The phenomenon of annoyingly persistent earworms is a great introduction to the meme theory: the idea that songs (and all other forms of cultural expression) are self-replicating informational “viruses” that use the mind as their host, the way DNA viruses use living cells and software viruses use computers. The best overview of this theory is …
Continue reading “What goes on neurologically when a song gets stuck in your head?”
The defining musical experience of my lifetime is hearing familiar samples in unfamiliar contexts. For me, the experience is usually a thrill. For a lot of people, the experience makes them angry. Using recognizable samples necessarily means having an emotional conversation with everyone who already has an attachment to the original recording. Music is about …
I’m fascinated by the Stone Age, so Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary about cave paintings was catnip for me.
Music has substantial evolutionary survival value. There’s a theory, which I find totally convincing, that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication. Read about it here: Humans’ success as a species is due entirely to our social organization, and …
We conventionally place a high value on originality in music. But it’s been my experience that the desire for originality gets in the way of making music that’s actually good. The closer you are to your influences, the more definite and truthful your work is. The key to quality music is to blend together an …
Our creation myths start with the assumption that we’re the most important thing in the world, the reason for everything else’s being. The story that science tells relegates us to the periphery. Life has mostly been smaller and simpler than us. I think it’s important to recognize that we might very easily wipe ourselves out, …
The best tool for understanding where music comes from is evolutionary biology. Songs don’t spontaneously spring into being any more than animals or plants do. They evolve, descending from reshuffled pieces of existing songs, the way our genes are shuffled together from our parents’ genes. The same way that all life has a single common …
The most-sampled album in history is probably James Brown’s compilation In The Jungle Groove. It includes the original recording of “Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” along with a sampling-friendly remix. It also includes some other much-loved funk tracks. None of them have been sampled as heavily as “Funky Drummer”, but there are some contenders. …
Humans are animals. Our tools are extensions of our bodies into the environment, like beavers and beaver ponds, coral and coral reefs, plants and oxygen. We’re unusual in the extent of our bodies’ impact on our environment, but plenty of other organism shape their environment to suit their needs. Technology is part of our extended …
“The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs is one of the most-sampled recordings in history. But even though the track is a cornerstone of hip-hop and other sample-based electronic music, for the first decade after its release, it was an obscurity. It’s not as catchy as James Brown’s big …
Continue reading “The natural history of the Funky Drummer break”
