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Tag Archives: sample maps

Nas Is Like

Friday, August 20, 2010

If I had to pick a single track to explain to an alien or time traveler what hip-hop is and why it’s so awesome, I think I’d pick “Nas Is Like.” Nas has a great flow full of powerful imagery, but what makes this track for me is DJ Premier’s production. It’s a complex web [...]

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Songwriting and genealogy

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common [...]

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His name is Prince, and he is funky

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Hip-hop artists love Prince. Like them, he blends drum machines, live jazz-funk musicians and samples of other songs.

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Samples and DNA

Monday, August 3, 2009

Everybody who posts on Craigslist wanting to start a band includes a list of influences. To me those ads all read like wish lists of samples. Whether you end up recreating a sound live or using a sample directly makes little difference in terms of the mental creative process. Every band I’ve ever been in [...]

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Mashups as micro-mixtapes

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a [...]

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The Michael Jackson sample map goes viral

Friday, May 29, 2009

As part of the research for my book, I’ve been making sample maps, diagrams showing what songs include samples of what other songs. I’m a big sample geek. I like knowing where my music comes from the same way I like knowing where my food comes from. This map shows many, probably not nearly all, [...]

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