At the end, they repeat “Naah, na na nanana naah, nanana naah, hey Jude” over and over for four minutes. I could listen to it for forty minutes. Why don’t I get bored? Each time through, the chant affects me a little differently. The forty-third time through might be musically indistinguishable from the forty-second but it feels different. My attention drifts and snaps back in. There’s a feeling of tension through each group of four or eight that gets resolved on the first repetition in the next phrase. A cumulative tension builds across all the repetitions. Some western listeners get anxious from this tension. I’ve seen loops make people surprisingly angry. The loop reaches deep into the brain stem, and not everybody likes having their consciousness altered so heavily. I’ve also seen loops bring groups of people into ecstatic states with an afterglow lasting for days, weeks, even months.

In retrospect, I look back at stuff I liked the best instinctively before I was a musician, still just a fan, and what ties it all together is loop-oriented structures.

• Riff-based Ellington, Monk and Coltrane tunes
• “Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads
• “Not Fade Away” and “Fire On The Mountain” by the Grateful Dead
• “Stir It Up” by Bob Marley
• “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” by Michael Jackson
• Everything by Run-DMC
• The first few minutes of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock

On paper, these tunes are all very boring pieces of music. But living in my ears, they’re bottomlessly gratifying. Most people I know with a casual relationship to music tend to enjoy loop-based music, especially on the dance floor. But many if not most of the trained musicians I’ve worked with are resistant to the loop. Whether they come from jazz or classical, schooled musicians tend to equate complexity and density with quality. This to me is one of the great pathologies afflicting the music academy. Making good music takes a lot of study and focus, but that’s different from effort. Some of the best music is easy. After struggling with all the intricacies of music theory, we musicians get too suspicious of simple truths. That suspicion gets in the way of our main job of connecting to listeners and making their lives more bearable.

A few years ago I went to hear a highly respected quartet led by a saxophonist who the jazz nerds speak of in hushed tones. I got to the club early enough to catch the soundcheck. While the sound guy fiddled with levels, the band played an open-ended funk groove on one chord. It was exhilarating: the loose interplay between the band members was anchored by the straightforward groove to make a satisfyingly tight sonic knot. I was all excited for the actual set, which turned out to be… a snooze. The material was bafflingly intricate, full of startling key and time signature changes at unpredictable intervals. The band maneuvered through these sonic mazes masterfully, and I’m sure they enjoyed themselves, but for me it was like watching someone else play a difficult video game. And these are jazz musicians, supposedly the warm, emotionally connected wing of intellectual music. The situation is even worse in the classical world.

All music is based on repetition. The definition of a rhythm is a patterned sound that repeats (or, for that matter, any patterned event that repeats.) Pitched sounds are produced by regular sine-wave vibrations as an air column’s pressure cycles back and forth.

Nearly all world music uses repeating phrases grouped into longer phrases, and groups those metaphrases into meta-metaphrases. Entire sections get repeated to form still higher level structures. For my ears, the most satisfying music is the most modular and recursive.

Repeated events are surprising because they’re thermodynamically improbable. Usually the rock falls off the mountain and just sits there. For the rock to roll around and around in a circle, some unusual force must be driving it. When we come across something improbable, we instinctively want to find a meaning for it. Symmetrical repetition creates structure and gratifies our pattern-recognition systems, the same ones that enjoy parsing out the meaning of a text or the rules of a video game.

Structure acts very strongly on our emotions, very often without our realizing why. One reason the Beatles and Michael Jackson sell so many more records than their seemingly equally talented peers is their mastery of structured repetition. Their best work repeats phrases exactly the right number of times, in exactly the right sequence. This aspect of songwriting is harder to quantify in rule sets than rhythm or harmony, but that hasn’t stopped the music industry from trying. Here’s an excerpt of an entertaining McSweeney’s series, Dispatches From a Guy Trying Unsuccessfully to Sell a Song In Nashville by Charlie Hopper.

To me, it appears that Music Row’s devotion to form and formula is not strictly venal. It’s just the smartest way to send a song into the Machine without you being there to defend it. “The first rule of songwriting is, there are no rules,” Barbara Cloyd, a Songwriting Tutor, likes to declare at the outset of her class. Then she takes a fairly deep breath: “Having said that…”

And she goes on to explain the three or four acceptable formulas.
It all proceeds from the notion that there are basic truths about how people like to get information. Barbara quotes someone she knows as saying, “We like to hear something, then hear it again. Then we want to hear something different for a while. After that, we’re ready to hear the first thing again.”

That would be Verse Chorus, Verse Chorus, Bridge, Verse Chorus.

I knew John spoke the Universal Language of Beatles. “So the basic formula is like, oh, ‘Ticket to Ride.’ Or ‘Day Tripper.’”

I might have been a little didactic. “Then, if you want, you can start with two verses. That gives you an option to have one or two verses after the first chorus. But you never put two verses after the first chorus unless you had two at the beginning. That screws with the formula.”

John was laughing and shaking his head in a way that meant he couldn’t believe I had bought into this seriously.

“Like ‘Yellow Submarine,’” I said. “Two verses, chorus, one verse, chorus, the farting around in a submarine during the bridge, verse, chorus. Actually, the bridge is optional. I’ve heard publishers say, ‘Do you really need a bridge here? There’s no new information in it…’”

The other form that’s generally acceptable, though less prized because it has no soaring chorus, is the “A A B A” form. The hook comes as the end line of each A section. It might show up at the end of the B section, but doesn’t have to. Most songs that are written with no thought of formula tend to be in this form. “Yesterday” is A A B A. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is. “Girl” is. Most Bob Dylan songs are.

Repetitive music teaches itself to you as you listen. It creates familiarity, which is a prerequisite to emotional connection. Cognitive scientists use the word “rehearsal” to describe the process by which the brain learns through repeated exposure to the same stimulus. As they like to say, neurons that fire together wire together. Repetitive music builds rehearsal in, making it more accessible and inclusive.

In America, our musical culture is a hybrid of mostly western European, African and Caribbean traditions. Our musical ancestors have some philosophical differences around repetition. The western European classical music term for a continually repeated phrase is an ostinato, from the Italian word for “stubborn.” It’s related to the English word obstinate. This is not an attractive quality in a person and the European classical world doesn’t think too highly of it as a quality of music either. Theodor Adorno criticized the repetitiveness of popular music as being “psychotic and infantile.” He was outspokenly contemptuous of jazz and dance music generally. From his book Prisms:

Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhabitation, as within an articulate language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas, and clichés to the exclusion of everything else.

Adorno is factually correct. But he’s wrong that this is a defect of the music. The tricks, formulas and cliches are the basic grammar of pleasure. Cooking tofu with sesame oil, ginger and soy sauce is a cliche too, and for good reason, it consistently makes the tofu taste good.

Fortunately, we in America are blessed with the strong African and Caribbean influences, and the musicians of these cultures hold circularity as a high virtue. To pick one example out of a vast many, Fela Kuti’s “Beasts Of No Nation” repeats the chords G minor to F for about half an hour. It doesn’t get old.

Sample-based hip-hop is the music most exciting my ears right now. The best beatmakers find fragments that were part of a linear stream and bend them into unexpected loops.

I don’t know the provenance of this RZA quote beyond wikipedia, but it’s a good one:

For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo, you’re going to have some nice music man, you’re going to have a nice hip hop track.

This is good advice for any musician, not just hip-hop beatmakers.

Gould liked the studio better than the concert hall because he felt that recordings created more opportunities for a two-way conversation between performer and listener. From the book Wondrous Strange by Kevin Bazzana:

He extended his belief in creative freedom to its logical limit, advocating the direct participation of the listener in the creative process, through the intercession of technology. He believed that the modern listener had the same right to tinker with the recording artist’s work as the performer had to tinker with the composer’s. “Dial twiddling is in its limited way an interpretive act,” he noted, and the hi-fi listener was by nature a creative force: even to adjust volume, tone and balance on a crude home stereo of the 1960s was to impose oneself creatively onto the work. “I’m all for the kit concept,” he said in 1968. “I’d love to issue a series of variant performances and let the listener choose what they themselves most like. Let them assemble their own performance. Give them all the component parts, all the component splices, rendered at different tempi with different dynamic inflections, and let them put something together that they really enjoy — make them participant to that degree.” [...] But even without the “kits” he envisioned, recording, Gould said, “compels the performer to relinquish some control in favor of the listener, a state of affairs, by the way, which I find to be both encouraging and charming, not to mention aesthetically appropriate and morally right.”

I’m totally on board with this idea. Classical music concerts are soul-deadening, even when the music is exciting. You have to sit silently and motionlessly. The performers’ faces rarely register emotion, much less their bodies. You can’t even clap between movements. Alex Ross tentatively proposes a relaxation of rigid concert etiquette to make the experience less tedious. That’s fine, but it doesn’t change the basic fact of the forbidding cliff between performer and audience. I’m not suggesting that classical concerts need mosh pits, but it flies in the face of our basic humanity to ask us to not participate in music bodily.

Glenn Gould was prescient in his insistence that music is all about participation, not spectating. There’s a direct line from Gould’s kit recording concept and musicians who release remix-friendly a capellas, instrumentals and separated stems. I’ll bet Gould would have been delighted to play around with Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” stems. I’m hoping he would have approved of my mashup, too:

Gould Lockdown

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_Gould_Lockdown.mp3)

Me vs Glenn Gould vs Kanye West

mp3 download, ipod format download

Born 2B Wylde
Download audio file (Revival_Revival_Born2BWylde.mp3)

Revival Revival vs Steppenwolf

mp3 download, ipod format download

Vocals and arranging by Barbara. Samples, guitar and drum machine programming by me.

The song was written by Mars Bonfire. Best stage name ever! I love this song as music, but its symbolism is a little lost on me. Bla bla bla sixties, open road, freedom, whatever. The biker mythos doesn’t grab me. I’ve never made it all the way through Easy Rider. I do like the poster though.

Steppenwolf is named after this book. Never read it, but it has a cool cover.

Let’s Just Dance

Download audio file (Revival_Revival_Lets_Just_Dance.mp3)

Revival Revival vs Lady Gaga vs David Bowie

mp3 download, ipod format download

Guitar and vocals by Barbara singer. Samples, beats and Auto-tuning by me.

The Bowie tune

Sample geeks will note the intro borrowed from “Twist And Shout” – it’s  not a sample, it’s an interpolation, but musically, what’s the difference? Fans of “real” rock tend to take a dim view of David Bowie’s eighties’ stuff – Chuck Klosterman derides him as resembling a waiter from the Olive Garden during this period. From my electronica-producing perspective, “Let’s Dance” sounds a lot fresher than the “classic” Bowie sound. Time has made me appreciate that Nile Rodgers production more than I did at the time.

The Gaga tune

I love Lady Gaga’s sound and look, but her lyrics aren’t too memorable. Barbara and I agreed that both songs benefit from skipping nearly all the words and boiling them down to their central message. It’s a good message, dance really does make it okay.

So maybe you want to write a song or an instrumental in a particular mood or style, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the scales. Here’s a handy guide to the commonly used scales in western pop, rock, jazz, blues and so on. They’re shown in the way you’d program them into Auto-tune. Click each image to go to that scale’s Wikipedia page, where you can hear it, see it in traditional notation and pick up fun historical facts.

Major scales

C major

Happy; can be majestic or sentimental when slow. The white keys on the piano. Examples: “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

C mixolydian

Bluesy, rock; can also be exotic/modal. Play over C7 chord. Same pitches as F major. Example: “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles.

C lydian

Ethereal, dreamy, futuristic. Same pitches as G major. Example: “Possibly Maybe” by Björk (from the line “As much as I definitely enjoy solitude…”)

C ahava raba

Exotic, Middle Eastern, Jewish. Same pitches as F harmonic minor. Example: “Hava Nagila.”

Minor Scales

C natural minor

Sentimental, tragic. Same pitches as E flat major.

C harmonic minor

Tragic, exotic, Middle Eastern.

C melodic minor

Mysterious, jazzy, very dark. Example: sixties Coltrane.

C dorian

Hip, sophisticated, jazzy. Same pitches as B flat major. Example: “So What” by Miles Davis.

C phrygian

Spanish/Flamenco. Same pitches as A flat major.

Synthetic Scales

C chromatic

All the piano keys. Freefalling, anxiety-producing. Same pitches as every other chromatic scale.

C whole tone

Dreamy, underwater. Every other key on the piano. Same pitches as D, E, F sharp, G sharp and A sharp whole tone scales. Example: Background parts in the Simpsons theme song.

C diminished

Dark, mysterious. Same pitches as E flat, G flat and A diminished scales. Examples: movies about Dracula.

C major pentatonic

Joyful; widely used in world and folk music. Major scale with 4th and 7th removed. Same pitches as A minor pentatonic.

C minor pentatonic

Rock; widely used in world and folk music. Minor scale with 2nd and 6th removed. Same pitches as E flat major pentatonic.

C blues

Blues, obviously. Works great over major and minor chords. Minor pentatonic with flat fifth added.

Making chords

To make basic chords from the major and minor scales, start with the first note, then skip to the third, then the fifth. Using C Dorian, that’s C, Eb, G. This is called a triad, and it’s the simplest type of chord.

To extend the chords, add in the seventh, the second/ninth, the fourth/eleventh, and the sixth/thirteenth. Using C Dorian, that’s Bb, D, F, A. The more notes you add, the more complex and dense the chord becomes.

You can also skip or leave out notes: C, Eb, Bb, F for example. Also, you can double notes (especially the first/root.)

Don’t put fourths/elevenths into major chords unless you leave the third out, it sounds very dissonant.

Have fun!

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are just long lists of numbers. They can be copied flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can duplicate them and edit them non-destructively, so you can edit and try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And the edits or overdubs you make are totally non-destructive.  There’s no undo with tape overdubs, but you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music seems more intellectually challenging than it is. There’s some memorization and practice required but mostly music is a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the anxiety out of recording. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if there isn’t pressure to lay to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other  tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point was with a soul/R&B band I had with Nicole Bishop called Love Child. We were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had an ace bunch of musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We would meticulously sequence a bassline and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk. So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings were not giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible, I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds. A better way to vary the sound between sections is to drop the loops out completely, rather than trying to vary them.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. Due respect to my fellow musicians but I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their tracks to suit. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

You can trace the ancestry of music like you can trace the ancestry of a person

Each new song is built using the same modular components as the other songs of its time and place, the way that all humans share the same genetic toolkit. My sister and I are like two different songs from the same album by the same band. My cousins are like songs on different albums by bands with overlapping members.

The ancestry of music is more complicated than the ancestry of humans. A better model is the evolution of microbes, with a lot of horizontal gene transfer happening. Biologists use the term “gene cassettes” to describe the semi-self-contained hunks of DNA that bacteria swap back and forth. The analogy to music fans spreading memes by passing tapes around couldn’t be any more perfect.

Some musical relationships do conveniently lend themselves to family tree-like representation.  The practice of sampling and quoting existing songs creates a particularly clear and unambiguous set of relationships well-suited to network diagramming. The internet has several handy sample databases, including the Rap Sample FAQ, Whosampled.com and Wikipedia. I’ve been hard at work the past year or so making sample maps visualizing the more interesting chunks of data.

See all of my sample maps here.

Sampling is the easiest set of relationships to diagram, but I could draw similar charts for use of particular scales, chords, rhythmic figures, melodic motifs, rhyme schemes, combinations of instrument sounds, and all the other memetic nuts and bolts of music.

A few really successful memes make up most of the music we hear

Some musical memes are better at getting themselves copied than others, the way genes for color vision or opposable thumbs are good at getting themselves copied. Here in America, the most successful memes include the backbeat, the one-four-five chord progression and the blues scale.

To illustrate just how widespread a musical meme can get, here’s a video called “Four Chords, Thirty-Six Songs.” In the key of C, the four chords are C, G7, Am, F.

The video barely scratches the surface of all the songs, famous and not, that have used those four chords. So why is this chord progression such a big hit? For one thing, it’s easy to play on piano or guitar or whatever. For another, the four chords sound good in any sequence or combination, spaced out on any harmonic rhythm. They have a wistful yet still uplifting mood that suits a variety of musical statements in a variety of styles.

Computers make recombining and resequencing the memes effortless

Pre-computer, composing and recording a song was a slow and effortful process. You wrote the song out or memorized it. Then you got a band together and they read the song, or you repeated it to them until they memorized it. Then you rehearsed it a bunch, and then recorded it from beginning to end. Sometimes you had to record many takes to get a good one. To get a polished, professional-sounding result generally required expensive gear operated by highly specialized engineers.

You can still operate that way if you want, but computers offer some faster and easier alternatives. I prefer to write by improvising into the sequencer or digital audio editor, picking the best patterns and editing them into shape. The computer gratifyingly collapses improvising, composing and recording into a single act. Making music electronically is like being able to type out any DNA sequence you want and immediately seeing how it will look as an organism. You can skip the tedious embryonic development of notating, rehearsing and memorizing. Technologies like MIDI, sampling and pitch-detection software let you read any existing musical genome and resequence it to your heart’s content.

All this freedom is positively alarming to some of the musicians I know, who view it as evil or immoral in some way. I find that the computer eliminates some of the labor, but doesn’t do the imaginative work for you, and that’s where the art happens. The computer makes it effortless to spin out ideas, but you still need to select among them and decide which are the good ones. The creative act itself stays the same as it always has been; there’s just less friction.

Towards a unified theory of musical evolution

A genome is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating the proteins and other structures making up an organism. A group of memes (a memeplex, as Susan Blackmore puts it) is an algorithm for getting itself copied by generating performances and recordings. What makes a song likelier to get itself heard, and eventually copied or adapted? Exact copying of previous generations of songs is a bad long-term strategy. Tastes change, like the way the environment changes for organisms.

Total originality is a bad strategy too. It’s easy to be original, to create a piece of music with no precedent or borrowing from anything existing. Bang randomly on a piano and you’re in business. Odds are that your random banging will mostly be annoying. (Chances are, a random DNA sequence won’t make for much of an organism either.) To be good, your song will need to be substantially familiar. Forming an emotional connection with the listener requires a lot of shared vocabulary and associations. What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator. Most mutations will make it harder to get copied, but a few improve your chances dramatically.

Many mash-up artists seem unaware that their work implicates any rights at all, and copyright owners may be reluctant to alienate fans with copyright restrictions. Artists such as Girl Talk remain outspoken against copyright restrictions on mash-up culture. Individual copyright owners, such as the owners of Star Wars, have adopted terms of use for mash-ups.

Is fan and other mash-up activity important to enrich our culture? Are existing allowances for fair use adequate? Should mash-up artists and fan fiction publishers have any right (legal or moral) to complain when others copy and redistribute their work? What is a copyright owner or licensee to do when it has contractual obligations to third parties in connection with their contributions? How should these issues be resolved?

The panelists: Professor Sonia Katyal of Fordham Law School, Professor Shaka McGlotten of Purchase College,  Martin Schwimmer (Partner, Moses & Singer), and me! The moderator is Jay Kogan (”DC Comics” and “MAD Magazine”).

February 24th, 2010
12:00 p.m.-12:30 p.m.: Cocktails (cash bar)
12:30 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Lunch
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Program
The Princeton Club, 15 West 43rd Street, New York, NY
Cost: $65.00 (members) $75.00 (non-members)

SPEAKERS (besides me):
SONIA KATYAL is a Professor of Intellectual Property, Property and Civil Rights Law at Fordham Law School. Her work focuses on intellectual property, civil rights, and new media, with a special focus on art and freedom of expression. Katyal was awarded a grant from the Warhol Foundation for her book, Contrabrand, which studies the relationship between art, advertising and intellectual property. Her new book, Property Outlaws, (co-authored with Eduardo M. Penalver), which studies the role of civil disobedience in property and technology, was just published from Yale University Press, and her work on fan fiction focuses on how copyright affects the representation of gender and sexuality. Her scholarly work has appeared in prominent legal publications, including the Texas Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. She received her A.B. from Brown University and her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

SHAKA MCGLOTTEN is an Assistant Professor of Media, Society, and the Arts at Purchase College, where he teaches courses on media, ethnography, and digital culture. His research focuses on the intersections of media technologies with categories of gender, sexuality, and race in particular. He also works in what might be broadly called “affect studies,” or the study of the ways feelings are central to our individually lived and shared social experiences. He is currently at work on a manuscript that explores these themes. “Virtual Intimacies: Media Cultures and Queer Sociality” examines a range of media sites DIY porn, online gaming, gay chatrooms to examine the mutual intensification between digital media culture and the creativity of queer sociality.

MARTIN SCHWIMMER is a partner in the New York law firm of Moses & Singer, practicing trademark and copyright law. He publishes The Trademark Blog, the nation’s oldest blog devoted to IP law. He is a fan of the Mets, the Jets, Arsenal, Lost, Fringe and Arrested Development. He has all of Girltalk’s albums.

MODERATOR:
JAY KOGAN is Vice President Business & Legal Affairs and Deputy General Counsel for “DC Comics” and “MAD Magazine”, where he serves as the companies chief intellectual property counsel. Jay is also an adjunct professor at New York Law School, where he teaches Intellectual Property Licensing and Drafting. Jay received his J.D. and Masters Degree in Mass Media in a dual degree program at Boston University School of Law and his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Connecticut.

Sponsored by the Copyright Society Of America

Nile Rodgers has led an action-packed life. As a teenager, he played with the Sesame Street band, and then with the Apollo Theater house band, where he backed such luminaries as Aretha Franklin and P-Funk. He was an active Black Panther. His Allmusic bio lists various NYC bands he played in before forming Chic, including a new wave rock outfit called Allah & The Knife Wielding Punks. He later went on to write most of the disco songs and eighties pop hits that I like, and helped lay the cornerstone of hip-hop. He deserves a blog post and then some.

My favorite Chic song is “Le Freak.”

Nile Rodgers treats electric guitar as a tuned percussion instrument, an approach descending from James Brown. The breakdown section with the long string build presages “Thriller.” The lyrics are kind of goofy and dated, but what a groove.

Chic is best known to hip-hop heads for “Good Times,” which the Sugarhill Gang interpolated for “Rapper’s Delight.” The groove was also the inspiration for Blondie’s “Rapture” and Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.” The Chic sound is highly infectious. Here’s a sample map showing tracks that have either sampled or interpolated Chic.

Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards’ stupendous production career began with Sister Sledge. “We Are Family” has the signature Chic sound: jazz harmony arranged in funky, percussive, sampling-friendly sixteen-bar blocks.

From here, Rodgers and Edwards went on, together and separately, to basically define the sound of the eighties. Their resume includes a staggering run of hits. From Allmusic:

Rodgers produced blockbuster albums like David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, and Mick Jagger’s She’s the Boss. Edwards wasn’t as prolific as a producer, but did join the one-off supergroup the Power Station along with Tony Thompson as well as Robert Palmer and members of avowed Chic fans Duran Duran; he later produced Palmer’s commercial breakthrough, Riptide. Edwards also worked with Rod Stewart (Out of Order), Jody Watley, and Tina Turner, while Rodgers‘ other credits include the Thompson Twins, the Vaughan Brothers, INXS, and the B-52’s‘ comeback Cosmic Thing.

Rodgers also produced, played guitar or programmed for Peter Gabriel, Debbie Harry, Laurie Anderson, Steve Winwood, Paul Simon, Mariah Carey, Cyndi Lauper, Carly Simon, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Robert Plant and the Gremlins soundtrack.

This is a mammoth collective impact on my ears, from guys whose names I didn’t even learn until the past year or two. It would have been really hard to track all this information down without the internet. Kids today, they can’t begin to appreciate how information-starved we were not so very long ago.

When I got my music education, I was discouraged from liking dance-oriented pop music, especially the stuff from the seventies and eighties. All these decades later, “good taste” dictates that I be suspicious of synths, drum machines, repetition and fun. My music teachers and mentors would be willing to give Nile Rodgers props for his guitar chops but collectively take a dim view of his work with Madonna et al. Duke Ellington had it right when he said, “If it sounds good, it is good.” Here’s to taking pleasure seriously. Awww, freak out!

Update: My friend Adam suggested that I mash up David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance.” Enjoy.

Let’s Just Dance

Download audio file (Revival_Revival_Lets_Just_Dance.mp3)

mp3 download

At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.

Sixties Motown

When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.

In the eighties my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. I can’t argue with the musical qualities of the Big Chill tracks. The singing is full of emotional truth-telling. That said, the arrangements sound pretty cynical and commercial to my ears now. All those strings weren’t exactly sticking it sonically to the man. The slickness of Motown drove me to eventually seek out…

Delta blues

Raw, intense, minimalist, tied to a specific time and place: this is as good a definition of musical authenticity as you could ask for. The fact that it’s being made by oppressed people is even better. I embody the cliched story of the white hipster going back through the Stones and Zeppelin and hearing all the music they were inspired by/stole from.

I stand by the blues as an exceptionally powerful and truth-telling musical form. But my desire to participate in it quickly became a problem. This sound might have been authentic for Howlin’ Wolf, but for me, it’s an awkward fit at best. It’s not for lack of trying, I play the best white blues harmonica of anyone I know. The phrasing and microtones and general attitude has shaped my approach to every other style of music I’ve attempted. But if I was going to tell my own truth in music, I needed to find something socially a little closer to home. Jerry Garcia helpfully steered me towards…

Bluegrass

As the fans like to say, bluegrass is sung from the heart through the nose. It has all the earmarks of regional authenticity, including an apparent lack of concern with finding a wide audience.

As with blues, I ran up against some immediate cultural tourism issues when I started exploring this music. It’s easy for a New Yorker like me to condescend unintentionally, treating bluegrass as “pure” because its practitioners are supposedly unsophisticated hicks, and therefore “unspoiled.” The true story is more complicated. These guys might be rural but they most assuredly are not dumb. Bill Monroe conceived bluegrass partially on a commercial basis, choosing repertoire and instruments that appealed to the audiences of his time and place. Bluegrass requires a lot of technical skill, especially for the lead instruments like banjo and fiddle. It’s not a good genre for the casual dabbler. Besides, by the time I dug into this music I was also starting to get interested in…

Monk and Coltrane

One way to define authenticity is through exclusivity. Bluegrass is excludes outsiders in part because of the virtuosity. But even bluegrass isn’t as demanding as bebop. This is part of the reason why bebop is as untainted by commercial success as any snobby hipster could wish. Hard jazz is consistently the worst-selling genre in America, year in and year out.

Monk and Coltrane don’t fit into the bebop box exactly, even though they helped define its sound. They’re good avatars of purity because of the extreme individualism of their respective sounds. Any three-second sample of either of them is instantly recognizable. Monk isn’t as impenetrable as his reputation would suggest — even though some of his tunes are bafflingly intricate, a lot of them have melodies a normal person could whistle. Coltrane wrote some nicely approachable tunes too, but he gets extra authenticity points for spending his last few years playing harshly avant-garde experimental music.

I’d recommend that any musician tackle bebop if they want a rigorous education in American music generally. It’s all in there: the blues, the showtunes, the highbrow and the lowbrow, all the chords and scales and rhythms and textures our culture has to offer, at least up until the advent of electronic music. But much as I love it, bebop never really felt like home to me. I’ll continue to study Monk and Trane and their cohorts, and will continue to enjoy and be inspired by them, but if I want to express my experience in the present reality, they don’t have all the answers I need.

Klezmer

Okay, so if black or southern rural white music is an awkward fit for a New York Jew, how about the music of the tribe? Klezmer is culturally close to home for me. It straddles the shtetl and the big city, the old country and the new one, ancient folk forms and American pop.

Klezmer sometimes gets called “Jewish jazz” but a better comparison is to country. There’s that oompah-derived boom-chick beat, the harmonic minimalism, the melodic improvisation, the emphasis on rawness and feeling over technical complexity. The scales are different — you don’t get a lot of Ahava Raba scale in country. But the transition is easy otherwise. Discovering this music was a key puzzle piece for me. I’ll use those Arabic scales any chance I get. The mutt-like fusion of disparate styles is a truer statement of myself than anything that could be described as pure. Unfortunately, klezmer isn’t a great way to connect with other people aside from other NYC hipsters with Jewish ancestry, so it was never going to be my ultimate destination. But I’m glad to have gotten acquainted.

The impenetrable avant-garde

You could define authenticity as an uncompromising commitment to inner truth, the desire to please others be damned. There’s something noble and admirable in this commitment. The problem is that the furthest reaches of inner space don’t usually produce music that other people can connect to. I never enjoyed extremely experimental music, but the academic world and critical establishment hold it in high regard. As an educated highbrow type I felt like I had to dutifully subject myself to a lot of avant-garde experiments in an effort to purge myself of my weak-minded desire for music to be fun. I guess I learned a few things about the limits of human tolerance, but mostly I learned that I really do just want to have fun. Here’s a hilarious quote from “Can Machine-Made Music Sing Without a Composer?” in New York Magazine:

[O]n February 5, the Fireworks Ensemble will perform a live version of Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 album Metal Machine Music, at Miller Theatre. Listening to Reed’s original double LP is a test of endurance. In his garment-district loft, he leaned various electric guitars against their amps so that they howled at each other in crescendoing feedback loops, and welded the tracks into deafening industrial polyphony. The result was one of the most loathed records ever to hit the market. Nevertheless, the intrepid composer Ulrich Krieger decided to arrange it for traditional instruments, an undertaking that smacks of flagellant zeal.

I like the word “flagellant.” We just can’t shake our puritan roots, can we? There’s a lingering notion that painful music has the deepest purity. I’m grateful to have rid myself of this silly idea. Deliberately annoying music seems now to just be another form of class competition, its flamboyant uselessness a bigger statement of materialist affectation than any crassly commercial pop.

The authenticity of fakeness

So where has the authenticity quest ultimately led me? As a kid I loved Michael Jackson and Run-DMC to pieces but as I got a “music education” I felt morally obligated to reject their music for their sinful use of drum machines, synthesizers and borrowing other people’s ideas. Most especially, I felt I had to reject them for their emphasis on pleasing people above all other musical concerns. Now pleasing people seems to me to be the only good reason to make music. If “fake” and accessible sounds like synths and drum machines put bodies on the dance floor, then fake is better than real. I’ve had an instinctive attraction to electronic music dating back to loving science fiction sound effects and scores as a kid. But my peers and educators pressured me to be suspicious and hostile towards high-tech, pop-friendly musicians like Herbie Hancock. Herbie’s acoustic piano work is acceptable to the guardians of the jazz canon, but controversy continues to roil over his embrace of the synthesizer, sequencer and the sounds on the radio.

I’m glad to have withdrawn from the battle over purity. Not everything you hear in clubs or parties is terrific, but rejecting it wholesale was getting me nowhere. Giving myself permission to enjoy pop-jazz fusion, Herbie’s seventies and eighties future sounds, hip-hop and dance music has opened up huge new continents of sonic enjoyment to me. Authenticity is about truth-telling. For a high-tech city dweller, loop-based electronic sounds are more truthful to my experience than banjos and mandolins. I’ve whole-heartedly embraced the whole bag of technological tricks: Auto-Tune, lip-synching, whatever you’ve got.

Musical authenticity is in the emotional content, not the tools used to make it. Many musicians of my acquaintance fetishize vintage gear. There’s the hope that if you play the same harmonica as Little Walter Jacobs through the same mic and the same amp, maybe some of that Little Walter Jacobs magic will rub off on you. No doubt, quality gear sounds good in the right hands. But the hands are more important than the gear. Good tools can make it easier to realize an idea, and can even spark ideas. But a lame, unpracticed or anxious harmonica player will sound lame, unpracticed or anxious no matter what. And there’s nothing inherently soulful or un-soulful about any instrument. Drum machines are inauthentic when they emulate human drummers because they suck at it. They’re authentic when used for their uniquely posthuman quality. It all depends on the musician. Like Herbie Hancock says, the machine doesn’t program itself.

As of this moment, my favorite song is “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

Is it authentic? Not really. It panders to me on many levels, as a hip-hop head, an R&B fan and a patriotic New Yorker. But Jay and Alicia pander so well, the beat is so tight, the chord progression and melody are so energizing, who cares?

The concern over purity is really about exclusivity. A mutt like me is is no position to be excluding anyone. But then, no one really is in a position to be excluding anyone. The shocking truth of biological evolution is that if you go back far enough, we’re all cousins with each other, and if you go back further, we’re cousins with bats, bananas, and bacteria. I believe strongly that the rules of evolution apply to music too. Our music all descends from the same monkey calls, so who’s in a position to be disputing the musical methods of anyone else? You don’t have to like everything, but disliking something is no reason to call its basic validity into question.