the riddim meth0d

consider a couple more mashups, if you will, which i think perhaps demonstrate another range of possibilities where the approach could prove compelling.

just as mashups of covers have the effect of focusing one’s attention on the convergences and divergences of multiple interpretations of the same, shared musical materials, mashups of sample-based songs and their sources - or alternately, of breakbeat-bearing tracks against their own breaks - direct our attention to the peculiar proximity and distance of a song from its progenitor or of a track from its own break.

and perhaps here i should take a moment to reflect again on the differences between a mashup, a remix, or a sample-based production. in a rather fundamental way, they are all - of course - the same. the mashup being a particular kind of remix or sample-based composition, one which involves, usually, rather long portions of multiple, discrete songs. and though i feel as though the mashup arises quite organically out of hip-hop’s approach to sampling other-people’s-music, the main difference is that - largely b/c of economic reasons, and partly, prolly, b/c of racist reasons - it is ok in 2005 to sample large portions of songs and distribute them widely, but in 1995, you’d hardly try to slip a one-bar loop of an obscure jazz tune by the sample-sniffers.

so i think it’s time to take this strange new license in the age of the mashup, the mp3 blog, and the online mix, and leverage it toward a persuasive argument, musically expressed of course, against the copyright status quo. in particular, i am attracted to the way that mashups of sample-based songs and their sources can demonstrate the costs and limits of sampling under the strictures of copyright even as they serve to affirm - as if further affirmation were needed at this point - that a sample-based approach to music-making is a valid, creative, and crucial approach.

yes, there are tacit, community-based rules, a code of the beats, about keeping these things under wraps. (shit, i’m the guy who wrote a master’s thesis on DJ premier and, in a departure from the norms of full academic disclosure, refused to divulge his sample sources even as i analyzed the way he flipped them.) and, moreover, some amazing techniques and beats have been born of the necessity of evading litigation. (though that’s hardly a justification for the state of the law being that even a de minimus defense is no defense.) at the same time, i wonder about the cost of keeping up this fenced-in front. what are we missing? what is lost in terms of creativity? or of critical commentary or cultural practice? if we only let those who can afford to pay for their samples sample, what kind of a musical world are we regulating and shaping? to attempt a snarky analogy: what if we always had to listen to rich kids’ music?

at any rate, the mpfree below is partly what i think we’re missing and partly an argument for it. it is also an homage to DJ premier and to monk higgins and to remix/DJ/mashup culture.

wayne&wax, “code of the beats”

what i have done here is to mix gang starr’s “code of the streets” and monk higgins’s soul-jazz cover of “little green apples” (as popularized by roger miller and o.c. smith - and, whattaya know, as sung by bobbie gentry, too) . for “code,” primo not only samples the opening two-bars of the higgins track, he lays the mighty melvin bliss’s “synthetic substitution” break over it. what i have done is to take the higgins track and essentially cut out any measures that depart from the same chord progression as the two-bar loop that primo uses. this means that i cut perhaps 2/3rds of the song, but that still left a lot of two- and four-bar sections, which i collapsed and then copied until they equaled the length of the gang starr track. so what you hear is some pretty dope sax soloing and some (syrupy) sweet string arrangements accompanying guru’s rhymes and primo’s beats and cuts. the best part is that the intros match up so well that the sax enters just as the drums drop on the gang starr joint.

sure, it departs from the smooth minimalism through which premier has distinguished himself. (just listen to those interludes on daily operation: most of them are simple, one- or two-bar loops that repeat verbatim, but i never tire of hearing them. even better, they accrue resonance with each repetition.) still, even if primo never woulda flipped it this way, it’s nice to be able to have the license - and technical facility (but that’s not saying much these days) - to imagine the beat as premier might have produced it if not for the constraining factors of copyright, technological feasibility, and/or aesthetics (which are, i would argue, rather bound up with technology and notions of ownership/license/commons, among other historical forces and social institutions).

the second example i have to offer is not nearly as profound or as pleasurable, i’m afraid, but perhaps it is as provocative. (and it don’t sound bad.)

what i have done - and i’m surprised no one has done this yet (please correct me if i’m wrong) - is to superimpose the immortal amen break over the track from which it comes, the winstons’ “amen, brother.”

wayne&wax, “amens, brother”

yeah, it’s kind of a stupid joke. and an obvious procedure. but it makes a point or two, too. and it sounds all right, i think. (perhaps, in a sense, better than the original - at least to my hip-hop-conditioned, drum-hungry ears.)

those who are unfamiliar with the original may not understand what i have done to it, and it’s true that the effect here is a subtle one. of course, the original already has some amazing, funky, off-the-hinges drumming throughout - that’s why the break is so unbelievable. but the drums are not mixed as “up-front” as we of the hip-hop-centric digital age are used to.

my main point is not about whether “amen, brother” sounds better with louder, and more repetitive, drums, though - it’s about the specialness of the break. it is so special, i’d argue, that it transcends its origins. it exists as its own thing - as no end of hip-hop and jungle producers have demonstrated - and thus can stand alongside, or on top of, or underneath the same song from which it breaks loose about half-way through.

i once had a frustrating discussion with a lawyer who works on copyright cases. his understanding was that people used breakbeats because it was easier than recording a new drum beat. that’s such an amazingly ignorant perspective on how this music works, i was somewhat taken aback. i did my best to try to explain that it was not all about the rhythm (though the rhythm is essential) but that it was also crucially about the timbre, the energy, the aura of that particular performance in that particular room recorded through that particular equipment on that particular day. there is simply no reproducing a classic breakbreat. it is what it is. and what an amazing building block it can be. there is a “feelingful” quality to breaks that no new session drummer will ever achieve. they are not short-cuts for lazy producers (ok, sometimes they are). more significantly, they are an integral part of a cultural system - and one with, at bottom, a resistance to domination and enclosure - that is constantly adapting to, even as it informs, technological change and social organization.

and so we loop, we sample, we mash, we mix, we method.

amens to that.