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.

The beat and accompanying guitar twang comes 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.

I resisted liking the song because of what I imagined it representing. I mean, watch this video with the sound off, these guys look like incredible douchebags. As a teenager I was very invested in the idea of purity in music, and INXS was the exact opposite of pure. The band was and is a capitalist venture above all else. I hadn’t yet learned that commercial music can be incredibly good, and that pure artistry is no guarantee against awfulness.

“Need You Tonight” was INXS’ biggest hit, but before it dropped there was concern on Atlantic Records’ part about its commercial prospects. Here’s a quote from the band’s manager Chris Murphy, courtesy of the wikipedia:

They hated it, absolutely hated it. They said there was no way they could get this music on rock radio. They said it was suited for black radio, but they didn’t want to promote it that way. The president of the label told me that he’d give us $1 million to go back to Australia and make another album.

This quote makes Atlantic Records seem like racist schmucks, but in fairness, it is kind of amazing that INXS managed to pass off such a pure techno song as rock. The beat is programmed on an icy-sounding drum machine. The guitar lick sounds like it was copied and pasted in Pro Tools. The band had to play the song to a click at shows so the sequenced synth stabs would line up. Aphex Twin produces more organic-sounding tracks than this one. This is nothing against INXS at all — quite the opposite. Their techno-futurism is what makes their song still sound terrific all these years later. Props to producer Chris Thomas, who, by the way, had his first professional studio job playing for some band named the Hollies, and had his second playing keyboards on the White Album, at age 21. I might be just a little bit jealous.

The production isn’t the only reason “Need You Tonight” sounds so hip. It has no chord progression. Like the best Michael Jackson songs, it’s a modal groove. The guitar part and vocal melody are clearly minor, but the synth stab is a major chord. The lyrics are hip too. They don’t rhyme, at all. Michael Hutchence is in a dialog with himself, his low whisper calling, his higher open-throated belt responding. It’s called songcraft, kids. Unfortunately, this song’s pop-cultural context gets in the way of its full enjoyment. Music videos are a terrible way to learn about how music works. What do kids think when they see a drummer miming along with the beat from a drum machine, and miming totally the wrong drums at that?

I’m very surprised to learn the song hasn’t been sampled more. How has Kanye West or someone not wanted to jump on this beat? I could only find two hip-hop tracks that use it. Big Pun and Beenie Man use it on “Make Me Sweat” from the soundtrack to How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which is okay, but not too special. Someone named Professor Green has a tune called “I Need You Tonight” which is pretty dumb. The last word in INXS samples has not yet been spoken. Get to it, MCs! I did find an interesting cover version by St Vincent, and a pretty excellent mashup by DJ McSleazy, who combines it with Neneh Cherry’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

(DJ McSleazy’s mashup of Michael Jackson and the Charlatans is good too.)

I feel obligated to say something about Michael Hutchence’s death, which came at the end of what seems to me like a pretty unhappy life. But you know what? I don’t know anything about it, except what it says on the web, and who knows how much of that is true. Also, I don’t care. I really just like this song.

There are a lot of “serious” musicians who think that the best way to express their inner pain is by causing pain to the listener. The music I like uses inner pain as the starting point for pleasure. “T.R.O.Y.” tells a somber story, but it uses attractively tight and funky music to do it. The track was inspired by the life and early death of Pete Rock’s cousin and friend  “Trouble” T. Roy of Heavy D & the Boyz. In a 2007 Village Voice interview, Pete Rock said:

I had a friend of mine that passed away, and it was a shock to the community. I was kind of depressed when I made it. And to this day, I can’t believe I made it through, the way I was feeling. I guess it was for my boy. When I found the record by Tom Scott, basically I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. It had such a beautiful bassline, and I started with that first. I found some other sounds and then heard some sax in there and used that. Next thing you know, I have a beautiful beat made. When I mixed the song down, I had Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School in the session with me, and we all just started crying.

The Tom Scott record in question is his rendition of “Today” by Jefferson Airplane. The great sax riff comes in at 1:37.

Pete Rock wasn’t the first hip-hop producer to have noticed this riff. Slick Rick used it a year earlier it on “It’s A Boy.” A ton of hip-hop tracks sample the beat from Tom Scott’s “Sneakin’ In The Back.” I had never heard of the guy before writing this post, but I turn out to have heard a lot of his work. He wrote the theme songs for Starsky & Hutch, Hill Street Blues and Family Ties. He plays sax and lyricon on Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead and about a zillion other albums.

And what about the original Jefferson Airplane song at the head of this memetic family tree? Here it is, in all its trippy glory. Enjoy the psychedelic light show that the YouTube poster thoughtfully added.

The chain of ideas from Jefferson Airplane to Tom Scott to Pete Rock and CL Smooth reminds me very much of the chain from Paul Simon to Bob James to Run-DMC that culminates in “Peter Piper.” It seems like a recipe for success: golden-age hip-hop group samples jazz fusion cover of sixties pop-rock song.

I’ve debated the musical merits of sampling with my friends, musician and non-musician alike, many times. “T.R.O.Y.” is a perfect example of why  sampling is so valuable. There’s no other conceivable way Pete Rock could have arrived his sound. Sampling lets him give the relaxed intensity of the loose-limbed original recording a laser-like focus. Even if they had wanted to hire Tom Scott to come in and play his sax riff live in the studio, it wouldn’t have sounded nearly as good. There wouldn’t be all the background instrumentation and ambiance from the original recording, the bassline and drums and groovy chanting. And even if they had been able to recreate all of that stuff exactly, emotionally there wouldn’t necessarily have been the same flavor. There’s much to be said for pulling a sample from the middle of a performance. If you ask a sax player to just play a riff off a sheet of paper, it’ll sound different than if it’s flowing out spontaneously.

The chain of memetic inheritance doesn’t end with Pete Rock and CL Smooth. Little Brother sampled “T.R.O.Y.” for “The Listening.” Mary J Blige samples it in a remix of  “Reminisce.” The lyrics have been quoted and referenced by dozens of emcees. I’ve been on an obsessive kick with it and am insistently playing it for anyone who’ll listen, including, hopefully, you. It makes me feel good about the world that Pete Rock’s pain has inspired so many new ideas.

Here’s the real video, which sadly I can’t embed. In its place, enjoy a fan video.

I’ve loved this song for years while barely being able to make out any of the words. I finally had to look them up on Google. MJ isn’t exactly Cole Porter, but his lyrics have nice body logic, they sound good and are super pleasurable to sing. MJ had the same songwriting strategy as the Beatles: he started with a melody over a rhythmic groove, developed using nonsense syllables. Only later, once the whole song was in place and recorded as a demo, did he find words that fit the metrical scheme.

Verse one:

Lovely is the feeling now
Fever, temperatures rising now
Power (ah power) is the force, the vow
That makes it happen
It asks no questions why
So get closer
To my body now
Just love me
‘Til you don’t know how

The melodic nut meat of this tune is on the words “lovely,” “fever,” “power,” “happen” and so on. The first syllable of these words is sung on D#, the major third in the key of B. The second syllable is on the A below, the flat seventh in B. The interval between these two notes is a tritone. It’s a sound with a richly conflicted emotional resonance. If you’re willing to follow me through a little music theory, it’ll help you understand what makes this song so awesome.

Western music theory is based on the buildup and release of tension. One of the best ways to create tension is with dissonance. The tritone is considered by European tradition to be a very dissonant interval. Every major key has a tritone in it, between the fourth and seventh notes of the scale (fa and ti, for Sound Of Music fans.) If you’re a typical western listener and you hear a tritone, your ear wants it to resolve to a less dissonant interval. You want the fa to resolve down to mi, and the ti to resolve up to do.

African-American music treats the tritone very differently. The blues uses tons of unresolved tritones. In blues, chords with tritones can functionally feel stable and resolved, “dissonant” though they may be. (The music has lots of other intriguing harmonic grittiness, like microtones, and the simultaneous use of minor and major thirds.) The blues passed the unresolved tritone on to its many musical descendants: jazz, rock, funk and so on.

MJ is squarely within his musical tradition to be basing his melody on an unresolved tritone. Still, it’s startling to hear it featured so prominently and starkly in a pop song, on the very first two notes of the vocal melody no less. It gives a jolt of intensity to what might otherwise be a harmless piece of disco fluff.

Music is fundamentally all about math. Most of the musical intervals in the western tuning system are based on simple ratios, the kinds of numbers you can count on your fingers. The interval between A and the next A up is an octave, meaning that the ratio between the two notes’ frequencies is one to two. The interval between A and E is a fifth, a ratio of two to three. The interval between A and C# is a major third, a ratio of four to five. The tritone is different. The interval between A and D# is one to the square root of two. Your ear might not know which specific irrational number it’s hearing, but it knows that something weird and complex is at work, something you can’t count on your fingers.

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” asserts further non-European quality in its extremely minimalist chord progression. It has just two chords, A major and B7. The A major has B as its bass note, which really makes it more of a B9sus4 chord. The music term for this kind of unvarying chord pattern is a modal groove. In this case the mode is B mixolydian.

Western music is mostly linear. The chord progression tells a story of dissonance leading to consonance, or vice versa. Modal tunes are more Eastern, trance-like and drone-oriented. They’re about creating a cyclical ambiance, a mood rather than a narrative. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” shares its modal quality with my other favorite Michael Jackson original, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which he wrote around the same time.

MJ’s chorus adds to the trance-inducing vibe by repeating the same line over and over:

Keep on with the force, don’t stop
Don’t stop ’til you get enough

It’s more of a mantra than a semantic idea. It helps keep the mind clear for the business at hand, the business of getting your groove on from the waist down.

The harmony and lyrics might be static, but there’s a lot of music packed into this track. Ben Wright’s string arrangement chases up and down the chromatic scale, adding another dash of unsettling dissonance. There are multiple layers of bells, handclaps and other percussion, and the bass and guitar mostly function as percussion too. Jerry Hey’s tight horn chart makes the brass into yet another percussion element, rather than a melodic one. Check out the stab at 1:37, the end of the first chorus. Hot!

As with all of MJ’s hits, “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” has been sampled many times. Some highlights, more or less in chronological order:

• Jazzy Jay – “Def Jam”
• Public Enemy – “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man”
• Double Trouble & Rebel MC – “Just Keep Rockin’ (Remix)”
• Slick Rick – “Impress The Kid”
• Mase ft Jay-Z, 112 and Lil’ Cease – “Cheat On You”
• Beyoncé – “Black Culture”
• People Under the Stairs – “Tuxedo Rap” (the sample is pitch-shifted way down, cool)

Purists might find it jarring, but I’m enjoying this remix with Jay-Z.

Here’s my own contribution:

MJ Makossa

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_MJ_Makossa.mp3)

mp3 download, ipod format download

Don’t stop!

MJ memorial mix

Download audio file (Ethan_Hein_MJ_Memorial_Mix.mp3)

mp3 download, ipod format download

Nice think piece:Michael Jackson’s Unparalleled Influence.

Sean Padilla’s thoughts on This Is It, which I still haven’t been able to bring myself to watch.

Here’s all of the MJ posts on this blog.

Her staggeringly ambitious album The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) is reason to be optimistic for the future of music. The big single is “Tightrope,” featuring Big Boi of Outkast, and the video is worth watching just for the shoes:

The ArchAndroid is not very sample-heavy. Actually, it’s remarkable how much varied live instrumentation it uses. But the few samples in there are killers. The first one that jumped out at me is in “Locked Inside.”

Fifteen seconds in, there’s a sample of the drum intro to Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You.”

There are some classical music references too. The Suite III overture quotes Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” And for me personally, the most surprising and evocative sample comes at the end of “Wondaland.”

The choral singing is an excerpt of “Alleluia” by Randall Thompson.

This piece of music is a choral cliché but for good reason, it’s a beauty. Wikipedia says it was commissioned by the Tanglewood Festival as a fanfare to kick off the festivities in 1940. Randall Thompson didn’t feel very festive, what with the war and all, so he wrote a moody and pensive piece instead. He meant for it to be sung slow, and while conductors rarely obey his tempo instruction, it still has an introspective wistfulness when sung fast. The whole text is the word alleluia, repeated like a mantra, with a single amen at the end. Thompson said that he thought of it as

a very sad piece. The word “Alleluia” has so many possible interpretations. The music in my particular Alleluia cannot be made to sound joyous. It is a slow, sad piece, and…here it is comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The first time I heard it was the night before I graduated from college. It was a weird night. I felt like a huge blowout party would have been the symbolically appropriate thing, but I didn’t know of any, and I wouldn’t have had much fun if I had gone to one. I felt really strange that night. I’ve since learned that feeling depressed or anxious the night before a graduation is pretty ordinary, especially if you have a complex family. (One of my friends with an even more complex family than mine told me later that she spent the night before her graduation tripping out of her skull; it shocked me then, but it doesn’t now.) I had my entire nuclear family assembled for the occasion, which was a rarity. There was my sister, my mom and stepfather, that was usual. There was also my dad and younger stepfather — having them in the same place as my mom and stepfather was strange. My grandmother was there too, and it was really surreal having her and my dad together. I can’t even think of another occasion when this specific combination of my loved ones was together. Maybe one or two of my birthdays when I was a kid? Certainly it had been a long time. To compound the intense feelings, my stepmother had died seven months before, and that was still hanging over all of us.

So the night before graduation, I felt out-of-body, not depressed exactly, I didn’t even know what that meant yet, but definitely not all present. I had some friends singing in the choral society, so I went to hear them. They sang “Alleluia” and it snapped me right into focus. It was so beautiful I couldn’t believe it. The evening got better, too. Wynton Marsalis was our graduation speaker. After the choral concert, someone grabbed me and told me Wynton was jamming with an alum in one of the music classrooms. He ended up treating us to a bunch of impromptu standards, with this random guy accompanying him gamely, it was pretty magical. Jazz got me through a lot of other difficult emotional stretches in the years following.

Anyway. Years later, I pick up this album by an R&B singer I’ve barely heard of, and there’s this huge walloping mass of associations waiting for me. This is why I love sample-based music. It creates dense webs of association and meaning, and that’s what music is all about. Ms Monáe packs a lot of ideas into this album, it’s wildly dense with them, and you may well find some surprises in it of your own.

Kids today, with their intuitive graphical user interfaces. They have no idea what a pain it was to use computers back in the eighties. DOS especially was an autistic nightmare. Bill Gates is some kind of genius to have convinced so many people to inflict that operating system on themselves. DOS made extensive use of both the forward slash and the backslash, for different purposes. To this day I have a terrible time remembering which is which. To launch Starflight in DOS, you had to type a couple of lines of abstruse code, and when you were done, you had to type a couple more lines to save your progress. But Starflight was worth it, and worth all the time sitting patiently while the floppy disk spun and data trickled in and out.

Starflight came on two 360 kB floppy disks. That’s kilobytes, not megabytes. I have one-page Word documents bigger than that. And yet, the game world comprised hundreds of explorable planets, generated randomly by fractal algorithms. This was a revolutionary move, an early gesture toward the open-ended gameplay you see in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Starflight also had a compelling underlying narrative. Most of the time I don’t care about the story behind a game. The games I tend to prefer have no narrative at all, like Tetris, or a very nominal story that isn’t central to the gameplay, like Plants vs Zombies. But Starflight told a terrific story, revealed throughout the gameplay in intriguing fragments.

The storyline begins in the future on an Earthlike planet called Arth. An archeological dig deep underneath the planet has uncovered artifacts from an elder race, including a faster-than-light starship powered by a crystal-like fuel called endurium. In the game, you captain one of these ships, based in a space station orbiting Arth.

Your mission, at first, is straightforward Star Trek boilerplate. You fly around looking for endurium and habitable planets. You also occasionally encounter various alien races, some friendly, some not.

As you do your exploring and interacting, you encounter clues to the real plot: something called the Crystal Planet is moving slowly but relentlessly across the galaxy, causing every star it passes to go supernova. You ultimately need to find the Crystal Planet and destroy it before your home sun blows up. There are some nice twists to this story. The Crystal Planet turns out to be made of endurium, the same substance that powers your ship. It further turns out that the endurium crystals themselves are living, sentient beings, which are being destroyed by human spaceships. So what you’re doing is heading off a desperate act of self-defense by the helpless creatures you burn in your engine. It feels uncomfortably like being in the Bush Administration. Complicated.

In order to discover how to destroy the Crystal Planet, you have to do a little detective work on the Galactic Empire’s history, and in so doing, you discover the ‘mythical’ planet Earth. It’s Earth in the far distant future, with the familiar continents and climates, but devoid of human presence. Aside from a few ruined buildings, there’s no sign of our ever having been there. The post-apocalyptic setting wasn’t the sci-fi cliche it is now, and at the height of the Cold War it was alarmingly plausible. When you discover the deserted Earth, it’s a poignant moment. Poignancy is not a quality you find in too many computer games.

Technology has gotten a lot better in the video game world, but the writing hasn’t. I’d trade all the 3D graphics in the world for more game settings like Starflight.

Hear all the tracks sampled on One For All, via Kevin Nottingham’s awesome blog.

The track “Slow Down” in particular jumped out at me.

“Slow Down” uses some samples of the usual hip-hop suspects: “Kool It (Here Come The Fuzz)” and “NT” by Kool & The Gang, and “Let’s Take It To The Stage” by Funkadelic. It also samples a less expected song, “What I Am” by Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians. Usually hip-hop producers use material of previous decades, but “What I Am” was only a year or two old when Brand Nubian sampled it.

“What I Am” is perfect for sampling. It has a great funky-reggae groove and two killer hooks, Kenny Withrow’s sliding sus-2 chord guitar riff and Edie’s slightly edgy voice singing “What I am is what I am.” Besides Brand Nubian, here are some other folks who have sampled it:

• New Edition – “Something About You”
• Aretha Franklin ft Lauryn Hill – “A Rose Is Still A Rose”
• Intro – “Love Thang”
• Smokin’ Suckaz wit Logic – “Mutha Made ‘Em”

These tracks do more justice to “What I Am” than the original song itself. Due respect to Edie and her band, but once you get past the guitar hook and the chorus, the song is extremely inane. The lyrics are like a parody of dopey neo-hippiedom. There’s a rich tradition in hip-hop of finding a jewel of a sample buried in a less-than-jewel-like song, like the Apache break’s origin in a disco cover of a goofy quasi-Western instrumental.

Another surprising bit of Brand Nubian source material is in “Feels So Good,” when they quote Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are.” Not too many hip-hop artists shout out Billy Joel. Props.

The Roy Ayers piano riff in “Wake Up (Reprise In The Sunshine)” was immediately familiar to me.

The sample took me a few listens to place. I finally figured out that it appears in stretched-out form in Björk’s “I Miss You (Dobie’s Rub Part One – Sunshine Mix)” from Telegram. No wonder she has so much hip-hop cred.

Oh, Delicious. I was so excited when I discovered it a few years ago, and it’s been kind of a heartbreak since then. I started out using it for its intended purpose, as a convenient way to store my browser bookmarks online. I still use it for that, though now it’s become more of a public-facing place for research and note-taking. My bookmarks all go to my Facebook profile automatically, in case someone there might find them useful. The particularly interesting ones I also manually post to Twitter.

The heartache comes from the way Yahoo has been managing Delicious since they bought it, or more accurately, not managing it. After a halfhearted redesign, Yahoo has mostly just been ignoring it, especially its rudimentary and poorly designed social features. This is a shame, since I have yet to find a better source of news and items of interest than other users’ bookmarks. I’ve assembled a list of about a hundred people in my network, and their collective posts have a dazzlingly high signal to noise ratio. When I want to see what’s going on in the world or on the net, my Delicious network feed is the first thing I look at, before any news site or blog reader.

Flickr

I don’t take a lot of snapshots, so I’m not putting many actual photos on Flickr. I mostly use it to store graphics like the one at the top of this post. For a while I was also using Flickr as an image blog, a convenient repository for images I found on the web. Now I mostly use Tumblr for random image blogging. But I do love the way Flickr lets you tag and categorize things, it lets me gather and sort research materials in an intuitive way. Flickr is extremely well search engine optimized, and it supports a robust ecosystem of secondary aggregators and rebloggers. If you put something on Flickr and license it Creative Commons, you’re guaranteed to get a bunch of clicks on it.

Everything I post on Flickr goes to Facebook automatically. When I mark someone else’s image as a favorite, it goes to my Tumblr, and from there to Facebook, the logic being that these pictures are likely to be interesting to my friends. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, bookmarking the images on Delicious is elegant, with automatic thumbnail generation. Even so, I don’t find myself bookmarking images too often. If something is that fascinating, usually I’ll find a reason to work it into a blog post.

Tumblr

I mostly use Tumblr for stuff that’s too random or trivial to merit a full blog post. It’s an effortless one-click process to reblog someone else’s Tumblr post, so I do that a lot. I stream my Flickr favorites here because their randomness fits the Tumblr vibe well. Everything I put on Tumblr goes automatically to Facebook, because why not, and hopefully it’s not so many posts that it’s annoying to people.

Facebook

Yes, it’s evil. But all my friends are on there, and increasingly my relatives too. My policy is to only friend people I know in real life, though I’ve made a few exceptions for cool folks I’ve met on the internet. It’s convenient to have almost everyone I know in one place, but I don’t trust FB with anything too personal.

For a while I had my blog posts going to FB automatically via RSS. I had to stop, though, because the way FB handles blog feeds is so irritating. FB renders imported blog posts as static snapshots. This is no good for me, because I tend to publish my posts when they’re still a bit unfinished, and then copyedit them after they’ve gone live. It keeps me from being too fussy and precious. Also, I use my stats to guide the allocation of my finite editorial resources — posts that people are reading more, I edit more. Having static snapshots full of mistakes on FB does me no good. Also, any comments that people were making on the FB posts aren’t visible to readers here (and vice versa.) So now I manually add links to new blog posts.

Twitter

I’ve resisted the temptation to cross-post my tweets to Facebook because I find it irritating when other people do it. My FB and Twitter friend lists overlap a fair bit and I don’t like reading all those 140-character witticisms twice. Also, on FB I’m writing exclusively for people who know me personally, whereas on Twitter I’m mostly writing for strangers, so the voice and content are different. I do send recent tweets to my blog sidebar automatically, I don’t find that too spammy when other people do it.

This blog

Nearly all the substantial personal writing I’ve done for the past few years has taken place here. There’s something about the public-facing aspect of blogging that keeps my fires burning. I love the WordPress platform for the way it facilitates my creative thinking like few other computer tools I’ve used.

LinkedIn

I keep my online resume here on the blog, but I like LinkedIn a lot and foresee it playing a greater role in my professional life over time. It has its own status updates, but that’s one too many statuses for me to be updating, so I just stream my work Twitter feed in there.

Friendfeed

There was a while there when I was so infatuated with Friendfeed that I made it the centerpiece of my personal home page. What could be a better landing page than an automatic aggregate of everything else I post on the social web? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of problems with posting an unfiltered lifestream. While a comprehensive listing of everything I post everywhere is useful and interesting to me, it’s not so useful or interesting to anyone else. Looking at other people’s lifestreams is mostly just exhausting.

There’s also the problem of duplicate content. Let’s say I bookmark something on Delicious and also post it to Twitter. Friendfeed displays both posts. There’s no way that I know of to recognize and eliminate duplicates automatically. For a while I tried deleting duplicates manually, but that was too annoying. I still keep my Friendfeed active, though, both for communitarian and cynical reasons. The communitarian reason is that there are some people out there who like the lifestreaming format. It’s not a lot of people, but they do exist. The cynical reason is search engine optimization. A link on an automatic Friendfeed post counts to Google’s spiders, even if no human ever clicks it.

So, there you have it. I’m about to embark on a new social media consulting job, and that’ll probably extend my web footprint. Like, I just joined Foursquare and Yelp, not because I have much need for them personally, but because they’re significant for clients and I need to know how they work.

This landscape shifts fast, so maybe I’ll come back to this post down the road and chuckle at how obsolete it is. I still have a MySpace profile that I can’t figure out how to delete. Who knows which of the profiles above are going to look similarly comical in a few years?

The phrase is a play on the opening of Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes, as made famous by Elvis:

One for the money, two for the show
Three to get ready, now go, cat, go

For the hip-hop world, the main reference point seems to be Spoonie G’s “Spoonin’ Rap” from 1979. Old school! Spoonie’s line is enigmatic in its meaning.

You say one for the treble, two for the time
Come on y’all, let’s rock the [whistle]

Spoonie’s Rap inspired some other early hip-hop artists. Two years later, Grandmaster Flash opened “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” with a scratch of Spoonie G. West Street Mob starts “Break Dance Electric Boogie” with Spoonie too, but they interjected a word of their own — “You say a-one for the treble, two for the time, come on y’all, let’s BREAK DANCE” (said in vocoded robot voice.)

Other songs that quote or reference “Spoonie’s Rap:”

• Kurtis Blow – “Under Fire”
• Common – “Food For Funk” (not on Youtube, sadly)
• DJ Khaled ft. Ja Rule, Fat Joe & Jadakiss – “New York Is Back” — combines Spoonie G with Carl Perkins, “One for the treble, two for the show.”

The other big hip-hop reference point is Davy DMX, who uses a different variation of the phrase in his song “One For The Treble:”

One for the treble, two for the bass
Come on Davy D, let’s rock this place

This song, and Spoonie’s, both really signify for Mos Def, who quotes them on at least three of his tracks: “Undeniable,” “Hip Hop” and “Oh No” ft. Pharoahe Monch & Nate Dogg.

Other people quoting Davy DMX:

• Brand Nubian – “Steal Ya Ho”
• Aceyalone – “Treble And Bass”
• Snoop Dogg – “Can I Get A Flicc Witchu.”
• Tech N9ne – “Bout Ta’ Bubble”
• Sergio Mendes ft. Erykah Badu and Will.i.am – “That Heat”

This couldn’t possibly be all the instances of this meme out there. If there are more interesting ones, let me know.