Lessig and company think that sampling and remixing of popular culture can empower us, enabling us to take ownership over the products of the dominant culture industry and enhancing “semiotic democracy.” Copyright law inhibits recoding and is grossly overbalanced in favor of large corporate entities and other powerful actors. In particular, so the narrative goes, marginalized hip-hop artists have suffered under the heavy hand of lawsuits and exorbitant licensing fees.

Is the free-culture movement right?

Thomas Joo challenges the free-culture movement’s assertions both theoretically and empirically. He analyzes the infamous lawsuits and finds only reinforcement of a longstanding status quo. He provides extensive evidence that commercial hip-hop artists of the “golden age” (the 1980s and early 1990s) were perfectly aware of the requirement that they license their samples, and that they were able to produce and profit from their music nonetheless.

Art and architecture critic Hal Foster coined the term “recoding” to refer to sampling, remixing, mashups, quotation and all other forms of artistic appropriation. This is a useful word — while the various practices it subsumes differ technically, they spring from the same creative impulse and are treated similarly under the law. Joo does some sly recoding of his own when he subtitles one of the sections of his paper “More Samples, More Problems?” in homage to “Mo Money Mo Problems.”

Sampling lawsuits go back to the earliest days of hip-hop

Lawsuits over unauthorized use of copyrighted material in hip-hop hardly began in the 1990s; they go back at least as far as 1979, when Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards successfully sued the Sugarhill Gang for their appropriation of “Good Times.” Joo provides a valuable service by debunking the sampling lawsuit mythology. However, he goes too far on the other side, casting doubt on the basic validity and worth of remixing and sampling pop culture.

Joo is skeptical of claims made by Lessig and others that that relaxing copyright rules would advance semiotic democracy:

Law and technology facilitating recoding not only help independent record labels and artists question the cultural meanings advanced by major record companies; they also allow the latter to appropriate from the former. Moreover, recoding not only creates new meanings from existing cultural materials, but also repeats and reinforces those dominant cultural meanings. Indeed, by creating alternative meanings for dominant cultural materials such as popular music, recoding can contribute to their commercial appeal and cultural influence… Not all borrowing of cultural products constitutes autonomous meaning-making by individuals. For example, permitting recoding without copyright permission enables individuals to freely appropriate from the powerful culture industries, but it also enables appropriation in the reverse direction. Furthermore, individuals who recode may assign new meanings to dominant cultural products, but they cannot easily displace the existing meanings. Thus recoding re-disseminates those existing meanings and reaffirms their importance.

This is a thought-provoking claim, but one that I ultimately find unconvincing.

Is compulsory licensing the answer?

Some free culture people advocate for the institution of a compulsory licensing scheme for sampling, similar to the longstanding system for covering other artists’ compositions. Joo does not consider this a reasonable solution. He favors the current situation, where copyright owners can set whatever licensing terms and prices that they see fit, or refuse to grant licenses at all. Joo believes that a creator’s right to control the meaning and interpretation of their work deserves protection more than the right of others to recode that work. He sees compulsory licensing of sampling as an effective subsidy for samplers. The market presently sets licensing fees, and a mandated licensing scheme would keep the prices artificially low. Joo questions whether such a de facto subsidy of sampling is worthwhile:

[T]he tension between legal restrictions and creative energy can be a productive one. After all, copyright law does not constitute a prohibition on cultural appropriation: it merely assigns it a price, just as every aspect of artistic production, from guitars to paintbrushes, has a price. Sampling in hip-hop, like earlier kinds of musical borrowing, did not develop in some mythical golden age in which intellectual property was unregulated.

Joo observes that hip-hop pioneers like DJ Kool Herc managed to recode copyrighted works at for-profit dance parties under a copyright regime essentially identical to the one that exists today. This glosses over an important distinction, however. Herc and his peers were operating outside of the law, not in compliance with it. A venue is supposed to pay a blanket license to the rights management organizations covering whatever songs get played by DJs, the jukebox or live bands. But that license doesn’t extend to the extensive alterations that hip-hop turntablists make to recorded works. Also, block parties tend not to pay blanket license fees. Joo equates not being punished with having the tacit blessing of the law.

Did the Biz Markie lawsuit end the golden age of sampling?

The greatest strength of Joo’s paper is his clarification of the widely misunderstood decision in the Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros. Records. The case resulted in a Biz Markie album being pulled from store shelves due to an unlicensed sample from “Alone Again” by Gilbert O’Sullivan.

Free culture advocates point to this case as having imposed a new legal sanction on unlicensed sampling that hadn’t previously existed. The story goes that before Grand Upright, hip-hop and electronica artists were free to sample at will; after Grand Upright, only the biggest stars could afford to use samples. Joo points out that this is a gross misreading of the decision. Biz Markie and his label were perfectly aware that they were required to obtain permission for all of their sample usage, and that they had failed to obtain such permission for the Gilbert O’Sullivan sample. The only issue in the case was over who precisely owned the copright to “Alone Again,” and whether the injunction ordering the album removed from stores was an appropriate remedy.

So are you allowed to sample without permission or not?

The law regarding sampling copyrighted recordings is unclear. Prior to the Biz Markie case, music labels worked out ad-hoc arrangements, setting prices and reaching agreements according to the specific situation. It’s possible that Biz Markie and other golden age hip-hop artists could have put forward a Fair Use argument for not having to pay for samples at all, so long as their use was sufficiently transformative as to constitute a commentary on or parody of the original work. But this isn’t what artists did; most recognizable samples got cleared, and those artists who didn’t seek permission knew they were at risk of a lawsuit. While sample licenses may have been costly, Joo sees that cost as belonging to the same category as the cost of recording studios, engineers, marketing, distribution and so on.

Joo is less persuasive in his analysis of Double Dee and Steinski‘s 1983 track, “Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix,” which is comprised entirely of well-known copyrighted songs, along with movie and TV quotes, spliced together from analog tape.

This track and its followups were enormously influential on sample-based producers. Steinski and Double Dee neither sought nor obtained permission to use any of their samples, and never released their proto-mashups commercially. Nevertheless, their work was widely heard and imitated. Joo takes this as evidence that copyright law didn’t hinder creative recoding. However, he misses a key point. The “Lesson” mashups became famous because they were widely played by DJs on commercial radio and in clubs, quite illegally. The fact that Double Dee, Steinski, the clubs and radio stations all escaped legal sanction is their good luck, not a sign of the culture’s broader tolerance for such copyright violations.

Joo is on firmer ground when he observes that several classic sample-heavy hip-hop records were made using licensed samples, including the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. While the license fees for both albums were considerable, that didn’t keep them from turning substantial profits. Joo also points to the example of Public Enemy, who expressed defiance of the law in their lyrics but nevertheless licensed their more recognizable samples. Public Enemy frontman Chuck D has himself brought two infringement suits for unauthorized sampling of his voice.

The conventional wisdom is that hip-hop producers were forced to abandon the dense collage method favored by Public Enemy and De La Soul for fear of lawsuits. Joo points out that this was more likely a consequence of hip-hop gaining a higher profile and becoming more profitable, resulting in copyright holders raising their clearance fees — a simple matter of supply and demand. Furthermore, Joo believes that the collage technique may simply have become passé. While many hip-hop fans would disagree, this argument can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Girl Talk and Fair Use

The law on sampling continues to be confusing and contradictory, with some courts finding that use of very short samples doesn’t violate copyright law, while others finding that any use of a copyrighted recording whatsoever is a violation. The Fair Use exception to copyright law isn’t universally recognized, though Joo considers it to be a good enough shelter for sampling artists from unfair prosecution. He cites Greg “Girl Talk” Gillis, whose work consists entirely of highly recognizable pop samples. Girl Talk samples with no permission whatsoever, invoking Fair Use to justify his practices. So far, no one has taken action against him, but this is probably not due to the robustness of Fair Use as a legal argument. Copyright attorney Martin Schwimmer once told me that no one will ever sue Girl Talk, regardless of the legal issues, because it would be a losing proposition. Girl Talk would be a highly sympathetic defendent, since he’s white and well-educated, with a fervent online following. (Martin Schwimmer himself is a fan.) If Girl Talk is successfully sued, the internet will rise up in protest, resulting in a public relations disaster that would cost the copyright holder far more than they’d win in a settlement. If the hypothetical copyright holder brought a case and lost, it would open the floodgates to unlicensed sampling. Rights holders prefer the status quo, where the law is murky and people mostly license their samples to be on the safe side.

Copyright owners and creators aren’t necessarily the same people

Joo is too quick to overlook the absurdities of copyright law as it stands. He notes approvingly that in the case Bridgeport Music Inc. v. Dimension Films, the interests of a less-wealthy and powerful musician (George Clinton) prevailed over those of two wealthier and more-powerful entities (NWA and Dimension Films.) However, this isn’t quite accurate. George Clinton had sold his copyrights long before the case, in an ill-considered business decision. The winner of the Bridgeport case was Bridgeport Music, a company that buys up copyrights and profits from licensing them. George Clinton didn’t benefit from Bridgeport’s lawsuit at all. In fact, Clinton is outspoken in his enthusiasm for sampling of his work.

Sample licenses are getting expensive

As hip-hop and electronic dance music have become more commercially successful and culturally prominent, rights holders have recognized the value of samples and have raised their license fees accordingly. Free culture advocates and hip-hop lovers alike complain that presently, the only way to make collage-like works from pop music is to either skirt the law or pay exorbitant sums of money. In their book Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola calculated that if Paul’s Boutique were made today, the sample licenses would result in almost twenty million dollars in losses on 2.5 million copies sold. The members of Public Enemy complain that their albums can’t be reissued because of the prohibitive licensing costs. Joo is unconvinced that the price of sample licenses is too high, and argues against a compulsory licensing scheme.

By limiting a copyright owner‘s control over derivative works and allowing users to simply take and pay, a compulsory licensing regime would likely lower users‘ costs. But it would externalize and subsidize users‘ costs; it would not necessarily lower costs overall. A compulsory licensing regime would constitute a subsidy of users at public expense–i.e., the considerable expense of administering such a regime.

His concern here seems overblown; after all, a similar argument could be made against compulsory licensing for compositions, but that system has worked well enough for a hundred years.

Is sampling good for society?

The fundamental question underlying all of the copyright controversies is this: should we place a higher value on the right of a copyright holder to control the use of their work, or the right of everyone else to recode that work? Joo is unequivocal in siding with the copyright holders. “Even assuming recoding advances semiotic democracy, subsidizing any method of cultural production can do so.” This argument too glibly equates all forms of artistic expression, however. In the media-saturated world we inhabit, I would argue that recoding of that media is a much more important right than the ability to compose new string quartets or bebop heads. It’s exactly the controversial nature of recoded works that makes them culturally valuable.

Not only is Joo unconvinced that recoding has special value; he thinks it may actually be harmful to semiotic democracy by reinforcing the hegemony of the corporate-produced media. He quotes Hal Foster: “Capitalism welcomes recoding, incorporates it, and co-opts it: such has been the fate of nearly every youth subculture based on recoding, from rock ‘n‘ roll to punk to hip-hop.” This is true, but both Foster and Joo neglect the time lag factor. Capitalism only appropriates recoding movements once they are widely established and no longer dangerous. Coca-Cola can visibly sponsor Jazz At Lincoln Center because it has been many decades since anyone found jazz to be controversial or threatening. Similarly, cruise lines wouldn’t use Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” in their ads if the song was still widely associated with heroin use, as it was when it was first released.

Joo is quite mistaken when he says that “[t]he mere act of recoding pop culture is no longer by itself an important or novel artistic statement.” This may be true in certain circles, but is by no means a valid generalization. Musicians, fans and critics remain deeply divided over the merits and ethics of sampling, many decades after it has become a commonplace. Recoding can even provoke vehement rage. Still, Joo does not believe that this controversy is reason enough to be protective of recoding.

Lowering the cost of recoding could retard semiotic democracy in that it would subsidize not only the semiotically weak and resource-poor, but also the most culturally influential members of society. Given the greater resources and distribution networks of established media corporations, their recodings are likely to have more cultural influence than those of less powerful speakers.

The problem with this argument is that it already describes the status quo. For example, Disney is notorious for appropriating public-domain folk tales, and then vigorously suing anyone who appropriates their works.

Does hip-hop need sampling?

Joo questions hip-hop essentialists who maintain that recoding is fundamental to the art form: “Sampling is… neither necessary to nor specific to hip-hop music.” He invokes the Beastie Boys, OutKast and the Roots as hip-hop artists who play conventional instruments. He neglects to mention, however, that these artists also sample and quote extensively. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of the Roots is a world-class drummer, but he nevertheless sometimes uses sampled breakbeats in his productions rather than playing live drums. And while Joo further tries to weaken the connection between hip-hop and recoding by mentioning its roots in spoken-word poetry, he neglects to mention that rappers “sample” other songs by quoting them continually, and sometimes run afoul of copyright law as a result. For instance, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh quoted the Beatles’ “Michelle” in the original version of “The Show.” They were forced to remove the line by EMI in subsequent pressings.

Joo is sanguine that the restrictions imposed by clearance costs stimulate new forms of creativity. For example, he cites DJ Shadow, who uses unlicensed samples that are too fragmentary or obscure to be litigated over. But flying below the legal radar is not the same thing as cultural approbation. Joo also gives a poor example with M.I.A.‘s 2007 hit, “Paper Planes.” He commends her for using samples of gunshots and a ringing cash register rather than recoded pop, while neglecting to mention that a looped sample of the Pixies runs throughout the entire song, and that the chorus’ structure references Wreckz-N-Effect.

Joo is right to point out that that the stereotype of hip-hop’s pioneers as disenfranchised and poor is a gross oversimplification. From the beginning, hip-hop artists have come from a diversity of class backgrounds. Joo is also correct that in the 1980s, samplers were expensive machines limited to the technological elite. However, once again, he goes too far in puncturing the hip-hop creation myth. Artists who did not have access to digital samplers used whatever means were available to them to do their recoding. Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest reminisces in the documentary Beats, Rhymes And Life about making painstaking “pause tapes,” a process that took hours to produce a few minutes of a looped sample.

Sampling musicians turn music listening into a conversation

Just as recording was a novel art form a hundred years ago, so too is sampling today. The ability to sample and remix recordings changes them from passive media to interactive media. Joo undervalues this transformation, and the art of sampling generally: “[S]amples are valuable to music producers because they offer a way to obtain the sound of a musician without employing any musicians.” This betrays Joo’s aesthetic preconceptions. Sampling musicians are still musicians. Creative sample use requires as much skill and practice as creative violin or piano playing. When Joo equates sampling with “automated production methods in other industries,” he shows ignorance of the human choices that comprise the sampling process. Furthermore, Joo undervalues the power of recoding to reshape the meaning of source material: “Even the most active engagements with texts, such as the production of innovative derivative works, involve at least some ceding of the meaning-making function to the author of the source work.” This is demonstrably untrue; it is quite possible for a recoded work to be significantly greater than the sum of its parts. For example, the song “They Reminisce Over You” by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth turns samples of a lite-jazz recording of a Jefferson airplane song into the basis of an elegaic tribute to a friend who died young. Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth turn trite and banal source material into a powerfully moving work.

Joo continues to be inaccurate in his analysis of the Grey Album, a mashup of the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album created by the producer Danger Mouse. Joo maintains that Danger Mouse “never stood a serious chance of contesting the cultural meaning of the Beatles‘ White Album or Jay-Z‘s Black Album.” I myself am proof that this is untrue. I was indifferent to Jay-Z until I heard his music combined with Beatles songs that I knew and loved intimately. The Grey Album acted as a cultural ambassador, opening me up not only to Jay-Z but to many other hip-hop artists as well. Jay-Z is well aware of this effect, and releases his albums in remix-friendly acapella versions with the outspoken hope that people will do exactly what Danger Mouse did.

When Joo says that recoding corporate-created cultural commodities only further cements their hegemony, he conflates the terms “corporate-created” with “corporate-owned.” EMI may own the Beatles’ copyrights, but the Beatles aren’t a corporate entity. (They tried to become one in the late 1960s with their Apple company, and failed spectacularly.) When Danger Mouse recodes the Beatles, he is engaging in a dialog with four musicians, not the faceless corporation who happens to own their copyrights. Joo is eager to convince us that consumption of corporate-produced pop music is no different politically than consumption of corporate-produced sneakers. This is a gross misunderstanding of the musical experience. I may purchase Beatles or Jay-Z recordings, but I don’t “consume” those recordings. I have close and ongoing emotional relationships with them, I study them and remix them, imitate them and react against them. I have no such intellectual discourse with my sneakers. Recoding has made my formerly one-sided relationship with recordings into a dialog, whether that means arranging “Dear Prudence” for a jazz octet or mashing it up with a Michael Jackson song.

Joo’s misunderstanding of the music-listening experience extends to the music production process. He observes that “[l]ike commercial pop hits, the very technology of digital sampling consists of commodities sold by corporations.” This is a facile and meaningless comparison. Some music production is indeed sold by large and powerful corporate entities (like Apple’s Logic); some is sold by small, independent companies (like Ableton Live); and some is given away for free on the Internet (like Audacity and ChucK.) Joo is even more mistaken that it’s impossible to assert ownership over mass-market entertainment. “Because media culture is a product we consume rather than make (at least not entirely), it is not entirely our culture.” This is exactly why it’s so important that we have a right to recode it. Joo draws a false equivalency between “watching television, writing fan fiction, or remixing a hit pop song” as “merely guilty pleasures, more like eating junk food, drinking beer, or driving a big car, and less like meaningful expressive or political activity worthy of special legal concern.” I’m inclined to agree with him about watching TV, but he’s utterly wrong about remixing (and fan fiction.) Writing generic classical or jazz melodies requires significantly less effort for me than a creative remix. There’s no comparison to be made with watching television or eating junk food.

I agree with Joo that the health of semiotic democracy depends on many factors besides copyright law. And I appreciate his effort to puncture the mythology of the free-culture movement. However, his own counterarguments are oversimplified as well, and he doesn’t value recoding highly enough. The free-culture movement may not have its facts in order, but its political heart is in the right place.

Gil Evans wrote the abstract intro section, partially inspired by “Voiles” by Debussy. The tune proper begins at 0:34. If you want to learn how to improvise jazz, you should definitely learn Miles’ solo. A guy named Steve Khan posted this nice transcription of it, but you’re better off figuring it by ear. Learn to sing it first, and then work it out on your instrument. Miles’ solo isn’t too challenging technically, and it can teach you a ton about melody, phrasing and build.

Here’s a live television performance of “So What.”

“So What” is famous for being one of the first modal jazz tunes. This just means that it doesn’t have a lot of chord changes compared to the usual harmonic density of bebop. Because “So What” is relatively easy to play, it’s a standard piece for beginners and high school jazz bands. The main part uses the D dorian scale, the mode you get when you play the C major scale from D to D. This scale is especially easy on the piano — just play the white keys. To play the bridge, you slide up a half step to E flat dorian.

The So What riff

The melody of “So What” is a call in the bass followed by a response from the piano and horns. The response part of the melody is known as the So What riff. It’s a pair of minor seventh chords, one a whole step above the root, the other on the root, played in the particular rhythm shown above. Miles Davis didn’t invent the riff. It’s a jazz accompaniment cliche, widely used by pianists, guitarists and horn section arrangers. Miles just had the wisdom to pluck it from the memepool and place it front and center in a tune. The riff is built on the So What chord: a stack of fourths with a third on top. The fourths make the chord sound ambiguous and open-ended. It’s a hip sound, and in fact you can use the So What chord for a variety of harmonic purposes, not just minor sevenths. It’s an especially useful voicing for guitarists, since it’s really easy to play and sounds good in so many different situations.

“So What” and “Impressions”

Casual music fans use the term “sampling” to mean any kind of musical quotation, interpolation or reference, not just digital manipulation of audio recordings. I think they’re correct to conflate all these different practices, since they all stem from the same desire to repurpose existing ideas in new context. In the broader sense of the term, “So What” has been sampled extensively. Most famously, John Coltrane, the tenor sax player on the original recording of “So What,” used its chord changes for his own classic tune, “Impressions.”

“Impressions” is more of a mashup, really, since its melody is sampled from Morton Gould’s composition “Pavane” — listen at 1:28.

Coltrane probably learned this composition from Ahmad Jamal, who recorded a popular  arrangement of it in 1955. Miles Davis was a big Ahmad Jamal fan too, and is said to have drawn inspiration from this passage’s harmonic setting for “So What.” Lewis Porter says that Coltrane got the B section for “Impressions” from Ravel’s “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.” This piece was also the basis for a 1930s standard, “The Lamp Is Low.”

How’s this for a sample chain? McCoy Tyner was Coltrane’s pianist on “Impressions.” Later McCoy recorded his own version of “Impressions.” A piece of the bass solo from this recording was sampled by Black Sheep in their classic track “The Choice Is Yours.” The memes do get around, don’t they?

Coltrane and his bandmates got a lot of mileage out of the So What riff, both in their writing and improvisation. Hear the riff at work in “Song of the Underground Railroad.”

The So What riff in funk, soul and R&B

Pee Wee Ellis, the trombonist and arranger for James Brown, says that he unconsciously copied “So What” when he wrote the horn part for “Cold Sweat.” It’s fitting, then, that “Cold Sweat” has itself been sampled many times.

The inspiration flows both ways. Miles loved James Brown and imitated him explicitly during his funk period. For example, Miles instructed Tony Williams to play the “Cold Sweat” beat on “Frelon Brun.”

And now, here’s where it gets really convoluted. One of the many songs sampling “Cold Sweat” is “Welcome To The Terrordome” by Public Enemy. The track also includes a sample of James Brown’s “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose.” Miles actually sampled that same beat himself, on his late-period tune “Blow.”

The So What riff also shows up in the horn line from “Let a Woman Be a Woman And A Man Be A Man” by Dyke and the Blazers. This is another tune that’s been sampled extensively, most prominently in “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy, as heard in tons of TV commercials.

The Heavy’s usage of the Dyke and the Blazers sample has been the subject of intense litigation, which I think is funny, because Dyke and the Blazers copied their tune almost note-for-note from James Brown. The irony of the situation merits a full blog post of its own.

More recently, Erykah Badu repurposed “So What” for her live version of “Rimshot.”

Teena Marie makes similar use of “So What” in her tune “Harlem Blues.”

For all of the influence “So What” has had, I’m surprised to find that there are hardly any hip-hop tracks that sample it directly. Maybe it’s too sacred even for hip-hop producers. If you can think of a good example, hit the comments. Meanwhile, here’s a diagram of all the songs mentioned above.

Hear a mashup of many of the tracks discussed in this post:

So What megamix by ethanhein

Other Miles Davis samples

Busta Rhymes‘ “Everything Remains Raw” gets its moody chord progression from the ending of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now.” It’s not on YouTube, sadly, but it’s worth chasing down, it’s a beauty. OutKast uses Miles’ trumpet scream from “Sivad” on “Ain’t No Thang.” See a map of many more Miles Davis samples. And read all about how Miles remixed himself on the album In A Silent Way.

Doing this kind of genealogical tracing of music has convinced me that ultimately, there is no originality. There’s just the splicing together and hybridizing of memes. Some people find this realization dismaying. I find it exciting. I enjoy tracing the lineage of the music I care about. Hope you’re enjoying it too.

There’s probably a whole generation of producers who have sliced and diced this beat without having heard the actual song. I’m sure the same is true of “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache.” Beyond the break, “Cold Sweat” is a remarkable piece of music, way out ahead of its time. On James Brown’s album of the same name, it’s sitting alongside jazz standards like “Nature Boy” and some boilerplate blues and R&B. Compared to those more traditional songs, “Cold Sweat” sounds like it belongs in another era entirely. It has a radically simple two-chord structure and an African-influenced intricacy to its rhythmic groove, and it still sounds pretty fresh more than thirty years later.

“Cold Sweat” was written by the Famous Flames’ bandleader Pee Wee Ellis, seeded by a bassline James Brown came up with vocally. Ellis says he got his horn line from “So What” by Miles Davis, which has been the basis for many other tunes as well. Hear a mashup of “Cold Sweat” with “So What” and other related tunes.

So What megamix by ethanhein

As befits a song based on a musical quotation, “Cold Sweat” has been sampled widely. Here’s a sample map; click to see it bigger.

“Cold Sweat” has been a particularly rich source of inspiration for Public Enemy — they sample it on “How to Kill a Radio Consultant,” “Prophets of Rage” and “Welcome To The Terrordome.”

“Welcome To The Terrordome” is an unusually dense web of samples, even by Public Enemy standards. It includes several other James Brown samples, including “Give It Up Or Turnit A-Loose,” “Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved” and “Soul Power.” And “Welcome To The Terrordome” has itself been sampled and quoted many times, by KRS-One, Non Phixion and Ice Cube, among others.

“Cold Sweat” is so influential that Mongo Santamaria’s cover version spawned a hot breakbeat of its own. It’s at 2:21.

RJD2, composer of the Mad Men theme song, uses Mongo Santamaria’s beat in “The Chicken-Bone Circuit.”

Ultramagnetic MCs love “Cold Sweat” almost as much as Public Enemy. They use the James Brown version on “Kool Keith Housing Things.”

And they use the Mongo Santamaria version in “Feelin’ It.”

Finally, I myself use the Cold Sweat break in the first track from my forthcoming Delia Derbyshire remix project.

Planetarium Remix

Me vs James Brown vs Delia Derbyshire vs Babsy Singer

mp3 download, ipod format download

Here’s how to program the Cold Sweat break on a drum machine. Give the drummer some!

Here’s the real video, which sadly I can’t embed. In its place, enjoy a fan video.

I’ve loved this song for years while barely being able to make out any of the words. I finally had to look them up on Google. MJ isn’t exactly Cole Porter, but his lyrics have nice body logic, they sound good and are super pleasurable to sing. MJ had the same songwriting strategy as the Beatles: he started with a melody over a rhythmic groove, developed using nonsense syllables. Only later, once the whole song was in place and recorded as a demo, did he find words that fit the metrical scheme.

Verse one:

Lovely is the feeling now
Fever, temperatures rising now
Power (ah power) is the force, the vow
That makes it happen
It asks no questions why
So get closer
To my body now
Just love me
‘Til you don’t know how

The melodic nut meat of this tune is on the words “lovely,” “fever,” “power,” “happen” and so on. The first syllable of these words is sung on D#, the major third in the key of B. The second syllable is on the A below, the flat seventh in B. The interval between these two notes is a tritone. It’s a sound with a richly conflicted emotional resonance. If you’re willing to follow me through a little music theory, it’ll help you understand what makes this song so awesome.

Western music theory is based on the buildup and release of tension. One of the best ways to create tension is with dissonance. The tritone is considered by European tradition to be a very dissonant interval. Every major key has a tritone in it, between the fourth and seventh notes of the scale (fa and ti, for Sound Of Music fans.) If you’re a typical western listener and you hear a tritone, your ear wants it to resolve to a less dissonant interval. You want the fa to resolve down to mi, and the ti to resolve up to do.

African-American music treats the tritone very differently. The blues uses tons of unresolved tritones. In blues, chords with tritones can functionally feel stable and resolved, “dissonant” though they may be. (The music has lots of other intriguing harmonic grittiness, like microtones, and the simultaneous use of minor and major thirds.) The blues passed the unresolved tritone on to its many musical descendants: jazz, rock, funk and so on.

MJ is squarely within his musical tradition to be basing his melody on an unresolved tritone. Still, it’s startling to hear it featured so prominently and starkly in a pop song, on the very first two notes of the vocal melody no less. It gives a jolt of intensity to what might otherwise be a harmless piece of disco fluff.

Music is fundamentally all about math. Most of the musical intervals in the western tuning system are based on simple ratios, the kinds of numbers you can count on your fingers. The interval between A and the next A up is an octave, meaning that the ratio between the two notes’ frequencies is one to two. The interval between A and E is a fifth, a ratio of two to three. The interval between A and C# is a major third, a ratio of four to five. The tritone is different. The interval between A and D# is one to the square root of two. Your ear might not know which specific irrational number it’s hearing, but it knows that something weird and complex is at work, something you can’t count on your fingers.

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” asserts further non-European quality in its extremely minimalist chord progression. It has just two chords, A major and B7. The A major has B as its bass note, which really makes it more of a B9sus4 chord. The music term for this kind of unvarying chord pattern is a modal groove. In this case the mode is B mixolydian.

Western music is mostly linear. The chord progression tells a story of dissonance leading to consonance, or vice versa. Modal tunes are more Eastern, trance-like and drone-oriented. They’re about creating a cyclical ambiance, a mood rather than a narrative. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” shares its modal quality with my other favorite Michael Jackson original, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which he wrote around the same time.

MJ’s chorus adds to the trance-inducing vibe by repeating the same line over and over:

Keep on with the force, don’t stop
Don’t stop ’til you get enough

It’s more of a mantra than a semantic idea. It helps keep the mind clear for the business at hand, the business of getting your groove on from the waist down.

The harmony and lyrics might be static, but there’s a lot of music packed into this track. Ben Wright’s string arrangement chases up and down the chromatic scale, adding another dash of unsettling dissonance. There are multiple layers of bells, handclaps and other percussion, and the bass and guitar mostly function as percussion too. Jerry Hey’s tight horn chart makes the brass into yet another percussion element, rather than a melodic one. Check out the stab at 1:37, the end of the first chorus. Hot!

As with all of MJ’s hits, “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” has been sampled many times. Some highlights, more or less in chronological order:

• Jazzy Jay – “Def Jam”
• Public Enemy – “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man”
• Double Trouble & Rebel MC – “Just Keep Rockin’ (Remix)”
• Slick Rick – “Impress The Kid”
• Mase ft Jay-Z, 112 and Lil’ Cease – “Cheat On You”
• Beyoncé – “Black Culture”
• People Under the Stairs – “Tuxedo Rap” (the sample is pitch-shifted way down, cool)

Purists might find it jarring, but I’m enjoying this remix with Jay-Z.

Here’s my own contribution:

MJ Makossa

mp3 download, ipod format download

Don’t stop!

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.