Entries tagged “sampling”

Do you want links? Because I'll give you some damn links, I'm not afraid of you! I'm not afraid of NOBODY!

• Reyhan Harmanci on the third wave of academic study of hip hop:

Dominant, a UC Berkeley alumnus who actually attended the much-publicized class on Shakur in the late '90s, says that he finds value in hip-hop studies, provided they take the long view. "With hip-hop and all black music, you can't talk about the art separate from a lot of other things," he says. "You can't talk about hip-hop as an art form without talking about the people, the economics, how and why it was made. You have to be pretty thorough."

Finding ways to teach and study hip-hop from within a university setting is not easy. "I worry that scholars like us get so obsessed with trying to justify hip-hop that we end up running in circles," says Berkeley grad student Felicia Viator, a DJ who's finishing up a doctorate in history.

• Businessweek's Catherine Holahan looks at the unfiltered conversations that have sprung up in light of community changes after USA Today's recent web redesign. I don't know that I'd make a change in the cultural assumptions of a site at the same time as aesthetic/UI changes, because then you don't know which one caused everybody to lose their minds.

• Speaking of which, I started a shitstorm by suggesting that Ask MetaFilter should have a white background. My personal experience is that the site is white, since I've customized my account, but I didn't, uh... make a very good case that it should be the default because I was a bit uncharacteristically combative. On the other hand, I learned I'm a twit, a shrill, self-promoting, a-list retard who's not good at building community, more than out of touch, prone to issuing stridently absurd protestations, deserved of getting pissed on by an elephant, who is only being taken seriously ... because [I'm] friends with Matt Haughey and I'm encouraging selling out. One of my toughest critics in the thread had actually proposed a winning redesign in a contest on the site, an entry that featured a white background and was voted the winner by the entire community. I don't know why people think the blogosphere is an unfriendly place, when an honest suggestion to change the background color on one subsite of a popular community blog that I'm a huge fan of can inspire those kinds of delightful, well-considered reactions. At least there was only one vague threat of violence.

• I was surprised to find a list of Fall Out Boy's favorite albums to be somewhat interesting.

• Ask the Wizard, written by Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo is, flat out, the best new blog of 2007. The thing I love about great writing is it makes the pervasive truths seem self-evident and even obvious. Plus it's actually funny, not another tech exec wearing a goofy tie and claiming to be full of ha-ha.

• There was a lot of link love for the list of NYC's ugliest buildings on Gridskipper, but the overlooked gem was the pan of the Astor Place Monster from the New Yorker a few years back. Man, that thing still startles me (in a bad way!) every time I walk by.

• Dear Drew, have you considered changing the font on Fark's homepage?

• This is the old Top 5% of all Web Sites graphic that used to be used by Point. Which was actually Point Communications, which was actually at pointcom.com, until it sold to Lycos during a period of the web's history 10 years ago that is apparently so old nobody caught the reference. Winning the meaningless award used to be accompanied by an email alerting you to the good news. I suspect Todd Whitney is not still toiling away at Lycos.

• Indie rock is a cult of failure. Could be worse, it could be emo.

• I spoke at the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver a little over a week ago, and there's video of my presentation up on the web, albeit with suboptimal sound. But it kind of gives you a feel for what we were all talking about, if you have the patience to sit through it. (My part starts about five minutes in.)

• I wanted to be uniformly supportive of the Times story about the struggle of Asian pop acts, but I'd felt kind of conflicted and couldn't articulate why. Fortunately, Sree Sreenivasan articulated it concisely: We're Asians too, dammit.

• If you've somehow missed them, a few articles on the tech generation gap. Emily Nussbaum's excellent, definitive look at the distinctions between the technological expectations of those born before and after 1977 in regard to privacy seems like the coming-out party for the topics danah has been talking about forever. A simpler, but still compelling, Tim Bajarin piece in PC Magazine complements it nicely. And the WaPo sez colleges have lost track of students because the schools are still trying to use phones and email to talk to kids who only use Facebook and IM. Whoops.

• Here, take this: A capella Beastie Boys vocals from some of their best tracks.

• Remind me to run all of this through the Cliché Detector later.

• Someday, me and Kal Penn in a steel cage match for Most Famous Indian in America. Someday.

Rip, Mix, and Burn? It's not new. Contrafact is what they called sampling before there was sampling. You take the chords from a song that the whole band knows, and play your new song on top of it. Familiar but new, and you don't have to pay royalties. While the haters say "that's not music!", you're busy making the theme song to The Flintstones, or maybe Fear of a Black Planet.

The most legendary contrafact-ual chords? The Rhythm changes, based on Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm". You could list more than a hundred songs based off the jazz standard ten years ago; There are undoubtedly dozens more today. Interestingly, none of the contrafacts of this classic are better-known than the original, but the fact that so many brilliant derivations have been created has helped burnish Gershwin's reputation as a genius.

It's almost as if letting people use the base of your work as the seed for their own creativity only acts to help both parties.

I'd started reading The Long Tail (You've read the blog, now buy the book!) by surprising myself with how excited I was to read the book; After all, I'd read the original article in Wired when it came out, and have been following Chris' blog since it started. Was there really anything new left? How could I still be interested in a topic that long ago became part of the scenery for the Web 2.0 and VC crowd?

In short, it's just plain good writing. My enjoyment of the book probably centers around the extensive amount of hard data used to gird the book's examples, as well as the pleasingly broad set of cultural influences and examples used to illustrate the effects of the Long Tail. I've criticized the technology industry often for its unrepentant insularity; The breadth of culture in The Long Tail amply evidences the fact that the phenomenon extends well past the confines of the traditional definition of "technology" as an industry.

Above all else, using a wider range of source material than even the seminal Wired article, along with the phenomenal amount of primary research into sales data, makes the book something very impressive and unique. The Long Tail is profoundly intellectually honest.

I'm on the record as a genuine admirer of Malcolm Gladwell, but I have to say that one of the most accurate of the persistent criticisms of his work is that it often substitutes qualitative anecdotes for qualitative evidence. Given that this is, to some degree, what Blink is about, I don't find this a particularly egregious habit. But it is nevertheless a valid point to raise, and The Long Tail is a stronger book for the near-scientific rigor of much of its analysis. (Informing this discipline, no doubt, is Chris's stints at Nature and Science.)

But here's an example of how the breadth of the narrative really got my gears turning. If you read this site back when I used to do my Daily Links, you might remember the history of house music I linked to. It's an encyclopedic and comprehensive resource that, along with the dictionary of samples, was one of my favorite links ever. Interestingly, house music comes up near the end of The Long Tail.

Now, I believe that, without hip hop and remix culture (of which house music is firmly a part), there would be no blogging. "Rip, Mix, and Burn" isn't merely a tenet of digital culture, it's among the fundamental principles of post-disco black music, which has consistently shaped contemporary culture. And that's important to note because The Long Tail isn't a book about business, or the Internet, or even economics. At least, it isn't merely about economics; It's a book about a change in culture.

Of course, The Tipping Point reached its, well... you know, after somehow morphing from being a book about cultural trends into being perceived as a business guide. So I'm not surprised that The Long Tail is packaged that way; The same audience might well purchase it for the same reasons. Indeed, Reed Hastings' back-cover blurb suggests that The Long Tail will sit on your shelf between The Tipping Point and Freakonomics. Presumably these books are all also bad and good for you.

But I digress. House music, you say? Let's go to the tape:

What was notable about the rise of house was that it was both a reaction to the bankruptcy of blockbuster culture and a vibrant culture of its own. DJs and clubs created a music industry that was radically different from pop music. Clubbing is really about surfing the Long Tail of dance music, and this ecosystem has seen the evolution of new models of innovation around it.

Naturally, there's a lengthier explanation of why this is so in the book, along with an acknowledgement of Umair Haque for contributions to the analysis. But what struck me as noteworthy in this, admittedly minor, part of the book was the pleasantly catholic set of influences. There's a lot of commonalities between the various long tail-based media that media hackers and culture jammers tend to gravitate towards.

I think it's no coincidence that many early bloggers (and, especially, many people who made blog-related tools) have been influenced by hip hop's remix culture, or by the multifaceted beat-matching culture of DJing. It's not just the methods of distribution that are similar; It's the aesthetic of mix-and-match, more lately referred to as Rip, Mix, and Burn.

Have I mentioned that, in addition to being an early investor in Six Apart and a skilled blogger, Joi Ito used to be a house DJ in Chicago? It's true.