UNIT 6

Readings and Resources

Textbook or eBook:

Campbell, M. (2019). Popular music in America. 5th ed. Cengage Learning.

This unit discusses the changes in technology in the music industry and its influence on the development of electronica and rap. Additionally, it explores the new methods of processing and manipulating sound using digital technologies such as Music Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), Sampling and Streaming audio.

· Chapter 17: Electronica and Rap (pgs. 312-331)

Articles, Websites, and Videos:

What is electronica music? This site offers information concerning electronica music.

· . (2017). worldatlas.

Rap music has articulated a black aesthetic that is influencing the pop culture around the world. But does it also promote violence, misogyny, and crime? This program featuring rap master Melle Mel describes the history of rap and hip-hop from its roots in earlier oral and musical traditions to its full flowering in the mid-1990s. Commentary by Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, rap’s early innovators; music critic Nelson George, author of hiphopamerica; radical jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron; movie star and rapper Ice Cube; former gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg; members of Public Enemy, Arrested Development, and the jazz/hip-hop fusion group UFO; and others speak out about the urban African-American experience, civil rights, social responsibility, and other pressing topics. Clips from music videos provide a visual perspective on the genre. Some images and lyrics may be objectionable.

· Digital Classics Distribution. (2009, Mar 5). .

CH. 72

The Digital Revolution

72-1 Digital Audio

Digital audio introduced a fundamentally new and different process for the manipulation of sound. Electronic technologies convert sound waves into electrical signals, process the signals, then convert them back into sound. Digital technology adds an extra step: It encodes the waveform generated by the electrical signal into a binary format, then reverses the process for output. This encoding is accomplished by sampling the wave at regular intervals, with several possible gradations. On a standard compact disc (CD), the wave is sampled 44,100 times a second; there are 65,536 (16 × 16 × 16 × 16) possible gradations of the wave. This high sampling rate, coupled with the thousands of gradations, makes it possible to simulate the shape of the wave so closely that the original waveform and the digital sampling of it are virtually identical.

Digital audio fools our ears in much the same way that digital images fool our eyes. In introducing what Apple calls the “Retina Display” on the iPhone, Steve Jobs said, “there’s a magic number around 300 dpi (dots per inch), if you hold something about 10–12 inches away from your eye, it’s the limit of the human retina to distinguish pixels.” When magnified, what seems to be a smooth image a foot away is actually a grid of squares, each a single color or shade of gray. However, the size of each square is so small that our eyes are fooled into seeing color blends, curves, and other continuous images. In much the same way, our ears are fooled by digital sampling.

This ability to encode waveform data digitally has had several benefits. First, it eliminates signal degradation. In analog tape recording, there were inevitably some unwelcome sounds: One can hear tape hiss on predigital recordings that have not been remastered, or on cassette copies of recordings. The more a tape is copied, the more pronounced the extraneous sounds become. By contrast, digital information can be copied an infinite number of times, with no loss of audio quality, as anyone who has burned a CD or used a filesharing service knows.

Second, it became possible to maintain quality despite unlimited use. Previously, the quality of sound degraded over time because of the physical contact of a stylus with a record groove, or tape with the tape head. A recording played for the one-hundredth time on a turntable or cassette player will sound worse than the first time, no matter how much care is taken. This problem disappeared with digital audio.

required more than the ability to convert sound into digital data; it was also necessary to apply laser technology to encode data to and decode it from the storage medium (hence “burn” a CD). Research on the laser dates back to a 1958 paper by a physicist at Bell Labs. By the early seventies, lasers were being used to read digital data stored on discs. By 1980 Philips and Sony, two of the leaders in audio research, had agreed on a standard for CD audio: 16-bit sampling and a 44.1K sampling rate.

In 1984 the first CD pressing plant in the United States—in Terre Haute, Indiana—started producing CDs. The first CDs were expensive because the production process was seriously flawed; only a relatively small percentage of the CDs produced were good enough for release. As a result, the cost of a CD was high—higher than cassette or vinyl. Not surprisingly, given the nature of the music business, the cost of a CD remained higher than that of a cassette, even though production costs were soon much lower.

72-2bMIDI

Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or simply , is an industry standard that allows electronic instruments to communicate with one another and with a computer. In theory, this seems like a natural and modest step. In practice, it was a tremendous breakthrough for two main reasons. First, it enabled a single person to simulate an orchestra, a rock band, or a swing band, using just one instrument. Using a MIDI-enabled electronic keyboard or other similarly configured device, musicians could choose from an array of MIDI-out sounds—usually no less than 128. They could perform the passage as if playing a piano or organ, but the sound coming out would be like a trumpet, or bells, or violins, or a host of others.

For just a few thousand dollars, anyone can create a home studio that can do just about anything that could have been done only in a million-dollar studio less than a generation ago.

Second, MIDI devices could interact with sequencers. A is a device that enables a person to assemble a sound file, track by track. Using a sequencer that can store eight tracks, a person can re-create the sound of a band: one track for the bass, another for the rhythm guitar, and so on.

Sequencers can also be used to create loops. A is a short sound file—such as a drum pattern or a bass line—that can be repeated and combined with other loops or freely created material to create a background for a song, whether it’s rap, pop, techno, house, or something else. To make this process easier, loops are usually a standard length: eight beats (two measures), sixteen beats (four measures), and so on. With these kinds of resources, assembling the rhythm track to a song can be like building with Lego. Users simply snap them into a track in their digital audio software.

72-2cSampling

is a small sound file. (Please note that this meaning of sample is different from the sample of a waveform; the two meanings are related but different.) A sample can be the recorded sound of a voice or group of voices, an instrument (e.g., the Steinway grand piano) or group of instruments (such as a violin section), or some other sound. This sound can then be replayed through some other device. For instance, one can buy a disc with the sampled sound of several cellos playing every note on the usable range of the instrument, recorded in many different ways. Then the buyer can install it on a computer, activate it inside the appropriate software, and produce a passage that sounds like a recording of the cello section of a first-rate symphony orchestra.

Primitive forms of this technology have been available since the sixties. The first commercial “sampler” to achieve any kind of currency was the Mellotron. It was a keyboard instrument in which depressing a key would activate a looped tape of a string sound. It was not very flexible, but it was a cost-efficient alternative to hiring violinists. However, sampling didn’t really become practical until digital technology.

Now, sampling has reached such a level of sophistication that it is often impossible to determine whether a passage was recorded live or created using samples. In effect, this kind of sampling is a more advanced version of MIDI playback because the sounds are rendered more accurately.

Another primary kind of sampling involves lifting short excerpts from existing recordings to use in a new recording, much like a visual artist will use found objects to create a collage or assemblage. It has been a staple of rap background tracks since the technology became available in the mid-eighties.

72-2dComputer Audio

In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every couple of years. Moore’s Law, as it has been called, has largely held true. What this has meant is that the amount of computing power one can buy for $1,000 has doubled every eighteen months or so.

Because CD-quality digital audio requires over 1 million samples per second, the first personal computers could not handle audio processing in real time. Fast-forward to the turn of the century, though, and it’s a different story. One can burn CDs at … I hesitate to write a number here, because by the time you read this, the number will be out of date. Digital audio workstations, sequencers, special effects plug-ins, notation software—there is almost nothing in the process of creating and producing a recording that cannot be done on a computer equipped with the right software and peripherals.

72-2eThe Internet and Its Impact

The first attempts to create an Internet, or network of networks, date back to the seventies. By 1980, a protocol that enabled different networks to communicate with one another was in place. During its early years, the Internet was mainly under government supervision and control; the National Science Foundation managed it in the United States. However, in 1993, the Internet backbone was opened to the private sector in the United States, and Mosaic, the first browser, became available. (Mosaic became Netscape the following year.) Browsers simplified access to the Internet by providing a graphical user interface, similar to those found on Windows and Mac operating systems.

An iPhone 7 from 2016 has at least quadruple the RAM, a CPU that’s 10 times as fast, more storage, and a display with more pixels than an iMac from 2000. It fits in the palm of your hand and enables you to access the Internet from almost anywhere.

By 2000, the mechanics of the now-familiar Internet experience were in place. Since then, the pace of innovation and evolution has been breathtakingly fast and remarkably comprehensive. Driving this growth were astounding technological advances, in computing power, storage, portability, access, and more. By way of example, a current iPhone is a more powerful computer by far than an iMac a decade earlier.

Internet access and speed have grown at a comparable pace. Between 2000 and 2017, global Internet access grew 934%, an almost ten-fold increase. In 2000, less than 6 percent of the world’s population could go online; by March 2017, almost half have access, and in North America the ratio is 8 out of 9.

Numerous new businesses and services have leveraged these technological advances to open up all aspects of commence: as author Craig Anderson has discussed in depth, “free” is now an option. Consider the cumulative impact on the music industry of these developments:

· Napster: Napster went public in 1999 as a peer-to-peer filesharing application. By 2001, Shawn Fanning, its creator, had closed down the service after several artists sued the company. However, BitTorrent sites continue to make music available (illegally) for free. Legal and ethical issues aside, such peer-to-peer networks can function much like a greatly enhanced version of the preview clips on digital download sites such as iTunes and Amazon. They give enthusiastic listeners with more time than money the opportunity to sample a large body of music by a particular act before deciding whether to buy one or more albums.

(“concrete music”).

Others—among them German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, French-American composer Edgard Varèse, and American composer John Cage—assembled compositions completely from synthesized sounds, recorded, then spliced together to form a complete composition. In 1958, Lejaren Hiller set up the first computer music studio at the University of Illinois. Among these new electronic works were the first examples of the recording as the creative document—with no performer involved in the creative process.

Much of this music was conceptual: It grew out of a particular idea that the composer wanted to explore. The results probed every possible extreme. American composer Milton Babbitt created works in which every musical parameter was regulated by a predetermined mathematical series, a process called total serialism. At the other end of the spectrum were works by John Cage, in which events were determined by chance. One famous work required the performer to sit in front of a piano without playing it for 4 minutes and 33 seconds; the composition was the ambient sounds in the performing space. Stockhausen composed a work for piano in which fragments of music were printed on an oversized score; the performer determined the sequence of the fragments during the performance. Varèse created Poème électronique, an electronic piece that mixes synthesized and concrète sounds, for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, where it played over 425 loudspeakers.

All of these concepts have found their way into the various electronica styles. For example, the loudspeaker setup for Poème électronique anticipates the “total immersion” sound systems of dance clubs. Stockhausen’s piano piece, where the performer switches arbitrarily from fragment to fragment, anticipates the DJ mixing on the fly. Musique concrète anticipates the found sounds that appear in so much electronica and related styles like rap. And totally electronic pieces anticipate the millions of synthesizer-generated dance tracks.

, the first significant electronic style to emerge in popular music, dates back to the seventies. Its early history includes Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream. The father of ambient music, though, is Brian Eno; his recording Ambient I: Music for Airports (1978) is seminal. Eno’s early music, which shares common ground with the classical minimalist composers, was a bridge between the more esoteric world of classical electronic music and electronica in the popular tradition.

As its name suggests, ambient music is more atmospheric than dance oriented, with more attention to texture and less emphasis on rhythm. As a genre within electronica, it hasn’t had a home, but it has merged with both house and techno, introducing a more varied sound world into both. In these hybrid genres, it began to catch on in the late eighties and early nineties.

73-3 Music for Dancing, Places to Dance

The dance club is the home of electronica. The dance scene that has nurtured the music since the early eighties has been an underground continuation of disco. The songs produced by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder were among the best and most successful examples of early electronica. In essence, there were people who still wanted to dance after disco declined in popularity. The club scene, and the music created for it, gave them the outlet.

During the eighties, two major club scenes emerged in the Midwest: in Chicago and in Detroit. Both would have a profound influence on dance music throughout the world. House music was a low-budget continuation of disco. DJs like Frankie Knuckles would use bare-bones rhythm tracks as part of mixes that included disco hits and current disco-inspired songs. The Detroit scene was almost exclusively the work of three friends and colleagues—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—who had known one another since junior high. Despite their Detroit base, they were drawn to techno pioneers like Kraftwerk rather than Motown acts. As Atkins said in an interview, “I’m probably more interested in Ford’s robots than in Berry Gordy’s music.” As DJs and producers, they delivered a stark, dark kind of dance music under numerous guises, including Atkins’s Model 500 and May’s Rhythim Is Rhythim.

A rave is a huge dance party conducted in a large space: outdoors, an abandoned warehouse, or even a large club.

By the mid-eighties, the music had migrated to Great Britain. The event that brought the music, the culture, and the drugs up from the underground and into the public eye was the 1988 “Summer of Love,” a rave that went on for weeks. A is a huge dance party conducted in a large space: outdoors, an abandoned warehouse, or even a large club. Ecstasy and other designer drugs were very much part of the scene; they suppressed the need to eat or sleep. (Never mind that the drugs are dangerous—even deadly—especially when consumed with alcohol.) Indoors or out, however, electronica offered a novel musical experience.

73-4 Mixes

Dance music has defined a new performance paradigm for popular music. The nature of the venue—the dance club, rather than the arena, auditorium, night club, or coffeehouse—has fundamentally altered what is performed, how it’s performed, how it’s created, and how it’s experienced.

The obvious difference, of course, is the use of recordings, rather than live musicians, to produce the music being heard. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t the spontaneity and performer–crowd interaction that can be part of a live performance; it’s just that it comes from a different source—the DJ—and it occurs mainly in the sequencing of tracks rather than within an individual song.

, a group of songs connected by musical interludes. Often medleys were slow dance numbers; bands would play one chorus of each song rather than several choruses of one song. But they could be any tempo.

It was the DJ who transformed the practice of connecting songs into an art. A DJ with a two-turntable setup was able to mix a series of songs into a set, an unbroken string of songs.

During the early years of the rock era, medleys were harder to create in the moment, because the identity of a song was more comprehensive. More than just the melody and harmony, it included every aspect of the song as preserved on the recording. It was more difficult to alter songs so that one would flow easily into the next. Still, the idea of connecting songs did not disappear, as landmark albums such as Sgt. Pepper and The Dark Side of the Moon evidence. However, it wasn’t until disco that the idea of creating medleys resurfaced, in a much-updated form.

It was the DJ who transformed the practice of connecting songs into an art. A DJ with a two-turntable setup was able to a series of songs into a , an unbroken string of songs that could last longer than even the most extended Grateful Dead jam.

The art of the DJ begins with music that he or she selects. For this reason, many DJs create their own music; it helps them develop a signature style. In the dance club, skilled DJs string together a series of dance tracks with seamless transitions. It is not just that they blend one record into the next without dropping a beat—unless they plan to. They orchestrate the sequence of songs, how much they’ll use of each song, and the kind of transition they’ll use to give a sense of architecture to the set. It is in this context that they can respond to the dancers’ energy, building to a climactic moment or moments as the set unfolds.

In the discussion of rock and rhythm and blues in the sixties, we noted that the record had become the document, the fullest and most direct expression of the musicians’ creative intent. This changes in dance music. The musical unit is no longer the recording—which is seldom if ever played in its entirety—but the set. The recording is the raw material for the set; recordings are the building blocks—much as riffs are the building blocks of so many songs.

This in turn changes the nature of a dance track. It isn’t just that it’s music for dancing. Instead, the dance track is often created with the idea that it is a component of a larger structure—the set—rather than an entity complete unto itself—the song. This is a radical departure from mainstream rock; rock gave the song an integrity that it could not have had in earlier generations.

Moreover, music for club use employs a different sonic spectrum. During the sixties, popular music designed for airplay concentrated on mid-range frequencies because these come across better on radio than high or low frequencies do. By contrast, dance clubs typically have good sound systems, so producers can take advantage of the entire range of audible frequencies. Electronica styles typically make full use of this, especially low-end frequencies.

This combination of a full sonic spectrum and relentless dance beat, all in an enclosed space, produces a kind of sensory inundation. It is virtually the opposite extreme of sensory deprivation, and it seems to have many of the same mind-altering consequences.

73-5 Early Electronica “No UFO’s”

of a song. Recall that one of the significant developments of the early rock era was the emergence of the “record as document.” That is, the song was what was recorded on the album or single. However, even then multiple versions of songs occasionally appeared: the single version of the Doors’ “Light My Fire” is much shorter than the album version, which features long instrumental solos by Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger. As mentioned earlier, Jamaican record companies took this a step further when they would issue the instrumental backing of a song as the “B” side of the record so that DJs could toast over it. Still, musicians and producers were limited because of the relative difficulty in isolating and recombining tracks and song components and segments in analog mixing.

Digital technology liberated music creators from both the signal degradation and ease-of-use issues in analog recording. As computers gained speed and audio workstation software developed, it became possible to construct a song out of several components, which could be modified, added to, and otherwise manipulated to create other versions of the song, some of which can be quite different. For example, the “Peter Heller Park Lane Vocal” version of “South Side” is 5 minutes longer than the album track, and one track is an instrumental.

culture, along with break dancing and graffiti. All three were unconventional forms of expression that required considerable skill and preparation. is extremely athletic; its vigorous moves parallel the energy of the music to which it’s performed. Graffiti artists prepared their work much like a military campaign. They would plan the graffito through a series of sketches, scout out the train yards, sneak in and paint the cars, then sneak out. Their use of trains and buses as “canvases” suggests that graffiti was another way to get their message out of the ghetto.

There is a kind of defiance built into all three: rap, graffiti art, and break dancing. The implicit message is “You can put us down, but you can’t keep us down.” You—the man, the establishment—can subject us to subhuman living conditions. You can ignore us. But you can’t break our spirit. We can create something that comes from us, not you, and you can’t do what we do, even though you want to.

75-5 Grandmaster Flash: Messages and Techniques

Among rap’s pioneers was Grandmaster Flash. Flash (born Joseph Saddler, 1958) was born in Barbados but moved with his family to the Bronx at a young age. He grew up with passionate interests in his father’s jazz records and electronics, which he merged as a budding DJ at block parties and in public parks.

Inspired by Kool Herc, the first great hip-hop DJ, Flash developed the array of turntable techniques that would revolutionize rap. Even more significantly, he translated these techniques into a radically new musical conception: the . In the visual arts, an artist creating a collage assembles found materials (artifacts such as print materials, photographs, or machine parts) or natural objects (such as seashells, flowers, or leaves) into a work of art. The collage can consist exclusively of the preexisting materials, or it can be integrated into the work of the artist. What the visual artist does with found materials, Flash did with sound. In effect, he cut and pasted sound clips from recordings into his music. The clips could range in length from a fraction of a second to several seconds; in either case, Flash completely recontextualized them.

The first track in which he showcased these skills was “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel,” which he recorded with the Furious Five, featuring Melle Mel (Melvin Glover) and ex-Sugarhill Gang percussionist Duke Bootee (Ed Fletcher). The track, a minor R&B hit in 1981, included excerpts from Chic’s “Good Times,” Blondie’s “Rapture,” and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” as well as samples from other songs and sources; it would become a textbook for the creative possibilities of sampling. As practiced by Flash, sampling was a radical transformation of the age-old practice of musical quotation. Instead of inserting snippets of melody, Flash mixed in the entire musical event as preserved on record.

Another of Flash’s early and important contributions was “The Message,” which reached No. 4 on the R&B charts in 1982 and also crossed over to the pop charts. It was innovative in both subject and setting.

“The Message” presents a brutal picture of life in the ghetto. Its impact begins with the rap itself, which describes the oppressive and parlous circumstances of everyday life for those who live there. Another noteworthy feature was the “arrest” at the end of the track, a “slice of life” interpolation that interrupts the musical accompaniment for several seconds. When the accompaniment resumes, it is as if the arrest were barely a blip on the radar screen—a virtual nonevent in the ongoing misery of life in the ghetto. Both the rap and the arrest scene convey a much more serious message. With “The Message,” rap graduated from party music to serious social commentary.

, which emerged in the latter part of the eighties, brought the violence of inner-city life into the music and out into the world. A visual image of this life was the 1988 film Colors, starring Robert Duvall and Sean Penn as police officers trying to control violence between the Bloods and the Crips, two rival Los Angeles gangs. Ice-T, among the first of the gangsta rappers, recorded the title track of the film.

Although Schoolly D, a Philadelphia-based rapper, is credited with the rap that sparked the genre (the 1986 single “P.S.K.”), gangsta rap has been perceived as a West Coast phenomenon because of the success of rap artists and groups such as N.W.A. and Ice-T, then Dr. Dre (a former N.W.A. member), Snoop Doggy Dogg, MC Hammer, and 2Pac (Tupac Shakur). The success of these artists escalated the territorial animosity from rival gangs within a community to the communities themselves. Bad blood developed between West Coast gangsta rappers and New York hip-hop artists; both groups used lyrics to dis the opposing camp. The violence portrayed in the lyrics often spilled over into real life. Snoop Doggy Dog and Tupac Shakur were among the notable gangsta rap artists who served jail time; the shooting deaths of Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. are commonly regarded as gang retribution.

Violence was not the only controversial aspect of the music. Raps were often pornographic and misogynistic, and richly scatological. Most recordings routinely earned the “parental advisory” label from the RIAA. For suburban whites, gangsta rap must have seemed like forbidden fruit; the genre would enjoy a large following among whites, most of whom experienced the rappers’ world only vicariously.

Although its audience had grown steadily throughout the late eighties and early nineties, gangsta rap crossed over to the mainstream in large part because of a musical decision: to work pop elements into hardcore rap. It first appeared in the music of New York hip-hop artists such as Notorious B.I.G. and Nas, and quickly spread to the west coast: Tupac Shakur’s “California Love,” which topped the pop, R&B, and rap charts in 1996, epitomizes this new approach.

76-2 Tupac Shakur

If ever an artist seemed destined to live and die by the sword, it would be Tupac Shakur (1971–1996). His parents were active in the Black Panthers; his mother was acquitted on a conspiracy charge only a month before Shakur’s birth; his father is currently incarcerated in Florida; and others close to his mother during his childhood were either in and out of prison or fugitives.

What made his too-short life doubly tragic was the terrible conflict between the sensitive and violent sides of his personality. He was intelligent and curious—reading Machiavelli during his prison term—and creative and multitalented, with obvious gifts as an actor, poet, dancer, and musician. Yet in his personal and professional lives, he gave vent to the violent side: run-ins with the law, a sexual abuse lawsuit, and scandal. “Hit ’Em Up” was a personal attack on Notorious B.I.G.; in it, he claimed to have slept with B.I.G.’s wife. That his life would end prematurely as a result of the ultimate violent act seems in retrospect almost a foregone conclusion.

Shortly before his death, Shakur recorded “California Love” with Dr. Dre for Death Row Records, the label headed by Suge Knight, who was also repeatedly in trouble with the law. The opening scene of the music video of the track and the action during the song itself seem inspired by the Mad Max films: They purport to present a desolate, lawless world a hundred years in the future. Although it is skillfully produced, the video has no obvious thematic connection with the song, which is very much in the present—the “ ’95” that Dr. Dre mentions is clearly 1995, and Tupac’s first words are “out on bail/fresh outta jail,” which happened to be true. Both the video and the song evidence the mutation of rap from an outsiders’ music flourishing in inner-city parks to a big business.