WEEK 05: Technology And Appropriation

Last week was largely about cultural appropriation. This week, as we continue the historical journey of popular music and how appropriation functions in that history, the focus is more on the other course themes: technology and commodification, and art as a participatory rather than a consumer phenomenon.

By the middle of the twentieth century more and more of the music people are experiencing is recorded. In our world when we think of music, recordings is probably where most of our heads go, but not so long ago music was mostly live, and before about 1900 there was almost no audio or video recording of anything. Music was originally alive and unrepeatable, an organic creation of living human beings. A lot of music was made by ordinary people, not professionals, and much of it was a direct expression of living emotions, like the blues. In the 20th century, all that changed for the majority of people in the Western world, and I invite you to consider the weirdness of music being frozen in recordings and turned into products to be sold.

The rise of the producer

Recording studio technology advanced by leaps and bounds in the 1960s and after, and new potentials for creating recorded music in the studio began to suggest themselves. To mention a famous example, the Beatles's producer George Martin collaborated with the band on their later works to create recordings that were not a direct reflection of live performances. In the 1950s, most recordings had still been made by taping live performances "from the floor": the band would get together in the studio and play their songs and the tapes would record their live performance in the studio. Gradually, all that started to change. Band members would record their parts separately, including overdubs, creating cleaner sound and allowing a mix of the best takes by each member in the final product. In the 60s, bands started to experiment with adding effects in the studio, bringing in outside musicians to play along behind their recorded performances (a string orchestra for instance), and using loads of overdubbing to achieve new sounds.

An album like Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), for instance, uses studio effects, tape manipulation, outside musicians and sound sources, and overdubbed vocals and instruments that the Beatles would not have been able to produce live to achieve its psychedelic and genre-bending effects. By the 1970s this kind of production was common. An extreme example would be Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975), where Freddie Mercury's vocals and Brian May's guitar lines are overdubbed to create orchestral and choral effects. Most of the songs on the album were not really performable live, and people who went to see Queen live in those days were often disappointed by attempts to use echo machines and other tricks to try to create some of the symphonic richness of the record.

The studio was becoming "an instrument," as many people said, and the producer was increasingly becoming a composer.

Glenn Gould: The Audience as Artist

Classical pianist Glenn Gould , the greatest Canadian (;-), was famous for his scorn of live performance and his embrace of recording technology. In a typical example of his use of the studio, he spliced together material from two different takes to create one of the fugues in his recording of Bach's The Well Tempered Clavier. Although this kind of thing did occur in Classical music recordings, it was generally hushed up and reviewers and listeners found it disturbing. The idea at the time was that the classical interpreter was a living genius and should be able to create an ideal performance live. Gould, on the other hand, in an extremely interesting essay from 1966, called attention to what he and the engineers had done and praised the superior interpretation created by electronic means. Gould loved technology and saw it as a positively liberating force for the arts.

The essay “The Prospects for Recording” was published in High Fidelity, a  magazine read by audiophiles who mostly listened to classical and jazz records. Gould made several statements and predictions that were radical for his day, but seem to be borne out by the evolution of how we enjoy music since. Among his “radical” claims:

• žListening to recordings is better than hearing music live
• žPrivatised listening will take the place of public appreciation
• žThe roles of composer, performer, engineer, and ultimately consumer will be merged
• žThe audience will become the interpreter

Gould was convinced that this was the future: a world in which the consumer would take control of the listening experience, and ultimately of the interpretation. From the primitive controls on a home stereo in the 1960s, where bass and treble could be adjusted, but little else, Gould extrapolated a world of editor-listeners, in which the roles of composer-performer-critic-consumer were collapsed into a radically democratized creative being. It’s a world we’re on the brink of today. In 1969, Gould suggested that in the future, rather than sending out finished recordings, music companies would send out "kits" of various takes and the listener would assemble their own versions of the pieces to their taste:

This was in an age before digital music and the possibilities we have today. It is now possible for a composer or artist to release source files for individual tracks, alternate takes, and other media and for a "consumer" with a computer and a bit of software and music knowledge to remix the material in as many ways as they like. Radiohead, for instance, released all of the source tracks for their album In Rainbows to their fans on the Internet and invited them to have fun with them, as discussed in this clip from Rip: A Remix Manifesto (2008).

Remixing classical music as Gould imagined has begun as well, although it is still a challenge for the home user. In an experiment applying his techno remix and sampling skills to the Classical realm, the techno producer Stefan Goldmann has released a re-edit of Stravinsky’s Le sacré du printemps. Gould, I am sure, would have been fascinated by this interpretation, which previously existed in no concert hall or recording studio, but solely in the mind and laptop of Stefan Goldmann. Making use of material from fourteen different recorded versions of Stravinsky’s work, Goldmann creates an entirely new performance, which swoops from one mood and tone to another in a way that no living orchestra could. I can’t really judge whether it’s any good; I didn’t know the piece well enough before listening to Goldmann’s version, and it seems to me that it is by nature a disjointed and discontinuous sort of experience, even when it’s only being performed by one set of musicians.

But the potential for creativity suggested by this release is staggering. I would love to be able to easily edit together the bits of performances that I like. In the process I could even edit out passages altogether or add new ones, creating music that Bach or Stravinsky never wrote themselves, for instance. The tools for this kind of work, still crude but getting easier to use and more sophisticated all the time, are basically already available.

The director Orson Welles once said something along the lines of “A movie studio is the greatest toy a boy ever had.” Anyone who can afford a computer now has something getting closer all the time to this powerful toy at their fingertips. I feel sure that Gould would have been delighted.

Gould concluded his essay in 1966 with nothing less than the assertion that art as we know it will be unnecessary when people have complete access through technology to the means of creating and shaping their culture :

"The audience would be the artist, and their life would be art." This flies in the face of the 20th century view of art as a product made by professionals to be consumed by a passive audience.

Dub: The first remix music in the strict sense

Around the same time that rock musicians were creating the earliest "over-produced" records (as they called them when I was young), and Glenn Gould was trying to convince the world that technology would turn music from a consumer product into a creative act of interpretation for the home listener, some very interesting things were happening in Jamaica.

Dub is a brand of musical creation that originated in Jamaica around 1970. Many people credit King Tubby, the most famous early dub artist, with having created the studio “remix” in his dub versions of songs he and others produced for the Reggae market. Dub arises out of the popularity of “versions” in Jamaica in the 1960s. Versions were the instrumentals from songs, commonly released as b sides of singles. The full version of the song was released on the a side, and the version without the vocals on the b side.

These instrumentals became popular at dance events, and the mobile “soundsystem” disc jockeys (known as MCs in Jamaica, not to be confused with MCs in hip hop: rappers) would sometimes fiddle with the controls on their amplifiers or mixers to create special effects as they played the music. It is believed this was an inspiration for the early studio experiments that led to dub. Similar to the evolution of hip hop from live djing to sampling, dub started out as a live "performance" of the MC, creating spaced-out instrumental versions of songs that people would then "toast" over, one of the many inspirations for rap in America.

To create dub versions of a song, music producers would use the filters and other mixing board effects in the studio to make instrumental versions of pop reggae songs that were often very far from the originals, usually creating a trippy alternative the “straight” vocal track.

You can get a quick sense of what dub is often like by comparing the beginning of the vocal version of Earl Zero’s 1975 Reggae hit “Please Officer” with Tubby’s b side dub “Officer Dub.”

Tubby produced the Earl Zero track, and then messed with the source tracks to create a mostly instrumental remix, "Officer Dub."

Much of dub involves a “subtractive remix” approach – meaning instruments are removed from the mix or severely filtered to direct the listener's attention to other parts of the mix, typically the bassline and drums. Among the most characteristic practices in dub are heavy echo and reverb effects, heavy filtering of instrumental tracks, temporary or total cutting out of various instruments, and cutting up and rearrangements of (usually fragmentary) parts of the vocal track. Sometimes someone will “toast” (the Jamaican precursor to rap) over the instrumentals at various parts as well.

Dub has influenced many other forms of music, including drum and bass, dubstep, and trip hop. Arguably it was the first true remix form, in that it takes parts of a recording and changes them, adding and subtracting other elements, to create a new piece of music partly from parts of an existing recording.

Riddims

Another interesting practice in Jamaican music – particularly dancehall – is for a producer to create a basic rhythm track (bass and percussion) and to then solicit a variety of artists to create songs over it. The track is called a riddim. A riddim is a sort of “invitational appropriation,” in which sometimes dozens or even hundreds of artists will put their own melodies and harmonies, additional instrumentation, and above all vocals over the same beats. Imagine if Kanye produced accompaniment tracks and then invited other artists to do with them as they liked. An intriguing alternative model, which has things in common with other forms of musical appropriation, but in some ways is almost an inversion of hip hop practice and sampling.

Since the advent of the Internet, a number of websites have sprung up that catalogue riddims and the songs made from them, and sometimes provide access to the songs. DJs frequently compile continuous mixes of songs based on a single riddim and release them on records or cds. To get a taste of what that is like you can listen to this short excerpt from a compilation of some of the songs that were created over the “Bam Bam Riddim,” produced by Sly and Robbie in 1992. The riddim has been used in many songs since 1992, including the song at the end of the video, “El Taxi” (2015).

I find the concept of the riddim really interesting, because again it invites not passive consumption but active creation.

From live hip hop to sampling

Because records are mass-produced, more permanent than live performance, and major sources of wealth that are subject to copyright, legal and ethical questions about appropriation become more central in the second half of the 20th century. Remix in the strict sense is an appropriative art that relies on technology. Most of the related forms of appropriation also involve recordings and technology:

• Dub versions (1970s - ) [recording studio]
• Disco re-edits (1970s – ) [tape recorders]
• Remixes (1970s – ) [recording studio]
• Hip hop DJing (1970s – ) [turntables]
• Sampling and producer music (1980s – ) [samplers, studios, computers]
• Mashups (1990s – ) [computers]

Disco djs developed the method of extending a song by having two turntables with a copy of the same record on each.

When hip hop began in the 1970s, the most common practice was to create continuous danceable music with "breakbeats" (the instrumental part of the song where the singing stops for awhile). The DJ would have two copies of the same record – one on each turntable - or sometimes two different records that were close enough in tempo and feel that he could mix the breaks from one record into or over the breaks in the other one to create a continuous, rhythm-focused groove.

To repeat: the early hip hop dj would cut back and forth between an instrumental or percussive interlude in the song (the “breakdown”) and the same or a compatible instrumental passage on a second disc, creating a continuous stream of the same rhythm line for people to dance to, and eventually for the MC to rap over.

Rapping developed out of a number of traditions, but when it happened in hip hop, it was initially the DJ who would talk, shout, or chant over the music briefly, encouraging people to get up and dance, "get down," etc. Here's a rare recording of DJ Hollywood and Lovebug Starski from 1979 that gives you a bit of the feel.

The "crew" were initially the actual friends of the DJ who helped him transport and set up his sound system, and guard it from theft and vandalism. Eventually, members of the crew would sometimes take turns shouting and rhyming over the music. Dancers would sometimes take the spotlight to perform wild moves over the breakbeats, hence "break dancing."

Kool Herc's "merry-go-round"

Clive Campbell was a young man in the Bronx whose family had immigrated from Jamaica in the 1960s. As mentioned earlier, the Jamaican "MCs" (DJs) often drove around with their "soundsystems" and set them up for live dance happenings. It became a matter of pride to have the biggest, loudest soundsystem, and when Campbell started to DJ at live events in the Bronx he assembled a famously large and loud system. His stage name was DJ Kool Herc. DJ Kool Herc is frequently credited with inventing hip hop djing, in the sense of mixing more than one record on top of each other or into each other live.

In the 1970s, the disco DJs downtown had started using two turntables. While one song was playing, they would set up the next song on the other turntable, and then as soon as the first song ended the second one could begin, with a minimal break in the music and dancing.

Herc emulated this technique, though he played more hard-edged funky music for his parties in the Bronx. At one point it occurred to him that he could play two songs at the same time on the different turntables, and using a mixer he could mix from one to the other without the first one ending. The songs could even play together for a time, as the instrumental conclusion of one song blended into the instrumental beginning of the next song.

Eventually, Herc figured out that people were happiest dancing to the instrumental parts of the records, and he developed his "Merry-Go-Round" approach, where the instrumental parts of different records could be mixed into each other, repeated, and added to one another to create a continuous dance mix of larger instrumental "breaks" (the intrumental breakdowns from records, where the vocals disappeared for a bit and the music became purely instrumental, with the focus on drums and bass).

Disco re-edits and club remix

Meanwhile, downtown the DJs were interested in creating longer versions of their own records, because people enjoyed dancing to the repeated rhythms and motifs. The typical R&B, salsa, or pop song that the DJs were playing lasted only three or four minutes - intended for release on 45 rpm singles, and play on the radio. The DJs started adopting some of the merry-go-round ideas. They would tape-record records that were popular and then use simple cassette deck dubbing to create new edits of the songs where instrumental parts (and also vocal sections) might be repeated several times, to turn a three minute song into a 10-minute dance track.

Eventually the idea of the "extended remix" caught on, and record producers themselves created these for the club market in their studios. By the heyday of disco in the mid-1970s, labels were putting out 12-inch singles with 15-minute-long versions of popular disco songs, for club dancing.

Hip Hop DJing

Though hip hop parties went on for hours, hip hop DJs were more interested in fast cutting between different records, or different sections of two copies of the same record. This required much more skill than what the disco DJs were doing at that time, and hip hop DJs turned the turntable into a musical instrument - as hard to play well as any other. They produced entirely new musical experiences from entirely appropriated material - the records they had at their disposal, often "borrowed" from their parents' R&B and funk record collections.

Appropriation in early hip hop

Early hip hop was an all-night "happening." DJs would mix records for hours while crowds danced and partied. Sometimes people would breakdance, and eventually, DJs, crew, and finally dedicated MCs would rap over the "breaks" as well. But rapping was not originally the focus - it was live dancing to a night-long nearly continuous mix of beats.

The hip hop art forms of djing, breakdancing, and rapping emerged organically and among amateurs whose focus was on having a good time and making interesting and spirited music. Hip hop events were collaborative happenings that lasted for hours. Initially hip hop was not commercial in our sense; it was typically practised in recreation centres, outdoors in schoolyards and on the street; it was improvisational and its practitioners had not received formal training. It was done for pleasure.

It was an example of "jes' grew" culture, as described in last week's lesson. Like the blues and early jazz, it was a kind of (urban) "folk music." DJs appropriated (almost exclusively black) records (dance, funk, and r&b), which they mixed together to create extended breakbeat backdrops for b-boys and b-girls to dance to and rappers to rap over. These were “amateur” public performances, for small cover charges, largely unrecorded, in which old and new records (funk, soul, jazz and disco) were used as sources for original musical experiences.

Hip hop DJs had invented a new form of music - one dependent on technology and on previously recorded records. They played their turntables as instruments, and they composed new music by cutting between and mixing together parts of existing records.

Recording hip hop

It is only with recording and sampling that legal (and political or moral) questions of ownership and appropriation become central to hip hop practice. Many of the early hip hop pioneers were initially against making hip hop records. The point was the opposite: to take the performances frozen on records and make them come alive again in performance on turntables.

The first recorded hip hop to get a lot of radio airplay was "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang (1979). In one account of how the record came to be, punk singer Debbie Harry, aka Blondie, is a key figure. Blondie was into the underground hip-hop scene in the late 70s and it was she who invited members of the disco funk group Chic to a Sugarhill Gang event, which is how they knew who the Gang was when members jumped up onstage and started improvising raps over Chic's “Good Times” at a Chic concert a few weeks later.

The Sugarhill Gang were so excited by the results that they created a cassette of themselves rapping over the Chic song and circulated it on the street. Some people really liked it. The song "Rapper's Delight" with the Sugarhill Gang rapping over the Chic song was eventually to become the first hip hop single to make it onto the "charts" - sell significant copies.

It was also the first clear example of ownership and copyright issues in hip hop. When Chic heard the cassette they were upset with the Sugarhill Gang for using their music without permission. When the Gang decided to put out a commercial release of their song on vinyl, rather than pay Chic for the right to use their recording, they instead utilized what may be the first sample replay. In a sample replay, you get other musicians to replay the music you want to use in the same style as the original. Then you only have to purchase the publisher's rights for the song, not the recording rights.

“Rapper’s Delight” was the first mainstream rap single (1979). It uses an instrumental cover (sample replay) of the Chic song as the accompaniment. This was the first time a band (Chic) demanded remuneration from a hip hop artist for using their music with the artists’ rapping. This video from a dance music show of the day gives you a sense of what rap was like at the time:

“Rapper’s Delight” is a 12” single. It’s about 15 minutes long. It was the bestselling 12” single to that time.

Chuck D, later of Public Enemy, remembers when “Rapper’s Delight” appeared how strange the idea of recording hip hop seemed back then: “I’m like, record? Fuck, how you gon’ put hip-hop onto a record? ‘Cause it was a whole gig, you know? How you gon’ put three hours on a record?” Chuck says. “Bam! They made ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ And the ironic twist is not how long that record was, but how short it was. I’m thinking, ‘Man, they cut that shit down to fifteen minutes?’ It was a miracle.” (quoted in Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop)

Many hip hop artists at the time were infuriated by "Rapper's Delight." Some thought it misrepresented the artistic practice of hip hop, which was not about recording but about live and participatory events, mostly dancing. Others felt their ideas had been ripped off, or as in the case of Grandmaster Caz and others that the Sugarhill Gang had stolen their rhymes. With recording came fame and fortune, and suddenly ownership, originality, and remuneration became central to the art form, whereas in the "Jes' Grew" urban folk culture of hip hop up until then they had barely been considered.

Originally, hip hop was a live participatory experience, not a fixed consumer product to be listened to privately. This is discussed by many of the interviewees in the 2016 Canadian HBO documentary series Hip Hop Evolution:

Hip hop had gone from being a participatory amateur happening to being a product that could be monetized. It proved to be lucrative and many more rap singles followed.

Blondie, “Rapture” (1981)

It's shocking, but the first #1 single to feature “rap” was actually by Blondie!

On the one hand, this is a remarkably late example of a white performer capitalizing on a black invention and selling it to the white majority. On the other hand, it was intended as a tribute and served to legitimize hip hop further with mainstream audiences, and it is pretty impressive in its own way.

• Earliest white appropriation of hip-hop
• Very rare early female "rapper" (not the first)
• The first #1 single to feature rapping
• The first “rap” video to be broadcast on MTV; one of the first ever videos on MTV (1st day of MTV)
• Features cameos by rapper and graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy and graffiti artists Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
• The legendary hip hop dj Grandmaster Flash was supposed to appear, but didn’t show for the video shoot
• However, he used the song in his famous mix “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of steel ”

Incidentally, “Rapture” doesn’t actually use appropriation of other people's records, sampling, or hip hop djing. They wrote an original tune for the song. You could perhaps say that it was "inspired by hip hop," rather than a genuine rap song. However, as I've suggested, Blondie was deep into the New York hip hop scene and helped to popularize it.

Sampling (1980s - )

Gradually through the 1980s the live hip hop DJ tends to be replaced by canned backing tracks in rap songs. These are usually based on sampled breaks, programmed drum machine beats, and commercially produced loops sold for this specific purpose. The producer takes the place of the live dj. Sampling involves cutting up recordings on tape or digitally, rather than live djing. Throughout the 1980s it gradually became the standard practice in making hip hop records, and was also used in other genres. (If you're interested in the history of sampling, check out this one hour BBC radio documentary on the Amen break.)

During the 80s, sampling was largely carried out without paying release fees for the use of the sampled recordings. By the late 80s, some hip hop producers might be using more than a hundred little samples to assemble the music that rappers would rap over. A lot of these samples were just bits of rhyth tracks, often modified so that no one would ever be able to recognize the original. Sampling became a recombinative art, and many great tracks were pieced together like Frankenstein's monster from sources most of which would not even be recognized by listeners.

In an interview with Kembrew McLeod, Chuck D and Hank Shocklee from Public Enemy were asked about how hip hop was changed by the rise of mandatory licensing of samples. In the interview, they suggest that the need for sample clearance changed hip hop in two negative ways:

1. Younger hip hop artists couldn't afford to make new tracks in the traditional way because of the cost of sample clearance.
2. Established artists began confining themselves to one or two samples per song, also to avoid costs and the hassle of clearing the samples.

Public Enemy in particular had practiced a sampling technique where tiny fragmentary samples had often been pieced together, creating a song from perhaps dozens of small, often unidentifiable, samples. Once they started having to clear and pay for every sample or risk lawsuit, they had to revise their practice.

Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.

It is often thought that this court case brought an end to the kind of freewheeling sampling that had characterized hip hop in the 80s. Biz Markie wanted to sample Gilbert O’Sullivan's 1972 soft pop hit “Alone Again (Naturally)” in a jokey rap remake of it, and O'Sullivan refused. Biz Markie went ahead and used it without permission and O'Sullivan's label sued Markie's. You might be surprised to learn that O'Sullivan's label was the underdog, Grand Upright Music. By this point, rap had become big business and Biz Markie was backed by the behemoth media company Warner.

During the trial, the Warner Brothers lawyers attempted to suggest that using other people's recordings was integral to hip hop creation (which it was) and the practice was brought to the attention of the public, the record labels, and the lawyers. When O'Sullivan won, record labels saw it as a cue to start looking for remuneration from anyone sampling their material, and - as Chuck D and Hank Shocklee suggested - this changed how hip hop music tended to be made forever.

O'Sullivan himself was not pursuing Markee for the sake of royalties, however. He was angered that his work had been used without his permission, and indeed in direct contradiction of his wishes that it not be used. This thus also raises the question of performance abduction, and by extension the even larger issue of identity appropriation, to which I will turn next week.