Candied Pop

Even though this should be filed under Rat’s Ass, Could Give A I’ll take the bait and respond.

Dear Ms. O’Neal Parker, after reading your article, Why I Gave Up On Hip-Hop in the Washington Post, I have come to the conclusion that you, sadly, are one of those people that has allowed age to ossify their ability to stretch and grow with the world around them. What makes me say this?

I don’t know the day things changed for me. When the music began to seem so obviously divorced from any truth and, just as unforgivably, devoid of most creativity. I don’t know when my love turned to contempt and my contempt to fury. Maybe it happened as my children got older and I longed for music that would speak to them the way hip-hop had once spoken to me.

Rap and Hip-Hop haven’t stopped speaking, it is you who have stopped listening. Seriously, read what you have just written, you sound like some pathetic has-been whining about how no band can rock as hard as Boston used to, pining for those hot nights in the back seat of an arctic blue Camero all the while still rocking the same feathered hair you had in 1981. Take a moment and get familiar with the world around you because it keeps moving forward all the while you are staring at where it was.

My husband, Ralph, and I try to tell [our daughter] Sydney that rap music used to be fun.

That is just sad. Really, did your parents dictate what you could listen to based on its propensity for “fun”? No, judging by the tale you wove your love affair with Hip-Hop was one rooted in the forbidden and the thrill of the new and novel. Let your daughter experience the same, and if you raised her right she’ll be able to discern hate from love and lies from truth.

That my decision to end our love affair had come only after years of disappointment and punishing abuse. After I could no longer nod my head to the misogyny or keep time to the vapid materialism of another rap song.

Hip-hop had long since gone mainstream and commercial. [Emphasis mine]

That, right there, is the problem. You are so wrapped up in commercial products that you cannot see the world around you. Commercial products are packaged and marketed for the lowest common denominator and by their very nature are often unchallenging and devoid of substance and meaning. Let me put it this way, do you go to TGI Friday’s expecting cuisine that will at once challenge and sate you? Let me answer for you, “Yes.” TGI-Friday’s is Middle-American convenience food and commercial Hip-Hop is exactly the same as it plays into the expectations, stereotypes and prejudices of mainstream America.

Maybe as the coolest black boys kept getting shot on the streets while the coolest rappers droned: AK-47 now nigga, stop that.

Maybe as the madness made me want to holler back: “Niggas” can’t stop AK-47s, and damn you for saying so.

You just made your prejudices crystal clear. Guess what? Not all rap is about gang bangin’ and ho smackin’. Wake up, open your ears, and stop consuming all your food–intellectual, spiritual, and material–from the commercial troughs. There is plenty of work in Hip-Hop that is positive, spiritually engaging, socially and politically conscious, as well as being an achievement musically. Here’s a list:

• Aceyalone
• Blackalicious
• The Coup
• El-P
• Five Deez
• J. Live
• Latyrx
• Lyric Born
• Ohmega Watts
• Talib Kweli
• Sage Francis
• Wale Oyejide

Now take your over-educated-ivory-tower-Hip-Hop-hatin’ ass out to the damn store, buy some CDs from these artists, and learn something before you write about it because you sound like a fool.

Granted the title is a tad flippant but I am left with the feeling that Douglas Hofstadter needs to broaden his horizons, maybe expose himself to music beyond the boundaries of the staid world of Classical music. Possibly delving into other arts and disciplines, in particular psychology and communications as many of his concerns about the disappearance of art as a human endeavor seem to be leaning towards reactionary and work in those fields could assuage some of his fears.

In his article, Sounds Like Bach, Hofstadter revisits the concept of artificial intelligence and its potential role in music composition, building his article upon the work of David Cope and his Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) which appears to both terrify and fascinate Hofstadter. EMI is an effort to design a software intelligence that can approximate the composers of the Western Canon and from that create new works based on prior art. His choice of the Western Canon lies in its well documented structure and strict adherence to rules which in turn facilitate the engineering of software based intelligence that can analyze and produce music based on those rules. Cope writes,

Similarly, most of the great works of Western art music exist as recombinations of the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered scale and their octave equivalents. The secret lies not in the invention of new letters or notes but in the subtlety and elegance of their recombination.

That is the goal of EMI, the recombination of notes in a manner both pleasing to the ear and adhering to the rules of composition. Three basic principles underpin EMI:

1. Deconstruction (analyze and separate into parts)
2. Signatures (commonality – retain that which signifies style)
3. Compatibility (recombinancy – recombine into new works)

(more…)

C|Net posted an article yesterday, ‘Copyright criminals’ look to remix the noise–legally, which took a look at a recent documentary, Copyright Criminals, which details the growth of sample and remix based culture. In addition is discusses the recent efforts of Creative Commons to create an environment where artistic appropriation is not only legitimate but encouraged pointing to a contest that the documentary’s creators are running where artists are being asked to submit songs that re-purposed content from the film. Overall it is a cursory peak into what the current state of affairs is with regards to sample based musics.

The article raises an issue for me, and one that should really be under consideration by the DJ culture at large, how sustainable is sampling? Appropriation and re-purposing of content is a valid expression and should be encouraged as it opens a dialog about culture but the trouble is that often is does not return anything new to the canon, rather it introduces only variations that contain increasingly subtle differences. At its best remixing can create new perspectives on existing work and even draw attention to contemporary issues but at its worst remixing can approximate some of the worst written fan fiction, though both suffer the same problem: nothing new was created.

Certainly, the fiscal squeeze felt by independent artists has resulted in a renaissance of sorts with regards to beat making, particularly in light that the use of a six second loop could cost you upwards of $100k USD. Beat creation moves the art out of an evolutionary dead end as it forces the artist to create new works and thereby actually adding to the cultural canon. Possibly, Creative Commons could create an environment where new music is created to be consumed in various manners, be it sample or remixing, but the question is whether or not culture, by and large, has the inertia to move in the direction to create anew.

Being the curmudgeon that I am I think that it will take more than just a handful of artists working on the periphery to change things. It is more likely that industry groups like the RIAA will play nice only so long until they push for more changes to the current copyright law and in turn create even more artistic consolidation and maybe at that point people will tire of Kayne West mining the same old tired samples from the Seventies and clamor for some thing new. Then again, perhaps not.

I’m not going to pull any punches on this one, I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Grammys, and this year’s continues to remind me why. First piece of evidence?

Best Rap/Sung Collaboration: “Numb/Encore,” Jay-Z featuring Linkin Park.

Are you serious? No really. The industry sanctioned mashup of Linkin Park and Jay-Z, the very same one that hit the streets after the RIAA furor over DJ Danger Mouse’s The Gray Album. The very same album that had a blitz of late night advertising on stations possessing that “key demographic” in the hopes that Warner could appear both relevant and cutting edge. The inclusion of the single on the the list is evidence enough that the Grammys aren’t worth the coverage I’m giving them right now and the fact it won proves that I am wasting your time.

Next in line, Mariah Carey. Honestly, she is getting, and looking, tired. The Emancipation of Mimi is intended to be her comeback album and with sales climbing north of 8.5 million I would say that it is likely she can buy another Bentley or four. However, the album has garnered middle of the road reviews which begs the question of what the Grammy awards are based on. I know that they say it is “for outstanding achievements in the recording industry” but is achievement a polite way of saying “units shipped or sold.”

U2 swept the awards, raking in five, but also left me wondering when the band was going to ease into retirement. Look, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb made out better in terms of reviews than Carey did but what is the achievement here? That you made another album that sounds the same as the eleven that preceded it? Well, that’s not entirely fair, Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Pop at least showed the band trying to do something evolutionary with their sound. It is too bad that they are being rewarded for going back over the ground they covered over twenty years ago. I just can’t wait to catch their 2016 North American Casino Tour.

Color me a curmudgeon but reading over the list of winners leaves me with the feeling that the Grammys continue to be more self-congratulatory insider bullshit and all I have left in me to say is “pffffft.”

Freedom To Tinker has a brief article on the potential lifespan of DRM products loaded on retail music CDs and poses the question of what happens when those same CDs are placed into computers years after their first purchase. The article assumes that if autorun is enabled than the software on those CDs will attempt to execute and install itself to the host. This is not a far fetched scenario considering the progression of Microsoft’s Windows features and it is foreseeable that autorun will be enabled by default on at least the consumer versions of their next OS.

So what will happen? Likely, if there have been substantial changes in the underlying components of the OS than the software will fail in its attempt to install itself. The process would be similar to installing software written for Windows 95 on XP, it may install and function but do not count on it. However, it is distinctly possible that if the software does manage to install itself that it could result in system instability especially if it replaces key system files. Those are not the only possibilities, though.

Freedom to Tinker postulates that DRM manufactures could avoid this situation in several different ways. The software could ship with a sunset date so that after a particular point in time, say 7 years after pressing, it will check the system date of the PC to determine whether or not it should install itself. Other options, which Sony has pursued with the firmware for its PSP, is to ship updates for the DRM on other CDs or ensure that the software is Internet enabled so that it can download updates. The latter has the greatest potential to be problematic from the consumer standpoint.

Imagine in twenty years you are feeling a touch nostalgic for your lost youth and decide that My Morning Jacket’s Z would soothe your frayed ego. You pull it down from the shelf and carry it over to your computer planning on transferring the songs onto your latest generation iPod. Now, you are fastidious about keeping your computer clean of spyware, malware and viruses but the passage of time has dulled your memory to the XCP debacle of the mid-Naughts. You pop the disc in and as expected it spins up but seems to be taking a little longer than usual. Behind the scenes a small executable was launched because autorun is enabled and it promptly checked the system time and seeing that it passed the sunset date immediately shells out to obtain the most recent copy of itself from Sony/BMG thus allowing the DRM software to continue its purpose by keeping you from transferring said CD to your iPod.

Granted, it does come off as outlandish but it should be remembered that software aimed at controlling the user’s experience and ability to perform desired tasks is getting increasingly sophisticated. It would not surprise me if software similar to the PSP game-based firmware auto-update evolves off a proprietary platform to the more open world of home computing–a distinct possibility under the Trusted Computing platform. Rest assured, caveat emptor will continue remain an important phrase.

Boing Boing has continued the conversation which incidentally, this dovetails nicely with their discussion of the Broadcast and Audio Flag proposals now winding their way through the Senate Commerce Committee. Definitely worth a read.