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

A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” — in English, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.”

This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it. Anna says she’s sung it many times in church. Bach didn’t write it; the text is an older Latin poem translated into German by Paul Gerhardt, set by Johann Crüger to a secular love song called “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret” by Hans Leo Hassler.

Not only did Bach appropriate the hymn from all the above sources, but he recycled it several times, within the St Matthew Passion and elsewhere in his work. I think I recognize it from the D minor violin partita. According to Wikipedia, Bach used the tune

in his cantata Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem, BWV 159. Bach used the melody on different words in his Christmas Oratorio, both in the first choral (#5) and the triumphant final chorus. Franz Liszt included an arrangement of this hymn in the sixth station, Saint Veronica, of his Via Crucis (the Way of the Cross), S.504a.

That’s all well and good, but the real reason for my musical deja vu is that the hymn is the basis for Paul Simon’s classic “American Tune.” Here’s a performance from 1974 — Paul’s hair and mustache were especially unfortunate at that time but the music sounded great.

Here’s another performance, thirty-four years later, on the Colbert Report, and here’s Paul performing it in a duet with Willie Nelson. For maximum enjoyment, try singing “American Tune” over the Bach video above, a lot of it fits perfectly.

Rhymin’ Simon may not have taken the hymn directly from Bach; it’s more likely that he got it from folksinger Tom Glazer, who used it in his tune “Because All Men Are Brothers.” It’s featured in the folk music bible Rise Up Singing, which Paul Simon is undoubtedly familiar with. Here’s all that complex genealogy in convenient network diagram form:

Bach feels a lot more contemporary and relevant to me than most of his bewigged eighteenth-century European peers. I never made the connection before between one of my favorite Paul Simon tunes and my favorite Baroque composer, but in retrospect it seems obvious. The whole thing confirms my belief that the most creative artists are the least original. Art is a process of recombining existing memes, not creating new ideas out of whole cloth. The deepest music taps into rich veins of shared musical heritage spanning centuries and continents, from the mists of European history through a devoutly Christian Austrian to a series of earnest American folk singers to me.

I was told by a Bach-loving friend that I’ll be hearing the “O Sacred Head” chords everywhere now that I’m paying attention. If you have some examples to share, please let me know.

The sun was on my mind today anyway, it being so nice and cloudless outside. But days like today also cause me anxiety. I’m a fair-haired sunburn-prone type, and my dad died from skin cancer, a combination of Scandinavian genes and long hours as a young guy on a ladder helping Grandpa paint houses, plus many more hours on boats and beaches with no sunblock. I stick to the shade, wear hats and generally play it very safe, but still, I feel some dread about the amount of radiation I’m getting from the great thermonuclear reactor in the sky.

My dread does have an upside. It’s fueled a lot of fascination. The sun is a bottomless source of interest if you’re a science geek like me. They tell you in ninth grade biology that all life on earth is powered by the sun. Technically, this isn’t true, since there are those cool little ecosystems living around undersea volcanos that are powered by nuclear reactions in the Earth’s core. But the sun is the prime mover for you and me and all the organisms we interact with. The sun also powers all of our technology, since we’re burning fossilized plants for fuel. You can think of coal, oil and natural gas as a conveniently stable and portable form of sunlight.

I’ve known for as long as I can remember that the sun makes all of its energy from fusing hydrogen into helium, but it was only in the past few years that I tried to figure out what that actually means. Here on Earth, hydrogen molecules repel each other like the north ends of little magnets. The sun is so big that its gravity smacks the hydrogen molecules into each other hard enough to tear them apart into their constituent protons and electrons. In the center of the sun, the protons get jammed into each other so hard that they can come within the tiny range of the nuclear forces. This is when the really weird and exciting physics happens.

Inside each proton are two up quarks and a down quark. When the protons come close enough together, the weak nuclear force can come into play, transforming one of the up quarks into a down quark. This reaction makes the proton turn into a neutron, spitting out a positron and a neutrino in the process.

The positron is the antimatter counterpart to the electron. It quickly seeks out the closest electron in an electromagnetic death spiral that annihilates both particles and creating a pair of very high energy photons. These photons bounce from atom to atom in the sun, being absorbed and re-emitted, until they finally make their way to the surface and zip off into space. I would have naively guessed this ping-ponging around to take a few seconds or minutes, but NASA says that it can take anywhere from a hundred thousand to fifty million years for a photon to get from the core to the surface.

Meanwhile, the newly made neutrons combine with protons to make helium, a much more stable atom than hydrogen. The sun isn’t big enough to fuse helium, so once it runs out of hydrogen, it’ll burn out. The good news is that there’s about five billion years worth of hydrogen left. The bad news is that as it runs out of juice, the sun will get bigger and hotter until it vaporizes the Earth. So, clock’s ticking.

If burning fossilized plankton and ferns is stored fusion power, why can’t we just cut out the middleman? Why don’t our cars run on the fusion of hydrogen into helium? There’s plenty of hydrogen in the planet’s water, and helium is as harmless a waste product as you could ask for. The problem is that it takes a high temperature and/or ridiculously extreme pressure to make atomic nuclei overcome their mutual electromagnetic repulsion and get the nuclear forces doing their thing. Driving around with a tank full of gasoline is dangerous enough; imagine driving around with a reactor whose interior is at ten million degrees. So we shouldn’t be holding our breath for fusion-powered cars.

The sun converts four and a quarter million metric tons of matter into energy every second, and science writers are always comparing it a constantly exploding thermonuclear bomb. But pound for pound, the sun turns out not to be all that energetic. At its center, the power production density per cubic foot is about as intense as an iguana’s metabolism, or the chemical reactions in an active compost heap. The sun is pumping out so much juice because of its humungous size.

Okay, enough science. Here’s an awesome duet version of the George Harrison song that he played with Paul Simon on Saturday Night Live:

Nina Simone did a nice version too. Here’s a cool electronica remix:

Seriously, people, wear that sunblock.

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!

“Peter Piper” is like a patchwork quilt, both in its music and lyrics. The track is based on samples of Bob James‘ instrumental version of Paul Simon’s song “Take Me to Mardi Gras.” Here’s an excerpt of the Paul Simon original:

Bob James’ version opens with a much groovier beat, along with some random radio chatter:

The bell pattern is an example of Agogô, from a Yoruba word meaning gong or bell. The bells had a religious, ceremonial function in Yoruba society. Agogô spread from West Africa to America via the Caribbean, where it also became one of the foundational sounds of samba. For all I know, people have been drumming variations on that high-low pattern for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. Bob James’ Agogô groove intro is the most exciting part of his recording. Once the actual melody starts the energy level falls off dramatically.

Jam Master Jay follows the time-honored hip-hop tradition of taking the coolest part of a recording and looping it to full song length:

Jay is spinning two copies of the Bob James vinyl, and about thirty-five seconds into the track, the two copies play simultanously at slightly different speeds, phasing against each other hypnotically. Vinyl is a lot harder to use than digital sampling, but its adherents are right to stick up for it. Much as I love electronic production techniques, the result can be a little clinical, since it’s so easy to edit out your mistakes. Vinyl can be more conducive to happy accidents.

Hip-hop lyrics are usually full of pop-cultural and folk references, and “Peter Piper” carries the trend as far as it can go. In addition to the tongue twister of the title, the lyrics also reference Humpty Dumpty, Jack B Nimble, Little Bo Peep, Rip van Winkle, Alice in Wonderland, Jack and Jill, Dr Seuss, Mother Goose, Weebles (they might wobble but like Jam Master Jay’s turntables, they don’t fall down), The Flash, King Midas, Rub-a-dub-dub, the little old lady who lived in the shoe, Pinocchio, Trix (they’re for kids), the three little pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Hey Diddle Diddle. My favorite lyric in the song is this, talking about Jam Master Jay:

He’s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood
Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good

You might make the case that Run-DMC stole from Bob James. I don’t know if they paid for the “Mardi Gras” sample, but even if they did, you might say there’s still an intellectual theft. But did they harm him? I would argue that they helped him. There’s no way I’d even know who Bob James was if Run-DMC (and a lot of other hip-hop groups) hadn’t sampled him. Chances are, you wouldn’t know or care either. If you had played me some Bob James, I wouldn’t have been interested at all, since his style of slick lounge jazz holds zero attraction for me. My ears would have pricked up at the opening few seconds of “Take Me To The Mardi Gras”, but I wouldn’t have paid it any further mind once the main song started in. And much as I love Paul Simon, “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” isn’t one of his stronger tunes. Without the Run-DMC connection there’s no way I would have sprung for a ninety-nine cent download. We usually think of stealing as bad. But in this case, it’s bad meaning good.

Originality is a seriously overrated virtue, and not really possible anyway. Raising Hell is as powerful as it is because of its many cultural appropriations, not in spite of them. Along with “Peter Piper”, the other standout tracks on the album are also derived from other songs. Most famous is the radical reworking of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” in my opinion a huge improvement over the original. Then there’s “It’s Tricky”, which combines a guitar sample from “My Sharona” by The Knack with the metrical scheme from the chorus of “Mickey” by Toni Basil. Copyright law as it presently stands is a major impediment to this kind of collage-based music, a source of much sadness for me and other hip-hop fans.

Here’s a mashup of both versions of “Take Me To The Mardi Gras,” “Peter Piper” and “Work It” by Missy Elliot.

Peter Piper Mardi Gras Megamix by ethanhein

And here’s a mashup of “Peter Piper” with two other eighties classics, “Oh Yeah” by Yello and “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds.

Happy sampling!