You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person

Each new song is built using the same modular components as the other songs of its time and place, the way that all humans share the same genetic toolkit. My sister and I are like two different songs from the same album by the same band. My cousins are like songs on different albums by bands with overlapping members. Here’s a diagram of my entire extended family – parent/child relationships are green and spouse/partner relationships are red.

The ancestry of music is more complicated than the ancestry of humans. A better model for music is the evolution of microbes, with a lot of horizontal gene transfer happening. Biologists use the term “gene cassettes” to describe the semi-self-contained hunks of DNA that bacteria swap back and forth. The analogy to music fans spreading memes by passing tapes around couldn’t be any more perfect.

Some musical relationships do conveniently lend themselves to family tree-like representation. The practice of sampling and quoting existing songs creates a particularly clear and unambiguous set of relationships well-suited to network diagramming. The internet has several handy sample databases, including the Rap Sample FAQ, Whosampled.com and Wikipedia. I’ve been hard at work the past year or so making sample maps visualizing the more interesting chunks of data.

See all of my sample maps here.

Sampling is the easiest set of relationships to diagram, but I could draw similar charts for use of particular scales, chords, rhythmic figures, melodic motifs, rhyme schemes, combinations of instrument sounds, and all the other memetic nuts and bolts of music.

A few really successful memes make up most of the music we hear

Some musical memes are better at getting themselves copied than others, the way genes for color vision or opposable thumbs are good at getting themselves copied. Here in America, the most successful memes include the backbeat, the one-four-five chord progression and the blues scale.

To illustrate just how widespread a musical meme can get, here’s a video called “Four Chords, Thirty-Six Songs.” In the key of C, the four chords are C, G7, Am, F. (Some coarse language towards the end.)

The video barely scratches the surface of all the songs, famous and not, that have used those four chords. So why is this chord progression such a big hit? For one thing, it’s easy to play on piano or guitar or whatever. For another, the four chords sound good in any sequence or combination, spaced out on any harmonic rhythm. They have a wistful yet still uplifting mood that suits a variety of musical statements in a variety of styles.

Computers make recombining and resequencing the memes effortless

Pre-computer, composing and recording a song was a slow and effortful process. You wrote the song out or memorized it. Then you got a band together and they read the song, or you repeated it to them until they memorized it. Then you rehearsed it a bunch, and then recorded it from beginning to end. Sometimes you had to record many takes to get a good one. To get a polished, professional-sounding result generally required expensive gear operated by highly specialized engineers.

You can still operate that way if you want, but computers offer some faster and easier alternatives. I prefer to write by improvising into the sequencer or digital audio editor, picking the best patterns and editing them into shape. The computer gratifyingly collapses improvising, composing and recording into a single act. Making music electronically is like being able to type out any DNA sequence you want and immediately seeing how it will look as an organism. You can skip the tedious embryonic development of notating, rehearsing and memorizing. Technologies like MIDI, sampling and pitch-detection software let you read any existing musical genome and resequence it to your heart’s content.

All this freedom is positively alarming to some of the musicians I know, who view it as evil or immoral in some way. I find that the computer eliminates some of the labor, but doesn’t do the imaginative work for you. The computer makes it effortless to spin out ideas, but you still need to select among them and decide which are the good ones. The creative act itself stays the same as it always has been; there’s just less friction.

Towards a unified theory of musical evolution

A genome is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating the proteins and other structures making up an organism. A group of memes (a memeplex, as Susan Blackmore puts it) is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating performances and recordings. What makes a song likelier to get itself heard, and eventually copied or adapted? Exact copying of previous generations of songs is a bad long-term strategy. Tastes change, like the way the environment changes for organisms. A meme that was successful yesterday may not be successful tomorrow.

Total originality is a bad strategy too. It’s easy to be original, to create a piece of music with no precedent or borrowing from anything existing. Bang randomly on a piano and you’re probably going to play something that’s never been played before. It’s likely that your random banging will mostly be annoying. Chances are, a random DNA sequence won’t make for much of an organism either.

To be liked enough to be copied and imitated, your song will need to be substantially familiar. Forming an emotional connection with the listener requires a lot of shared vocabulary and associations. What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator. Most mutations will make it harder to get copied, but a lucky few improve your chances dramatically.

See a version of this post on Quora.

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.)

Dances With Wolves

The plots are extremely similar. Both are racially problematic, as thoughtfully outlined by io9.

Pocahantas

Not the historical Pocahantas, the Disney version. From Ponyponyshow’s Tumblr, click for full-sized.

Both Dances With Wolves and Avatar descend from the Pocahantas myth. I haven’t seen the Disney version, but Terrence Malick did a lovely job of it in The New World. That movie, Dances With Wolves and Avatar all share a cast member, Wes Studi.

Roger Dean’s paintings

Like the album covers he did for Yes.

Avatar is especially influenced by Roger Dean’s thing for floating islands.

The ever-helpful io9 has many more examples.

The Matrix

The whole virtual body thing naturally didn’t start with the Matrix, but that’s what I kept thinking of. The “avatar” disambiguation page on wikipedia lists a zillion things with that name, the two most culturally significant being the original word from Hinduism and the ubiquitous computing concept. Unlike in the Matrix, in Avatar, the virtual bodies are real. Except that they really aren’t, they only exist as ones and zeros. Layers within layers! Who says Hollywood action movies are dumb?

The Abyss

James Cameron has a fetishistic thing with asphyxiation, relating to his love of near-death diving experiences – see the New Yorker profile for some gruesome details.

Aliens

Sigourney Weaver! Robotic exoskeletons!

Sexy blue women

See this article on io9 about the phenomenon.

Unobtainium

Praise be to wikipedia. How else would I know that “unobtainium” is a fifty-year-old word?

Every Vietnam movie

All that helicopter-based combat in a jungle setting. A rich high-tech civilization being defeated by a less rich, lower-tech one with home field advantage.

Entire planet as organism

Pandora’s planetwide nervous system descends from the Gaia hypothesis. There’s an Asimov novel called Nemesis where a planet’s bacterial life all turn out to be a single networked superorganism that communicates telepathically with human visitors. The best “planet as organism” is the South Park episode “Lice Capades” where the sentient world is Clyde’s scalp.

The Dragonriders of Pern

Outing myself as a real dork here, but so Anne McCaffrey wrote a whole series of books about riding giant flying reptiles. As I recall, the riders communicated telepathically with them.

Fern Gully

Haven’t seen it myself, but one of my Twitter buddies pointed it out. Tone Loc is in it!

My point here is not that James Cameron is a bad artist for being so derivative. His work has its problems, what with the racial stereotyping and clunky dialog and broadness of stroke. But he’s still a good artist. His referencing, borrowing and outright quotation makes his work stronger. Any quotes or sources I missed? As usual, kindly hit the comments.

Before the mid-sixties, it was a different story. Pop and jazz artists were mostly interpreting existing, familiar material, and only rarely writing new stuff. Even the most prolific and brilliant jazz composers like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk devoted album after album to arrangements of standards. Nobody arranged standards more radically and personally than John Coltrane.

My Favorite Things

The emblematic Coltrane remake is “My Favorite Things” from his classic album by the same name. Here’s a live rendition:

Coltrane’s arrangement of this tune bears the same relationship to the one in The Sound Of Music as “Hard Knock Life” by Jay-Z bears to Annie. Jazz arranging uses different technology than sampling and remixing, but it makes the same musical statement. It’s a stamp of personal ownership on a familiar piece of public musical property.

I bought Coltrane’s album when I was eighteen or nineteen after hearing Jerry Garcia and many other musicians rave about it. On the first pass, I wasn’t impressed. A corny showtune played on soprano sax, whee! Now I experience Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” as the mind-expanding flight of imagination I was promised, but I had to grow up a little to appreciate it. I eventually developed such an obsession with it that when I had a jazz band, I insisted that we perform it regularly, and that we include it on our one CD.

Coltrane and looping

Coltrane had a way of anticipating what music would sound like in the future. He was particularly prescient about the importance of looped basslines. Jazz bass is usually a complex semi-improvised stream of quarter notes. But Coltrane liked to have his bassists play strictly structured two-bar loops. On “My Favorite Things,” Jimmy Garrison plays a a simple pattern on the note E identically for almost the entire duration of the song. This kind of bassline anticipates the looped, sequenced and sampled bass parts in hip-hop and other electronic music. The idea was probably inspired in part by the Ravi Shankar albums Coltrane was listening to at the time.

Coltrane was also prescient in his liking for open-ended loops on a single chord, or a few repeating chords from a single scale. This is the basic structure of nearly all forms of electronic music. Like James Brown and the hip-hop artists he inspired, Coltrane relied a lot on the “repeat until cue” instruction. The E major and E minor parts in “My Favorite Things” are open-ended loops. You play each one as long as you feel like playing it, and then signal the band that it’s time to continue to the next section by playing the “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” melody.

But Not For Me

The album My Favorite Things is most famous for its title track, but it also includes three other startling reinterpretations of standards. “Every Time We Say Goodbye” implies a doubletime feel in places and stretches the melody like silly putty. “Summertime” is played fast, with an aggressive feel and crunchy, dissonant chord voicings. Finally, “But Not For Me” gets transformed almost as radically as the title track. Here’s a conventional version by Chet Baker:

And here’s Coltrane’s arrangement.

Should we consider Coltrane’s arrangement to be the same piece of music as the Gershwin original? The most obvious change is the first four bars. In the Gershwin tune, the line “They’re writing songs of love but not for me” runs over a simple ii-V-I progression in E flat. Coltrane’s first four bars are a sprint through the keys of E flat, B and G via those keys’ respective dominant chords. The bassline spells out the descending E flat whole tone scale: Eb, F#7/C#, B, D7/A, G, Bb7/F, Eb. Coltrane rewrites the melody completely to fit this new chord progression.

Coltrane inserts some other new structural elements into “But Not For Me.” He adds a long tag section where he lifts unexpectedly up to a few distant minor keys for eight bars each. There’s also the extremely extended open-ended tag on the ii-V-iii-VI turnaround. If you call this tune on the bandstand and you expect the Coltrane arrangement, you’d better come prepared with charts and a lot of explanation.

Jazz and modularity

Every jazz arrangement of a standard is an analog remix. Where do you draw the line between an arrangement, a new melody written to existing chord changes and an improvised solo? The line is blurry at best. Should we consider “Whispering” and “Groovin’ High” to be the same song? How about “I’m In The Mood For Love” and “Moody’s Mood For Love?” Or “I Got Rhythm” and the zillion bebop heads it inspired?

Jazz was largely built on a scaffolding of showtunes and other pop songs. The crucial ones known as standards have certain musical characteristics that make them more amenable to jazz adaptation: a modular structure amenable to being dissassembled and reassembled, like a good Lego kit. Jazz compositions and improvisation look to me like different combinations from a giant box of musical legos, rearrangeable at will on paper or on the bandstand.

The most jazz-friendly standards have singable melodies with rhyming lyrics accompanied by a simple chord progression (or sometimes not so simple, but always intelligible to the ordinary person’s ear.) They’re repetitive and predictable. They follow a small set of conventions in their structure: four, eight and sixteen-bar phrases, repeated two or three or four times, with the larger grouping of phrases repeating more or less intact for the entire duration of the tune. There are a lot of interchangeable modular forms: the cadence, the turnaround, the counter-clockwise trips around the circle of fifths.

As with harmony, there’s a finite toolbox of riffs, patterns and scale runs you can use to build your jazz melodies and solos. Blues is particularly heavily based on Lego-like modular riffs. Intros and endings are few, highly standardized and interchangeable. One much-recycled ending is the one Count Basie uses in his performance of “Fly Me To The Moon” with Frank Sinatra:

Another basic Lego is the Duke Ellington ending, as in “Take The A Train.”

Modules and samples

I think that the distance between a jazz module like the Duke Ellington ending and a sample like the Funky Drummer break is short. The technology changes but the underlying musical statement is the same. Writing a jazz tune based on licks and progressions from existing songs feels very much the same to me as producing a track based on samples and loops. I doubt there’s ever been much originality in the most creative music, and I see a smooth continuity from the practices of my musical forebears to the ones used by me and my contemporaries.

Even Coltrane’s “original” music draws heavily on other sources. His classic tune “Impressions” is a mashup of “So What” by Miles Davis and “Pavane” by Morton Gould. If the most creative artist in the history of jazz is sampling, I think everyone should feel emboldened to do the same.

Here’s my remix of Coltrane’s “Venus” — enjoy.

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Doesn’t sound much like the Verve, does it? Here’s the Andrew Oldham Orchestra‘s version, the sample will jump right out at you twenty-five seconds in.

Although “Bitter Sweet Melody” was written by Verve frontman Richard Ashcroft, its publishing rights are held by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. This bit of legal absurdity is due to the Rolling Stones’ manager Allen Klein, who also holds many of the band’s earlier copyrights. Klein successfully sued The Verve for plagiarizing “Bitter Sweet Symphony” from “The Last Time.”

The Verve had legally licensed the Andrew Oldham Orchestra sample, but once their song became a hit, Klein challenged the terms of the license in court. His legal argument was that the Verve had used too much of the sample to be able to claim any authorship over “Bitter Sweet Symphony” at all. The Verve didn’t think they’d win the case and didn’t have the resources to pursue it. They agreed to a court settlement that gave the song’s publishing rights to Allen Klein’s company and songwriting credits to Jagger and Richards.

This case was tried in the UK, not America. Still, if the Biz Markie lawsuit and others like it are any indication, our courts would have probably produced a similar outcome. This is lame. The US Constitution says that the point of copyright is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” If you think, like I do, that sample-based music is a useful Art, then copyright law as it’s presently interpreted is not doing its job. Allen Klein didn’t contribute creatively to the Stones’ original song, the orchestral arrangement or the Verve song. He has nevertheless managed to collect a lot of the money all three recordings have made over the years. The Stones and The Verve get performance royalties for their songs, respectively, but when their songs get used in movies or video games or commercials, they get bupkes.

US copyright law says that works based or derived from another copyrighted work is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work. The problem with this statement is that all new works are derivative. All creative thinking consists of adapting existing ideas, especially in music. Nevertheless, the law says that if you write or record a song based on an existing copyrighted song, you need the copyright owner’s permission. Same if you write a story or shoot a movie using settings or characters from an existing copyrighted story or movie. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said in Feist Publications Inc v Rural Telephone Service Company that “copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work… It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.” O’Connor thinks that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality”, but as Wikipedia observes, the standard for creativity is not completely based on a work’s novelty. A work needs only a “spark” or “minimal degree” of originality. I’d say that The Verve’s song has more than enough of that spark to meet the standard of an original work.

The fragment of orchestral melody the Verve used for their song is totally unrecognizable as having any connection to the Rolling Stones, unless you know its history. There is a connection, a family lineage, but the Verve can’t reasonably be accused of having stolen anything. The sample is from a melody written by Andrew Oldham that sets up the Rolling Stones’ melody, but is distinct from it. If the Verve had had the foresight to hire a bunch of violinists and percussionists to play an identical snatch of music, the Stones would have no claim whatsoever.

Another irony is that the “original” Stones song is hardly original. Keith Richards freely admits that he borrowed the idea for “The Last Time” from a 1955 Staple Singers record.

This is nothing against the Stones. The Staple Singers were adapting a traditional song that has been widely replicated throughout the gospel world. Plenty of other musicians have derived new original works from the Last Time meme, the idea of a vocalist running out of patience for someone over a rhythm and blues setting. For example, James Brown recorded a song in 1964 called “Maybe The Last Time.”

To compound the ironies, Klein’s claim of 100% of the publishing of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” crowds other would-be stakeholders. The beat sampled in the song comes from “Doggone By Love” by George Suranovich, but he has no share in the song; he clearly doesn’t have the same legal acumen that Klein does.

The Verve’s song is arguably a lot more original than the Stones’, but because of the peculiarities of modern copyright, they’ve been screwed out of a lot of the money. Richard Ashcroft’s lyrics take on a dark irony given how the life of his song played out: “You’re a slave to money, then you die.” Klein licensed “Bitter Sweet Symphony” to Nike, Opel and Vauxhall for TV commercials against The Verve’s wishes, and Richard Ashcroft didn’t get a dime. Same thing when the song is used in video games, movies and TV shows.

Musicians mostly continue to disregard the law when it impedes their creativity. “Bitter Sweet Melody” has been covered, sampled and repurposed endlessly. Michael Jackson fans make tribute videos set to it. Kanye West and Wale rap over it, and it’s been sampled and interpolated for tons of techno and dance tracks, for example this one by David May.

Hear a mashup of most of the tracks referenced above.

Bittersweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Update: this post was used in a Williams College English course called Borrowing and Stealing: Originality in Literature and Culture. It followed a discussion of Andy Warhol’s a, A Novel and Pope’s An Essay On Criticism. Thanks, Professor McWeeny!

Records I Can’t Sample

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

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Synth strings played on video game controller MIDI.

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

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

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

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

Why add to the population of orphaned works?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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