Nature Boy Megamegamix update

A while back, I made a mashup of many different versions of “Nature Boy”, one of the loveliest and weirdest jazz standards. Every so often I go back and add new versions to it. Here’s the latest update.

I added Jon Hassell’s recording of the tune over the beat from “B Boys Will B Boys” by Mos Def and Talib Kweli, and did some other general tightening up. Enjoy!

Bach Anxiety

Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas and sonatas on guitar. I can play these pieces slowly and badly, but I’m having a great time doing it. And I have learned a ton from remixing them:

I want to write about why Bach is so much more appealing to me than the other composers of his time and place. This story is as much about Bach’s reception history as it is about the notes on the page. Michael Markham has a good summary of that reception history in his essay, “Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past”, from the 2021 book Rethinking Bach. If you don’t have university library access, Markham explores the same themes in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay, and also in this one. Let’s dig in! Continue reading

Morning Dew

Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending collapse of American democracy. But those missiles are all still there! The Grateful Dead ended a lot of their sets with a tune about what it would be like the day after the missiles launched. That is not the expected way to close out a set of hedonistic hippie rock.

This t-shirt is funny, but the song itself is pretty extraordinarily horrifying. In a good way!

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Transcribing Missy Elliott

As a kid growing up in New York City in the 80s, I loved rap, especially Run-DMC. In my teens, I moved away from it under the pressure of my rockist peers and other white nonsense. I found my way back into rap fandom as an adult, thanks in large part to Missy Elliott’s music of the early 2000s. “Get Ur Freak On” was especially undeniable, and it remains as fresh today as it was in 2001.

The track is my go-to example for Phrygian mode. I love that the plucky tumbi part doesn’t repeat identically; in the seventh repeat out of each eight, the last note is raised a half-step. (I marked these pattern-breaking notes in red in the chart below.) This is the kind of producerly attention to detail that makes a track grab you hard. Superb though Timbaland’s track is, though, my main interest here is Missy’s flow. I transcribed the first verse and the hook by writing a melody like I did for KRS-One and Lil’ Kim. Because I have Missy’s acapella track, I could assist my ears using Melodyne.

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Remixing Ben Shapiro

My dissertation research includes a methodology of my own invention, which I’m calling analytical remixing. I’m writing about three hip-hop educators, in order to illuminate hip-hop as an education philosophy, not just a subject area. That includes centering the remix as an important and underexplored music education practice. Beyond just writing about remixing, I am making some remixes as part of my research product. Specifically, I’m taking audio data (interviews, music, and various cultural artifacts) and remixing them to create a dissertation mixtape.

The value of the remix method is so self-evident to me that I made little effort to justify or explain it in the first draft of my dissertation proposal. However, my advisor, Alex Ruthmann, rightly pointed out that it is not self-evident to people who aren’t me. He suggestied that I pick a specific example and walk through it. So in this post, that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a remix I made of Ben Shapiro explaining why rap isn’t music.

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