Sampling and influence

Whenever you look posts on the Musicians Wanted section of Craigslist by people who are starting bands, they all include a list of influences. They 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 yearned unconsciously for sampling. We’d try for the feeling of Stevie Wonder in Talking Book, or fifties Miles, or Led Zeppelin IV.

Shared musical memes are shared DNA

The tribal associations of music operate at a more granular level than entire genres or performers. Any shared musical memes build a network of musical association that can create pathways for emotional connection. Chord progressions, melodic figures, scales, rhythmic figures, lyrical phrases — all the DNA of music draws on a finite pool shared across the world’s musicians, the way that the genomes of humans and mice and fruit flies and daisies all draw on the same basic set of genes.

When John Lennon uses the sad descending chromatic bassline in “Dear Prudence,” he’s signaling an affinity for every piece of music that uses that bassline, and everyone who’s felt the mood that the bassline evokes.

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

I’m not a big Sarah McLachlan fan, but I do like her song “Ice Cream.” It has a nice 6/8 groove with a lot of syncopation, a groove I associate more with sixties Coltrane than with unthreatening singer-songwriters.

I finally looked “Ice Cream” up on the web and learned that the drummer on the session, Guy Nadon, is a jazz musician who studied with Elvin Jones.

By sneaking a little Coltrane DNA into the unlikely host of a Sarah McLachlan song, Guy Nadon was able to reach across my general hipsterish resistance and move me.

Shared DNA creates family

Michael Jackson had been on my mind quite a bit before he died, and hasn’t been far from my thoughts much since then. I’m especially interested in the “mama se mama sa mama coo sa” chant at the end of “Wanna Be Startin Something.” By quoting Manu Dibango, MJ was throwing a sly wink to all the disco and afro-funk lovers who were hip to “Soul Makossa.” Whenever someone references or samples the chant, it’s a signal of inclusion to those of us who care about MJ.

Referencing doesn’t have to be explicit or conscious for it to work. I loved “Got Your Money” by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Kelis on the first hearing without knowing exactly why. Later I wasn’t too surprised to find out that the beat is a slowed-down sample of “Billie Jean.”

All music evolves from previous music. Sampling makes the chain of memetic inheritance more explicit than other musical memes.

Sampling is more emotionally evocative than quotation

Sampling is an more powerful tool for emotional connection than quotation, because in addition to the melodic or rhythmic figure that’s being activated in your memory, it’s all the subtle nuances of a recording that you may have heard hundreds or thousands of times. Samples can short-circuit the analytic parts of your memory and tap directly into the deep unconscious.

Permission and ownership

The simultaneous beauty and menace of sampling is that you don’t need anyone’s permission: not the performers, not the producers, not the composers or arrangers or copyright holders. Selling your sampled works might be another ball of wax, but if you just want to make mashups, all you need is the audio and a few pieces of inexpensive software.

Be brave, let people sample you

The recording artists I admire are the ones who invite new interpretations of their work. Jay-Z puts out remix-friendly versions of his albums with the isolated vocals on one side and the instrumentals on the other, with the express purpose of making it easy for anyone to repurpose them. The electronic music world has responded enthusiastically, so now you can hear Jay’s rhymes paired with the Beatles, Radiohead, Brian Eno and other unlikely-seeming musical combinations. When I was more of a hip-hop dilettante, Jay’s music was a little too intense for me. Hearing him combined with the safely familiar White Album was the gateway for me to be able to appreciate his work in its original setting. Being able to connect to Jay opens the possibility of connecting to his many fans, which has broadened my social circle noticeably.

Not everybody likes the connections formed by sampling

A lot of people are angry about the practice of sampling, and I’m not just talking about copyright holders. Plenty of people I know find sampling enraging, from professional musicians to the most casual listeners and everyone in between. Maybe these people are attached to their emotional associations to particular recordings and don’t want them invaded. I can see that. When I hear a song based on a sample before the original, I can’t help but think of the sampling track when I eventually do hear the original.

I heard “Crazy In Love” by Beyoncé dozens of times before I ever heard “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)” by the Chi-Lites, the source of the brass and cymbal samples. As a result, the Chi-Lites inevitably evoke Beyoncé for me. I think this is basically a good thing. You can’t keep a fence around your emotions, no matter how much you might want to. More complex associations force the possibility of more connection with other people, and you can never have too much connection.

The discussion continues

A couple of my musician friends shared some thoughts about this post on Facebook. Jeremy is a rock bassist, and Jesse is a jazz trumpet player.

Jeremy:

Nicely done! One of the best defenses / explanations of sampling in music that I’ve read. One thing worth exploring / defusing when it comes to the people who hate sampling is “the craftmanship argument.” To wit: people who say that sampling is not valid because the sampler did not play or write the sampled element. I don’t think that this is a valid argument against the practice of sampling, but haven’t exactly put together why…

Me:

Thanks dude! Your opinion matters to me. I think the craftsmanship issue is a critical one, and yeah, it’s tricky. There’s the puritanical equation of effort with quality, for one thing. For another, there’s the idea that learning an instrument is more effortful than copping a sample. On the first front, well, that’s such a deep-seated cultural assumption that people tend to not be open to debating it. I’ve spent years struggling against it. Sampling seems “easier” because the work is kind of invisible compared to woodshedding on an instrument. But the work is still real. You need to listen to a lot of music and do a lot of analyzing of it before you can identify good samples. There’s not much effort in the act of pulling and looping them, but there’s a lot of intellectual groundwork to be laid, and in the end I think it ends up being as much effort as running scales on guitar or whatever.

Jesse:

Going to weigh in here with my three cents 1) The structural information of the song: lyrics, melody, harmony, even certain iconic rhythms can be quoted and referred to by a band or a composer either indirectly as in a quotation or iteration or directly by doing a cover tune, let’s say. 2) This is a paraphrase from “This is your brain on music” – A study was done where a 2 second clip of pop tunes was played. Just from the “sound” (the sonic environment – the production elements: reverb, orchestration, warmth) participants could reliably pick the tune out of a multiple choice list. I experimented with this by the way. It’s fun. Drop your iTunes needle around. Anyway, I can spot any track of “innervisions” in under a second. 3) That feel of that sound is what sampling is doing as well. And, sorry, wether its artfully done or not, is quite different than the content of the song: its the context of the sound of the song that produces the resonance.

Me:

I guess it depends on the length of the sample we’re talking about. A one-beat stab buried in the mix is going to work differently on the listener than a complete phrase. It’s the difference between the kick drum from the Funky Drummer vs the entire four-bar loop. My post was more about the use of full-length phrases, since that’s what tends to be the most emotionally (and legally) controversial.

Jesse:

I guess my point was that actually copping the sound of a recording live or on another recording is just about impossible without sampling. There’s something that can be artful about it but ultimately there is an appropriation of some producers hard, hard work to create an iconic sound. To equate the effort of sifting through a library with taste and creativity with the effort of actually producing those iconic sounds from scratch is absolutely offensive. It’s just a straight up different art form and without accurate sourcing is enslaving in that it makes something work outside its consent and original purpose.

Oh and . . . the bomb squad was great at it Irony. So much fun.

Me:

I agree with you that the whole point of sampling is to use a recognizable recording vibe along with the recognizable melody, rhythm etc. I don’t find it offensive. You could just as easily think of it as a tribute, homage, humbling yourself before your source inspiration. That’s how I think of it. I do believe in accurate sourcing. The present brokenness of the copyright system drives samplers underground and encourages secrecy about sources. I think there’s another unspoken philosophical tension here about who owns a piece of art, the artist or the world. I side with the world. I feel like, I bought the record, I own it now.

Jesse:

I’m on both sides of it. It’s a good debate. Warhol comes to mind obviously.

Jeremy:

There’s also obvious parallels in sampling to collage art in the visual world, and found art. When you take a sample out of the original context, juxtapose it with new samples or original music, you create a new, hybrid context.

You can have bad sampling, just as you can have bad original composition. When someone hijacks an entire song and just redubs their vocals, well, that sets off a lot of alarms… I think there needs to be a new critical language to address what constitutes “artful” sampling vs. “artless” sampling.

Jesse:

This is an interview that shares Pat Matheny’s views on Kenny G. Vis artless sampling. Priceless. Good for the soul. Devastatingly brutal.

A snippet: “Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track “What a Wonderful World”. With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all – as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music.”

Jeremy:

I had read this before – a friend, knowing my love for incendiary music writing, forwarded it to me. It’s great. “But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, f*cked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible…”

So I think we have a good working definition of what qualifies “bad” sampling.

Me:

Yeah. I’m not completely opposed to the idea of overdubbing your own sax solo on another recording, but ideally you’d be someone less lame.

Here’s my story of good sampling. We did a Revival Revival show and while Barbara took a break, I spun some of my instrumentals. On the Bittersweet Melody remix, I have a sample of the opening few bars of A Love Supreme. Two tenor sax players were at the gig, so after the sample had run a few times they both jumped in on it. They played it in more or less in unison a few times and then took off on this whole interlocking thing with the phrase transposed and displaced against the original. It was pretty magical, I wish we’d recorded it.

Guys, do you mind if I include some excerpts of this conversation in the blog post itself? I think non-FB users would find it interesting. If you’d prefer I didn’t that’s cool too.

Jeremy:

I’ve got no problem with that… it seems especially appropriate to throw some samples into the writing, if you don’t mind getting all “meta” with it. Personally, I have no problems with meta-whateva.

Oh, and I wish you had recorded that Revival Revival gig too! In my head it sounds awesome! Did you know the tenor players were going to do that?

Me:

No idea! One of them had been playing bass and a little sax with us regularly and the other was just there hanging out, I had never met him before. It was both of their first time hearing the track.

Jeremy:

Good frickin’ lord… real musicians just blow me away.

Me:

You’re telling me.

Jeremy:

Yeah, well, that’s what I’ve got effect pedals for… when you can’t wow ‘em with chops, confuse ‘em with expression-controlled delay trails.

Now that mashups are so common, this track doesn’t sound particularly remarkable. But in seventh grade it was startling to hear a house music track full of random samples. “Pump Up The Volume” was part of the same UK dance music movement that spawned the KLF’s “Doctorin’ The Tardis” and “Rush” by Big Audio Dynamite. I wasn’t enough of a hip-hop head in 1987 to recognize where the phrase in the title comes from, but now I do, it’s from “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B and Rakim. Listen at 0:43:

It makes sense that I first encountered Rakim Allah in the context of a sample, because he and Eric B pretty much wrote the book on sample-based music. “I Know You Got Soul” is named for the Bobby Byrd song, written and produced by James Brown, that you hear looped throughout the track. Sampling James Brown has become a basic part of the musical toolkit, but it wasn’t such an obvious choice back in 1987. Stetsasonic said it best in their song “Talkin’ All That Jazz:”

Tell the truth, James Brown was old
’til Eric and Ra came out with “I Got Soul.”

Now, thanks to eighties hip-hop, James Brown will be cool forever. Sample-based music is supposed to be “fake,” but paradoxically, sampling made funk authentic again after disco had turned it corny. Michael Krimper observes in his blog post Future Funk: Searching For The Lost Groove that by removing music from its original social context, sampling frees it to be heard and experienced in new and unexpected ways.

The aesthetics of the hip-hop beat — one of recycled recorded sounds and reinvented roles for samples clips repeated on loop — spawned a whole new social practice of archiving. A new culture of crate diggers, both collectors and enthusiasts, grew obsessed with finding and archiving dusty, lost vinyl from a previous generation… It’s almost as if these producers began, nearly 20 years later, where the previous musicians had left off. Those funk sounds, once dulled down by over-saturated commercial mediation, became fresh again and pregnant with a wave of creative potential. The early hip-hop generation didn’t grow up during the golden age of the funk era, but they listened and absorbed at home as children. They grew familiar with the sounds without enduring the same forces of marketing as their parents. Maybe that opened up enough free space for them to imagine the music differently.

Eric and Ra have a futuristic electronic sound based almost entirely on samples and turntable scratching, but its futurism is balanced by the rich network of associations they build in with their choice of sampled records. Here’s a map of all the samples on the album Paid In Full – click to see it bigger:

Fittingly, Eric B and Rakim have themselves been a rich source of samples for other artists, starting with Coldcut’s epic remix of “Paid In Full.” Eric and Ra themselves have sampled the songs on Paid In Full many times as well. The phrase “follow the leader” at 1:03 in “I Know You Got Soul” is the basis for, you guessed it, “Follow The Leader.”

Eric and Ra sample “Eric B Is President” in both “Eric B Never Scared” and “Move The Crowd.” This kind of extreme self-reference has been an inspiration for subsequent self-samplers, like Nas on “Nas Is Like” and Fugees on “The Score.” And by the way, “The Score” includes a sample of Eric and Ra’s “My Melody,” which heavily features a sample of itself. How’s that for recursion?

Eric and Ra also inspired the recording of mine that I’m most proud of. “Eric B Never Scared” samples “Those Shoes” by the Eagles. When it came time for my band Revival Revival to work up our arrangement of “Those Shoes” it seemed logical to work in a sample of “Eric B Never Scared.” This is easily the nastiest groove I’ve ever put together.

Revival Revival – Those Shoes Never Scared by ethanhein
I had a teenage guitar student who loves hip-hop, and he asked me for some recommendations. He was underwhelmed when I played him “Follow The Leader” — he thought it sounded old-fashioned and unsophisticated. I was shocked; what could be fresher than Eric B and Rakim? But I’m from a different generation. High school kids now were born into a world where hip-hop is a given. They take it for granted that artists like OutKast and Common and Lauryn Hill will pack their flows with dense internal rhymes and tumbling streams of imagery. Rakim doesn’t sound so groundbreaking now that every halfway decent emcee has absorbed his techniques. It’s like the way the radical innovations of Jimi Hendrix have been turned into standard rock cliches. It takes some historical context to imagine how stunning he must have been back in the sixties.

Rakim came by his connection to the musical past more personally than most, since he’s the nephew of the great R&B singer Ruth Brown. In an interview with Planet Ill, he talks about how his musical upbringing impacted his flow:

I think playing in the bands and learning how to read music; learning the theory of music breaks it down a little more and you get to understand it better. It helped me a lot with my rhythms and my syncopations… I played the sax in school. I play alto all the way up to baritone sax. Coming up in the house my older brother played piano, my middle brother older than me played saxophone, the drums.  I tried to get my hands on whatever I could.

You can clearly hear the bebop in Rakim’s deadpan delivery and his long chains of eighth notes, starting and ending on unexpected beats. His flat affect holds a lot more swagger than if he was yelling and screaming. It lets you focus on the complex musicality of the words. For the first couple of albums, he uses every single song to rap about how awesome he is at rapping, which he proves by being awesome at rapping, even when he’s just rapping about how awesome he is at rapping.

I’m a member of the first hip-hop-listening generation and I still hear Eric and Ra as hot. All that minimalism and repetition and empty space — I know plenty of musicians who are still catching up with it. The eighties hip-hop sound feels urgent to me, it’s so confident in itself. It becomes timeless by being so unapologetically of its time.

Some of the musicians I work with are very anxious about not being too fresh. There’s this need to imitate the masters of the past, to not stray too far from the territory marked out by the Beatles or Led Zeppelin or John Coltrane or whoever their idols may be. This results in weak music. How can you tell the truth about yourself when you’re too timid to belong to your own time and place? I want to grab any musician now who’s obsessed with sounding like Zeppelin, and ask: would you care about them if they were anxiously imitating the music of thirty or forty years before them? There were plenty of bands in 1975 who only played big band jazz, does anyone care about them now? Led Zeppelin took big risks in 1975. Now that their sound has become acceptable, there’s no risk in sounding like them, and no reward either. It’s 2010, better to play and write and produce like it’s 2010.

That doesn’t mean you have to forget or ignore the past. Far from it. Best to follow Eric and Ra’s example and study the past, incorporate it and transform it. The Biz Markie sampling lawsuit may have thrown a wet blanket onto sample-dense music as a commercial enterprise, but the artistic genie is out of the bottle. I, for one, plan to keep doing as much sampling as I can get away with.

Meanwhile, Eric and Ra continue to make their presence felt. The list of hip-hop and techno artists who sample or quote them is too long to go into, and it runs right up to the present. They’ve even crossed over into video game territory — DJ Hero lets you mash them up with MIA, Tears For Fears and David Axelrod.

Hear my mashup of “I Know You Got Soul” with “Pump Up The Volume” and “Follow The Leader.”

I Know You Got Soul Megamix by ethanhein

Nas has a great flow full of powerful imagery, but what truly sets this track apart for me is DJ Premier’s production. It’s a complex web of samples and scratches that tie together so seamlessly as to be much greater than the sum of their parts. A lot of the samples are from other songs by Nas himself. Here’s a diagram of all the samples, click to see it bigger:

Primo tells the story of the track, including the serendipitous discovery of the killer orchestral string sample, in The 14 Deadly Secrets by DJ Premier:

A transcript:

The day I made this record, I was at my house in Long Island, and I found this old record that I was gonna throw away. It was a ten inch record from a Lutheran church, and it was pink with a black fish on it. And I was gonna throw it in the garbage, ‘cuz it didn’t look like it had anything hot on it. But somethin’ told me “before you throw it away, put it on the turntable, see if you can find something on it.

And I found that sample of “Nas Is Like”, and I broke it into 3 parts, scratched it live to the drumbeat that I already had, with the little chirpin’ birds and from there, “Nas Is Like” was born, man…

The birds twittering during the intro beat are from “Why” by Don Robertson. And here’s the Lutheran record Primo’s talking about, “What Child Is This.” Very unlikely hip-hop source material.

Most of the lines in the chorus come from Nas’ breakout hit “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” The “life or death” line is at 0:32, the “Nas is like” that gives the song its title is at 0:44, and the “half man half amazin’” comes in a few seconds later. “My poetry’s deep, I never fell” is at 2:41.

“It Ain’t Hard To Tell” includes some hot samples of its own, including the synth intro from “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson and a saxophone riff from the much-sampled “NT” by Kool & The Gang (listen at 3:12.)

The other source for the “Nas Is Like” chorus is Nas’ “Street Dreams” from 1996. Samples are at 3:16 (“I’m a rebel) and 3:18 (“no doubt.”)

This track is also a composite of different memes – it quotes “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics and samples its beat from “Never Gonna Stop” by Linda Clifford.

Maybe the most inventive sample in “Nas Is Like” is a single syllable from “Nobody Beats the Biz” by Biz Markie. It’s the line “highly recogNIZED as the king of disco-in’” at 2:06. Out of context, “NIZED” sounds like Biz is saying “Nas.” That might be the single most creative sample usage in hip-hop history.

No wonder DJ Premier loves Biz — both like using a lot samples and allusions. Biz’s chorus is a play on a commercial jingle that’ll be familiar to anyone from the NYC region who grew up in the eighties (or has watched Seinfeld.) Biz also samples the drums from by “Hihache” by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band, “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller and, to heighten the self-reference even more, one of his own classic tracks, “The Def Fresh Crew” with Roxanne Shanté.

To add yet another layer of reference, there’s a bit in here where Biz quotes the jingle for Meow Mix! Biz is so much bigger than copyright law.

Nas does a lot of bragging in his rhymes. I learned excessive self-deprecation as a virtue from both my Jewish and middle American Protestant sides, so swagger feels deliciously subversive for me. There’s nothing more balling than sampling yourself in your own songs. Any sample-based song carries a dense web of associations, and I love the complexity that gets introduced when people sample themselves, or when they sample tracks containing samples, or best of all, both. “Nas Is Like” has a complex family tree, a set of allusions to allusions to allusions. This is as it should be. Fundamentally, all music is built of reshuffled bits of other music. Hip-hop makes this fact an explicit part of the music’s message, and that’s the biggest reason why I love it.

Hear a mashup of “Nas Is Like” with “It Ain’t Hard To Tell,” “Human Nature” and “Right Here” by SWV.

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person

Each new song is built using the same modular components as the other songs of its time and place, the way that all humans share the same genetic toolkit. My sister and I are like two different songs from the same album by the same band. My cousins are like songs on different albums by bands with overlapping members. Here’s a diagram of my entire extended family – parent/child relationships are green and spouse/partner relationships are red.

The ancestry of music is more complicated than the ancestry of humans. A better model for music is the evolution of microbes, with a lot of horizontal gene transfer happening. Biologists use the term “gene cassettes” to describe the semi-self-contained hunks of DNA that bacteria swap back and forth. The analogy to music fans spreading memes by passing tapes around couldn’t be any more perfect.

Some musical relationships do conveniently lend themselves to family tree-like representation. The practice of sampling and quoting existing songs creates a particularly clear and unambiguous set of relationships well-suited to network diagramming. The internet has several handy sample databases, including the Rap Sample FAQ, Whosampled.com and Wikipedia. I’ve been hard at work the past year or so making sample maps visualizing the more interesting chunks of data.

See all of my sample maps here.

Sampling is the easiest set of relationships to diagram, but I could draw similar charts for use of particular scales, chords, rhythmic figures, melodic motifs, rhyme schemes, combinations of instrument sounds, and all the other memetic nuts and bolts of music.

A few really successful memes make up most of the music we hear

Some musical memes are better at getting themselves copied than others, the way genes for color vision or opposable thumbs are good at getting themselves copied. Here in America, the most successful memes include the backbeat, the one-four-five chord progression and the blues scale.

To illustrate just how widespread a musical meme can get, here’s a video called “Four Chords, Thirty-Six Songs.” In the key of C, the four chords are C, G7, Am, F. (Some coarse language towards the end.)

The video barely scratches the surface of all the songs, famous and not, that have used those four chords. So why is this chord progression such a big hit? For one thing, it’s easy to play on piano or guitar or whatever. For another, the four chords sound good in any sequence or combination, spaced out on any harmonic rhythm. They have a wistful yet still uplifting mood that suits a variety of musical statements in a variety of styles.

Computers make recombining and resequencing the memes effortless

Pre-computer, composing and recording a song was a slow and effortful process. You wrote the song out or memorized it. Then you got a band together and they read the song, or you repeated it to them until they memorized it. Then you rehearsed it a bunch, and then recorded it from beginning to end. Sometimes you had to record many takes to get a good one. To get a polished, professional-sounding result generally required expensive gear operated by highly specialized engineers.

You can still operate that way if you want, but computers offer some faster and easier alternatives. I prefer to write by improvising into the sequencer or digital audio editor, picking the best patterns and editing them into shape. The computer gratifyingly collapses improvising, composing and recording into a single act. Making music electronically is like being able to type out any DNA sequence you want and immediately seeing how it will look as an organism. You can skip the tedious embryonic development of notating, rehearsing and memorizing. Technologies like MIDI, sampling and pitch-detection software let you read any existing musical genome and resequence it to your heart’s content.

All this freedom is positively alarming to some of the musicians I know, who view it as evil or immoral in some way. I find that the computer eliminates some of the labor, but doesn’t do the imaginative work for you. The computer makes it effortless to spin out ideas, but you still need to select among them and decide which are the good ones. The creative act itself stays the same as it always has been; there’s just less friction.

Towards a unified theory of musical evolution

A genome is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating the proteins and other structures making up an organism. A group of memes (a memeplex, as Susan Blackmore puts it) is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating performances and recordings. What makes a song likelier to get itself heard, and eventually copied or adapted? Exact copying of previous generations of songs is a bad long-term strategy. Tastes change, like the way the environment changes for organisms. A meme that was successful yesterday may not be successful tomorrow.

Total originality is a bad strategy too. It’s easy to be original, to create a piece of music with no precedent or borrowing from anything existing. Bang randomly on a piano and you’re probably going to play something that’s never been played before. It’s likely that your random banging will mostly be annoying. Chances are, a random DNA sequence won’t make for much of an organism either.

To be liked enough to be copied and imitated, your song will need to be substantially familiar. Forming an emotional connection with the listener requires a lot of shared vocabulary and associations. What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator. Most mutations will make it harder to get copied, but a lucky few improve your chances dramatically.

See a version of this post on Quora.

I slept on Prince straight through the eighties and most of the nineties. I was more of a Michael Jackson guy. Prince was a little too grown up for me. I definitely wasn’t ready for his naked butt in the cassette liner notes. He won me over when I learned how to play some of his songs with bands. We did “Let’s Go Crazy” in my non-serious college hipster cover band. A few years later I played with a singer-songwriter named Kimberly West, and we had “Kiss” in the set list for a while as a straight-ahead cover.

“Kiss” is one of the most pleasurable songs I’ve ever played on guitar. The solo and fills are as tightly structured as if Prince copied and pasted them together with a sampler. For all I know, that’s how he comes up with all of his guitar parts. The harmony is jagged and angular, based on tritones, and that tension balances out the smooth rhythms well. The wah-wah pedal part is as structured as the drum machine part. And he’s got synth marimba under there! Futuristic stuff.

My more recent connection with Prince is that my sister has been living in Minneapolis, where he was born and where he still lives and works. It’s a much hipper place than you would think given its midwestern surroundings. Along with Prince, the Minneapolis music scene has produced Bob Dylan and Garrison Keillor. I can’t quite figure out the pattern there, but all three of those guys are fearlessly idiosyncratic and committed to a personal sound.

“Prince”, by the way, is not a stage name. His given name is Prince Rogers Nelson. It’s an optimistic name, and Prince is a confident guy. I guess that’s why I resisted him as a self-doubting angst-ridden teenager. Now it’s why I like him.

Prince has mostly produced his music by sequencing drums and synths and layering live instruments on top. For most of his classic hits, he did beats on a Linn LM-1 drum machine. He did his synths and sampled instruments with a Fairlight CMI. See a demonstration of this instrument by Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones.

Prince hasn’t done a whole lot of sampling, but when he does, he chooses like a hip-hop producer. He used George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” on his song “Style.” George Clinton returned the compliment by sampling Prince’s “Sex” on his song “Hysterical.”

In his song “Gett Off”, Prince used samples of “The Funky Drummer” and “There It Is” by James Brown and “Shack Up” by Banbarra.

“Gett Off” has itself been sampled in “Jump Around” by House Of Pain and “Funk Liberation” by X-Clan.

Prince is also supposed to have borrowed the main riff in “1999″ from the backing vocal part in the first verse of “Monday, Monday” by The Mamas And The Papas. This inspired me to mash the two songs up, along with two other post-apocalyptic tunes, “99 Luftballons” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

1999 Luftballons by ethanhein

Finally, enjoy some Dave Chappelle.

Quoted on Chartreuse B’s Tumblr

Glenn Gould wasn’t necessarily being prophetic. He was just paying attention to the long history of music before the relative eyeblink of the twentieth century. The always perspicacious Wayne Marshall says:

Only in the relatively recent past — within the last century — have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice — that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people — demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.

I’m a child of the cassette era. I loved making mix tapes in high school, for myself and whoever among my friends would listen. It was a pain, but still worth it. I still remember burning my first CD, sequencing the tracks with Toast before the half-hour long burn session during which the computer couldn’t do anything else. I’ve said farewell to albums with little sadness. It’s nice to listen to Graceland or Abbey Road in their original sequence, but for the most part, I do a better job of sequencing tracks for my own needs than anyone else can.

What’s true at the multiple-song level is even more true within a single song. Writing a song is really sequencing together a “mixtape” of licks, scale fragments, chord progressions and beats. When I learned how to play the guitar, I became free to string together whatever song fragments I could get under my fingers. It was fun being able to freely collage songs together, constructing segues and suites. All “new” compositions are really mashups you make in your head. Any creative undertaking is less like conjuring out of thin air and more like making a salad. As a sampler and remixer, my freedom of musical choice is total. Making mashups is a delightful blend of writing songs and putting together mixtapes, except that the pieces of music are shorter and layered simultaneously.

Mashup and remix culture isn’t new. Club DJs have been mashing up songs on the fly for decades, intermixing hot dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other well-known dance tracks. Girl Talk has nothing on “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” or Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. Creating popular music is a ruthless evolutionary process. You sort through idea after idea, looking for the hooks. The best mashups take the Darwinian process to the next level, mating the hooks together into ultrahooks. My favorite mashups of the moment are the United State Of Pop mixes by DJ Earworm. He takes the top twenty-five singles from a given year and boils them down into single, devastating tracks.

United State Of Pop 2007

United State Of Pop 2008

There are plenty of other high-concept mashups like these, and some of them work as music, but a lot of them are gimmicky and annoying. In order to work, there has to be some musical resonance between the source tracks. The more unexpected the affinity, the better. My favorite Earworm mashup combines Django Reinhardt’s performance of “Brazil” with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.”

Brazilian Diamonds

Who would have guessed that the bouncy rhythms of South African pop as filtered through the mind of a Jewish folksinger from Queens would mesh so well with the bouncy rhythms of samba as filtered through the mind of a Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist? This kind of discovery is only possible via a lot of trial and error. The growing ease and plummeting price of audio editing makes trial and error a lot less onerous than it used to be.

One of the great pleasures of sample-based music is encountering something familiar in a strange context. Sometimes the recontextualization can be jokey, like Ludacris’ ironically grandiose “Coming 2 America” which combines quotes from the Eddie Murphy movie with themes from both Mozartâ’s Requiem and the last movement of Dvorak’s New World symphony. Sometimes it’s playful without being jokey. Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from his opera The Magic Flute shows up in “Like You” by Kelis, and it makes me wonder why every R&B song doesn’t include coloratura soprano.

The mixtape-mashup analogy isn’t perfect. Mixtapes are linear, with each song usually appearing once. If you make a mashup in this linear way, with each sample appearing only once, it will probably be annoying. Within the parameters of a song, repetition is crucial to enjoyment. This is why Girl Talk gets on my nerves. He runs a sample four or eight times and then forgets about it. His tracks are too much like watching someone else flip channels on TV for my tastes.

I’m especially interested in musicians who use samples of themselves as the basis of new works. The first Nas song I heard was his biggest hit, “Nas Is Like.” The chorus is based on samples of his earlier song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.” When I heard the original, it sounded like it’s full of samples of “Nas Is Like.” This confusion of time sequence is one of the central pleasures of sample-based music for me. The meta-recursive hip-hop prize probably belongs to the Fugees, whose song “The Score” includes samples of every other song on the album of the same name.

The mashup doesn’t belong exclusively to music. The video mashup is coming excitingly into its own. I would have expected that combining two songs in 5/4 time might be too clever, but in this case it works:

The video mashup’s answer to DJ Earworm is Kutiman, who stitches together multiple Youtube videos. Check out “The Mother Of All Funk Chords”:

Jonathan Lethem’s essay on literary mashup culture, “The Ecstasy Of Influence,” is itself an amazing literary mashup. There are visual mashups too, I have a collection of them on Flickr. An intriguing random visual mashup maker is the Ad Generator. Its makers explain: “Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.” It works uncannily well.

The fan-made advertising mashup shows the potential to become an entire new artistic style unto itself. Dig this trailer for an as-yet nonexistent Green Lantern movie made entirely out of pieces of other movie trailers:

Sasha Frere-Jones says in his essay 1 + 1 + 1 = 1:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.

This very blog post is a mashup of Glenn Gould and Wayne Marshall and DJ Earworm and Grandmaster Flash and Kutiman and uncountable others. I know there are plenty of copyright holders out there that regard any kind of derivative work as stealing. I think it’s a misplaced form of anxiety. I think mashups are natural, healthy, and the best vector to get your ideas circulating through the memepool long after you’re gone. As I was writing this post, I discovered someone did a version of my Michael Jackson sample map with Michael Jackson on it, and I couldn’t be more flattered.

Long live DJ culture, across whatever media!

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