurism is balanced by the rich network of associations they build in with their choice of sampled records. Here’s a map of all the samples on the album Paid In Full – click to see it bigger:

Fittingly, Eric B and Rakim have themselves been a rich source of samples for other artists, starting with Coldcut’s epic remix of “Paid In Full.” Eric and Ra themselves have sampled the songs on Paid In Full many times as well. The phrase “follow the leader” at 1:03 in “I Know You Got Soul” is the basis for, you guessed it, “Follow The Leader.”

Eric and Ra sample “Eric B Is President” in both “Eric B Never Scared” and “Move The Crowd.” This kind of extreme self-reference has been an inspiration for subsequent self-samplers, like Nas on “Nas Is Like” and Fugees on “The Score.” And by the way, “The Score” includes a sample of Eric and Ra’s “My Melody,” which heavily features a sample of itself. How’s that for recursion?

Eric and Ra also inspired the recording of mine that I’m most proud of. “Eric B Never Scared” samples “Those Shoes” by the Eagles. When it came time for my band Revival Revival to work up our arrangement of “Those Shoes” it seemed logical to work in a sample of “Eric B Never Scared.” This is easily the nastiest groove I’ve ever put together.

Revival Revival – Those Shoes Never Scared by ethanhein
I had a teenage guitar student who loves hip-hop, and he asked me for some recommendations. He was underwhelmed when I played him “Follow The Leader” — he thought it sounded old-fashioned and unsophisticated. I was shocked; what could be fresher than Eric B and Rakim? But I’m from a different generation. High school kids now were born into a world where hip-hop is a given. They take it for granted that artists like OutKast and Common and Lauryn Hill will pack their flows with dense internal rhymes and tumbling streams of imagery. Rakim doesn’t sound so groundbreaking now that every halfway decent emcee has absorbed his techniques. It’s like the way the radical innovations of Jimi Hendrix have been turned into standard rock cliches. It takes some historical context to imagine how stunning he must have been back in the sixties.

Rakim came by his connection to the musical past more personally than most, since he’s the nephew of the great R&B singer Ruth Brown. In an interview with Planet Ill, he talks about how his musical upbringing impacted his flow:

I think playing in the bands and learning how to read music; learning the theory of music breaks it down a little more and you get to understand it better. It helped me a lot with my rhythms and my syncopations… I played the sax in school. I play alto all the way up to baritone sax. Coming up in the house my older brother played piano, my middle brother older than me played saxophone, the drums.  I tried to get my hands on whatever I could.

You can clearly hear the bebop in Rakim’s deadpan delivery and his long chains of eighth notes, starting and ending on unexpected beats. His flat affect holds a lot more swagger than if he was yelling and screaming. It lets you focus on the complex musicality of the words. For the first couple of albums, he uses every single song to rap about how awesome he is at rapping, which he proves by being awesome at rapping, even when he’s just rapping about how awesome he is at rapping.

I’m a member of the first hip-hop-listening generation and I still hear Eric and Ra as hot. All that minimalism and repetition and empty space — I know plenty of musicians who are still catching up with it. The eighties hip-hop sound feels urgent to me, it’s so confident in itself. It becomes timeless by being so unapologetically of its time.

Some of the musicians I work with are very anxious about not being too fresh. There’s this need to imitate the masters of the past, to not stray too far from the territory marked out by the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or John Coltrane or whoever their idols may be. This results in weak music. How can you tell the truth about yourself when you’re too timid to belong to your own time and place? I want to grab any musician now who’s obsessed with sounding like Zeppelin, and ask: would you care about them if they were anxiously imitating the music of thirty or forty years before them? There were plenty of bands in 1975 who only played big band jazz, does anyone care about them now? Led Zeppelin took big risks in 1975. Now that their sound has become acceptable, there’s no risk in sounding like them, and no reward either. It’s 2010, better to play and write and produce like it’s 2010.

That doesn’t mean you have to forget or ignore the past. Far from it. Best to follow Eric and Ra’s example and study the past, incorporate it and transform it. The Biz Markie sampling lawsuit may have thrown a wet blanket onto sample-dense music as a commercial enterprise, but the artistic genie is out of the bottle. I, for one, plan to keep doing as much sampling as I can get away with.

Meanwhile, Eric and Ra continue to make their presence felt. The list of hip-hop and techno artists who sample or quote them is too long to go into, and it runs right up to the present. They’ve even crossed over into video game territory — DJ Hero lets you mash them up with MIA, Tears For Fears and David Axelrod.

Hear my mashup of “I Know You Got Soul” with “Pump Up The Volume” and “Follow The Leader.”

I Know You Got Soul Megamix by ethanhein

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

David Shields says that about one in five hip-hop songs samples “Impeach The President.” That doesn’t sound to me like it’s true, but the break certainly has been sampled enough times to place it alongside the Funky Drummer and Apache breaks as a cornerstone of hip-hop. Here are lists of tracks that sample “Impeach The President” from the Rap Sample FAQ and Whosampled.com. Some standouts:

Audio Two – “Top Billin’”

Cleverly flips the break, reordering its component drum hits into a totally different beat. Audio Two’s beat, in turn, was sampled for “Real Love” by Mary J Blige.

Big Daddy Kane – “Smooth Operator”

Includes a bunch of other samples: “All Night Long” by Mary Jane Girls, “If it Don’t Turn You on (You Outta Leave it Alone)” by BT Express, “Do Your Thing” by Isaac Hayes, “Risin’ to the Top” by Keni Burke, “The Champ” by the Mohawks, and “Put Your Hands Together” by Eric B. & Rakim.

Biz Markie – “Alone Again (Naturally)”

The subject of the infamous lawsuit that ended the golden age of sample-based commercial hip-hop. The song uses two samples, one from Gilbert O’Sullivan, the other from the Honey Drippers. Gilbert O’Sullivan is the one who sued; the Honey Drippers didn’t. To my knowledge, they’ve never received a nickel in royalties from anyone who’s used the sample.

De la Soul – “Ring Ring Ring (Hey Hey Hey)”

The chorus uses lyrics and melody from the Curiosity Killed the Cat song “Name and Number.”

Digable Planets – “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”

The horn lick comes from “Stretching” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

Eric B and Rakim – “Move the Crowd”

There are a ton of other samples in this track, you can read all about it on Wikipedia if you want.

Mick Jagger – “Sweet Thing”

From his nineties solo album. Sounds like there’s a sample of “Apache” in there too.

Nas – “I Can”

The lyrics are on the corny side, but it’s cool that it quotes “Für Elise” and it’s a nice message.

Nice & Smooth – “Funky for You”

Uses a great sample of “Do That Stuff” by Parliament. Dizzy Gillespie did not, in fact, play the sax.

Notorious B.I.G. – “Ready to Die” and “Unbelievable”

Biggie Biggie Biggie Smalls is the illest.

Slick Rick – “It’s a Boy”

Also includes sax from Tom Scott’s version of Jefferson Airplane’s “Today” and vibes from Cal Tjader’s version of the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna.” (The Tom Scott sample is also the hook in “They Reminisce Over You” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth.)

Tekken 3 – “End Theme”

Really.

Wu-Tang Clan – “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nothin’ to F**k Wit’”

Also samples “Hihache” by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band, “Papa Was Too” by Joe Tex and the theme from Underdog.

Here’s a hot mix tape of many tracks sampling “Impeach The President,” along with the original.

The Honey Drippers may be everywhere in music, but they’re not well documented. The internet has very little to say about their members, history or anything else beyond their name. “Impeach The President” isn’t available on iTunes or Amazon, though it’s easy to find mp3s on the web. The imbalance between the Honey Drippers’ anonymity and the omnipresence of their sample is amazing to me. The beat fits under songs about despair and uplift, mindless partying and sober social commentary, bragging and self-loathing. Sample culture is crazy sometimes.

Update: see a blog post on how to program this break on a drum machine.

The Apache break is an especially interesting sample, because there’s a yawning gap between its lame original context and the diversity of uses that musicians have since put it to. More than most samples, the Apache break has enormously transcended and eclipsed its original context. “Apache” was first written as fake Native American music by Jerry Lordan in the late fifties, inspired by a cowboys-and-Indians movie. How such a lame song became a cornerstone of electronic music is a long and convoluted story. Here are two good tellings: an essay called All Roads Lead To Apache, and a followup New York Times article.

Here’s the story of “Apache” in network diagram form:

“Apache” has been sampled uncountably many times. The first noteworthy example is “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”

In a similar vein, check out Double Dee & Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. They’re must-hears if you care about the art of the mashup.

In keeping with the old-skool flavor, here’s West Street Mob’s “Break Dance Electric Boogie,” which uses some of the horn parts from the Incredible Bongo Band recording in addition to the percussion break. Got to love those vocoded robo-vocals.

The first song to sample Apache that landed on my consciousness was probably “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” by C+C Music Factory:

Drum n bass producers love the Apache break. Instead of just looping the sample, they like to slice and dice it into new, more complex beats. Goldie’s “Inner City Life” is a high-profile example. I admire the drum n bass guys conceptually, but when it comes to day-to-day listening I’ll take hip-hop every time. Nas uses the Apache break on “Made You Look” — I think he even paid for it.

I have some friends who like hip-hop as music but are uncomfortable with the practice of sampling. They have this idea that sampling is a form of stealing. These friends tend to rally around the Roots, who play hip-hop on live instruments. The thing is, even though the Roots’ Questlove is one of the best drummers in the world, he also programs and uses samples in his production work. Hear Roots MC Black Thought do one of his hottest rhymes over Apache on “Thought@Work”:

When the Roots play this live, Quest and the percussionist re-create the break in the manner of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache Rap.” Missy Elliot sampled the Sugarhill Gang remake in “We Run This.”

Electronic music undermines the western concept of the composer. For any track based on the Apache break, who composed it? Jerry Lordan wrote the song but you’d never guess a connection between his original recording and anything that samples the Incredible Bongo Band. Should the composer credit go to the Incredible Bongo Band? Or just their rhythm section? Should it go to Kool Herc or whichever DJ first had the idea to loop the break by itself, or the producer who did the sampling? What’s the connection between Jerry Lordan’s song, the Bongo Band version, the Sugarhill Gang’s recreation of it and Missy Elliot’s song sampling the Sugarhill Gang? To me, the question becomes meaningless. Music emerges out of collective cultural practice more than any single person’s mind.

Asking what the origin is of a given piece of music is like asking what the origin is of my blue eyes. The gene/musical meme analogy is a useful one. James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” has dominant hip-hop genes. The roots of hip-hop are obvious in this song, since JB is literally rapping over a funk beat. It’s like the way my mom has blue eyes — there’s no big mystery where that gene came from in me. My dad had brown eyes, though; the blue-eyed gene was recessive in him. The hip-hop gene is recessive in the Bongo Band’s “Apache”, and more recessive still in Jerry Lordan’s original.

Hit me in the comments for noteworthy Apache mixes. I’m working on a mix of my own, I’ll post it when it’s done.

There’s a cool scene in the TV Movie “The Jacksons – An American Dream” showing Michael in the studio recording “Human Nature.” It’s at around 6:58 and unfortunately the sound isn’t lined up too closely.

Here’s a cool fan video:

SWV samples “Human Nature” for their song “Right Here (Human Nature Mix.)

“Human Nature” is extensively quoted, if not actually sampled, in Tupac’s “Thug Nature.”

Miles Davis played it a lot his last few years, unfortunately not while he was at the peak of his game. Still, it’s intriguing to hear his interpretation.

A sample of “Human Nature” runs under the verses in Nas’ song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.”

The track was produced by Large Professor. It also includes samples of “NT” by Kool and the Gang, “Why Can’t People Be Colors Too?” by the Whatnauts, “Slow Dance” by Stanley Clarke, “What Do You Want From Me Woman” by The Blue Jays, “Long Red” by Mountain and “Sorcerer Of Isis” by Power Of Zeus. Nas himself sampled “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” in his later song “Nas Is Like”. He isn’t the only one. “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” has been sampled in “Killing Fieldz” by Gravediggaz, “Invasion” by Jeru the Damaja, “Survival Of The Fittest” by Mobb Deep, “Half Man Half Amazin” by Pete Rock and others. Here’s a diagram of all the samples Nas used on Illmatic:

Where else is “Human Nature” out there in pop culture? Any other samples or covers I should be aware of? Hit me in the comments.

Here’s a mashup including many of the tracks mentioned in this post:

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

And here’s a mashup with Björk’s “Human Behaviour.”

Human Nature And Behaviour by ethanhein

Glenn Gould wasn’t necessarily being prophetic. He was just paying attention to the long history of music before the relative eyeblink of the twentieth century. The always perspicacious Wayne Marshall says:

Only in the relatively recent past — within the last century — have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice — that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people — demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.

I’m a child of the cassette era. I loved making mix tapes in high school, for myself and whoever among my friends would listen. It was a pain, but still worth it. I still remember burning my first CD, sequencing the tracks with Toast before the half-hour long burn session during which the computer couldn’t do anything else. I’ve said farewell to albums with little sadness. It’s nice to listen to Graceland or Abbey Road in their original sequence, but for the most part, I do a better job of sequencing tracks for my own needs than anyone else can.

What’s true at the multiple-song level is even more true within a single song. Writing a song is really sequencing together a “mixtape” of licks, scale fragments, chord progressions and beats. When I learned how to play the guitar, I became free to string together whatever song fragments I could get under my fingers. It was fun being able to freely collage songs together, constructing segues and suites. All “new” compositions are really mashups you make in your head. Any creative undertaking is less like conjuring out of thin air and more like making a salad. As a sampler and remixer, my freedom of musical choice is total. Making mashups is a delightful blend of writing songs and putting together mixtapes, except that the pieces of music are shorter and layered simultaneously.

Mashup and remix culture isn’t new. Club DJs have been mashing up songs on the fly for decades, intermixing hot dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other well-known dance tracks. Girl Talk has nothing on “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” or Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. Creating popular music is a ruthless evolutionary process. You sort through idea after idea, looking for the hooks. The best mashups take the Darwinian process to the next level, mating the hooks together into ultrahooks. My favorite mashups of the moment are the United State Of Pop mixes by DJ Earworm. He takes the top twenty-five singles from a given year and boils them down into single, devastating tracks.

United State Of Pop 2007

United State Of Pop 2008

There are plenty of other high-concept mashups like these, and some of them work as music, but a lot of them are gimmicky and annoying. In order to work, there has to be some musical resonance between the source tracks. The more unexpected the affinity, the better. My favorite Earworm mashup combines Django Reinhardt’s performance of “Brazil” with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.”

Brazilian Diamonds

Who would have guessed that the bouncy rhythms of South African pop as filtered through the mind of a Jewish folksinger from Queens would mesh so well with the bouncy rhythms of samba as filtered through the mind of a Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist? This kind of discovery is only possible via a lot of trial and error. The growing ease and plummeting price of audio editing makes trial and error a lot less onerous than it used to be.

One of the great pleasures of sample-based music is encountering something familiar in a strange context. Sometimes the recontextualization can be jokey, like Ludacris’ ironically grandiose “Coming 2 America” which combines quotes from the Eddie Murphy movie with themes from both Mozartâ’s Requiem and the last movement of Dvorak’s New World symphony. Sometimes it’s playful without being jokey. Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from his opera The Magic Flute shows up in “Like You” by Kelis, and it makes me wonder why every R&B song doesn’t include coloratura soprano.

The mixtape-mashup analogy isn’t perfect. Mixtapes are linear, with each song usually appearing once. If you make a mashup in this linear way, with each sample appearing only once, it will probably be annoying. Within the parameters of a song, repetition is crucial to enjoyment. This is why Girl Talk gets on my nerves. He runs a sample four or eight times and then forgets about it. His tracks are too much like watching someone else flip channels on TV for my tastes.

I’m especially interested in musicians who use samples of themselves as the basis of new works. The first Nas song I heard was his biggest hit, “Nas Is Like.” The chorus is based on samples of his earlier song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.” When I heard the original, it sounded like it’s full of samples of “Nas Is Like.” This confusion of time sequence is one of the central pleasures of sample-based music for me. The meta-recursive hip-hop prize probably belongs to the Fugees, whose song “The Score” includes samples of every other song on the album of the same name.

The mashup doesn’t belong exclusively to music. The video mashup is coming excitingly into its own. I would have expected that combining two songs in 5/4 time might be too clever, but in this case it works:

The video mashup’s answer to DJ Earworm is Kutiman, who stitches together multiple Youtube videos. Check out “The Mother Of All Funk Chords”:

Jonathan Lethem’s essay on literary mashup culture, “The Ecstasy Of Influence,” is itself an amazing literary mashup. There are visual mashups too, I have a collection of them on Flickr. An intriguing random visual mashup maker is the Ad Generator. Its makers explain: “Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.” It works uncannily well.

The fan-made advertising mashup shows the potential to become an entire new artistic style unto itself. Dig this trailer for an as-yet nonexistent Green Lantern movie made entirely out of pieces of other movie trailers:

Sasha Frere-Jones says in his essay 1 + 1 + 1 = 1:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.

This very blog post is a mashup of Glenn Gould and Wayne Marshall and DJ Earworm and Grandmaster Flash and Kutiman and uncountable others. I know there are plenty of copyright holders out there that regard any kind of derivative work as stealing. I think it’s a misplaced form of anxiety. I think mashups are natural, healthy, and the best vector to get your ideas circulating through the memepool long after you’re gone. As I was writing this post, I discovered someone did a version of my Michael Jackson sample map with Michael Jackson on it, and I couldn’t be more flattered.

Long live DJ culture, across whatever media!