REAL MUSIC

A couple of interesting links for Saturday summer lazing about.

First, from AlterNet, an interview with Chuck D and Howard Shocklee of Public Enemy on sampling's death knell:

How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout – meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound – for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.

Click here for the rest.

When I first became aware of hip-hop's usage of digital sampling back in the 80s, I ignorantly dismissed it as simply ripping off real musicians--Vanilla Ice's gratuitous theft from Queen's "Under Pressure" served as an obvious proof of my point of view. My attitude gradually changed, and I started to see sampling as a sort of postmodern sound collage: in this era of wall-to-wall entertainment media, pop cultural artifacts become tools of language and expression in and of themselves; to ignore that is to ignore reality, and the core of the artist's mission, ideally, is to explore and express reality. Hence, sampling and intertextual reference are the artistic techniques of our time. It is a major drag that corporate greed has, by and large, put a damper on digital sampling--the Rolling Stones can go to hell.

For your guilty pleasure (or pain, as the case may be) here is R T Rankin, my old band from my high school days, ripping off some lines from the film Ghostbusters in their song "Rise of the Falling Slor." (By the way, my old buddy Matt, who's words sometimes appear on this blog, was the bassist/keyboardist for the band. I was on guitar.)

Next, an Associated Press article via the Houston Chronicle on the latest would-be savior of jazz:

Jamie Cullum might get the MTV crowd to notice jazz

He may be shaking up the jazz scene, but in some ways Cullum is a throwback to an older, pre-bebop generation of jazz musicians who saw themselves as entertainers and embraced the popular music of their day. He cannot read music, relying more on his natural instincts.

"Jazz used to be about dancing, drinking and girls, but the first time I went to a jazz club all I saw were old men and no girls," said Cullum. "So what does a 17-year-old make of that?

"I'm not trying to change jazz," said Cullum. "I'm just trying to make music that I feel comfortable with ... and that I could relate to as a young man."

"Jazz is beautiful, melodic, catchy, cool music and it can be popular if it's just presented in a way that doesn't always try to pretend it's better than everything else."

Click here for the rest.

It seems like the arts took a wrong turn starting sometime in the 19th century. The Romantics (you know, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, all those wife-trading, opium smoking poets) created an elitist attitude when they started using the word "philistine" to describe people who were not sophisticated or sensitive enough to understand their work. Decades later, the avant-garde infiltrated painting, theater, symphonic and jazz music, you name it, and just ended up confusing and alienating pretty much everybody who wasn't an art snob. Existentialism compounded this by throwing depression and angst into the mix. In the meantime, the mass media and pop culture arose, giving mainstream audiences art that was much more digestible, albeit often aimed at society's lowest common denominator. Today, what we know as "the arts" serve, by and large, a very small community of well educated snoots; normal people with taste are forced to endure Friends and Britney Spears.

Of course, this all distresses me because I consider myself to be a theater artist. I don't know how many great shows I've performed in for virtually empty houses because people don't go to the theater. It's also a drag to know about lots of great art that's out there, but unknown to most people because they feel like "art" isn't their thing. I have no idea what to do about changing mainstream attitudes about art, but I do have a strong belief that artists need to get over themselves and use all their stinking brilliance to figure out how to make their work more universal. Hell, the Beatles pulled it off, and so did Alfred Hitchcock. Great art can appeal to the masses without condescending to them: artists must learn how to do this or face continuing social irrelevancy.

Anyway, back to Jamie Cullum. I wholeheartedly agree with his notion that jazz "can be popular if it's just presented in a way that doesn't always try to pretend it's better than everything else." Cullum has shot the concept of the "philistine" dead. I'm listening to his record right now: it's pretty good stuff, not great, but definitely going in the right direction. His Harry Connick, Jr. style voice has a rough, untrained, everyman feel to it which only adds to his joe sixpack appeal. His cover of Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary," a song known to more than a few normal people, captures the mellow cool of the original, but is also true to the jazz idiom. His version of the Cole Porter standard "I Get a Kick Out of You" really swings in a way that pretty much everybody can enjoy. And his originals...well, his words for the song "Twentysomething" are some of the most relevant lyrics I've heard in a long time. Check it out:

After years of expensive education
a car full of books, and anticipation
I'm an expert on Shakespeare, and that's a hell of a lot
but the world don't need scholors as much as I thought

Maybe I'll go travelling for a year,
finding myself, or start a career
i could work with the poor, though I'm hungry for fame
we all seem so different, but we're just the same

Maybe I'll go to the gym, so I don't get fat
all things are easy, with a tight six-pack
who knows the answers, who do you trust
I can't even separate love from lust

Maybe I'll move back home, and pay off my loans,
working nine to five, answering phones
don't make me live for my friday nights,
drinking eight pints and getting in fights

I don't want to get up, just let me lie in
leave me alone, I'm a twentysomething

Maybe I'll just fall in love, that could solve it all,
philosophers say that that's enough
there surely must be more, ooh

Love aint the answer, nor is work,
the truth deludes me, so much it hurts,
but I'm still having fun and I guess that the key,
I'm a twentysomething and I'll keep bein' me

I'm a twentysomething, let me lie in,
leave me alone, I'm a twentysomething

Don't get me wrong. This is not a great album; it's good, but with his musical philosophy of drinking, dancing, and girls, I expect great things from this guy in the future. I think he's got the right formula for revitalizing jazz--and maybe artists from other fields will take his lead.

If we're lucky.

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