Posts Tagged ‘Beats’
“He’s like the ghost in the machine”*…
Sasha Kay on Clyde Stubblefield’s 20-second drum break that became one of the most sampled beats in music…
On November 20 1969, musical history was being made in a red-brick end-of-terrace in Cincinnati, Ohio. The sounds of cymbals and snares leaking out from under a garage roller door included a beat you’ve probably heard hundreds of times — perhaps without even knowing it.
At King Records’ low-key studio, drummer Clyde Stubblefield was improvising a 20-second breakbeat during a James Brown jam session which became known as “Funky Drummer”, a track that dramatically changed the course of music sampling and moulded the hip-hop genre which would be born a few years later.
Brown stresses Stubblefield’s genius in the song’s title and in various flamboyant asides stippled throughout the break — “Ain’t it funky” — but Mr Funky Drummer himself never received a penny from the track’s royalties. As was typical for the time, Stubblefield was on a work-for-hire contract, meaning his performance was legally attributed to Brown. Despite cooing “I wanna give the drummer some” over Stubblefield’s snares, Brown never gave Stubblefield a dime.
“Funky Drummer” fell short of the top 50 chart when it was released as a single in March 1970, but the record had a remarkable afterlife…
[Kay recounts the extraordinary life of the break as a sample in other musicians’ (especially Hip Hop artists’) works. See here for as complete a list as one’s likely to find– over 1,860 songs.]
… At the end of Stubblefield’s life, Prince paid around $80,000 of his medical bills — perhaps the singer’s personal reparation for mislaid royalties after sampling the beat in his “Gangster Glam” (1991).
Although “Funky Drummer” is a strong contender for the world’s most sampled beat, most wouldn’t recognise it in another tune, and much less know the drummer’s name. Stubblefield often said he was influenced by the sounds of factories and railways he grew up around — and no doubt many young instrumentalists have unknowingly been shaped by a music culture framed by his rhythm…
“Funky Drummer — pop history was made when James Brown hollered ‘Hit it!’,” from @FT.
For an appreciation of Stubblefield by Ahmir Thompson (AKA Questlove), see here.
* Questlove on Clyde Stubblefield
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As we beatify the beat, we might spare a thought for another undersung hero of percussion, Uriel Jones; he died on this date in 2009. The drummer in Motown‘s in-house studio band, the Funk Brothers, during the 1960s and early 1970s, he can be heard on dozens of recordings, including classics like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye, “Cloud Nine” by the Temptations, “The Tracks of my Tears” and “I Second That Emotion” by Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, “For Once In My Life” by Stevie Wonder, and both versions of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell in 1967 and the 1970 remake by Diana Ross).
Among the ruins…
Photographer Matthew Christopher has been intrigued by abandoned structures since he was a child. His site Abandoned America collects the fruits of that fascination.
We live in a time where every spare plot of land is being developed and redeveloped, a time when cookie-cutter, prefabricated homes and businesses are the general rule. The failures of the past are being ignored and repeated, and many valuable pieces of our common past are falling to the wrecking ball every year. This process may be considered inevitable but it speaks of a certain carelessness and wastefulness on our part not to acknowledge and explore these fragments together while we still can. There is also a responsibility we all share to confront the horrors some of these sites are witness to. While we teach and reteach certain historical atrocities like the holocaust (and rightfully so), most people are completely ignorant that asylums and institutions on our own soil came close to being as horrific and lethal to those inside. Likewise, every factory complex that is demolished erases a valuable part of the heritage of the community it helped create, and an opportunity to understand the sometimes brutal working conditions, class struggles, and the economic devastation created by its closing is gone forever. While I love archaeology, I am dismayed at the prevailing blindness in scholastic circles that prizes a handful of nails or pottery fragments from an early colonial settlement but ignores sites that are still above ground and critical to preserving the accounts of accomplishments and missteps over the last century.
Beyond that, there is an undeniably artistic element to decayed sites, and an immense number of social, theological, and philosophical questions they pose. Abandoned America’s aim encompasses not only the historical and photographic cataloging of such sites, but also on a larger scale a eulogy for the lost ways of life they represent, a statement of their emotional, spiritual, and metaphoric relevance to our everyday lives, and a sense of the visceral experience of entering a parallel universe of silence, rust, and peeling paint…
Many, many more mesmerizing memorials at Abandoned America (from whence the photos above, all rights reserved to the artist).
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As we tread carefully, we might send a lightly-but-carefully-composed birthday verse to Lawrence Ferlinghetti; he was born on this date in 1919. A translator and writer of fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known as an author for his poetry, perhaps especially for A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He is also justly famed as a pioneering publisher: he initiated the “Pocket Poet” series, publishing his own verse, and works by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. He published fiction by the by the William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski; non-fiction from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn; translations of Bataille, Brecht, and Goethe… and Neal Cassidy’s “memoir,” which might arguably fit into more than one of those categories.
But Ferlinghetti is perhaps best known these days for his base of operations, San Francisco’s famed City Lights Books; established in 1953, it was the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Given its stock and its publishing activities, it quickly became the “clubhouse” for the Beats, and a center of challenging thought– a role it occupies to this day.
“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.” – These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993
Ferlinghetti, reading at City Lights
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