My friend Andrew, who was at the show, said this afterwards: “I can’t decide whether hearing the president say ‘This is not class warfare, it’s math’ or the fact that this band could become popular makes me feel more optimistic about the possibilities of life in America.”

Merrill Garbus started receiving rapturous praise from the indie-rock press a couple of years ago. I read her adulatory New Yorker profile and was immediately skeptical — in the abstract, the idea of a white indie rocker playing African music on a ukelele is not an enticing proposition for me. But curiosity got the better of me, and when I listened to some tracks, I was immediately hooked.

Stylistically, Tune-Yards is an unlikely combination of Fela Kuti, Medúlla-era Björk, Reggie Watts and Primus. Merrill Garbus uses pedals to sample and loop her voice and drumming, and plays baritone ukelele. Sometimes she strums it like a guitar, but she also plays fingerstyle in a way that evokes thumb piano. She’s accompanied by a bassist and two tenor sax players, all of whom also play assorted percussion instruments. See the band in action:

Here’s an actual music video:

Why does this music excite me so much?

The most obvious pleasure is Merrill G’s tremendous talent as a singer. Underneath all the growling and shrieking, she has a legit voice, with a big range and precise pitch control when she wants it. She’s an electrifying stage presence, too, with a relaxed intensity and unfakeable confidence.

Merrill G’s writing is interesting too, though not as consistent as her performance. Her tunes are quirky, thorny and dense. They have a lot of abrupt starts and stops, and show clear signs of being assembled solo in a bedroom on Garageband. Merrill G is masterful with the rhythmic and sonic aspects of English, with a dense syllabic flow that leans toward hip-hop. (She also sings a bit in Swahili.) Her melodies are chants or simple pentatonics, but still manage to show a lot of personal idiosyncrasy, like her penchant for starting and ending on scale degree two.

It’s always politically tricky when white musicians imitate black music. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a bad white rapper, for example. White musicians have a very mixed track record with African sounds. I’m totally in favor of David Byrne and Paul Simon, but Vampire Weekend is painful. Merrill G has so far been a lot closer to David Byrne. Rather than imitating the surface sounds of African music, she’s internalized it and used it to express the truth of her inner self. Some of the technique might be borrowed from Africa, but the content is all about modern America, and it feels truthful and authentic coming from her.

Live looping

The most significant aspect of Tune-Yards’ music is Merrill G’s use of live looping. Anyone who wants to make groove-oriented music in the present moment faces a dilemma. Live drummers tend to fall back into tiresome rock cliches, which get lamer with every passing year. On the other hand, sampled and programmed beats aren’t conducive to dynamic live performances. It’s hard to get that feeling of excitement from watching someone press the space bar on a laptop and then just… stand there.

Live looping gives Tune-Yards the best of both worlds. Merrill G records her drum patterns into the loop pedal right in front of you, one instrument at a time: floor tom, rim shots, snare, cymbals. She couldn’t use rock cliches if she wanted to, since she plays standing up and doesn’t use a kick drum. Because she doesn’t always nail her patterns exactly, her loops have an appealing human quality. And she mixes it up, so some tunes use only looped drums, some use both looped and live drums, and some are played entirely live.

Merrill G’s looped vocals are even fresher-sounding than the drums. Sometimes she uses them to do conventional backing vocals with herself. Sometimes the vocals act as a rhythmic element. Sometimes they build into hair-raising noise collage. Most songs use some combination of the above. By stopping and starting the loops in unexpected places, the tunes are spiced with attention-grabbing silences, a much better way to snap the room into focus than boring fills and crescendos.

If you couldn’t tell from reading this blog, I’m not too wild about rock and roll these days. I enjoy the classics, but I don’t think there’s much juice left in the orange anymore. I like Tune-Yards because they rock, incredibly hard, without falling back on tired rock tropes. I’d like to hear more music like that.

Some wishes

One of the high points of the show was when Merrill G had us all sing a long sustained note, the fifth of the key, through a section of one song. There’s room for way more audience participation than that in the Tune-Yards experience. I’d love to see Merrill sample the crowd clapping a simple pattern, or chanting, and then build on top. Audience participation is one of the main things missing from most concerts, and when you do it right, it’s magical. It’s one of the great sicknesses of our society that we leave music-making to specialists, while most people just passively observe. Tune-Yards could create some truly ecstatic group music-making, without having to get all kumbaya about it.

I also wouldn’t mind hearing Tune-Yards slip a cover or two into the mix. Original material is all well and good, but it would have been really satisfying to hear the set close with a radical take on a classic eighties pop tune. Anna suggested “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper, which I think would be perfect — imagine Merrill G shrieking the lyrics over a raucous drum loop. Or how about some Michael Jackson? “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” would fit their style like a glove. Pop covers would be another way to bring in some more audience participation, since Merrill G’s knotty original stuff doesn’t facilitate much singing along.

My own preferred form of audience participation is the remix, so here’s a mashup of Tune-Yards’ “Bizness” with “Nobody Beats The Biz” by Biz Markie, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” by Kanye West and Jay-Z, “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” by Billie Holiday, “Taking Care Of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive and “Strictly Business” by EPMD. Enjoy.

Bizness megamix by ethanhein

Update: really good article discusses Merrill Garbus’ complex gender politics. Recommended.

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.

Blues is a confusing term. You probably have some idea of what blues is, but it’s surprisingly hard to define it specifically. There are many songs with the word “blues” in the title that aren’t technically blues at all, like “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams. John Lee Hooker was the living embodiment of blues, but a lot of his best-known songs aren’t technically blues either.

Meanwhile, there are quite a few songs using the blues form that you might not think to identify as blues. Two examples: “Shuckin’ The Corn” by Flatt and Scruggs, and the theme from the sixties Batman TV show.

So what exactly is blues?

Blues is a mood

The term descends from the “blue devils,” slang for depression. Blues music is a soulful, wailing expression of pain, heartbreak and yearning. But not all blues is depressing, and not all depressing music is blues. There’s a whole category of bragging, sexually dominant blues by artists like Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith, the precursors to swaggering hip-hop MCs. Meanwhile, punk-influenced bands like Nirvana and Radiohead make music that’s full of anguish, but you wouldn’t call their material blues. To me, blues is more about persevering through the pain than the pain itself. It’s an expression of adult regrets and sorrows, as opposed to rock’s more adolescent angst.

It’s possible to invest just about any style of music with blues feeling. In rock, jazz, country or pop, you can get blues feel by playing slower, swinging more, using more expression and idiosyncrasy, playing repetitive and riff-based ideas, and being as emotionally direct as possible. You can also slip in the blues scale; more on that below. I’ve noticed that most of the singers I like infuse everything they do with blues feeling, from Aretha Franklin to Gregg Allman to Michael Jackson.

Aside from the general emotion, the word blues refers to three specific technical music concepts: a scale, a set of pitches, and a song form.

The blues scale

To make the blues scale, start with a minor pentatonic scale and add the sharp fourth/flat fifth.

The blues scale descends from west African music brought to America by slaves. It sounds equally good over major and minor chords, and it flouts European conventions of consonance and dissonance. See a full blog post about the blues scale.

Blue notes

A lot of people incorrectly describe the flat third and seventh of the blues scale as “blue notes.” Blue notes are microtonal pitches that lie between the piano keys. See a full blog post about blue notes.

The blues song form

When musicians say “This song is a blues in C,” they mean that the song has a twelve-bar form using a particular combination of C7, F7 and G7 chords. All those 7th chords have unresolved tritones in them, a crucial ingredient in the blues feel. Here’s the simplest version of twelve-bar blues in C.

| C7 | C7 | C7 | C7 |
| F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| G7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |

Here’s a more common version, with a little more complexity.

| C7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| G7 | F7 | C7 | G7 |

There are uncountable thousands of songs written in the twelve-bar blues form. One of my favorites is Muddy Waters’ “Standing Around Crying” — the devastating harmonica is by Little Walter Jacobs.

There are endless refinements and embellishments you can tack onto this basic structure. Jazz musicians will usually play something more like this:

| Cmaj7 | F7     | Cmaj7 | G-7 C7 |
| F7    | F#dim7 | C7    | A7     |
| D-7   | G7     | C7 A7 | D-7 G7 |

Again, to pick one example out of uncountably many, here’s “Parker’s Mood” by Charlie Parker.

“Parker’s Mood” and “Standing Around Crying” hint at the staggering breadth of expression you can get out of the twelve-bar-blues form. Some musicians return to the form again and again and never exhaust the possibilities. Duke Ellington alone probably wrote hundreds of twelve-bar blues tunes.

The blues form is basic knowledge for American musicians, which makes it a reliable standby, especially for informal or ad hoc groups. I did a show at St Nick’s Pub a few years ago with a jazz and R&B singer named Nicole Bishop. Most of her band members were meeting for the first time on stage that night. (In the jazz world this isn’t as unusual a situation as you might think.) The weather was bad, and Nicole was very late to the gig. To stall for time, the band played blues in various keys at various tempos, including “Twisted” by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and “Blue Monk” by Thelonious Monk. We were able to keep the audience from getting impatient and leaving until Nicole arrived.

There are some other widely-used blues forms other than the standard twelve-bar. Eight bar blues is the first two thirds of twelve-bar blues, as in “Bemsha Swing” by Monk. There’s also sixteen bar blues, which usually repeats bars nine and ten of the twelve-bar variety, as in “Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock.

Minor blues

It’s possible to play twelve-bar blues in minor keys too. Here’s a typical form.

| C-7 | C-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| F-7 | F-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| Ab7 | G7  | C-7 | C-7 |

“The Thrill Is Gone” by BB King is probably the best-known minor blues tune. John Coltrane loved the minor blues, and used it for some of his best compositions. My favorite is “Equinox,” which features what might well be the man’s most beautiful solo.

Lewis Porter has a full transcription of “Equinox” in his book John Coltrane: His Life And Music, an absolute must-read for jazz nerds.

Simpler blues forms

The simplest form of blues doesn’t have a formal name. I call it the “one chord blues,” an open-ended groove on a single chord, ambiguously major and/or minor. John Lee Hooker got a lot of mileage out of this form.

Coltrane played a lot of one-chord blues too, though with a very different stylistic vocabulary. Coltrane’s one-chord blues is about as intense as music gets.

Blues modules for guitar

Blues is exceptionally well suited to the guitar, since a lot of the tastiest riffs fall easily under the fingers. Here’s a standard boogie-woogie groove for blues in A. It’s a good exercise for a beginner who’s mastered the standard fifteen chords and wants to take the next step. Use your index on the second fret, your ring on the fourth fret and your pinkie on the fifth fret.

The racial politics of blues

The history of American music is largely the story of white people appropriating traditionally black forms. That’s never more true than the story of the blues. White musicians enriched rock and roll immeasurably by injecting it with big doses of blues, and some of them enriched themselves financially that way too. Some white blues appropriators have made a good-faith effort to show proper love and appreciation. Others, not so much. The Onion says it best: “Affluent White Man Enjoys, Causes The Blues.”

Blues and originality

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I take issue with the concept of originality in music. I don’t think that originality is desirable, or even possible. Long before I got involved in sample culture, I confronted the issue of originality and ownership in the context of blues. Take the guitar riff I wrote out above. Who owns that? Who originated it? If I use it in a song, am I being original?

Blues is defined by a set of distinctive cliches, interchangeable modules. Different people will combine those modules together in different ways, but everyone from Charlie Patton to Charlie Parker is drawing from the same box of legos. What’s the difference between creating an “original” blues tune and just stringing standard riffs together? If you want your blues to be recognizable as such, you have to stick close to tradition. For traditional players in the days before recordings and widespread copyrighting, there was hardly any distinction between quotation and composition. See an eloquent expression of this idea by Peter Friedman.

The key to blues playing is to not to even try to be original. Inhabit the cliches, play them in your distinctive voice, and enjoy the connection to all the other musicians who have used those same cliches. Feel the pleasure of your ego dissolving in the face of a huge and beautiful tradition, belonging to everyone and no one.

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.

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