Transcribing Noname

Having transcribed verses by KRS-One and Lil’ Kim, I wanted to take on something more current. I decided to do Noname‘s haunting neo-soul-infused song “Don’t Forget About Me.”

The song evokes D’Angelo, and calls him out by name.

In some ways, this Noname track was an easier transcription project than the verses by KRS-One or Lil’ Kim. Noname sings a clear melody on the G-flat major pentatonic scale, so even when her pitch is casual, it’s still obvious what note she’s pointing at. However, Noname’s flow is quite a bit more rhythmically complex and ambiguous than the relatively straightforward sixteenth note grid of boom-bap. The main question for me is how literally to take her performance. There are phrases where it sounds like she might have mentally conceived of a string of straight sixteenths, but then dragged or rushed for effect. Or maybe she did all these complex tuplets deliberately? Rather than try to read her mind, I ultimately opted to write out her performed rhythms as exactly as I could. Continue reading “Transcribing Noname”

Transcribing Lil’ Kim

Toni Blackman recommends a rap writing exercise: take an existing flow and replace the lyrics with your own. In order to do this with my music education students in the spring, I’m going to provide them with notated transcriptions as well as recordings. I’ve transcribed a couple of Toni’s recommended verses. The first was KRS-One’s “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight.)” The second is Lil’ Kim’s feature on Mary J Blige’s “I Can Love You.”

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What is Hip-Hop Education, the remix

In my first official interview with each of my three dissertation research participants, I asked them to answer the question, “What is hip-hop education?” To analyze their responses, I edited their answers down to their most salient moments and remix them by laying them over related music. The next step was to compare the remixed responses to see what resonances and conflicts emerged.

I exported the “acapellas” from each first-round remix and edited them down to what I consider to be their most crucial segments. Then I organized the sequences into a kind of “cypher,” where the three participants virtually pass the mic. I put all this over the instrumental from “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth, not for any special thematic reason, but because I consider it to be an exceptionally powerful and meaningful song.

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What is going on in this Noname beat?

Hip-hop in the post-Dilla era has been pushing the boundaries of rhythmic dissonance. The coolest and most mysterious groove I’ve heard in a rap song lately is “Sunny Duet” by Noname.

The rhythms here are bananas and I struggled for quite a while to figure out what was going on. I got very excited for a minute when I thought I realized that the hi-hats are playing a septuplet grid.

I was wrong, though, it’s not the hi-hats doing that rhythm, it’s the “doot doot doot” backing vocals. But I went to the trouble of learning how to do tuplets in Dorico and made the graphic, so you might as well enjoy it.

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Transcribing KRS-One

In my most recent dissertation interview with Toni Blackman, I asked how a non-rapper like me might approach rap songwriting with music education students. The best approach, of course, would be to just invite Toni herself to come in and teach it, but I wanted suggestions for what to do when that’s not possible. She recommended giving the students some scaffolding: rather than having them work from a blank page, have them write their own lyrics to an existing rap verse. Specifically, she recommended using KRS-One’s flow from his iconic first verse in “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight.)”

A rap flow isn’t just a rhyme scheme or a rhythmic structure; it’s a melody too. The pitches might not be confined to the piano keys, but they are specific nonetheless. Asking students to write this way is therefore much the same as giving them an existing melody and having them write new lyrics for it. Using this particular KRS-One song is especially appropriate, because it begins and ends with new lyrics written to the tune of Blondie’s “Rapture.”

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Brandon Bennett interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of conversation.

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Adam Neely video on rap covers

I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See the result here:

Seeing Adam’s process from the inside gives me great respect for his skills as an editor. He had a list of questions for the interview, but it was free-flowing and jumped around on many tangents. The tight and logical sequence of ideas you see above is the result of postproduction. 

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Toni Blackman interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a quarter worth of audio.


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Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio.

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Children of Production

My four-year-old daughter is currently super into “Children of Production” from Parliament’s classic 1976 album The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, their followup to Mothership Connection. If that album called down the holy mothership, this one introduces you to its occupants. This is the kind of groove that sounds effortless until you try playing it.

Here’s a live version, a bit more spaced-out:

On the studio version, the groove announces its subtle strangeness in the very first half second of the track. It begins with Jerome Brailey’s drums, Bootsy Collins’ bass, and (I assume) Bernie Worrell’s electric piano bumping together on the downbeat. Except they aren’t playing the downbeat, they’re playing the sixteenth note before the downbeat. The downbeat itself is silent! Then the rest of the band kicks in on the eighth note after the downbeat. That is a lot of rhythmic information to pack into a single beat’s worth of musical time! Let’s unpack.

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