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Original post on Quora

Harry Truman played classical piano.

Richard Nixon played classical piano too, and even composed a bit.

Condoleeza Rice has pro-quality classical chops. Don’t miss her appearance on 30 Rock.

Former federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan attended Juilliard and played professional alto sax and clarinet in the Woody Herman band before going into finance. Unfortunately, I can’t find a video.

Of course, there’s Bill Clinton and his famous sax solo.

Mike Huckabee plays respectable rock bass. Here he is playing with Def Leppard, don’t miss.

Finally, who could forget former Attorney General and singer-songwriter John Ashcroft? Awful though he is, the song is weirdly catchy.

Original post on Quora

The central message of evolutionary theory is that complexity emerges spontaneously through purely natural processes. This is a difficult truth to grasp, and it flies in the face of centuries of cultural tradition. The Biblical narrative says that the world was created especially for humans, and that we’re the most important thing in it. Evolution says that the world came into being as a series of contingent accidents, and that humans are no more special or important than slime molds or wolverines or ferns or sea cucumbers (and that we’re much more like these creatures than unlike them.) If your science teacher tells you that a magical force is guiding evolution, you’re being let off the intellectual hook. Rather than having to struggle with the counterintuitive idea of self-assembling molecules, you’re comforted by a thought-terminating fantasy.

We’re at a critical juncture in technological history. It won’t be long before we can just print out DNA sequences at will to create custom organisms. If kids are coming out of American schools thinking that biology is being guided by a magical force with intentionality, that’s going to be a severe intellectual handicap. It isn’t just scientists who need to understand these things. Ordinary people will need to vote for policymakers who regulate and fund biotechnology, and will need to vote with their dollars and opinions as to whether the products of biotech take hold. We’ll need to understand that the line between “natural” and “artificial” is, well, artificial, that living things are made of the same molecules as everything else, following the same physical rules. We’ll need to understand the profound similarities between biological viruses, computer viruses and our own self-assembling nanobots. We’ll need to know that humans are part of nature and not separate from it, and that evolution is mindless and difficult to predict. I shudder to imagine the intellectual damage that ID does in such a world.

Original question on Quora

From Rick Santorum’s Wikipedia entry:

A controversy arose following Santorum’s statements about homosexuality in an interview with the Associated Press that was published on April 20, 2003. In response to a question about how to prevent sexual abuse of children by priests, Santorum said the priests were engaged in “a basic homosexual relationship”, and went on to say that he had “[...] no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts”; that the right to privacy, as detailed in Griswold v. Connecticut, “doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution”; that, “whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”; and that sodomy laws properly exist to prevent acts that “undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family”. When the Associated Press reporter asked whether homosexuals should not then engage in homosexual acts, Santorum replied, “Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that’s what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality”.

Rick Santorum is guilty of hate speech. In a perfect world, Dan Savage would have addressed Santorum’s ignorance and bigotry in a loving, Gandhi-esque fashion, but I give Savage credit for creativity and effectiveness. His Google bombing campaign might be juvenile and vengeful in tone, but he’s fighting speech with speech in an exceptionally clever way, and has drawn a lot of attention to a worthy cause. What’s more moral than protesting hate speech nonviolently?

Santorum is a high-profile voice for one of America’s last widely acceptable forms of institutionalized bigotry. His hate speech has real-world consequences. Two days ago, a fourteen-year-old who made an “It Gets Better” video committed suicide after being bullied for being gay. Rick Santorum is in part to blame for the atmosphere of hate that gay kids have to live with. If the worst thing that happens to him is being made fun of on the internet, well, that sounds pretty just to me.

See also: Ethan Hein’s answer to Which SEO strategies could one use to get ricksantorum.com ranked #1 for “Rick Santorum”?

Original question on Quora

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don’t need no water, let the motherf***er burn

The chant made its first appearance in the hip-hop canon in “The Roof Is On Fire” by Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three, the B-side to their 1984 single “Request Line.” “The Roof Is On Fire” ended up being way more popular.

The recorded version of “The Roof Is On Fire” leaves out the mofo line. In 1984 people mostly weren’t using curses in hip-hop recordings, which now seems charmingly quaint. In live shows, Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three were less demure, and when they led the crowd in the chant, the mofo was included.

I don’t know what specifically Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three were referring to in the chant. I’ve seen it associated with the 1985 firebombing of MOVE’s headquarters by the Philadelphia police department, though the Dynamic Three song was written a year earlier. The chant probably got attached to the MOVE bombing after the fact. It wouldn’t be the first time that hip-hop has channeled political anger into a semi-ironic party slogan.

MC Serch is on fire

I first heard the chant in “Here It Comes Again” by my favorite white rapper, MC Serch. Listen at 1:21.

Someone much cooler than me in high school used this song in a dance performance. It’s the mark of a truly powerful meme that the chant has been stuck in my head for more than half my life. The other line that jumps out of my memory after eighteen years is “J-E-L-L-O, ya know?” – listen at 2:15. I love this kind of nerdy, cerebral, reference-heavy emceeing. I also love early 90s sample-heavy production. Serch is the kind of geek who samples the Mahavishnu Orchestra, on his tune “Hits The Head.”

Anyway. For a lot of people, the strongest association with “the roof is on fire” is P-funk, who like to chant it during performances of “Tear The Roof Off The Sucker.” P-funk’s chant inspired Talking Heads to write “Burning Down The House.” It also inspired many techno DJs to work the chant into their own work, including The Orb and Westbam.

The Bloodhound Gang is on fire

When you Google the phrase “the roof is on fire,” the results are dominated by Bloodhound Gang’s song “Fire Water Burn,” which I had never heard of before researching this post. I find mopey rock interpretations of hip-hop tedious in the extreme. I don’t have any problem with rock musicians borrowing ideas from black music; all the good ones do that. I just don’t like the sullen tone. Music should be fun.

Anyway, there are plenty more rock songs that quote the chant:

• “Sway” by Coal Chamber
• “Polaroid Baby” by Bratmobile
• Songs by Slipknot and Cake — I haven’t identified which specific ones because their music makes me sad; knock yourself out

Other sightings of the roof meme

Tweet named her track “We Don’t Need No Water” after the chant. The track is produced by Missy Elliot, using a sample of “Mango Meat” by Mandrill. Hip!

“In Da Club” by 50 Cent quotes the chant too — listen at 2:54:

In “The Roof Is On Fire” Bizzy Bone refers to the chant amusingly as “the old negro spiritual.”

Any others I missed? Hit the comments.

And here are the first three minutes of the film:

Are white hip-hop fans stealing black culture?

The film’s central thesis is stated by Paul Mooney: “Eminem is blackface without makeup.” Mooney draws an equivalence between the stealing of black culture by white people with the literal stealing of black people during slavery. However much white people enjoy hip-hop, Mooney views us as unwelcome intruders and appropriators.

I feel the moral force of Mooney’s argument, but it glosses over many complexities. Hip-hop has never belonged exclusively to black people. The practitioners and fans have come from a broad spectrum of races, cultures and classes from the beginning. Also, blackness isn’t synonymous with the traditional hip-hop signifiers: being urban, street, poor, etc. And who says the fans of a musical form have to live the same experiences as the artists? As Aesop Rock says in the movie: “I love Star Wars but I’ve never been to space.”

Still, all of that aside, there are a lot of embarassing white rappers and hip-hop fans. It’s worth asking hard questions of anyone in a socially dominant group who adopts the trappings of a less-dominant group.

So who’s exploiting who?

The story of music in America is one of powerful people exploiting marginalized people. Hip-hop is no exception. But the situation is complex. The film shows a hip-hop tour of Harlem, where the tour guide distributes bling and Kangol caps to the bemused, mostly white and Asian participants. This would seem like a textbook example of the worst and most demeaning kind of exploitation… except that the tour is run by Grandmaster Kaz of the Sugarhill Gang. Does he get a pass because he’s exploiting his own culture? Can a founding father of hip-hop exploit himself?

Vanilla Ice is another complex case. In the film he claims that he was a victim of exploitation, not a perpetrator of it. He says that he revered hip-hop growing up, and that he was duped into a clownish bastardization of the music he loves by the lure of money. At first blush he appears to be an exploiter, not an exploitee — you could argue that he got to cash in because of his race. But then, Will Smith was a corny, market-friendly rapper too. Was he an exploiter, or an exploitee, or both, or neither? I don’t have the answer.

Acting black vs acting cool

One of the film’s most compelling characters is a white girl from small-town Indiana who was deeply involved in wigger culture. She explains her appropriation of hip-hop style: “I didn’t want to be black. I wanted to be cool.” If the cool people you know of are mostly black, or behave in stereotypically “black” ways, it’s natural to want to act “black” too.

For me, hip-hop is so cool because a release from the stifling pressures of bourgeois professionalism. Hip-hop gives uptight, repressed people like me a way to access and validate our more aggressive side, to give vent to anti-authoritarian urges, to use improper language, and to give attention and validation to bodily pleasures. I can say confidently that my inner life would be severely impoverished without hip-hop, and so would my cultural and social lives. But how do I embrace and participate in this culture without becoming the thieving white oppressor, perpetuating ugly stereotypes for my own selfish benefit?

Why are some white rappers fine while others are unbearable?

The film thoroughly documents all the wrong ways of being a white hip-hop musician or fan. The worst example isn’t Vanilla Ice, it’s a duo of dreadlocked white chicks called Empire Isis, appearing at 0:42 in the second video above. Empire Isis rap in a style influenced by dancehall reggae. Or at least, they used to. If you visit their web site now, you’ll see they’ve undergone a dramatic image makeover, perhaps motivated by being portrayed in the film as the most clueless pair of white wanna-be Rastafarians since Ras Trent:

In fairness to Empire Isis, their frontwoman is multiracial, not white. But I still get a strong Ras Trent vibe from them. After the screening I asked a couple of the NYU students sitting next to me why they thought Empire Isis is so wack, whereas everybody loves MC Serch. (When Serch came up in the film’s montage of lame white rappers, the girl behind me exclaimed, “Oh, why you wanna hate?”) One NYU kid’s assessment: Empire Isis is so bad not because they’re appropriating an oppressed culture, but because they’re doing it so ineptly. MC Serch gets a pass because he can actually rap. NYU Kid offered Natalie Portman’s SNL gangsta rap video as a positive white rap role model. Natalie might be playing a self-mocking character, NYU Kid argued, but she brings so much heat and passion to the gangsta role that she deserves to inhabit it.

Al Jolson and Eminem

The film is most provocative in its examination of Al Jolson and blackface. After mostly supporting Paul Mooney’s assertion that wiggers are no different from the minstrels of yore, the movie then gives Jolson a surprisingly sympathetic reading. This is a bold move, because the most embarrassing people depicted in the film aside from Empire Isis are the members of the still-active Al Jolson society. They don’t wear blackface so far as I know, but the film does show a dude performing “Mammy” to an audience on Long Island without a trace of irony. It’s a total facepalm moment. And yet, a historian in the film gives Al Jolson credit for making a good-faith effort to show love and respect to black culture. Jolson said that he found his most authentic self singing in blackface. I’m appalled at the ignorance of that idea, but I have to ask myself how different it is from the way I feel about rapping that Ice Cube song. Growing up in the time and place I did has made me more culturally and politically sophisticated than Al Jolson, so I have better manners and am more careful to show my feelings respectfully. But am I that different?

America is the land of mutts. We can’t be expected to keep our musical interests within our class and racial identities. If I’m going to defend my own motivation for wanting to participate in hip-hop music and culture as coming from a place of love, then I need to at least give Al Jolson the benefit of the doubt. I’m not trying to apologize for blackface, which I continue to find disgusting. If minstrelry is a form of admiration, it’s an ignorant, warped form. And white, upper-class hip-hop fans like me have the privilege of being ignorant without having to suffer any negative consequences, except being portrayed negatively in documentaries. The question isn’t, should white kids like hip-hop? The real question is, what’s the most appropriate way to reach across power differentials when exploring other cultures’ music?

Are wiggers intruding into a private space?

Harry Allen gives a powerful argument why hip-hop is more than just a style of music in his essay “The Unbearable Whiteness Of Emceeing: What The Eminence Of Eminem Says About Race” (pdf link), first published in The Source, February 2003. It mostly concerns 8 Mile, the loosely biographical story of Eminem overcoming his whiteness to win rap battles. As his epigram, Allen quotes James Baldwin:

“Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand — or sleight-of-hand — by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary — without the faintest notion of what really means — the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more compelling in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.”
–from “Sermons and Blue,” The New York Times Review of Books, March 29, 1959

Allen’s essay is worth quoting at length:

Compared to Black artists, Eminem, like Vanilla Ice, Beastie Boys, 3rd Bass and a number of white rappers before him, got more by doing less; an almost sure way to mark someone as white under the system of race. (Asked by novelist Zadie Smith in Vibe how he’d grown as an artist while making The Eminem Show, he replied, “I learned how to ride a beat better…. On the last album, I hadn’t completely mastered it yet, to sink into the beat…I’d listen, and I’d be like, ‘why am I so far behind that beat? The first album was terrible — like, I was playing catch-up with the beat constantly” Oh, my.) As well this charge — that race has greased white people’s way—that they haven’t really earned what they possess — is, in this writer’s experience, the accusation that white people typically find most infuriating.

Watching 8 Mile at the multiplex, I was struck by a number of facts: the unusual whiteness of the New York City theatre audience for what is, essentially, a rap movie; that at least one filmgoing couple was, generously, well past retirement age; the flat, cardboard quality of the film’s characters; that, with exemption of Eminem, nobody has any parents, and everyone seems inexplicably focused on “Rabbit,” as Eminem’s character, Jimmy Smith Jr. is nicknamed. Everyone seems usually concerned with what he’s going to do or not do, what he thinks or feels. Characters orbit him in a way that, especially if you’re Black, feels completely false. Eminem has been widely compared to Elvis Presley, due to both men’s so-called “white-trash” roots, controversy-counting careers, and enormous success mining Black music and importing it to white audiences. This contrast has been drawn by persons as disparate as Sir Paul McCartney, Leiber and Stoller (who wrote Elvis’s hit “jailhouse Rock”) Public Enemy’s Chuck D—and by Eminem himself. In the video for “Without Me” Eminem appears briefly as Presley in this bloated, near-death form, self-mockingly rapping, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/To do Black music so selfishly/ And use it to get myself wealthy…”

But, in truth, the Tarzan narrative—that of a white infant, abandoned by its mother and father and raised by apes, who rises to dominate the non-white people and environment around him—gets closer to the heart of Eminem as a phenomenon. (“The baiting of Blacks was Tarzan’s chief divertissement,” wrote his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, neatly summarizing 8 Mile’s climax.) As well, the Tarzan myth also neatly sockets into one of white supremacy’s most enduring structures; the Black facilitation of white development (BFWD); that is, Black people, often at great cost to themselves, working to, again, improve white people.

I think my job as a white hip-hop fan is to listen closely to Harry Allen and Paul Mooney, to take their arguments seriously, and to not react defensively. The right attitude for me is to remember that I’m a guest in this culture, that I should behave as I would in someone else’s home. I should probably leave the Ice Cube songs to Ice Cube. I can let my own music be informed and influenced by my hip-hop heroes without imitating them. I can learn from people different from me and then go back to work at trying to be myself.

If you’re a follower of internet memes, you know the story by now. If not: Antoine, his sister Kelly and her daughter were asleep in their apartment in the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama. An intruder broke in and sexually assaulted Kelly before Antoine chased him off. The family complained to the housing project authorities, who were unmoved. So on July 28, 2010, the Dodsons took their story to the local news. Here’s the clip:

The video became an instant YouTube sensation. Antoine is a charismatic guy, with a distinctive way of expressing his anger. Many people found him funny for his stereotypical ghetto mannerisms filtered through his flamboyant gayness. It’s a depressingly familiar story: the internet chooses someone to make the object of random large-scale ridicule, then gets bored and moves on.

But then, enter the Gregory Brothers, the prankster musicians behind the hilarious Auto-tune The News videos. The Gregorys have lately been Auto-tuning viral Youtube videos in addition to TV. As Michael Gregory observed, Antoine’s outburst had a strong melody to it. So it seemed like a natural move to do the “Bed Intruder Song.”

This track launched both Antoine and the Gregorys into the pop mainstream. It became YouTube’s most viewed video, with twenty million views as of this writing and no end in sight. The song has been climbing the iTunes charts and even cracked the Billboard top 100, the first web meme to do so. It would be a hugely significant pop artifact for that reason alone. But the fascination and horror of the song only begins there. It’s problematic in a way that the Double Rainbow song isn’t. You couldn’t ask for a more complex set of emotions than the ones that “Bed Intruder” inspires in me.

The case against

Everything about this story sets off my political alarms: a bunch of white Brooklyn hipsters do a parodic take on a horrific tragedy befalling a poor urban black family, using a music style appropriated from black urban culture. My liberal guilt kept me from even listening to the song for the first couple of weeks it was making the rounds. The worst part is at the end where Evan Gregory sings the song accompanying himself on piano in an exaggerated soul singer voice, radiating smug entitlement. That part makes me want to die of embarrassment.

The case for

Antoine Dodson himself told CBS news that while the attention bothered him initially, he now sees it more positively: “A blessing came out of a bad situation, a blessing in disguise.” He hired a lawyer, set up a web site and has been earnestly setting about professionalizing his fame. He seems fine with the song and has it set as his ringtone.

Brooklyn hipsters though they may be, the Gregorys seem like genuinely decent, well-intentioned people. I met Michael on the subway a few months ago, and in our brief conversation he came across as polite, nerdy, self-deprecating, basically like any of my friends. The Gregorys have been doing the right thing by Antoine, splitting all the proceeds from the song fifty-fifty with the Dodsons, and mostly behaving respectfully.

As a piece of music, the song works. It’s the strongest tune the Gregorys have produced so far. It has a great melody, a strong hook, and the emotions come across loud and clear. A friend and collaborator of mine, one of the most adventurous musicians I know, adores the song. I was surprised, because she herself has been the victim of sexual assault. The Dodsons’ situation is terrible, but Antoine is showing a fierce desire to protect his sister. His on-air rant is an expression of love and support. My friend finds the song to be uplifting, and apparently she’s not alone.

The Gregorys have become very adept at self-promotion using YouTube. One of their brightest innovations is to include lyrics and chords to make it easy for people to do remixes and covers, and the internet has responded. Here are the most interesting ones, starting with the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Marching Band:

Guy with violin:

Guy with shamisen:

DeStorm cover/parody, complete with costume:

I like the Gregorys and am glad they’re breaking through into the mainstream, troubling though I find the circumstances of their breakthrough. And I’m pulling for the Dodsons. Antoine has a web site that includes video of him answering questions from the fans.

Usually internet fame chews up its recipients and spits them out. I hope all this brings the Dodsons some happiness.

The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.

The Gregory Brothers also produce straight R&B tracks. With all possible respect, I don’t find their serious music to be anything special. It’s when they submerse themselves in TV that they shine the brightest. The internet doesn’t have a lot of info about their production techniques, all I could find was an interview where Michael Gregory says:

Logic Express was a godsend for composition–it has an enormous sample library. I use it for all my audio now. For vocal processing, auto-tune and melodyne plug-ins come in super handy. I use Final Cut Express for all the editing, but the capture feature is somehow rubbish, so iMovie gets called in for that.

So there’s a lot of very sophisticated computer software at work, though with a charming zer0-budget lameness of video compositing and audio mixing. I imagine when they wind up on Comedy Central or wherever, the production values will get a little more slick.

Musically, these videos are working for me. If they slowed the tempos down and found some heavier kick and snare sounds, they’d be ready for the radio. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My own experiments with Auto-tune show any kind of human speech as pretty tonal to begin with. When you automatically tune someone talking to the closest piano-key pitches, it makes it easier to make out the melodies that were already present. The Gregorys do a lot of further manipulation and harmonizing, but their best moments come from unintended speech melodies, like Joe Biden shouting “God bless America”, from space.

Some languages are more tonal than others. Chinese uses pitch to differentiate words semantically, the way English uses combinations of vowels and consonants. The same string of phonemes spoken at different pitches in Mandarin might have completely different meanings as words. Even in English, we use pitch to communicate punctuation, emotional stance and other metadata. Read this out loud to see what I mean:

Okay?

Okay.

Okay…

Okay!

Speech has a lot of profound overlaps with music, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to draw the line between them. This is I why I’m convinced by the theory that music is the evolutionary precursor of language, the bridge between monkey calls and our present communications systems.

By quantizing and digitizing information, you make it easier to memorize and replicate it. I find myself humming phrases from the Gregorys’ videos the way I hum Andrew Lloyd Webber. Digitized sound information is easier to memorize, store and copy. The subtle nuances of Katie Couric’s speech with all the pitches on a continuous spectrum are difficult to remember and imitate, but once it’s Auto-tuned, it becomes effortless. Digitizing data in any medium makes it much more robust across many generations of copies. DNA is a digital medium – the G, A, T and C of your genes can be logically expressed as ones and zeros, and ones and zeros can be replicated flawlessly and endlessly.

I find Auto-tune bottomlessly entertaining to listen to. Jay-Z and many of my friends say they’re tired of it, but I’m not. I can understand why you might be getting a little burned out on it if you listen to pop radio. However, there’s a lot of resistance out there to Auto-tune that’s too deep and intense to just come from jadedness with a music fad. The Time magazine article about the Gregorys allows that Auto-tune “isn’t always a way to cheat.” I find that funny. How can Auto-tune be cheating? How can you cheat at music? It’s not a competitive sport. I prefer to think of music as more like a game. You can play better or worse, but there aren’t really winners and losers. We’re adept at coming up with systems of rules for music, but we get carried away with that. Who cares how you make it so long as it sounds good?

If Auto-tune causes you distress because you care about authenticity in your music, I can understand that. I resisted “fake” music through most of my teens and twenties. Now I regret all the effort, but I guess I had a point. I was worried that someone was trying to put something over on me. I gave up my desire for authenticity after it became clear that it’s an impossible dream. There is no authenticity anywhere.

Ever since the sixties, we urban elites have fetishized the bluegrass of the forties as a pure folk form. But Bill Monroe wasn’t some naive backwoods hick. He designed his music deliberately for its commercial appeal to a particular audience. For instance, all that intense treble was there to cut through radio static and low-tech mics and mixing desks. This doesn’t make Bill Monroe’s music any less truthful or good. I commend him for finding a way to reach a mass audience with such idiosyncratic, regionally specific music.

I don’t think there’s anything magical or transcendent about good music. It’s like good food, if you make it with care and attention, then it makes people feel good. Sometimes you’re cooking for yourself, sometimes you’re cooking for anyone who walks in the door, sometimes you’re cooking for paying customers. It depends on the situation which recipes are going to work the best.

The half-life for “bad” inauthentic pop music to decay into “good” authentic art music seems to about one generation. The analog synths and drum machines that sounded so fake and lame in the seventies and eighties are cherished vintage gear today. Even the digital samplers of the eighties have attained authentic status because of the digital crunchiness you get from the low sampling rate. I’ll bet you anything that future hipsters are going to fetishize Auto-tune once the pop mainstream has safely abandoned it.

Potentially the most offensive but also the least ironic video by the Gregorys is this one:

Here’s the mp3 if you want to download it. It makes me a little uncomfortable, especially the greenscreened backup singer thing, which feels disrespectful. But I can’t argue with the message. I’d like to hear a producer with more chops do a version of this, maybe at a mellower tempo with less embellishment. Imagine turning on the news and seeing that speech. Either version.

MJ is in the middle, with his songs in the first ring out. The next ring shows songs that sampled MJ. The outer ring shows the artist who did the sampling. Most of the information comes from the Rap Sample FAQ and wikipedia. I included MJ quoting “Soul Makossa” and Björk quoting “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” even they aren’t technically samples, but I figured, musically and legally it’s the same thing.

I got the idea to do the Michael Jackson map when I was walking down the street in Park Slope. This was a few months before he died and was not much on anybody’s mind. Barbara, the singer in my laptop band, was always playing his tracks, but it’s not like you were hearing him out in the world much. So I was surprised to hear a guy drive past on his motorcycle, with the speakers booming out what I thought was a crazy remix of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” It was the “Mama se, mama sa, mama coo sa” chant, but in a deep bass voice over an afro-funk beat. I thought someone had taken a sample of MJ and slowed it down or something. I looked it up on the internet to figure out who it was, and it turned out not to be a remix at all, actually the exact opposite. The song was “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango, MJ’s original inspiration for the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

I started the map on March 26th and posted it on Flickr a few days later. I also talked it up a little on Facebook and Twitter. It got a few dozen views and a couple of nice comments. I had thought to include the Jackson 5 on it too, but it would have made the map too unwieldy. So a few days later I did a separate map:

My first sample map to get wider internet attention wasn’t any of the Michael Jackson ones, it was the Wu-Tang Clan one. (The hipsters on Tumblr love Wu-Tang.) Meanwhile, the MJ map continued to get a few views a week or so, more than most of the stuff I post, but not a whole lot more.

Then on May 26th, the MJ sample map was viewed over three thousand times. The next day it was viewed more than thirty-five thousand times. I had no idea why this was happening until I got a Flickr message from Forumz1:

Hi,

I was the one who originally submitted the MJ map to Reddit. I found it via a MJ forum. Just wanted to say that your maps are great! I’m a pretty big MJ fan and was excited to hear people sampling him in such creative ways in the 90′s and early 2000′s, but after a while I felt it got out of hand and this old Onion article started to become true:

www.theonion.com/content/node/32563

It didn’t take off that well on Reddit, but I think Digg’s best user found it and submitted it and it skyrocketed. I’m glad it got exposure, and your work got a lot of exposure!

The Digg user who posted it is MrBabyMan. Thank you MrBabyMan, wherever you are. The Digg post generated most of the views, directly and through aggregators. It also produced a bunch of comments that, between them, represent a perfect cross-section of the internet’s feelings about MJ in the months before his death, about sampling, and hip-hop and race relations in America generally.

The first few comments are ignorant one-liners about how hip-hop isn’t music. Then someone asks:

I confess, I need someone to explain it to me, as if I were a 4 year old.

MrBabyMan helpfully responds:

From the center out:
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson song
Song that was covered/sampled using the Jackson song
Artist who sampled said song
i.e. Public Enemy’s “911 is a joke” samples “Thriller” by MJ

A couple of people use “4 years old” as a hook for pedophile jokes. Others jump to defend MJ’s musicianship, in spite of his troubled personal life.

He might be a crazy freak show, but ya gotta admit – the man knows how to make music.

Someone announces:

I doubt highly that he is the sole composer of all that music.

He isn’t. MJ is the sole composer of some of his songs and co-composer or arranger on most of them. Quincy Jones wrote some of them. A British musician named Rod Temperton wrote “Thriller” and “Rock With You.” Two of the guys from Toto wrote “Human Nature.”

One commenter is dismayed by the current state of hip-hop:

So Michael Jackson indirectly helped spawn an entire industry of mediocre music and inflated egos? MJ’s music actually was pretty good, rappers just got lazy.

My observation is that some hip-hop musicians are lazy, some are fanatical workaholics, same as in any other profession. The ones who are really good at it tend to be the ones who practice the most, same as in any other profession. But a lot of Digg users equate sampling with plagiarism, and doubt that it takes any skill:

If you showed me how I bet I could do it pretty decently, after all, I have most of the music these guys are cutting from!

I say, go for it. The software is easy to learn. Finding musical uses for it takes a lot of trial and error.

Some commenters don’t take issue with the basic musical validity of hip-hop, but they are concerned about the violation of intellectual property rights.

It may take technical talent but there’s hardly anything musically artistic about borrowing someone else’s beats as a backer for spoken poetry. Let’s face it, if you can’t play an instrument, you can’t read or compose music and you can’t sing, then your musical talent is dubious at best. That’s not to say that rappers don’t have talent. After all, finding creative new ways to incorporate various bodily orifices and functions into spoken poetry isn’t easy. I’m just suggesting that calling them musicians might be a bit of a stretch.

I actually think talking about bodily orifices and functions is a good thing. They’re part of life, I think it’s healthy to have a sense of humor and fun about them. I’m too chicken to do it in my own music, so I’m glad Missy Elliot is willing to stick her neck out on the rest of our behalf.

Not every Digg commenter is bent out of shape about the culture of appropriation.

The old blues musicians borrowed each others riffs all the time.. and they are considered the founders of Rock music. Go listen to a few Robert Johnson recordings compared to a few Leadbelly recordings, and you’ll find that without the vocal accompaniment, there is almost nothing to distinguish between them. What it comes down to, in my mind, is artistic relevance. If you rip off a song and have nothing new to add to it, then it’s bullshit.. regardless of law. I think this market should take care of itself. Either you’re relevant, or you’re not. When you consider the fact that there are only 7 notes in the western musical scale, the argument for originality falls apart… so what it comes down to is whether people support what you’re doing or not. In other words, it’s all politics.

Amen to that.

As a musician and a songwriter, I would be pissed if someone outright stole my song.. which does happen… but as an artist, I would be ecstatic if someone took my idea to another level.

Amen to that too. When was anyone ever original?

Of course, what I’m saying is highly subjective, but I don’t see anything wrong with borrowing and expanding on ideas, so long as it isn’t outright theft… which I don’t consider most sampling artists to be doing.

Seriously. “911 Is A Joke” uses a sample of “Thriller”, but I doubt anyone is going to confuse one for the other.

Sampling makes some commenters very huffy:

You’re comparing playing a recording of someone else to actually performing on a real instrument music composed by someone else? That’s the same thing to you? You’re lost.

In my experience, choosing and sequencing samples isn’t any harder or easier than writing on an instrument. “Lost” is a revealing choice of word, like samplers are breaking some kind of religious law. Music has religious overtones for  a lot of people, me and this guy included.

Too many artists take songs from good artists like Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, etc and butcher them up. I actually become angry when they come on the radio.

The word “butcher” is pretty graphic. Like samplers are dismembering their source material? I’m going to play armchair psychiatrist and guess the anger here goes a little deeper than the state of popular music.

You don’t see 80′s bands remaking rap songs and putting them on the radio.

Which is too bad, because I’d love to hear Depeche Mode covering Kanye West.

One of my supporters is anxious about the sorry state of copyright law.

I love when information is organized like this. Hope nobody gets sued… That would be unnecessary…

I don’t think I have much to worry about. This is just factual information, nobody owns it.

The warmest pro-MJ sentiment is someone who quotes the Dave Chappelle jury duty skit.

Prosecutor: So, you don’t think Michael Jackson is guilty?
Dave Chappelle: No, man. He made Thriller.
[pause]
Dave Chappelle: Thriller.

There are requests for more sample maps. People want to see Zapp and Roger, “Amen Brother“, the Beastie Boys and Kraftwerk. There are also sarcastic requests for P Diddy and Will Smith, who are not much loved by Digg’s users. Some people don’t like my graphic presentation style:

What an awful, awful way to present this information.

Graphic design fail.

Not very graphic, I’m only seeing a lot of boring info.

Some of the design criticism is helpful.

I’m not suggesting a pie chart would be better. But maybe a legend even. Or make it bigger so it’s not all cramped. Or different colors for each section. Something. The whole point of an infographic is to make something easier to understand, but this honestly would be easier to follow in a list form.

The reason I did it so cramped is so it can all fit together on one screen. If I was going to do a wall-size print or a shower curtain, I’d use a lot more white space. What I like about it the map format is how it creates unexpected juxtapositions. [Update: I subsequently color-coded the maps.]

Digg has a humungous readership, and it feeds a ton of other blogs and aggregators. The map got reposted on Twitter, Delicious, and Tumblr, on Buzzfeed and Prefix Mag, on Highsnobiety and Posterous, on Sling Blog, Funkjelly, Laroushe, and Gearslutz. It was on Spike TV, Fiftyonefiftyone, Yepyep, a Polish blog called Infomuzyka, and Dutch and Italian MJ fan forums. Gigdoggy wrote a nice article about the sample map project generally, and even plugged my book.

While this was all starting to happen, I was reading “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I felt like I was living the book in real time. Like a lot of computer nerds, I don’t get out much. It was a lot of fun making the connection with all thsse MJ fans, and even with the haters.

Then MJ died. Not much more I can add except, rest in peace to a great musician and a complex individual.

After that the map started to really get around. Otis Taylor from South Carolina’s The State interviewed me and ran a bunch of nice quotes in his Sunday article. The map has been on the MTV and VH1 blogs, MSNBC’s Clicked, Rachel Maddow’s Map Room and MJ’s official site. As of this writing, it’s been viewed over a hundred thousand times, by people in Poland and South Africa and Japan and Russia and Iran and France and most of the rest of the internet-using world. Somebody even did a remix:

I’m grateful for all the attention, though I wish it wasn’t driven by the early death of one of my lifelong favorite artists. My friends assure me that I shouldn’t feel guilty, I did the map out of love and everything. It’s been good to hear his music so much lately, I can say that.

Here’s a mashup of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Soul Makossa” with many related and derivative works.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something Megamix by ethanhein

“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”

The article gives Gawker writer Nick Douglas’ reasons for using WordPress as their platform. He’s right, WP is the bomb.

What I like about Gawker prose is that it uses the voices of specific, recognizable humans that inhabit the same reality I do. Gawker and its siblings are like the Stewart and Colbert of blogs.

Blog media gets very recursive. It’s easy to get sucked in to blogging about blogging. Gawker does its share of that, but they’re good humored about it. I especially enjoy their list of blog media cliches, for which they graciously shoulder their share of the blame:

“Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. [negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. [purposefully non-ghetto statement], yo. [undesirable conclusion]. Oy. [amazed paraphrase of opposing position]. Seriously? Seriously? What’s next? [outlandish scenario]? I’m looking at you, [example of complaint]. Um, [condescension]? [Undesirable experience] made my [sensory organ] bleed. [x] is the new [y].”

Here are some high points from my Gawker tag on Delicious:

How Rudy Giuliani Soothes Conservative Fears:

“The cross-dressing thing probably doesn’t put your mind at ease. And the fact that I’ve been married three times, once to my cousin, well, even I find that a little creepy. But you know what? 9/11. Also: Firemen! Flags! Kittens with firemen!”

Meet The Rich:

“Searching for Donald Trump in the VIP tent at the Bridgehampton Polo club isn’t hard. The man stands out like he’s written in all caps. TRUMP, says his hair. TRUMP, proclaim his slitty eyes.”

On a great sadness of New York City:

“It’s been such a long wait for all of us! But at last, the World Trade Centre is nearly ready for its opening day. In just a few months, it will be a proud day for all of us in Bahrain.”

From mid-2008, Will Wright To Launch 2005′s Best Video Game This September:

“Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, stepped down from his platinum throne on Mount Olympus to tell Newsweek why it took so long: He had a hard time dumbing down his magical world for human minds.”

I’m Not Addicted To The Internet, I Just Need It Inside Me:

“Imagine having a conversation and being able to invisibly call up instant research. For all practical purposes, you’d be as smart as the Internet (or as dumb as the Internet, but still.) Twelve hours a day online is unhealthy; that’s why I need twenty-four.”

A beautiful caption: Photo of Britney Spears In Tiny Car Makes Us Wistful

On the death of LSD inventor Albert Hoffman:

“When you see him with his white hair and suit and tie, all looking like a Deutsche Bank senior VP, and you realize he couldn’t get his drug legalized, you just shake your head sadly for the stinky, beardy NORML kids on every college campus everywhere.”

We Are The Champions. Of Drugs:

“Shed a patriotic tear, fellow Americans: we are the most drugged-out nation in the world… Suck our woolie blunt smoke, Kiwis!… All it takes is one look at this handy chart to see… did you lock the front door? Did you hear something?”

Sarah Palin, The Life-iest Pro-Life Candidate Who Ever Scared The Crap Out Of Me:

“So by now you know John McCain picked some pretty lady from Alaska as his running mate. Crafty! But you have never heard of her before. No one really has. Sure, she was profiled in Vogue a few months back, but you don’t get Vogue for the articles, and the reason for that is that the Vogue profile totally missed one of the most interesting things about Sarah Palin, which is that she found out her fifth baby had Down syndrome through prenatal testing and she went ahead and had him anyway. Do you know how many people do that? Ten percent of people do that… There are many many people, a silent plurality I would even venture, who believe abortion is technically a kind of murder, but that it should stay legal anyway.”

Your Guide To the Endless Newsweek Story on the Endless Campaign:

“In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska.”

We Are Old And Sad:

“On one hand, we’ll get to see The Roots on TV every night; on the other hand, Black Thought opening for Jimmy Fallon every night is the cultural equivalent of Miles Davis playing his horn on the subway platform to back up a semi-trained dancing spider monkey.”

Barack Obama’s Secret Identity Revealed: Boring Yuppie

“Barack Obama — he’s just like us, if you’re a constitutional law professor married to a lawyer.”

White House Memo: Please Damn Bush With Faint Praise

“The single nicest tribute to the man from roughly January through November of this year came from Oliver Stone. But, post-election, post-John McCain, mid-Sarah Palin, Republicans are grudgingly, mildly complimentary of the inept man-child president they used to love. The nice thing about the Republican media machine is that they generally repeat their talking points verbatim instead of, like, reworking them to sound original.”

My online presence aspires to the condition of Gawker.