Teenagers like music for its own sake, but they’re also using it for a specific developmental goal: to define themselves and their tribal allegiances, and to learn about the tribal allegiances of others. This is why their hairsplitting arguments about the difference between two similar-sounding genres carry so much heat — it’s not about classifying the music, it’s about classifying themselves. The visuals add a lot of valuable social context to the music. You can see what the artists look like, their age and race and class, how they dress, how and if they dance, what instruments they show themselves using, what kind of physical settings they inhabit. If the videos are stylized and fantastic, there’s still plenty of information there; it’s just more emotional and symbolic.

The only people I know who watch music videos on TV are nostalgic old Gen Xers like me. Kids exclusively watch on the computer, or on their phones. They do it mostly in their bedrooms, but can really watch anywhere they happen to be if they have smartphones. The sharing and discussion of the videos is as important as the videos themselves, thus the appeal of YouTube and its easy integration with Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter etc.

Original post on Quora

The panel:

• Moderator: Jeff Leeds, Editor in Chief, Music, Buzzmedia
• Angel Laws, Founder and Editor in Chief, ConcreteLoop.com
• Jessica Suarez, Writer, Stereogum
• Tamar Anitai, Senior Editor, buzzworthy.mtv.com
• Rob Bonstein, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Epic Records
• Sarah Weiss, Head of Markting, Bowery Presents

The panel is taking place in the Buzz Media office, a grungy downtown space. The walls are hung with art made from stuff found on the ground. Being here makes me feel like an old, old man. It doesn’t help that I have a job interview later today, so I’m wearing my most conservative suit. Meanwhile, Rob Bonstein may be a Senior Director, but he looks like he’s about twelve.

Nevertheless, here I am. The setup in here is distinctly less slick than yesterday’s presentation at JWT, which is a colossal, gleaming midtown ad firm. This is a grungier downtown space with a flaky PA and flakier internet.

As far as this panel is concerned, social media is coextensive with Twitter. The word “Facebook” isn’t uttered once in the first hour. When someone finally does mention it, it’s in the context of driving traffic to Twitter. The panel considers Facebook to be like MySpace for adults, except without the music-playing functionality.

Transparency vs mystique

Should bands have separate personal and professional Twitter presences? The panel can’t agree. On the one hand, transparency is the fundamental social media value. Who doesn’t love behind-the-curtain access to their music heroes? Mystique seems like an outdated concept in the social media age. On the other hand, when rock stars reveal the mundane reality of their lives, they run the risk of puncturing the whole fantasy we’re trying to project onto them. There’s a reason you don’t see Lady Gaga posting Twitpics of her wearing sweatpants.

The panel is unanimous that a musician’s public persona needs to be “on brand.” Otherwise you get too much cognitive dissonance, like M.I.A. and her infamous truffle fries. It makes sense to expect musicians to have a consistent persona, but it asks a lot to ask someone to equate their personhood with their brand. The idea frankly creeps me out. Kanye West succeeds at admirably at inhabiting his persona at all times, but he’s either a hyperdisciplined virtuoso performance artist or a complete lunatic, or both.

Meanwhile, sometimes artists do their most meaningful work when they go “off-brand.” Miles Davis was way outside the bebop identity he helped invent when he put on his sequined lace-up bellbottoms and made Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way, but that was the peak of his commercial (and arguably cultural) impact.

Regardless of whether musicians are supposed to be playing characters or just being themselves, social media best practices are the same as they are for any person or band. Self-promotion is follower repellent. Show the fans love! When they write to you, write them back. Wish them good luck on their math test or whatever. The panel cites Ciara as a good example of the personal and interactive approach. More surprisingly, the panel also mentions Ice-T, who loves to publicly argue with his critics. Just retweeting praise is as boring as any other kind of promotion; Ice-T’s stream is interesting because he’s real and unpredictable.

Planet Kanye

Angel Laws says that when she met Kanye, he told her, “I don’t need Twitter, I’m Kanye West!” That was then.

Kanye’s Twitter is a must-follow. One look at the grammar and spelling and you know that his feed isn’t written by a publicist. It’s constantly “on-brand,” but that brand is so eccentric and self-mocking and over the top that it couldn’t possibly be calculated. Maybe the specifics of Kanye’s life aren’t very relatable to the average hip-hop fan, like his difficulty in selecting the right marble table for his conference room. But Kanye’s Twitter voice is so idiosyncratic and heartfelt that I find it totally endearing.

The bottom line

Twitter is very amusing, but does it actually drive album and ticket sales? It certainly helps get you press attention, and attention generally. The journalists on the panel say if you want to get on their radar, at-replies work better than press releases. As for sales? No one really knows why people buy one album and not another, much less this panel. No one knows specifically whether a given social media effort will make anyone do anything. But attention can’t hurt, and a close connection to the fans can only help.

Guilty pleasures

This doesn’t have anything to do with social media per se, but it’s worth mentioning. Tamar Anitai from MTV kept invoking the concept of the “guilty pleasure.” This is funny to me. America is so puritan, even the hipsters of the pop music world. I love the idea that if I enjoy Justin Bieber, I’m being immoral, like I’m harming someone. Tamar Anitai breaks up the band gossip on her Twitter by talking about TV shows, and she “confesses” to “hating herself” for watching Dancing With The Stars and such. So I’m supposed to believe that that MTV’s marketing team and their Twitter followers are so highbrow and cultured normally, and that they’re being deliciously transgressive when they reveal the dirty secret that they watch crappy reality TV? Didn’t MTV give us Jersey Shore? So many contradictions.

Odds and ends

Facebook isn’t the only big social platform to be conspicuously absent from the presentation YouTube also doesn’t get mentioned until near the very end. It seems surprising, since YouTube is by far the biggest music search engine and discovery tool on the web. I guess no one’s talking about it because it isn’t much of a revenue stream for the music industry. Though how could the labels and music press not be capitalizing on it somehow? I don’t understand the music business. But apparently, neither does the music business.

Erykah Badu live-tweeted giving birth! No real comment there, just, wow.

At this point, artist web sites only exist to direct Google searchers to the appropriate social media profile or item for sale.

The panel doesn’t see much value in requiring people to enter email addresses to hear tracks or do other kinds of interaction. All kids have multiple email addresses now, one that they actually use and the rest to put into web sites to collect marketing messages and spam. Organic social media interactions, word of mouth and TV are the only way to actually get a kid’s attention.

The panel sees a bright future in the use of Foursquare check-ins as a celebrity marketing tool. Ugh.

Social media is all well and good, but no one is buying albums. If you want to make money from recordings, your best hope is to get something placed in a TV ad.

On a brighter note, the panel loves Soundcloud. So do I. No better music-sharing service exists on the web. The panel especially loves the within-song commenting. Show Soundcloud lots of love, internet, we want them to succeed.

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.

Here I’m going to collect some breakdance media and see if any thoughts emerge. Your suggestions welcome.

Beat Street

Grandmaster Flash spins in Wild Style

Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo broom dance

Here’s a fan video someone did, Michael Jackson breakdancing in slo-mo to Nite Lite by Yo Gotti.

Anything else I should see?

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.

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!