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As you know from an earlier post, I got a lot of sewing done Saturday. Sunday was very productive, lots of homework done and a bit of home cleaned up. Also broke down and decided to get my favorite pizza from Papa Johns - pineapple and no sauce. It's a been a long time since I'd had that yummy treat!
My weekends are always three days long, since I don't have Monday classes. Usually makes for nice, happy Mondays. This Monday was even happier. I got a phone call for an interview - I won't say any more about it now, don't want to jinx anything!
Yesterday at school, I was a little nervous heading into class. We were talking about sampling - and as anyone who knows me knows, I love hip hop (partly because I love finding the samples in the songs.) But some of my classmates had some different views on hip hop and sampling, one described allowing sampling as " encouraging the creation of Hip-hop at the expense of 'established music." Others called sampling "lazy" or "uncreative."
Then, the professor opened class with this and this, switching between MIA's Paper Planes and T.I.'s Swagga Like Us in a way that emphasized the sample of the first that becomes the hook of the later. And he came out swinging in defense of sampling - first order of business: establishing the creative aspects and importance of it. Yay!
(Assignment sample.)
And of course, every day was sprinkled with wonderful conversations with Mommy, Munchkinhead and Mr. Trizzle. I think I only emailed with Alfred... hmmm guess it's time to give her a call ;)
What a great run. I hope the next 7 days are just as great! :)
5 comments:
Ah, sampling.....a bone of contention in my house. I'm all for it and Dale positively abhors it. Some of my favorite bands like FatboySlim and BigAudioDynamite use tons of samples. To me, sampling is being creative with found objects..blending them together to make a new thing. Artists do it all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is a pile of crap. To Dale, a life-long musician, who's been in bands creating music since he was in grade school, it is lazy and uncreative. He also subscribes to the "it promotes hip-hop" theory.
In fact, just last night we had "the discussion" yet again after he downloaded a DJ app (to help with podcasts). He put two "records" on the "turntables", flipped some of the switches and announced "hey man....I'm MIXING!".
I really like the MIA song, the other one not as much. I had never seen the MIA video before--it helped me understand some of the lyrics. Did you know she's sampling "Band on the Run" by Wings?
I'm curious about the people in your class who didn't approve sampling...were they older? I just assumed all young people thought nothing of it.
Well, we'll just have to lock Dale in a room and force him to listen to good sampling until he 'gets it' hee hee hee. ...or, maybe not.
I didn't know MIA was sampling Wings, and I do know that Wings song. I'll have to go back and listen to it again. A guy in our class mentioned that MIA's song is also a take off of a Clash song, but I wasn't familiar with the Clash song.
The people in the class were not older, but it is law school, so a lot of my classmates are in their late 20s and early 30s. That probably doesn't qualify as 'old' but it would put them sort of just above the generation when hip hop really moved into the mainstream. They were not people who listened to hip hop, as they made clear in other places of their notes and comments.
You can tell Dale, one of the things our professor pointed out is that the technically, mixing is not hard, just like it's not hard to type on a keyboard or write on a piece of paper with a pen or pencil, but doing it well, choosing the music or words your going to use, and putting them together in a meaningful way and doing it well is what's difficult.
An example of an absolutely beautiful song using samples well: Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Wind Blow" (uses Fleetwood Mac). [sorry, can't find it on youtube or anywhere but the lil bit on amazon, it has the sample though: http://www.amazon.com/Wind-Blow-Explicit/dp/B001NYRRKI/ref=sr_f2_1?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1233891270&sr=102-1]
So educate me - what's the difference between sampling and using bits of a tune from another song in your song? George Harrison was sued years ago for "My Sweet Lord" - the suers (?) said he stole the music from "He's So Fine" and I don't think they sound anything alike. Then there are those guitar riffs in the beginning of some songs which sound like other songs and nobody sues....I don't get the difference. Do the artists have permission in sampling?
Hi Mommy :)
sampling is different than what George was accused of. sampling uses actual sound recordings and then alters them (usually) to fit the way the artist wants to use them in the new song. from what I remember of the George case (we read that in copyright class actually) he was accused of plain old copying, playing himself what someone else had written.
Whether or not artists have permission in sampling - I assume you mean my 'permission' that they can do it w/o negotiating a license - is a bone of contention and depends to some extent on what circuit your in. In the 6th Cir. sampling, not even one note, not even one note changed beyond recognition, is not ok. But I think the judges're just haters and went a lil too extreme.
I can send you a copy of an article we just read for class if you want ;)
GR--that's pretty freaky to hear Fleetwood Mac in a rap song!
I can't figure out what Clash song is in the MIA song, but he might have been confusing her with Santogold...who DOES pretty much use the Clash song "Guns of Brixton" in her song "Guns of Brooklyn". If I'm hearing it correctly, she just subs Brooklyn for Brixton and everything else stays the same.
Well, Joe Strummer is dead, so he won't say anything, and Mick Jones was BigAudioDynamite--a famous sampler and advocate of the same.
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