8Sided Blog

thoughts about music’s place in the 21st century

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.