8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

The Art of Alan White

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After playing on famous albums by George Harrison and John Lennon, drummer Alan White joined Yes just before their next tour, on three days’ notice. That’s notable because those Yes songs (and Yessongs, a live set culled from that tour, is the first album Alan played on) are complex, baroque beasts filled with time-switches and dastardly riffage from which no instrumentalist can escape. He passed the audition and was Yes’s key skin-pounder for the rest of his life. And that life, unfortunately, ended for Alan White this week.

I’ll argue that Alan White is one of the most influential drummers of our time, though I bestow the title fully knowing that his influence is involuntary. You see, Trevor Horn bought a Fairlight CMI sampling keyboard with his formidable “Video Killed The Radio Star” royalties, setting him back a cool £18,000. “You could buy a house,” he says about that purchase. But Trevor sniffed the future. He parlayed this new device to help get his early music producer jobs — bands not only enjoyed Trevor’s production chops but also exclusive access to this wizardry machine. Malcolm McLaren and ABC came calling.

Trevor assembled a team to help out on those two productions, with Gary Langan on engineering duties and JJ Jeczalik managing the ins and outs of the frustratingly complicated Fairlight. The great Anne Dudley also appeared, contributing string arrangements and keyboard expertise. This crew then worked on Yes’s 90125 album, home of the breakout song “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” Yes’s dated prog-rock pomposity unexpectedly gave way to Trevor’s unmistakable sonic touch.1Yes’s previous album Drama is also worth a listen as it’s where Trevor Horn first collaborated with the band — as their lead vocalist!

As legend has it, JJ Jeczalik and Gary Langan were lingering in the studio after a Yes session, fooling around with the Fairlight. They thought it would be novel to take a discarded drum track from Alan White and feed it into the Fairlight’s Page R sequencer. Wikipedia claims (and I have no reason to doubt) that this was the first time an entire drum pattern was digitally sampled.

Fast forward a few months, and this production team formed The Art of Noise around these Fairlight experiments with the assistance of writer and media wrangler Paul Morley. And, as a result, that’s Alan White you hear sampled, cut-up, and processed-to-hell on the seminal songs “Close To The Edit” and “Beatbox.”

Not only is it likely that Alan White was the first drummer to get captured in a sampler’s Phantom Zone, but those beats went on to inspire whole genres of hip hop, breakbeat, big beat, and so much more. I doubt there’d be a Bomb Squad without Alan White and that night of Fairlight tomfoolery, and, really, that’s all you need to know. Today’s music wouldn’t be the same.

Curious about this vintage alien technology called a Fairlight CMI? Someone made a video with the sampler and replicated the creation of “Beatbox.” The display graphics seem right out of a dashboard screen on the USCSS Nostromo:

Fairlight CMI Screen

Side tale: When I heard (Who’s Afraid of) The Art of Noise? I was instantly obsessed. I couldn’t figure out how this music existed, and I needed to know. In my knowledge quest, I learned about this amazing new thing called a digital sampler. I had to have one, but I didn’t have £18,000 lying around. So I made a list of all the things I’d eventually sample once I got ahold of one: household appliances, my friends vocalizing, various neighborhood pets, and so on. When I finally got my first sampler, a Casio SK-1, I was frustrated by its limitations and couldn’t act on over 90% of my list. But it was still a formative blast. That weird little keyboard and a few tunes sampling the drummer Alan White were responsible for pushing me down the music production path.

🔗→ Previously: Digital Sampling With a Sense of Humor

Small Potatoes

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Sample-Snitching → One quiet morning in the early 2000s, I arrived at my label’s office and listened to the voice mail no sampling record producer wants to hear. The call was from a lawyer representing the estate of the leader of an obscure ’70s funk band. He knew that I used a 2-bar drum loop from this band on a song from my first album. It didn’t matter that this loop was fairly common, used prolifically in both mainstream hits and underground white labels. It also didn’t matter that I probably grabbed the loop off one of those erroneously named ‘royalty-free’ sample CDs that were common in the ’90s. The lawyer (and, presumably, his client) wanted his cut. 

Long story short, the fact the loop appeared in several mainstream hits probably worked in my favor — once the lawyer saw the requested final sales figures for my album, he realized I was small potatoes. I guess I wasn’t worth the effort, and I never heard from him again. But the most disturbing thing was how he found me. He was going through listings of songs that sampled his client on a sample-identifying website. 

I’m not sure which site the lawyer used at the time. Today’s most popular one, WhoSampled.com, launched several years after that frightening phone call. But the fear persists among producers. A new article in Pitchfork by Mosi Reeves details how representatives of legacy catalog use WhoSampled to source potential litigation, despite its intended purpose of pointing fans to old records:

It is a useful resource for rap listeners, despite its complicated role in sampling culture. Chris Read, the London-based company’s head of content, said that using the website as a fact-finding tool for potential lawsuits is a violation of its terms of service, and that the practice “stands in opposition to the reason WhoSampled was created, which is to provide a place for music fans to discover the origins of the music they love and celebrate sampling as an artform.” He acknowledged that the site does not distinguish between cleared and uncleared samples in its listings, because information about sample licensing is not always made publicly available. Producers can request takedowns of listings related to their work if there is information that “they would prefer was not published” on the site, he added.

The law is clear, so producers using uncleared samples — myself included — are unambiguously in the wrong. Many in the music industry’s creative roles have called for an overhaul of these laws to recognize sampling as an art form and create avenues for producers working outside the profitable mainstream. Some lawyers, like the one who contacted me and ended up letting the sample slide, would seem to agree. But then there’s the challenge of differentiating those who use samples artfully vs. those who use them to profit off the notoriety of earlier works. Yes, music rights are complicated (a phrase that’s in the running for the motto of this blog).

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A preview of Marc Méan’s forthcoming album Basteln → Friend of the blog Marc Méan has recorded a new album, titled Basteln. It’s out next week on Neologist Productions. I’m sure I’ll write more about it upon release as it’s terrific, maybe even better and lovelier than his previous effort, Collage. You can listen to the advance single (or, perhaps, it’s an excerpt as the album consists of two 20-minute tracks), recorded using “Cocoquantus, piano, voice & FX.” 

Marc lives in Zürich. The Swiss city has been on my mind as I’m near completing Kim Stanley Robinson’s fantastic near-future climate change novel The Ministry for the Future. Zürich is the setting for much of the novel, and the descriptions of the city are inviting. However, Zürich was already on my radar as the home base of the founders of my favorite art pranksters, the Dadaists. Here’s where Cabaret Voltaire got their name.

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Optional Essentials Vol. 1 → My friend Dr Olive — who once took me to the top of Mont St-Michel — recently launched a new label, 3 to the 3rd Music. The latest release is an ambitious two-part compilation cheekily titled Optional Essentials. The hype-text describes this collection as “the home-made home-listening soundtrack to one of the strangest years, written by music makers from 7 countries.” The sound is chill, overall, but audacious. There’s a diversity of instrumentation and mood-scapes, never a dull moment. The sequence is thoughtful, easily pulling the listener into its zone when played from beginning to end. And I have a connection — I contributed the song “Tarkovsky” under my Q-BAM moniker. I recorded this song ages ago, inspired by repeated visits to Moscow and my admiration of the Russian filmmaker named by the title. And I sampled Robbie Hardkiss saying, “Everything is cool.” Also on the compilation: amazing new tunes from my friends (and label-mates) Monta At Odds and Gemini Revolution.

Sampling Non-Stop

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CMU’s Setlist podcast is running a fantastic series of shows on the ‘Top Ten Legal Battles’ in the music industry. The latest episode is about a European court’s recent judgment over a two-second sample from Kraftwerk’s “Metall auf Metall”. As I’ve covered on the blog, the defendant lost. It’s all quite fascinating, and the podcast covers the ins-and-outs. The hosts also include a short history of sampling litigation and an easy-to-follow explanation of the rights in play. Check it out:

The unsuccessful lawsuit over a short horn sample in Madonna’s “Vogue” is discussed in the history section. The hosts remark that the publisher for the sampled artist — The Salsoul Orchestra — used ‘new technology’ to identify the short sample. I would make a bet this technology is the website whosampled.com. Rights-owners often consult this site to find who sampled their artists. I speak from experience — someone once contacted me regarding one of my sneaky samples, revealed to the sampled artist’s publisher via that site.

In other sampling news, CMU also recently covered Drake successfully arguing fair use for one of his samples. The sampled artist was Jimmy Smith, with a snippet appearing in Drake’s “Pound Cake.” It’s a sample of a spoken word bit from 1982’s “Jimmy Smith Rap” where Jimmy states that “jazz is the only real music that’s going to last, all that other bullshit is here today and gone tomorrow, but jazz is, was and always will be.”

The case is curious because Drake cleared the recording — usually the only requirement in sample clearance — but Smith’s estate argues that he should have cleared the ‘lyrics’ as well. So, Drake went for a fair use defense for his appropriation of the lyrics.

I’ve written before how fair use is a tricky argument. There aren’t any set-in-stone conditions that qualify for fair use, but there are some loose guidelines. In the end, it’s left to the opinion of the court. And surprisingly (to me), the court ruled in Drake’s favor.

CMU:

In the words of the Second Circuit: “The message of the ‘Jimmy Smith Rap’ is one about the supremacy of jazz to the derogation of other types of music, which – unlike jazz – will not last. On the other hand, ‘Pound Cake’ sends a counter message – that it is not jazz music that reigns supreme, but rather all ‘real music’, regardless of genre”.

The court goes on: “‘Pound Cake’ criticises the jazz-elitism that the ‘Jimmy Smith Rap’ espouses. By doing so, it uses the copyrighted work for ‘a purpose, or imbues it with a character, different from that for which it was created’”. Which, the judges reckon, is sufficient to constitute fair use.

That’s a coherent and straight-forward opinion. But I still feel the ruling could have gone either way. As I’ve said before if you’re going to argue fair use then be ready to defend that in court. And keep your fingers firmly crossed.

🔗→ Artist News Business News Labels & Publishers Legal Setlist Setlist: Top ten legal battles – The Kraftwerk sampling case
🔗→ US appeals court rules that Drake’s Jimmy Smith sample is definitely fair use

How Songwriters Got Thrown Into a Minefield

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I’d like to highlight a couple of informative and disconcerting articles about the state of infringement litigation in the wake of the “Blurred Lines” decision. Both pieces are worth a full read.

In The New York Times, Jon Caramanica writes that It’s Got a Great Beat, and You Can File a Lawsuit to It:

Originality is a con: Pop music history is the history of near overlap. Ideas rarely emerge in complete isolation. In studios around the world, performers, producers and songwriters are all trying to innovate just one step beyond where music currently is, working from the same component parts. It shouldn’t be a surprise when some of what they come up with sounds similar — and also like what came before.

The idea that this might be actionable is the new twist. Every song benefits from what preceded it, whether it’s a melodic idea, a lyrical motif, a sung rhythm, a drum texture. A forensic analysis of any song would find all sorts of pre-existing DNA. […]

What’s left in its wake is a climate of fear. In some recent cases, you can sense pre-emptive gamesmanship, as when Taylor Swift gave a writing credit to Right Said Fred for a cadence on “Look What You Made Me Do” that recalled “I’m Too Sexy.” Or the rapid settlement Sam Smith reached with Tom Petty for perceived similarities between “Stay With Me” and “I Won’t Back Down.” Whether there was a direct borrowing didn’t seem to matter; the potential for the perception of theft was enough to instigate an arrangement.

A few years ago, I worked with a songwriter who unexpectedly received a writer’s credit on a previously unheard new song. No one contacted this songwriter beforehand — the credit just suddenly appeared on publishing statements. It turns out the ‘hook’ for the new song was similar to the chorus in a well-known composition the songwriter penned in the ’70s. My songwriter friend didn’t mind and probably wouldn’t have litigated, but was happy with the outcome — the new song ended up a worldwide #1, resulting in a nice payout.

I’m sure this decision — as is the case with most of these preemptive moves — was made by the label’s legal team. I imagine a group of on-staff musicologists pouring over every potential hit song looking for the vaguest of similarities. The lawyers are alerted of any resemblance and the original writers are proactively paid off with a credit and publishing share. I find this risky as it informs the original writer of the similarity. Even with the credit, I don’t think anything is stopping a writer from claiming copyright infringement, that it’s an unauthorized derivative work. A court might see the publicly acknowledged credit as admission. But of course, payment for essentially doing nothing is appreciated, so why bother with the hassle of going legal, right?

A Close-Up of Piano Keys

In Rolling Stone, Amy X. Wang explains How Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits:

While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons’ successful suit against George Harrison in 1976 for the strong compositional similarities between his “My Sweet Lord” and their “He’s So Fine”), the “Blurred Lines” case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection — and thus that a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one. […] “They’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,” [Katy] Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera warned in the case’s closing arguments. […]

The popularity of cheap music-production software, which offers the same features to every user, has added another layer of risk. “Music is now more similar than it is different, for the first time,” [prodcuer and songwriter Ross]Golan says. “People are using the same sample packs, the same plug-ins, because it’s efficient.”

Instrument plug-ins, to be intuitive and easy to use, tend to push users in creative directions. Certain built-in sounds rise to the top, as do sequences and arpeggiations included in the presets. Though these are sounds and one can’t necessarily be sued for a sound (though it has happened!), the inspiration provided by the built-in options potentially send producers to common destinations. A similar five-note motif using a shared patch or a melodic run from an embedded sequence pattern opens up an incentive to take action. Based on what we’ve seen, it’s uncertain a jury would understand the nuance.

And there are potential problems with services like Splice that offer samples and construction kits used by multiple producers. More than one song can easily feature the same melodic building block, and some sample pack offerings from Splice and other services even include lyrics. If a song based on a Splice melodic loop becomes a hit, what happens to the other songs using the same hook?

With copyright protectors like Content ID, it’s who-gets-there-first when it comes to commercially available sample packs. If there’s more than one song using a sample pack melody, the first applying for Content ID stakes the claim. Other songs using that melody might get flagged. This issue has happened in the past with Apple Loops, as producers discovered if they used specific melodic loops included with Logic Pro, the songs would get blocked by YouTube for infringing an earlier song using the same loop.

Even if a sample isn’t used in its blatant form, or is obscured or twisted in the mix, it likely provides the same inspiration as other producers hearing the same sample. It’s not unrealistic to think similar ideas, melodies, or compositional seeds will result from a shared inspirational foundation. Unless there’s future legal clarification — or the courts decide to rely on experts rather than juries in infringement cases1Manager Lucas Keller says in the Rolling Stone article: “In British court, they’d just ask a musicologist to decide. In American court, we bring in 10 random people.” — paying out ‘damages’ and carving out writing shares will be an expected ritual for composers of hit songs.

A Tale of Two Copyright Rulings

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This week saw a couple of big events in the world of music copyright. First off, resolution to the Kraftwerk “Metal On Metal” case in the EU courts, as mentioned previously. Here’s Complete Music Update:

The court said in a statement yesterday: “Phonogram producers have the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit reproduction in whole or in part of their phonograms. Consequently, the reproduction by a user of a sound sample, even if very short, taken from a phonogram must, in principle, be regarded as a reproduction ‘in part’ of that phonogram so that such a reproduction falls within the exclusive right granted to the phonogram producer”.

But what about the artistic freedom of the sampler that the German Constitutional Court was so concerned about? Well, the ECJ has put some constraints on its main ruling. […] In the words of the court: “Where a user, in exercising the freedom of the arts, takes a sound sample from a phonogram in order to embody it, in a modified form unrecognisable to the ear in another phonogram, that is not a ‘reproduction’”. That conclusion is necessary, the court then added, to properly balance the rights of an intellectual property owner with the rights of artistic freedom.

There’s been the myth of a time allowance on samples, that if one samples only two-seconds (or another arbitrary small amount) then, legally, everything is okay. This has never been true in the short history of sample litigation. The issue is identifiably and uniqueness. If, say, a jury can point to a phrase and agree that it’s an unauthorized appropriation of a master recording (a sample) then it’s likely deemed copyright infringement. The length doesn’t matter.

The confusion is probably due to the lack of precedent and definition in the US courts. There hasn’t been a high profile episode like the Kraftwerk complaint yet. So, while the ruling of the EU court doesn’t necessarily say anything new (and it doesn’t add any new limitations, despite what some clickbait headlines might lead one to believe) it is good to have the context fully explained by a legal body.

Then there’s the court’s additional opinion on the artist who artistically messes with a sample to the point of ambiguity. Of course, that artist is in the clear — thanks, EU court — but that’s not so much because it’s ‘artistic freedom.’ It’s that ideally, no one would identify the errant sample in the first place. In other words, sample away. Just be sure to muck that thing up beyond all recognition.

The other big copyright news concerns this Katy Perry vs. Flame outcome. Rolling Stone:

A jury unanimously ruled that Katy Perry’s 2013 hit single “Dark Horse” improperly copied Christian rapper Flame’s 2009 song “Joyful Noise.” The nine-member federal jury in a Los Angeles determined that Perry and her co-writers and producers will owe [$2.78 million in] damages for copyright infringement. […]

Perry, who was not present when the verdict was read, testified that she had never heard “Joyful Noise,” nor heard of Flame, before the lawsuit. Her co-writers testified similarly. Flame’s lawyers responded that the song was widely distributed, with millions of plays on YouTube and Spotify, and reminded the jury of Perry’s origins in the Christian music scene. His team argued that Perry and her team had ripped off the main beat and instrumental line of “Joyful Noise.”

One remarkable aspect is the quoting of YouTube and Spotify plays as evidence that obviously everyone’s heard the song. Umm … okay. Have Spotify plays been argued as evidence in court before?

My feelings, but dialed down a bit, echo those of YouTuber Adam Neely in this video (and kudos for pointing out the similarity of the phrase in question to a famous song by The Art of Noise, which I haven’t seen anyone else mention):

Additionally, Flame’s Marcus Gray added in his original complaint that “Joyful Noise” has been “irreparably tarnished by its association with the witchcraft, paganism, black magic, and Illuminati imagery evoked by the same music in ‘Dark Horse.‘” Of course, there are some kooky internet ‘theories’ out there about Katy Perry and the Illuminati. But I don’t know why people fear the Illuminati so much … if this all-powerful organization couldn’t help Katy Perry win this case then I doubt they’re competent enough to secretly run the world.1Though a hidden overload’s incompetency could explain the current state of affairs.

Podcasts: Analog to Digital, Music Rights Brawls, and Imagining Utopia

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Damon Krukowski used to be in Galaxie 500 and is currently the first name in Damon & Naomi. He also spends a lot of time thinking philosophically about our cultural shift from analog to digital media. I briefly wrote about his brilliant Ways of Hearing podcast series here, and he recently followed that project with a book of the same name. It’s near the front of my reading queue. In the meantime, Damon appeared on the Madison, WI, public radio program A Public Affair to talk about the concepts of his book and podcast. That topic gives us much to chew on. I also enjoyed (and cringed at) the side-story of how Galaxie 500 had to bid on their master recordings in an auction.

Season two’s first episode of The Secret History Of The Future tackles the relationship between technology and music dating back to the invention of the phonograph. It turns out songwriters have been panicking about getting paid since the beginning of commercial sonic reproduction. Go figure. The podcast follows the prescient concerns of John Phillip Sousa (he’s a lot more fascinating than I would have guessed) to the freak-outs over digital sampling. And then there’s the more recent tug-of-war over The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.” The hosts provide an excellent intro to music rights, delivered in a way that is entertaining and comprehensible to the novice.

Listen to “Rutger Bregman’s utopias, and mine” on Spreaker.

In the last paragraph of yesterday’s post, I wrote that “we need to imagine that better world to draw us closer to it.” This interview with Rutger Bregman on The Ezra Klein Show is all about that sentiment. Bregman wrote the book Utopia for Realists (also near the front of my reading queue) and speaks about accomplishing change by aiming for a shared paradise. His ideas are rosy and appear ludicrous to many — open borders! universal basic income! 15-hour workweek! — but he makes the case that any step toward these visions will improve our world. We need to foster hope and optimism in the face of despair and defeat — admittedly not an easy task right now. I strongly recommend this episode.

Trouble for the Two-Second Sample

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There’s a misconception that sampling has a time limit, that one can legally sample anything (a drum hit, a vocal yelp, a guitar riff) as long as it’s short. I’ve heard various guidelines set for this assumption with the two-second mark as the most common. It’s not true. If a judge or jury can identify a sound — any sound — as originating from a copyrighted source, you’re probably in trouble.

Granted, the US courts have not been consistent in how they rule on this, and it’s fair to say there’s no set precedent here. But, in the EU, this may no longer be the case thanks to repeatedly snubbed Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Famers Kraftwerk and the synthesized sound of banging metal.

via Billboard:

The case involves a two-second sample from “Metall auf Metall,” which the producers Moses Pelham and Martin Haas used as a continuous background loop in the 1997 song “Nur Mir.” Although the sample consists of just two seconds of the original song, it’s recognizable and important in “Nur Mir,” which is performed by the singer Sabrina Setlur. […]

… Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the European Court of Justice, which is deciding a copyright case that involves Kraftwerk’s “Metall of Metall,” that even limited sampling of a recording can constitute copyright infringement. Advocate General opinions are not binding, but they’re watched closely, since they often predict the way the high court of Europe will decide cases.

The case is interesting as it involves only the recording (master) side of the music and not the composition (written song). The idea is that one can take a ‘sample’ of a written song in isolation — such as a couple of notes or a few words — and it would be too general to constitute infringement. The failure of the recent “haters gonna hate” lawsuit illustrates this. But a recording is specific, easily traced to its rights-holder. Complete Music Update once again provides the most helpful explainer:

Basically, when you sample a two second clip of a track, you are sampling both the recording and the song contained within it. But it might be hard to argue that the two second snippet of the song can be protected by copyright in isolation. However, at the same time you could argue that the two second snippet of the recording is.

The ‘Metal On Metal’ case centres on the recording rights. In essence, in the 2012 court hearing, when one argument on the Kraftwerk side was that Pelham could have recreated the sounds he sampled, they were basically saying that there was no song copyright to infringe here, but that the separate recording copyright had been infringed by the uncleared sample.

In his ruling, the Advocate General wrote, “A phonogram is not an intellectual creation consisting of a composition of elements such as words, sounds, colours etc. A phonogram is a fixation of sounds which is protected, not by virtue of the arrangement of those sounds, but rather on account of the fixation itself.” Feel free to substitute ‘phonogram’ with ‘recording’ as you read that.

Billboard again:

Some of the questions referred to the European Court of Justice involve details of European law, including whether the German concept of free use is compatible with EU law. But others get to the center of the debate around copyright and free expression. Generally, most countries’ courts have held that quotation doesn’t infringe copyright when a new work refers to the original one – in a book review, or even in a parody of a song. But what about when the new work has nothing to do with the original? Such questions have increased urgency in the digital age, and this is one of several important cases on the topic.

I wonder if this will create more consistency in how the courts rule on ‘short sample’ cases in the US. And I also wonder if New Order ever had to pony up for their own short Kraftwerk sample in “Blue Monday.”

America Is Waiting

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Brian Eno & David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is often credited as one of the first ‘sample-driven’ albums. It can be argued whether or not its cut-and-paste tape embellishments are ‘samples’ in the Art of Noise “Who’s Afraid Of?” or The Bomb Squad sense, but the influence is undeniable. The album did alert many already art-inclined musicians to the possibilities found in adding sounds and dialogue to productions. Rather than sampling, we could say it popularized collaging.

I was on a high school trip to Disney World, probably around 1986, and we ended up in Panama City for an overnight rest stop (we were coming from Louisiana). I was hungry for ‘alternative’ records, as they were scarce in small town I lived in. So, in our short stay in Panama City I sought out and somehow found an underground record shop. I was tempted by the many albums I’d never heard of — they all looked like something I should listen to — but I only had money to buy one. I did what you did in those days: I asked the record clerk for his recommendation.

He asked me what I was into and where my taste currently resided. I’m not sure what I said, but I was mining early Cabaret Voltaire at the time (Red Mecca was an obsession) so that may have influenced his decision. He pulled out a vinyl copy of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and asked, “Have you heard this?” I hadn’t, so he insisted I spend my cash on this unassuming-looking album. Once I returned home and put the album on the turntable I was transfixed. It was weird, completely different than anything else, and organic and sloppy while other sample-based/electronic albums at the time were technical and precise. I wish I could thank that guy at the record store.

I bring up My Life in the Bush of Ghosts today because of this sad news story reported in Soundblab:

Less than two weeks ago from this writing (December 2, 2018), the body of longtime progressive radio host Ray Taliaferro was discovered in the woods near Paducah, Kentucky. Taliaferro was a pioneering black broadcaster and community leader in San Francisco starting in the late ‘60s. Sadly, he suffered from dementia in his later years and mysteriously went missing several weeks before his body was found.

It’s hard not to think about Taliaferro wandering disoriented and alone when he was a lamp to so many in life. For posterity though, his voice was captured in a much more vibrant moment as the first that is heard on Brian Eno and David Byrne’s collaboration, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts.

If you know the album you immediately know the voice: “America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.” It’s so matter-of-fact, but ominous, almost authorative, denoting a conspiratorial paranoia that we recognize all-too-well in 2018. I knew nothing about Ray Taliaferro — I didn’t even know he was behind the song’s vocal until today — but he seems to have been a well-respected broadcasting forerunner. I wonder what he thought about his voice on “America Is Waiting,” portraying him with nervousness and an almost methodical mania.

This brings up some of the problems expressed about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. There’s a matter of cultural appropriation and context-shifting that could be extended to Ray Taliaferro.

At the time, fellow world-tapping producer Adrian Sherwood seemed to sneer at this and Eno’s intent of creating a “vision of a psychedelic Africa” when he titled an African Head Charge album My Life in a Hole in the Ground, not soon after the Eno/Byrne release. Sherwood also later appropriated the Eno quote for another album title.

Writing for Getintothis, Jono Podmore is heavily critical of Eno and Byrne’s ethics with regards to the project but eventually celebrates the tension:

The musicians were by and large white but the style is rooted in African American forms of funk, replete with thumb slapping bass and the sound world of George Clinton. There’s no rock drum sounds, no wailing guitar solos. And then there are the “found voices”. Of the 10 tracks on the original release, there are 9 vocals and 6 of them are American, and at least half of them are clearly African American voices. None are African. There’s a sense of selling American culture back to itself as exotica. A slight change of context, a touch of “African psychedelic vision” and the picture we get is a Pynchonesque world, a filmic unreality directed by Wim Wenders featuring Harry Dean Stanton as a sweaty southern preacher …

Cultural appropriation is a tricky subject. No one disagrees that the originators should get their due. And context-shifting is fine and dandy until it happens to you. But the mash-up of different cultures is how new movements and genres are made — Hank Shocklee has even stated the influence of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts on The Bomb Squad and his innovative production for Public Enemy. And these combinations also release a bubble, inspiring fans to track down the influences. Paul Simon got a bit of flack for Graceland, but the album did turn a lot of people (including me) onto Soweto street music.

Even Jono Podmore admits, “The first African book I ever read was My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – because the album had introduced the title to me.” The line is even blurrier once we learn that Eno and Byrne never read the book themselves — they just liked, and appropriated, the title.

Dubset’s Major Move

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TechCrunch:

Spotify and Apple Music could soon get the legal grey area of music like remixes and DJ sets that today live unofficially on SoundCloud. Sony Music Entertainment today became the first major record label to allow its music to be monetized through unofficial mixes thanks to a deal with rights clearance startup Dubset. That means Sony’s master recordings will be indexed by Dubset, and rights holders will be compensated even if just a tiny one-second snippet of their song is used in a DJ set or remix.

A source tells TechCrunch that Dubset is getting closer to securing deals with the other two major labels Warner and Universal.

If it can lock down all three, remixes and DJ sets featuring almost any music could be legally hosted on the top streaming services instead of being barred or removed for copyright infringement. That might eliminate the differentiation that’s kept struggling SoundCloud afloat. Illegal music uploaded there has sometimes flown under the radar since SoundCloud is protected by Safe Harbor law regarding user generated content. But if it’s legally available on Spotify, Apple Music, and elsewhere, listeners wouldn’t have to go to SoundCloud.


Could we be stepping closer to a mainstream acceptance of remix culture? A future where derivative works are not only allowed but encouraged is a divergent music future, indeed. As previously stated on this blog, if you can clear unauthorized remixes using Dubset, then why not clear samples eventually? We might be entering an era where most music is fair game for creative mutation, and the original artists get paid. How will that work with songs already released, especially the ones that sneakily didn’t clear drum loops or other samples? Should clearance lawyers start looking at new career options?

As far as Apple Music and Spotify go, I really can’t see them opening up their services to user-uploaded content a la SoundCloud. I’m ready to be surprised, but I do think those predictions are off the mark. The Verge gives a clue to where this might be headed for the two big streamers:

DJ mixes have historically proved to be especially difficult for monetized distribution. “The average mix is 62 minutes long and has 22 different songs in it, and those 22 different songs are represented by over 100 different rights holders,” {Dubset CEO Stephen} White tells The Verge. Using Dubset’s technology, a 60-minute mix can be processed in just 15 minutes.

During that 60-minute mix, White says, MixSCAN will fingerprint every three seconds of audio. “We’re using a combination of audio fingerprinting technologies and fairly advanced algorithmic approaches to identify the underlying masters that are being used in a mix or a remix,” he says. Although MixBANK asks DJs themselves to identify the masters, White says this is just to help validate MixSCAN’s results.


Apple’s Beats 1 Radio regularly broadcasts sets by newsworthy artists and celebrities, but the Beats 1 platform still fails to make the news. These DJ events need exposure outside of the ephemeral original broadcast. Wouldn’t it be nice if the sets were recorded and archived, and then available to play on demand via Apple Music? I think that’s what’s happening here. A different sort of license is required to make these DJ sets available on demand, and every song (and, yes, unofficial remix) must be cleared for this type of usage. Theoretically, Dubset’s technology would not only clear the songs in the mix, but it would be able to do so in 15 minutes. A Beats 1 set could be available to stream on Apple Music within thirty minutes of its broadcast. Voilà. And I’d wager Spotify has similar ambitions.


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