If you’re a follower of internet memes, you know the story by now. If not: Antoine, his sister Kelly and her daughter were asleep in their apartment in the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama. An intruder broke in and sexually assaulted Kelly before Antoine chased him off. The family complained to the housing project authorities, who were unmoved. So on July 28, 2010, the Dodsons took their story to the local news. Here’s the clip:

The video became an instant YouTube sensation. Antoine is a charismatic guy, with a distinctive way of expressing his anger. Many people found him funny for his stereotypical ghetto mannerisms filtered through his flamboyant gayness. It’s a depressingly familiar story: the internet chooses someone to make the object of random large-scale ridicule, then gets bored and moves on.

But then, enter the Gregory Brothers, the prankster musicians behind the hilarious Auto-tune The News videos. The Gregorys have lately been Auto-tuning viral Youtube videos in addition to TV. As Michael Gregory observed, Antoine’s outburst had a strong melody to it. So it seemed like a natural move to do the “Bed Intruder Song.”

This track launched both Antoine and the Gregorys into the pop mainstream. It became YouTube’s most viewed video, with twenty million views as of this writing and no end in sight. The song has been climbing the iTunes charts and even cracked the Billboard top 100, the first web meme to do so. It would be a hugely significant pop artifact for that reason alone. But the fascination and horror of the song only begins there. It’s problematic in a way that the Double Rainbow song isn’t. You couldn’t ask for a more complex set of emotions than the ones that “Bed Intruder” inspires in me.

The case against

Everything about this story sets off my political alarms: a bunch of white Brooklyn hipsters do a parodic take on a horrific tragedy befalling a poor urban black family, using a music style appropriated from black urban culture. My liberal guilt kept me from even listening to the song for the first couple of weeks it was making the rounds. The worst part is at the end where Evan Gregory sings the song accompanying himself on piano in an exaggerated soul singer voice, radiating smug entitlement. That part makes me want to die of embarrassment.

The case for

Antoine Dodson himself told CBS news that while the attention bothered him initially, he now sees it more positively: “A blessing came out of a bad situation, a blessing in disguise.” He hired a lawyer, set up a web site and has been earnestly setting about professionalizing his fame. He seems fine with the song and has it set as his ringtone.

Brooklyn hipsters though they may be, the Gregorys seem like genuinely decent, well-intentioned people. I met Michael on the subway a few months ago, and in our brief conversation he came across as polite, nerdy, self-deprecating, basically like any of my friends. The Gregorys have been doing the right thing by Antoine, splitting all the proceeds from the song fifty-fifty with the Dodsons, and mostly behaving respectfully.

As a piece of music, the song works. It’s the strongest tune the Gregorys have produced so far. It has a great melody, a strong hook, and the emotions come across loud and clear. A friend and collaborator of mine, one of the most adventurous musicians I know, adores the song. I was surprised, because she herself has been the victim of sexual assault. The Dodsons’ situation is terrible, but Antoine is showing a fierce desire to protect his sister. His on-air rant is an expression of love and support. My friend finds the song to be uplifting, and apparently she’s not alone.

The Gregorys have become very adept at self-promotion using YouTube. One of their brightest innovations is to include lyrics and chords to make it easy for people to do remixes and covers, and the internet has responded. Here are the most interesting ones, starting with the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Marching Band:

Guy with violin:

Guy with shamisen:

DeStorm cover/parody, complete with costume:

I like the Gregorys and am glad they’re breaking through into the mainstream, troubling though I find the circumstances of their breakthrough. And I’m pulling for the Dodsons. Antoine has a web site that includes video of him answering questions from the fans.

Usually internet fame chews up its recipients and spits them out. I hope all this brings the Dodsons some happiness.

This is exactly the kind of golden age hip-hop song I love, a party-friendly beat and lyrics delivered with enough pissed off attitude to give it some bite. Dres and Mista Lawnge, I salute you.

The samples are particularly awesome. The upright bass loop comes from McCoy Tyner’s version of John Coltrane’s “Impressions” – it’s at 3:03 in the track.

It’s appropriate that Black Sheep should have wanted to sample “Impressions” because it too is based on samples, the analog kind. Coltrane borrowed his melody from a Morton Gould composition called “Pavane” and his chord progression from “So What” by Miles Davis.

The beat and accompanying guitar twang in “The Choice Is Yours” come from “Humpin’” by The Bar-Kays. The sample is right at the beginning.

“Big Sur Suite” by Johnny Hammond Smith supplies the organ lick, listen for it at the fifteen second mark.

(Tons of other people have sampled this track, including Dr Dre, Gang Starr, the Beastie Boys, DJ Krush, and, um, Insane Clown Posse.)

The most unexpected sample Black Sheep pulls out is the scratchy guitar hook. It comes from “Her Favorite Style” by Iron Butterfly, of all people. Iron Butterfly! Who knew they even had any songs aside from “In A Gadda Da Vida?” That’s some big-eared listening.

Finally, the James Brown-like grunt and “come on” is Sweet Linda Divine in her song “I’ll Say It Again” – listen at 1:52.

Talk about a track being greater than the sum of its parts. If handed all of these records, I’d enjoy some of them, be indifferent to others, and I very much doubt I’d come up with anything so devastatingly tight and seamless as “The Choice Is Yours.”

It seems like there would be a lot of songs that would sample this one, but I only turned a few from casual web searching:

• Fatman Scoop includes the “Engine engine number nine” part in his tune “Be Faithful.”
• Fatboy Slim quotes the chorus in “Weapon of Choice” ft Bootsy Collins.
• Dres does a verse over a sample of “The Choice Is Yours” on “Where Are They Now” by Nas.

There have to be others, right? Let me know in the comments. Doo-dah dipity.

A big part of my sadness is due to the early death of my dad, who loved Christmas and celebrated it with a total and unironic enthusiasm. Among his fellow investment bankers he presented a Frasier-like highbrow persona, opera-going and cosmopolitan. But he showed his midwestern roots in his lifelong devotion to Garrison Keillor, his love of fireworks and especially his fondness for Christmas kitsch. We stopped going to church after Grandma died. Dad didn’t inherit any of her religious fervor. Or did he? He took Santa Claus and the tree seriously. He loved to play Santa at office Christmas parties and signed half the cards on gifts to us “from Santa” into my college years and the one December past them that he lived. As a little kid I thought it was terrific, but the older I got, the more difficult it got. The holiday ritual I liked the best was the Elvis Christmas Album.

The high point is “Blue Christmas” – how hot is that? The male choir is due for a comeback.

We were listening to it on cassette when I was a kid. Later on when I met Anna it turns out her family had an Elvis Christmas Album ritual too (I guess a lot of people do.) She had the CD reissue that includes Elvis singing a few gospel tunes, including “Peace In The Valley”, which I dimly remember from church and which I love to pieces. What a chord progression.

On a more intellectual tip, Dad made an annual ritual out of watching his VHS copy of maybe the best ever adaptation of A Christmas Carol, the 1984 TV one with George C Scott as Scrooge. This is the one with the scrupulously accurate period clothes, furniture and so on. Here’s the scariest scene.

Our VHS cassette was a magnificent unintentional 80s time capsule. Before the movie started there was a snippet of CBS news, Dan Rather giving an update on something Gorbachev-related, right at the peak of the Cold War, when we were all terrified of the USSR. The broadcast was sponsored by IBM, and their ads featuring their then-new smoking hot 80286 processor-based PCs got more and more comical with the passage of time. But as the situation with our stepmother’s health deteriorated, this tape became sad. After a particularly ugly bout of fighting one year, Dad went into the den to watch it by himself. During the short interval between when she died and Dad did, I don’t really remember what happened with the Christmas Carol ritual, but whatever it was, it didn’t get easier. Eleven years later I doubt I could bear to watch it through.

If you know me, you might be wondering where my Jewish mother and the rest of the tribe fit into all this. Mom actually loves Christmas and celebrates it every bit as intently as Dad did. The deal when we were kids was that Dad got us through Christmas Eve, and then dropped us off that night so we could wake up and do Christmas morning with Mom and Ralph. This handoff was sometimes the occasion for the playing out of ugly custodial business. Post-Dad, Mom wanted to carry on with traditional Christmas as usual, maybe feeling a little relieved not to have to compete for attention. But it hasn’t worked out that way. For most of my twenties I preferred to just not have anything to do with any of it. Thanksgiving, yes, by all means, I never miss it, I love the family togetherness and all that. Christmas, on the other hand, just carried too much emotional freight.

My effort to reclaim the culture of late December for myself began with the Ellington Nutcracker. I found out about it from the Amherst jazz ensemble, who played big chunks of it in a concert one year. I almost fell out of my seat. Sam Woodyard’s hand drums in “Sugar Rum Cherry” are the sexiest thing imaginable. (They make a great sample.) Amherst hosted an Ellington symposium a couple years after I graduated. Stanley Crouch gave a talk about sixties Ellington, and he had this to say about Sam Woodyard:

Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard!

This year my sister is back in NYC for the first time in many years. We’re going to do the big Christmas Eve thing at our house, combining it with Anna’s birthday. My mom and stepfather are even coming. This will be the first time ever, and I mean ever, that they’ve been willing to do Christmas on our turf. We’ll play the Ellington Nutcracker and some Elvis, and I expect that I’ll be maudlin and depressed for part of it, but hopefully not too much. And having written this, I’m already feeling more optimistic about the whole thing.

Listen to that crowd. Lip-synching might be fake, but Michael’s audience knows they’re witnessing something real. The band in the back is just sitting there, since all the music is pre-recorded. But they’re feeling it, you can see dudes clapping. What makes this music, even though no one is singing or playing any instruments?

Michael is pretending to sing a song that he did sing for real, on the recording. The recording is the platonic ideal of the “Billie Jean” vocal. Michael sang it for real, probably live from top to bottom as was his usual method. But that take was selected out of who knows how many, and who knows how many tape edits and punch-ins were performed. The vocal was recorded on the most expensive microphone through the most expensive mixing desk by the most expensive engineer in the most expensive studio. There would be no possible way to have a live vocal sound like that. By playing back the platonically ideal vocal and lip-synching to it, Michael is free to commit his attention to the rest of his delivery: his facial expression, his gaze, his body language, and of course, the famous choreography.

Lil Wayne closes shows by jokily lip-synching to Whitney Houston singing “I Will Always Love You” which I wish I had thought of first and have every intention of imitating next time I get to plan a live show.

Musical purists do not generally approve of lip-synching. There was a while there when I considered it to be cheating. But now I feel like, if the performer is telling the truth and is committed, that’s all the realness I need. The problem with a lesser artist like Ashlee Simpson isn’t the fact of her lip-synching. The problem is that she’s doing it with less than total commitment, accompanied by uninteresting choreography to a lame track. It’s still music, just not good music like Michael Jackson’s.

Mad Men is well-made television, but so is plenty of other television. Why is this particular show so compelling to me and so many of my buddies? I think it’s that watching Mad Men is like watching a documentary about our parents and grandparents. In particular, Don Draper is a window into our emotionally inaccessible fathers. For me, the generations don’t line up exactly right – in 1963 my dad was only 21 – but it’s close enough for some intense emotional resonances. I feel like I’m looking through a magic window into events that the old photo albums only hint at.

My dad and Don. There’s so much overlap. Both were authority-resistant guys disguised by suits and corporate jobs. Both underwent name changes and had complex parentage. Both earned a lot more money in New York City as adults than they grew up with in middle America. Both were divorced parents of young kids.  Here’s a more detailed rundown of the similarities and differences.

Name changes
Don changed his name from Dick Whitman as a young adult, voluntarily, to escape an abusive family and general abject misery. My dad’s name change was involuntary and happened when he was an infant. He was born John Arthur Rammer, and was given up by his birth parents when his biological father had to go fight world war II. He was named Michael Hein by his adoptive parents, Milo and Phoebe, who raised him in a stable and relatively loving environment. Still, Dad never quite resolved the issue of his adoption. Like Don, he had problems with commitment, with authority, with connection and a sense of belonging. Like Don, he was a smart and talented guy whose rise up the corporate ladder was slowed at times by an unwillingness to be a team player.

Divorce
Again, not quite the same circumstances. My mom is much more Peggy Olsen than Betty Draper.

To my knowledge, Dad never cheated on her (though he did have some serious infidelities in his subsequent relationships.) But there’s some overlap. My sister and I were about the same age as Sally and Bobby Draper when our respective parents split. I don’t remember this scene from my own childhood but it remembers me. With us and the Drapers, it was a similar slow build to a swift and matter-of-fact resolution.

Politics
Dad was younger than Don and more liberal. He went to civil rights marches and in youth was kind of a rabble-rouser, at least by Wisconsin standards. Like Don, he was intrigued by the counterculture but not a member of it.

Fashion
Dad wore standard-issue gray suits to work, not quite as dapper as Don but presentable. On the weekends he lapsed somewhat into his Wisconsin roots: jeans, sweatshirts with cows on them, caps with logos of machinery makers worn without irony. Hard to imagine Don wearing any of that stuff.

Smoking
Dad smoked a pipe in the office, back when that was still allowed. In that regard he was a little more like Paul Kinsey.

Dad wasn’t a cigarette smoker that I’m aware of, though Grandma and Grandpa were. Grandpa eventually quit after jaw cancer, but Grandma was a Draper-level chain smoker until she died.

Drinking
I never witnessed Dad pounding back hard liquor like Don; he was more of a glass or two of wine with dinner kind of guy.

Recklessness and risk-taking
My dad shared Don’s fondness for reckless driving. Dad rode a motorcycle; Don was a half a generation too early for that. Dad didn’t drive drunk that I know of but he did love speeding. He also loved fireworks, which I could imagine Don having a thing for too.

General emotional inaccessibility
I saw Dad bury both of his parents and his second wife and I never saw him shed a tear. I barely remember him ever even mentioning his emotions, much less frankly discussing them. Very Don Draper in that respect.

A couple of other weird similarities between the Mad Men universe and mine. Dad had an accordion and did a little playing. Not as well as Joan, but still.

Any TV show you want to make that functions as an alternate-universe documentary about my family and friends, I’ll obsessively watch it. King Of The Hill has that quality for Dad’s midwestern ancestors. Seinfeld is a window into Mom’s Jewish relatives. Six Feet Under captured some of my family dynamics early on before it exploded into ridiculous melodrama a few seasons in. It’s lonely in modern life. Our tribes are scattered. If I have to use TV as a way to stay in touch, evidently I will.

For most of you reading, the name Kramer will have a different association.

I have a similar build to Michael Richards and some of his birdlike awkwardness. I’ve been here:

In my early twenties I felt like I wanted to start dressing cool but wasn’t sure how to get started. Kramer is a goofy dude but he always looks sharp. He has some of the same fashion sensibilities as my grandfathers. Papa Kramer was tall like me, not a flamboyant dresser but he liked bright colors and patterns. Grandpa Hein had even more adventurous ideas about colors and patterns. Once I started intentionally modeling my wardrobe on Kramer, my personal look completely came together.

Seinfeld is comfort food for me. It simulates hanging out with Mom, the Kramer clan and the majority of my schoolmates. It’s like how King Of The Hill and Garrison Keillor simulate my dad’s family. But Seinfeld has some authenticity problems. Like, we’re supposed to believe that George, Elaine and Kramer aren’t Jewish. Frank and Estelle Costanza are supposed to be Italian? Whatever. Cosmo Kramer? More like Schlomo Kramer. My sister’s nickname for the changing of Jewish names and identities to fit into America is the semantic nosejob.

A few other fakinesses of Seinfeld: the slap bass riff on the soundtrack is a sampling keyboard. Aside from a few outdoor establishing shots, the entire show was shot in Los Angeles, even the street scenes.

But for all its TV fakiness, Seinfeld is sometimes remarkably psychologically truthful.

Sometimes it even has Buddhist wisdom.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.” This kind of confident embracing of one’s own self with all its shortcomings is a powerful thing. It’s the basic psychological strategy at work in Barack Obama’s confessional writing. It conveys and inspires inner strength.

The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.

The Gregory Brothers also produce straight R&B tracks. With all possible respect, I don’t find their serious music to be anything special. It’s when they submerse themselves in TV that they shine the brightest. The internet doesn’t have a lot of info about their production techniques, all I could find was an interview where Michael Gregory says:

Logic Express was a godsend for composition–it has an enormous sample library. I use it for all my audio now. For vocal processing, auto-tune and melodyne plug-ins come in super handy. I use Final Cut Express for all the editing, but the capture feature is somehow rubbish, so iMovie gets called in for that.

So there’s a lot of very sophisticated computer software at work, though with a charming zer0-budget lameness of video compositing and audio mixing. I imagine when they wind up on Comedy Central or wherever, the production values will get a little more slick.

Musically, these videos are working for me. If they slowed the tempos down and found some heavier kick and snare sounds, they’d be ready for the radio. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My own experiments with Auto-tune show any kind of human speech as pretty tonal to begin with. When you automatically tune someone talking to the closest piano-key pitches, it makes it easier to make out the melodies that were already present. The Gregorys do a lot of further manipulation and harmonizing, but their best moments come from unintended speech melodies, like Joe Biden shouting “God bless America”, from space.

Some languages are more tonal than others. Chinese uses pitch to differentiate words semantically, the way English uses combinations of vowels and consonants. The same string of phonemes spoken at different pitches in Mandarin might have completely different meanings as words. Even in English, we use pitch to communicate punctuation, emotional stance and other metadata. Read this out loud to see what I mean:

Okay?

Okay.

Okay…

Okay!

Speech has a lot of profound overlaps with music, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to draw the line between them. This is I why I’m convinced by the theory that music is the evolutionary precursor of language, the bridge between monkey calls and our present communications systems.

By quantizing and digitizing information, you make it easier to memorize and replicate it. I find myself humming phrases from the Gregorys’ videos the way I hum Andrew Lloyd Webber. Digitized sound information is easier to memorize, store and copy. The subtle nuances of Katie Couric’s speech with all the pitches on a continuous spectrum are difficult to remember and imitate, but once it’s Auto-tuned, it becomes effortless. Digitizing data in any medium makes it much more robust across many generations of copies. DNA is a digital medium – the G, A, T and C of your genes can be logically expressed as ones and zeros, and ones and zeros can be replicated flawlessly and endlessly.

I find Auto-tune bottomlessly entertaining to listen to. Jay-Z and many of my friends say they’re tired of it, but I’m not. I can understand why you might be getting a little burned out on it if you listen to pop radio. However, there’s a lot of resistance out there to Auto-tune that’s too deep and intense to just come from jadedness with a music fad. The Time magazine article about the Gregorys allows that Auto-tune “isn’t always a way to cheat.” I find that funny. How can Auto-tune be cheating? How can you cheat at music? It’s not a competitive sport. I prefer to think of music as more like a game. You can play better or worse, but there aren’t really winners and losers. We’re adept at coming up with systems of rules for music, but we get carried away with that. Who cares how you make it so long as it sounds good?

If Auto-tune causes you distress because you care about authenticity in your music, I can understand that. I resisted “fake” music through most of my teens and twenties. Now I regret all the effort, but I guess I had a point. I was worried that someone was trying to put something over on me. I gave up my desire for authenticity after it became clear that it’s an impossible dream. There is no authenticity anywhere.

Ever since the sixties, we urban elites have fetishized the bluegrass of the forties as a pure folk form. But Bill Monroe wasn’t some naive backwoods hick. He designed his music deliberately for its commercial appeal to a particular audience. For instance, all that intense treble was there to cut through radio static and low-tech mics and mixing desks. This doesn’t make Bill Monroe’s music any less truthful or good. I commend him for finding a way to reach a mass audience with such idiosyncratic, regionally specific music.

I don’t think there’s anything magical or transcendent about good music. It’s like good food, if you make it with care and attention, then it makes people feel good. Sometimes you’re cooking for yourself, sometimes you’re cooking for anyone who walks in the door, sometimes you’re cooking for paying customers. It depends on the situation which recipes are going to work the best.

The half-life for “bad” inauthentic pop music to decay into “good” authentic art music seems to about one generation. The analog synths and drum machines that sounded so fake and lame in the seventies and eighties are cherished vintage gear today. Even the digital samplers of the eighties have attained authentic status because of the digital crunchiness you get from the low sampling rate. I’ll bet you anything that future hipsters are going to fetishize Auto-tune once the pop mainstream has safely abandoned it.

Potentially the most offensive but also the least ironic video by the Gregorys is this one:

Here’s the mp3 if you want to download it. It makes me a little uncomfortable, especially the greenscreened backup singer thing, which feels disrespectful. But I can’t argue with the message. I’d like to hear a producer with more chops do a version of this, maybe at a mellower tempo with less embellishment. Imagine turning on the news and seeing that speech. Either version.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, Doctor Who is an extremely long-running, low-budget British science fiction show about a time-traveling alien being who looks like a flamboyant Oxford don. Or actually a series of flamboyant Oxford dons. The original actor playing Doctor Who was elderly and became ill while the show was just getting to be popular. When he couldn’t continue, the BBC ingeniously decided to have the Doctor’s species periodically reincarnate as a routine part of their life cycle. They were thus able to keep the show going through many changes of lead actor. Doctor Who has been on the air for most of the past forty-five years with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Here’s the original 1963 title sequence, with music composed by Ron Grainer and arranged, produced and recorded by Delia Derbyshire:

Let’s talk for a second about Delia Derbyshire.

She produced the Doctor Who theme music using analog oscillators and tape loops, laboriously, over a period of many weeks. Here she talks about her process.

Her name suggests that she might have been a professor at Hogwarts, but Delia Derbyshire was a genuine hipster ambient techno producer, decades before such a thing existed. She was buddies with Paul McCartney, Yoko Ono, Brian Jones and the guys in Pink Floyd. In addition to the Doctor Who theme, she produced a bunch of other tripped-out electronica. Hear a sample:

Delia Derbyshire – “Planetarium”

The Doctor Who theme I was hearing in the eighties as a third grader was a newer arrangement by Peter Howell:

The Delia Derbyshire version broke a lot of new ground, but the eighties version is the one that really works for me musically. The groove is tighter because the bass was recorded to a click track. The main melody is played on an Arp Odyssey, a more sophisticated version of the synth they used for R2D2′s voice. Peter Howell sings the B section melody wordlessly through a vocoder. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video if you want to really geek all the way out. Dude isn’t the world’s most dynamic camera presence, but he demonstrates all the different retrofuture gear one piece at a time.

In 1988, The KLF had a number one pop hit in the UK with “Doctorin’ The Tardis” which includes a sample of the Peter Howell theme.

What I like about electronic music is how it makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. The best science fiction does that too. Nothing could have sounded more futuristic or otherworldly to me as a kid than those synths and that vocoder. Now they’re museum pieces.