Posts Tagged ‘Rap’
“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
###
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).
“I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories”*…
Comedy songs and musical parodies have been around for ages. But the novelty song– a performance rooted in a gimmick– dates from the 1920s. Dickie Goodman was a master of that arcane form, one whose gimmick presaged the popular music era in which we live…
On November 6th, 1989, a guy named Dickie Goodman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Ironically, this sad act marked the end for the creator of a specific kind of novelty record known as the “break-in.” Seen nowadays as a (dubious) precursor to sampling [see here], a “break-in” record is created by using clips of other songs to tell a story or perform a skit, usually with narration of some sort.
The written word cannot even begin to do the art form justice — and yes, it is an art form — so here’s an audio example by the king himself, Dickie Goodman. “Mr. Jaws” was a satire of the movie blockbuster Jaws, and was a Top 10 hit in the latter part of 1975.
… Jump back to 1956. Rock ‘n’ roll music is starting to really break through to the masses. The charts are full of records by Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and countless others. In the middle of 1956, two struggling songwriters named Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman created something that would finally put them on the map… but not as songwriters.
They decided to create a novelty record by writing a fake newscast about an alien invasion from outer space, but while they would ask the questions, the answers would be provided by musical snippets from popular records of the day. After a lot of shopping around and rejections, they finally created their own label and released “The Flying Saucer.”
Surprisingly, the record was a big hit, making it all the way to #3 on the Billboard chart and hitting the top of the charts in some local markets. Unsurprisingly, there were numerous lawsuits once the record became a hit. Most of the record labels that had a sample on “The Flying Saucer” sued Buchanan and Goodman for copyright infringement. The whole legal morass that followed is too much to detail here, but in the end it was decided that the record was a new work in the form of satire and wasn’t infringing on anyone’s copyright. It was one of those rare cases where the little guy actually won…
Goodman continued a balancing act over the next couple of decades between trying to be a legitimate songwriter and record producer, and creating more “break-in” records. He rubbed shoulders with the charts from time to time, but never had another big breakthrough until “Mr. Jaws” in 1975. Once that record came and went, he kept making novelty records periodically until his untimely end in 1989.
What’s really beautiful about Goodman’s novelty records — and this is a serious statement — is they’re excellent time capsules of different eras. Pick up any of his records and you’ll get an idea as to what was being played on the radio at the time. Wanna know what was big in 1969? Check out “On Campus.”…
Ol’ Dickie also left behind a nice sampling (no pun intended) of what was on the public’s mind as well. Communism, the flying saucer craze, the moon landing, campus unrest, Watergate, and the energy crisis were just a few topics covered by both the evening news and Goodman’s records. He also satirized television shows like Ben Casey, The Untouchables, Bonanza, Batman, and Happy Days among others, and various movies including Superfly, Shaft, King Kong, Star Wars, and E.T.
Keep in mind that these may look easy to do, but they’re not. Granted, anybody can throw one together (and many others have over the years), but to make one that’s actually funny is no simple task…
Honoring a pioneer: “Dickie Goodman and the Art of the ‘Break-In’ Record,” from @rebeatmag.
* DJ Spooky
###
As we eulogize our elders, we might recall that the #1 song in the U.S, on this date in 2002 was “Always on Time,” by Ja Rule featuring Ashanti. It has been sampled (at least) 9 times since.
“Who, who, who, who”*…
From 99% Invisible, the remarkable– and revealing– story of an all-time champion earwig…
All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.
The story of how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. About ten years ago, Ben Sisto was reading the Wikipedia entry for the song when he noticed something strange. A hairdresser in England named “Keith” was credited with giving the song to the Baha Men, but Keith had no last name and the fact had no citation. This mystery sent Ben down a rabbit hole to uncover the true story and eventually lead to a documentary about his decade-long quest called Who Let the Dogs Out…
“Whomst Among Us Let Out The Dogs (Again),” from @99piorg.
* Anslem Douglas, “Who Let the Dogs Out?“
###
As we contemplate catchiness, we might recall that on this date in 1995 the #1 song in America was “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio.
Interpolating Stevie Wonder’s 1976 song “Pastime Paradise,” “Gangsta’s Paradise” features vocals from American singer L.V. who served as a co-composer and co-lyricist with Coolio and Doug Rasheed. (Wonder was also being credited for the composition and lyrics.) The single was certified Platinum in October of 1995 and ultimately sold over 5 million copies.
“Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right”*…
What’s old is new again…
When Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure’. The video featured the two long-lashed goddesses twerking their way through a gilded McMansion in fabulous candy-coloured outfits, like bethonged Disney princesses. The lyrics create a cluster of ambiguities: are the speakers supposed to be sex workers struggling to pay their college tuition and running in fear from ‘the cops’, or wealthy A-list celebrities? Or are they, as Black women in a white man’s world, both? Do they really want anyone but each other? Do they own the house through which they strut? The song mocks its listeners and viewers for yearning for these superior beings in their state of limitless desire. At the same time, its sly laughter invites us to feel, for a couple of minutes, part of their glittering, multicoloured world.
The song’s genius lies in its inventiveness: its mastery of rhythm, and its innovative abundance of metaphors for the ‘wet-ass pussy’ of its title. You come for the nasty, but you stay for the poetry. The two artists celebrate the power of their bodies to express desire and joy, but more fundamentally, they celebrate their gushing waterfalls of linguistic ‘flow’. The joke of the title hinges on the fact that language is both literal and metaphorical: one body part is used as a linguistic modifier for another. The most memorable lines contain no words that would be unsuitable for a nursery school sing-along, but provide brilliantly funny images: ‘Swipe your nose like a credit card’, ‘Get a bucket and a mop’, or – climactically – ‘Macaroni in a pot’. It’s wild and down to earth at the same time, and for ever changes the way you think about cooking spaghetti.
Ancient Athenian comedy of the fifth century BCE – mostly known to us through the work of Aristophanes – can be usefully compared to a number of different modern genres. Like traditional TV sitcoms, it featured typical or stereotypical characters, and showcased their ridiculous lust, avarice, stupidity and ambition. Like modern stand-up comedians or late-night TV hosts, comic poets included speeches in their plays in which they railed at the audience about the state of society and their personal grievances. Like Saturday Night Live, comedy in fifth-century Athens included caricatures of people who might well have been in the audience – such as Socrates, Euripides or the politician Cleon. Like The Simpsons or 30 Rock, the dialogue had a high rate of jokes per minute, and catered to multiple different audience sensibilities, including a taste for lavatory humour. As in Broadway musicals or on the Disney Channel, characters in lavish costumes were liable to burst into song and dance at any moment – although, unlike on Hannah Montana, the male characters wore large strap-on phalluses. Old Comedy anticipated modern sci-fi, and shows like The Good Place, in its willingness to carry out fantastical thought experiments (talking frogs, a city of birds, a singing chorus of metaphysically inclined clouds, or, weirdest of all, women with real political power), and considered their social and political repercussions. Like pantomime or Punch and Judy, it included formulaic riffs on falling over, violence and cross-dressing.
But the lush comic hip-hop of Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B is one of the most useful modern analogues, because it illustrates the core element of Old Comedy that is most often obscured in contemporary Anglophone translations – the flow. Aristophanes, like the creators of ‘WAP’, was a musician, songwriter, choreographer and poet, and his linguistic effects depend, like theirs, on the artful manipulation of rhythm and sound in words and imagery. The poetic affinity between rap and Old Comedy is explored in Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq, a hip-hop adaptation of Lysistrata set on the South Side of Chicago…
Aristophanes and rap: “Punishment By Radish,” from Emily Wilson (@EmilyRCWilson), the translator of a wonderful edition of The Odyssey.
* Aristophanes
###
As we LOL, we might we might send dramatic birthday greetings to Nathan Field; he was born on this date in 1587. A contemporary and colleague of Shakespeare, Field was– like the Bard– both a dramatist and an actor.
As an author, Field wrote alone (e.g., the comedy A Woman Is a Weathercock), and in collaboration with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger (e.g., the tragicomedy The Knight of Malta). As an actor he ended his career in the Kings Men, working alongside Shakespeare, where he appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and in Ben Jonson‘s Volpone and The Alchemist, among other productions.
“To me, the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is a one-to-zero relationship. The artist should be granted anonymity.”*…
Wish granted…
Earlier this month a little piece of music history was restored. The news was easy to overlook. Sony Music Publishing announced that one of its outermost divisions would be rebranding: what had been EMI Production Music since 2011 would become KPM Music once again. The change may seem trivial, but it restores a name that has wielded a wide and surprising influence over popular culture.
The chances are you haven’t heard of KPM, despite its roots stretching back to 1780, when Robert Keith (the K of the name) set up a music shop in London. But you have almost certainly heard its music. Since 1956 KPM had been a producer of library music, which is not music to be played quietly for the benefit of readers, but music composed to a brief, kept on catalogue, and then used—in return for payment—to accompany something else.
You have probably encountered the work of KPM’s composers and musicians on television. In America the credits of “Monday Night Football” unfold to the sound of “Heavy Action” by Johnny Pearson; the melody for Channel 9’s cricket show in Australia was produced by KPM, though it was written with a news broadcast in mind. In Britain several shows have drawn on KPM’s library, including “All Creatures Great and Small”, “Mastermind”, “Grange Hill”, “The Two Ronnies” and the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon.
Even if you never watch TV, though, you will know fragments of this music, especially if you like hip-hop. kpm recordings have been a rich source of samples (a segment of sound used in another composition). Of KPM’s star composers, Brian Bennett has been sampled 114 times, by Drake, Nas, Kanye West and more. Les Baxter has been sampled 79 times by the Beastie Boys, Ghostface Killah and MF Doom, among others. Rap’s founding text, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, sampled KPM stalwart Alan Hawkshaw—specifically the song “Here Comes That Sound Again”. “Library music is sought after by producers, collectors and writers because it was played by people, not manufactured by [a] machine,” Mr Hawkshaw once [said]…
One of the most sampled songs in pop history came from kpm musicians playing together for fun in 1968. “Champ” by The Mohawks has a distinctive organ hook—played by Mr Hawkshaw—that was sampled by Eric B and Rakim and Afrika Bambaataa in the 1980s and is still being remixed by Frank Ocean, Janelle Monáe and Nicki Minaj today. “People think that’s a black group from Detroit [playing the tune], but it was hashed together by session musicians in Yorkshire,” Mr Hawkshaw said.
Library music is not the rich trove of unexpected wonder it used to be. These days budgets are tighter and there is less inclination to hire whole orchestras for an afternoon, so there isn’t so much scope for the moments of brilliance a room full of musicians might create. Artificial-intelligence firms are also trying to muscle in on the market, offering computer-generated compositions to accompany video content for a fraction of the cost of real musicians. But there is still magic in the thought of those shelves, full of music composed and recorded for who knows what, sitting there waiting to be used for something else entirely…
Its artists aren’t famous and you can’t buy the records in shops; but its work can be heard everywhere: “KPM Music is one of the most important record labels in history,” from @TheEconomist.
* Glenn Gould
###
As we honor the unnamed, we might send suspiciously on-key birthday greetings to Faheem Rasheed Najm; he was born on this date in 1984. Better know by his stage name T-Pain, he is a rapper, singer-songwriter, and record producer. But he’ll surely be best remembered as the person who popularized Auto-Tune pitch-correction technology. Indeed, T-Pain became so associated with Auto-Tune that an iPhone app that simulated the effect was named after him.
Developed in 1997, Auto-Tune was used in 1998 in Cher’s “Believe” to create vocal effects (though the producers attributed the result to a pedal, treating Auto-Tune as a trade secret). Years later, T-Pain popularized the tool… which has become a controversial staple in the recording industry (as it allows recording engineers to turn the tuneless into accomplished singers).
Time magazine quoted an unnamed Grammy-winning recording engineer as saying, “Let’s just say I’ve had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you’ll just run their voice through the box.” The same article expressed “hope that pop’s fetish for uniform perfect pitch will fade”, speculating that pop-music songs have become harder to differentiate from one another, as “track after track has perfect pitch.” According to Tom Lord-Alge, the device is used on nearly every record these days…
You must be logged in to post a comment.