Music Playlist: Spotify, Apple Music

PART 1: THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

Remix.

To copy, transform and combine existing materials to produce something new.

Remixing is everywhere you look.

Tik Tok is remixing. You do your version of dance moves.

You lip sync to someone else's audio.

You duet -- literally.

Memes are remixing. You take a photo, you repurpose it, then someone else tries it, then there's a flood of everyone trying out combinations, including remixing other memes.

When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it's actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.

Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.

You don’t need expensive tools to remix, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills or… good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.

From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix.

To explain, let’s start in the Bronx in 1972.

Title: Part 1: The Song Remains the Same

In the early seventies in New York City, a new technique for creating music starts to form. At parties DJs are looping the dancers’ favorite parts of songs.

An early pioneer is DJ Kool Herc, who extends instrumental breaks by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record. And he has partners, MCs, who sometimes speak rhythmically over these beats, just like many black entertainers had been doing for a long time.

Boom, rap music is born, and starts to grow. And in the last few decades of the twentieth century, it will transform popular music and the popular imagination.

Sylvia Robinson spots this new trend and assembles a team to record an actual rap song. She creates a group called The Sugarhill Gang, they copy the rhythm from Chic’s “Good Times”, and score rap’s first hit, “Rapper’s Delight.”

Grandmaster Flash takes Kool Herc’s simple idea, refines it and turns it into a new art. He records the first music created with just turntables.

This technique of taking old bits of music and using it in new music becomes known as sampling. At first rap samples are mostly r&b, soul, and funk–lots of James Brown.

But soon artists are sampling different sorts of music, like rock. Run DMC and producer Rick Rubin sample The Knack’s “My Sharona” in “It’s Tricky.”

A Tribe Called Quest uses the bass line from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in “Can I Kick It?”

The sampling gets more and more eclectic and more and more complex.

Public Enemy uses nonmusical sounds: speeches, sound effects, noise.

De La Soul brings together sixties rock, seventies soul, and eighties pop into a single song.

And the Beastie Boys and producers The Dust Brothers unite hundreds of samples in their album Paul’s Boutique.

Sampling spreads outside hip hop, into some of the biggest pop hits.

Sly and the Family Stone gets sampled in Janet Jackson's “Rhythm Nation.”

A riff by Tom Tom Club is used in Mariah Carey's "Fantasy."

The group Len samples a forgotten disco hit by Andrea True Connection in “Steal My Sunshine.”

And Britney Spears' "Toxic" uses a highly modified sample from an eighties Bollywood musical.

But one of the most famous and least recognizable samples in pop is in Daft Punk's "One More Time," which slices up a song by Eddie Johns. Firstly, three parts are isolated. Then the song gets slowed down. The second part then loops three times, then the first part plays once, this little sequence then loops two more times, then the third part loops seven-and-half-times, then the first part plays --. This whole sequence loops throughout the song. Eddie Johns' song becomes a Daft Punk song by just chopping it up, stretching it, and rearranging the parts.

Sampling reached its pinnacle with The Avalanches’ album “Since I Left You,” which merges perhaps thousands of samples into a swirl of sound unlike anything else. The album is layered together from distorted bits of obscure songs, sketch comedy, and movie dialogue. The title track loops and speeds-up a variety of forgotten songs from the sixties and seventies, then slices up, pitch shifts, and rearranges a vocal into an entirely new melody.

And finally, sampling leaves behind the twentieth-century, and the world of CDs and vinyl and physical media, and takes to an explosively growing new medium, the internet. Gregg Gillis' project Girl Talk challenges the entire concept of musical ownership with a series of flagrantly illegal mashup albums that can be downloaded for free. Each song is composed entirely of dozens of uncleared samples by popular artists.

Hip hop began at block parties in the Bronx and grew to dominate popular music, and along with it, so did sampling and so did remixing. Remixing is now a core element of music. Even when artists aren't remixing, they're often curating and manipulating sound in a similar kind of way.

But remixing didn't begin with hip hop. Earlier musicians were remixing too. They couldn’t sample, but they could still copy.

Just like rap is a remix, so is rock.

To explain, let’s travel to England in 1968.

After the break-up of the band The Yardbirds, their virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page starts a new group. He recruits John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham to form Led Zeppelin. They play a new kind of incredibly loud electric blues and within just a few years, they’re the biggest band on the planet.

And yet, Led Zeppelin are dogged by controversy. Many critics and peers label them as… ripoffs. The case goes like this.

“Dazed and Confused” features different lyrics but is clearly an uncredited cover of the same titled song by Jake Holmes. Holmes files suit over forty years later in 2010, a settlement is reached and Holmes’ name is finally added to the credits.

The iconic guitar riff of “Whole Lotta Love” is the creation of Jimmy Page but Robert Plant lifts some of the lyrics from Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love”.

“The Lemon Song” is also mostly a Zeppelin original but includes more copied lyrics, this time from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.”

And the most famous example is Zeppelin’s biggest hit, “Stairway to Heaven,” the opening of which resembles Spirit’s “Taurus.”

A battle is waged in court for years and Zeppelin finally prevails in 2020 when the song is found to not infringe copyright. Opinion among musicians is divided. Many argue that the chord progression is too common to be owned. While others argue that the similarities go well beyond the chord progression.

Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, three years before “Stairway” was released. In his sworn testimony, Jimmy Page claims he never heard "Taurus" before writing "Stairway".

Led Zeppelin made mistakes, but they were also just doing what artists do. Copying from others, transforming these ideas, and combining them with other ideas.

Hip hop artists would do the same thing a decade later. And they too would sometimes get in trouble for failing to credit other artists.

Hip hop artists would sample actual recordings. While rock artists would recreate melodies, chords, arrangements and more.

Chic’s “Good Times,” one of the major early hip hop samples, was itself synthesized from various sources throughout culture, like the funk and jazz of the seventies and the glamorous, sophisticated aesthetic of Roxy Music. "Good Times" famous bass line was inspired by the one from Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging.”

Nile Rodger's of Chic: This is a song I wish I had written. So what do I do? I go, damn, well if I wrote Hollywood Swing, it would go like this. And then I write "Good times."

“Good Times,” like every other song, remixes the musical ideas of others.

It was once rare for musicians to admit that they copy, but it's become common.

Like Dave Grohl has spoken openly about copying beats from disco bands when he was the drummer in Nirvana.

Dave Grohl: I pulled so much stuff from The Gap band and Cameo and Tony Thompson on every one of those songs. That's all disco! That's all it is.

And when a controversy emerged over Olivia Rodrigo's song "Brutal" perhaps copying an Elvis Costello riff, Costello said this was fine and he did it too. "It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy."

Musician and DJ Questlove has said that "...the DNA of every song lies in another song. All creative ideas are derivative of another."

But past musicians have certainly known this as well. The folk singer Odetta refused to condemn Bob Dylan for copying from her, and instead said this copying is a form of tradition.

Interviewer: Cause he stole --

Odetta: No, no, no, no. We call it folk music. We call it what do we call it? We don't call it stealing.

Interviewer: Appropriation?

Odetta: Well, we could, but we don't. It is... passing on the folk tradition. That influence, which is like just like a key that opened up something that was of his own stuff. So I can't even take credit for that. I can't take credit for how he heard something.

All musicians are connected, and these connections cross continents and oceans and decades and centuries. They transcend the barriers that divide people, and even unite the living and the dead, whose creativity lives on through us.

When we create, we often seem alone, but we are in fact together.

And yet, copying is complicated. One of the most boring things about popular culture is all the relentless copying. There's very clearly many many many bad ways to copy.

And that’s where we’re headed in Part Two.