Manu Dibango released “Soul Makossa” in 1972. He wrote it as the B-side to “Mouvement Ewondo,” a praise song for the Cameroonian football team on the occasion of the 1972 Tropics Cup. Language Log explains the chant-like lyrics:

The story behind these seemingly nonsensical syllables is a fascinating one, originating in the Cameroonian language Duala.

Duala is spoken in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city, which has long been a musical hotbed. Since the 1960s, Cameroonian pop music has been dominated by a rhythmic style of dance music from Douala known as makossa. The Duala word makossa is often glossed as “(I) dance” (as in this article by Cameroonian linguist George Echu). The entry for makossa in the Oxford English Dictionary further explains that makossa is “derivative of kosa ‘to peel or remove the skin of (a fruit or vegetable)’; the name refers to the twisting and shaking movements of the dancer.”

Language Log quotes this excerpt of Dibango’s autobiography, Three Kilos of Coffee:

On one side of the 45 I recorded the hymn [praise song]; on the other I recorded “Soul Makossa,” written using a traditional makossa rhythm with a little soul thrown in. In my Douala neighborhood, at my parents’ house, I rehearsed this second piece. The house had no air-conditioning, and the windows were wide open. All the kids flocked around. Hearing me rehearse, they fell over laughing. Unbelievable — how on earth had I concocted that mishmash? Poor makossa really took a blow. My father was astonished: “Can’t you pronounce ‘makossa’ like everyone else? You stutter: ‘mamako mamasa.’ You think they’re going to accept that in Yaoundé?” The Cup organizing committee reacted the same way. The march on side one they found “impeccable.” But the other side… “Really, Manu has gone nuts. What possesses him to stutter like that?”

The New York DJ and party promoter David Mancuso got his hands on “Soul Makossa” and played it incessantly at his loft parties. The song became an underground hit, especially when it started getting airplay on WBLS. The few copies floating around New York were quickly snapped up by other DJs. Several bands rushed out their own covers to fill the gap, most notably Baba Olatunji and the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. Their versions are fun, but nowhere near as funky as the original. Finally, Atlantic Records released Manu Dibango’s version on one of their sub-labels, and it went so far as to crack the top 40 in 1973.

Soul Makossa quotes, samples and remixes

Quoting “Soul Makossa” became something of a trope in the early eighties, ranging from subtle references to the beat or bassline or horn line to full-blown quotation. My favorite example is by Nairobi featuring the Awesome Foursome.

This song just screams 1982, especially with those 808 cowbells. This song was itself sampled in many other songs, including Schoolly D’s “Mama Feel Good.”

Kool Moe Dee’s “Pump Your Fist” draws on “Soul Makossa” for percussion, the wah guitar stab and part of the main sax riff.

A more recent example: “Latinhead” by Dirty Beatniks.

Soul Makossa has also been sampled by Jay-Z, Geto Boys, Poor Righteous Teachers and A Tribe Called Quest, among many others. See a full list of samples.

Michael Jackson and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

By far the most famous musical descendant of “Soul Makossa” is Michael Jackson’s first single from Thriller, the best song on that album and a strong contender for the best song of the eighties, period.

I was at a hippie-ish wedding this past summer. People were having a good time, but not really dancing. Then “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” came up on the iPod and the party suddenly jumped off. Little kids, old folks, everyone in between, people were getting down. Say what you want about Michael Jackson as a human being, but there’s no denying the power of this song. It never fails to get people shaking their butts, across all ages, races, classes and cultural backgrounds.

The copyright-minded among you might well ask: did MJ steal the Makossa chant? Manu Dibango certainly thought so, and sued MJ, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement. The issue isn’t a cut-and-dried one for me, though. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two chants:

The most obvious difference is in the syllables, but there are musical differences too. Manu Dibango’s chant is a two-bar phrase sung/chanted entirely on the note G, over an unchanging G7 chord. Michael Jackson’s chant is a four-bar phrase with a call and response structure. He adds a two-note melody harmonized in thirds and a chord progression alternating between D/E and E7. MJ also uses a little more syncopation. I’d say that MJ’s chant is more of an adaptation than a direct theft.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” quotes, samples and remixes

Pop and hip-hop musicians quote MJ’s version of the Makossa chant incessantly. Some high-profile examples:

• “No Clause 28” by Boy George
• “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith
• “Cowboys” by the Fugees
• “Brooklyn Girls” by Charles Hamilton
• “Lost In The World” by Kanye West

People love to shout out the chant during live performances, too, everyone from Zap Mama to Jamie Foxx. Rihanna goes further than quoting MJ’s chant; she builds an entire dance track around a reharmonized sample of it. MJ’s song is in the key of E, but Rihanna’s producers put it in the key of F# minor. This is hip stuff; the same notes in MJ’s sunny and uplifting coda become melancholy in Rihanna’s track.

People quote other parts of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” too. Big Daddy Kane quotes the “Yeah yeah” part in “Warm It Up Kane,” listen at 1:32.

Other tracks quoting this phrase include “Vibin’ (The New Flava Remix)” by Boyz II Men and Busta Rhymes featuring Treach, Craig Mack and Method Man, and “Feels So Good” by Mase.

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz adapt big swaths of MJ’s song in “Startin’ Something.”

Björk has to be different, of course, so she (mis)quotes the opening line of MJ’s song in live versions of “I Go Humble.” And by the way, her MJ fandom was apparently reciprocal, if this radio show transcript is to be believed.

Visualizing the Makossa diaspora

Here’s a complete map of the genealogy of the Makossa chant; click to enlarge.

Putting it all together

Here’s a mashup I made combining several of the tracks mentioned above so you can get your makossa on.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Any noteworthy sightings of the Makossa meme that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

Hat tip to Mike Devlin for coining the phrase “Makossa diaspora.”

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.

Manu Dibango

He wrote “Soul Makossa,” the inspiration for MJ’s chant.

“Soul Makossa” isn’t exactly the same as MJ’s version. Manu Dibango speak/sings “ma ma ko, ma ko sa, ma ko ma ko sa” on one note. MJ sings “ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa” as a sus chord resolving to a major chord.

Michael Jackson

Wrote “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” On the recording he sings lead and backing vocals, and he did some of the production and arrangement.

Quincy Jones

Produced the track, which in this context means he supervised the recording sessions, probably wrote the horn chart and did some other musical shaping. I have no idea what legal rights Quincy Jones has over the recording or composition, if any.

The other musicians

Along with MJ, the track features three synth and keyboard players, a guitarist, a bassist, a percussionist, a horn section and bunch of backing vocalists. Plus somebody programmed the drum machine. Legally, these folks aren’t entitled to anything beyond the union scale they got paid for the recording sessions, but my musician friends would say there’s an element of spiritual ownership.

Bruce Swedian

He was the lead recording engineer. He probably had some other engineers and assistants working with him as well, the internet doesn’t say. As with the backing musicians, he has zero ownership beyond what he got paid for the original sessions. His fellow recording engineers would stick up passionately for his spiritual ownership over the track, since it wouldn’t exist without him, and it wouldn’t have its arrestingly distinctive sound.

Sony Music Distribution

The label that presently puts out Thriller and, presumably, owns the master recording rights. There may be other co-owners, including MJ and his various financial partners and creditors.

BMG

The rights-management company that handles Sony’s publishing. Again, I’m sure there are other complex co-owners, from MJ on out.

Me

I paid ninety-nine cents for the mp4 on the iTunes store. I co-owned a cassette copy with my sister and stepbrother as a kid. I have a decades-long emotional relationship with the song.

Apple

They sold me the mp4 and the hardware I mostly use to listen to it.

My dad or stepmother

Or my stepbrother’s dad or whoever bought us the cassette of Thriller back in the eighties. Plus whoever they bought the cassette from (I’m guessing Sam Goody on 59th and Third), plus whoever was distributing Thriller on cassettes back then.

The situation only gets more complicated as I follow the chant’s path through my life. A few months ago I went with Anna and our neighbor to hear Zap Mama at Joe’s Pub. During one of her songs, she quoted MJ’s chant. Who owned that instance of the chant? Zap Mama? Joe’s Pub? Us, for buying tickets? Who owned the experience of me hearing the chant at Papaya King, or in Prospect Park, or on the computer network in my office? What about when the guy with the motorcycle was riding around Park Slope blasting “Soul Makossa” from his speakers and I mistook it for a remix of MJ?

What about the copy of “Don’t Stop The Music” by Rihanna that I bought from Apple? I assume that Rihanna’s producers and management paid some sort of licensing fee to Michael Jackson and/or his copyright holders to use the sample, or maybe they got a cut of my ninety-nine cents. They didn’t pay Manu Dibango anything.

Sampling makes people anxious because it raises so many questions about ownership. These questions are only going to get more complicated as technology evolves. The emotional questions are every bit as complex as the legal ones, if not more so. My feeling is, everybody who’s ever heard the chant owns it. Which means that no one does.

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

Update: within an hour of posting this, Otis Taylor tweeted me from a concert where Jamie Foxx was leading the crowd in the chant.

MJ never made a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” leaving a vacuum that the fans are only too happy to fill. This video even includes footage of MJ’s video game.

This MJ song has inspired a lot of fan art, maybe because it is itself fan art. The music industry likes to send lawyers after people who make fan art, which is dumb and self-destructive on their part. No fan art, no art.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is my favorite Michael Jackson song, against much stiff competition. Several of MJ’s most famous songs were written by Quincy Jones or Rod Temperton, but MJ wrote this one himself. It’s serious and personal. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s long, respectful article in GQ talks about MJ’s process:

By 1978, the year of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” — co-written by Michael and little Randy — ”Michael’s methods have gelled. He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts.

No wonder hip-hop musicians love MJ. Improvising into recording devices is where hip-hop comes from. MJ’s music is very electronic. There are places in “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” where different pieces of the lead vocal overlap, making it impossible for one person to really sing it live. All the backing vocals on the final version are overdubbed MJ.

Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts.

If he were a young guy now he’d probably be recording his siblings on his laptop using Pro Tools.

His art will later depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to hear his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier, Off the Wall-era demo of the eventual Thriller hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting.

The final version is produced by Quincy Jones, though MJ probably did most of the arrangement. The groove is based on a drum machine loop, with some Brazilian percussion on top. Three different guys are playing synths. The top-notch horn section plays with a perfection that makes them sound sequenced, but with full analog fidelity.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is a close musical cousin to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” They were written around the same time. DJs like to run them together at the peak of the night. Harmonically they’re extremely minimalist, using static mixolydian mode for the entire length of the song. That minimalism makes both songs sound fresher and more contemporary than MJ’s other disco material.

“Don’t Stop” has upbeat party lyrics that match its sound. “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is musically exuberant too, but the lyrics are mostly very dark and intense.

I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’
I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’

The tone goes from confrontational to helpless.

It’s too high to get over (yeah, yeah)
Too low to get under (yeah, yeah)
You’re stuck in the middle (yeah, yeah)
And the pain is thunder (yeah, yeah)

I took my baby to the doctor
With a fever, but nothing he found
By the time this hit the street
They said she had a breakdown

Someone’s always tryin’
to start my baby cryin’
Talkin’, squealin’, lyin’
Sayin’ you just wanna be startin’ somethin’

Normal pop songs were mostly not this serious in the early eighties.

You love to pretend that you’re good
When you’re always up to no good
You really can’t make him hate her
So your tongue became a razor

Someone’s always tryin’
to keep my baby cryin’
Treacherous, cunnin’, declinin’
You got my baby cryin’

This is the verse that gives me the most pause.

You’re a vegetable, you’re a vegetable
Still they hate you, you’re a vegetable
You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable
They eat off of you, you’re a vegetable

There’s the mysterious guest appearance by Billie Jean.

Billie Jean is always talkin’
When nobody else is talkin’
Tellin’ lies and rubbin’ shoulders
So they called her mouth a motor

This verse is probably directed at MJ’s father, who told the family around the time of this song’s writing that he had been having an affair and had fathered a child with his lover.

If you can’t feed your baby (yeah, yeah)
Then don’t have a baby (yeah, yeah)
And don’t think maybe (yeah, yeah)
If you can’t feed your baby (yeah, yeah)

You’ll be always tryin’
To stop that child from cryin’
Hustlin’, stealin’, lyin’
Now baby’s slowly dyin’

After all this anguish, MJ is still determined to keep a brave face, and for you to enjoy yourself. So he ends with uplift.

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl

No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you, help me sing it

And finally, the famous chant.

Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa

The chant is an approximate quote from a song by Manu Dibango called “Soul Makossa.” Manu Dibango’s song is mostly playfully riffs around the word makossa, a Cameroonian dance style. MJ was sued for the quote, but he probably didn’t mean any harm. The chant is a work of Manu Dibango fan art. Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop The Music” is fan art based on fan art. You could add another layer of recursion by doing a fan remix of the Rihanna song.

Plenty of people have sampled and quoted both Manu Dibango’s song and MJ’s.
The Rihanna song is especially interesting to me because it doesn’t just quote the chant, it reharmonizes it. MJ’s song is in E major. Rihanna’s song is in F# minor. This technique of taking a well-known melody line and writing a radically different harmony for it is widely used in jazz. The B minor and F# natural minor chords from Rihanna’s song are from the same E mixolydian scale as the E7 and D major chords in MJ’s, but they have a totally different emotional effect. (If you strum B minor and F# minor on guitar along with the end of MJ’s song, it sounds amazing.) Rihanna’s song is tragic and anxious. It picks up on the underlying tragedy and anxiety of MJ’s song. That’s quality fan art.

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

This is a continuation of a post about Rhymefest’s MJ mixtape. The thought continues in a post about who owns the chant.

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