In general, class this semester seems to be a weave of two different threads. On one hand, we talk a lot about the “digital” part. Technological advances in audio and recording and the interaction they have had with distribution and consumption and consumption. That is definitely something i did not wonder about, generally speaking from day to day.
We also talked about music itself, the murky ground of genre and ownership, its political nature, and the way it builds itself on past musics.

Obviously, both histories interact. The 80s show us a moment in which technology enabled a different way of modern music relating to and re-purposing past music (sampling). Of course, this was also dependent on the style of the music it calls back to .The rhythmic stability of funk drums of the catchiness of horns.

Maybe more broadly, music imitates technology in the way it depends on past advancements to reach a “new” place. The innovation of the Mp3 can be traced back to Bell Laboratories’ experiments with compression of sound (that history had to be uncovered) and one will always hear snatches of older songs in whatever comes out today. However, there seems to be a difference between the “information” commons and the “creative” commons. The conversation that one starts by innovating or responding to another’s creative work can introduce issues of class, race, and gender to the conversation. I guess this suggests that creative work is expected to hold some truth about the subjective experience of the artist, when innovation in the “tech” realm suggests something about the intellectual capabilities of the inventor or scientist (which make sit harder for Claude Shannon to stay famous).

I’m not sure if this makes much sense because I’m still trying to make sense of these different mediums of advancement as part of a larger whole. Might not be possible. Perhaps more later.

I have this theory that people only like what they allow themselves to like. That is, I’m more likely to decide that I like something if it was recommended to my by someone whose taste I am familiar with, or even someone that I like. I also succumb to the critical darling factor; if a record gets unanimously great reviews, I become excited to listen to it and find stuff that I like in it. I give streaming services a much smaller margin of error because I have no context within which to place the new information (music) that it is throwing at me. I might focus more on the elements of the song that I dislike, simply because I have not been told to like that music, or I have no stake in liking it. I am much more willing to discard the recommendations that an algorithm gives me.

There is also another layer to his which I think has something to do with patience. When I have the testimony of friends or critics going to bat for a band or a record, I am more likely to listen closely more than once to each song. Part of liking any song is just becoming familiar with it, and letting what was alien about it become “catchy.” But listeners skip streaming service songs fairly quickly. If we think of how much time it takes for a new sound to become palatable to us, it seems really unfair that we expect every song on Pandora to hook us instantly. That is not how new music works, generally.
In a sense, these streaming services seem to suffer from the very immediacy that they are built on, so they end up re-plating what is familiar to the listener over and over again to avoid the long arc of time between the first listen and the actual grasping of the song.

Again, I don’t know how one deals with the fact that the ability to “sample” music comes MUCH later than the music that was being sampled. No one was sitting in studio like “let me license this music so no one can splice parts of it into another song.” It was more like “let me copyright this so that no one else can sell the record, which is mine.”
Sampling is quite clearly, not selling the same record. And the technique and craftsmanship required to integrate a sample is clearly its own work. I cannot say how much I mistrust the Boladian/Bridgeport Records claim to “ownership of music, down to each note in any song. Obviously, if two bands use the same three notes in two different guitar solos, one band would not sue the other.
Bridgeport Records is completely divorced from the concept of music as anything other than a “product.” Sampling feels to me like an overt gesture toward music as “art.” I think of poetry a lot when I think about sampling. T.S. Eliot’s THE WASTELAND is actually a pastiche of other poems and epics. (If I were teaching THE WASTELAND, I would actually have students watch a video like the one by DJ Angelo that we watched, just to get a sense of how many voices poetry tries to reconcile). Poets lift lines all the time [1]

[1] Poetry is tolerant of blatant stealing; that’s not JUST because there is no money in it. It is an art form that recognizes its dependence on history. Meanwhile, stand up Comedians HATE the idea that a joke might be repeated by someone else.

. And of course, there are many highly restrictive forms in poetry that we all love. Sonnets, iambic pentameter, etc — the rhythm and number of lines are exactly the same, only the words change.
So the beef over sampling is a beef over the nature of creativity. The notion that a “new” thing is or must be wholly original is pretty shallow, Originality makes itself against what has already been. Quoting something else, like TS Eliot or Public Enemy, clearly doesn’t turn one work into another. In many cases, it brings the old work into the present, and might even re-contextualize it.

On Google NGrams, I actually triangulated the use of the word “funk” back to 1638, to a book by Sir Thomas Herbert called Some Yeares Traveled into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique, almost in Medieval English, and with two really long subtitles. It seems to be a word related to shipping and seafaring. From page 117: “They funk the vice and rear admiral of [someone’s] fleet; by that utterly losing their late hopes of marine command and excellence.”

Perhaps that relates to the future of funk or funkiness. To get a better idea, I also searched “funky” in Ngrams. I came up with a hit from 1839, a section of a novel called Ten Thousand A-Year published in  The Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art. (Novels being produced serially back then.): “I feel all of a sudden uncommon funky — I think that last cigar of yours wasn’t –” On further research, this Samuel Warren novel was apparently  wildly popular in the 1850s; it features such characters as Mr. Pimp Yahoo and Mr. Going Gone.
So here a state of being “off,” maybe sick, makes an appearance in funk’s vernacular history. As in “a funk.” This is widely used by the 1890s.

In the 1930s – 1940s Funky sees a surge in its usage. It becomes a state of fright, nervousness or timidity, according to 1940’s Modern Language Notes.
“It was Harold who was funky of the cows” from 1930’s April Fools: A Comedy of Bad Manners.

There’s a real musical reference in 1939, from Frederick Ramsey’s Jazzmen. “The words of the song, which later became his ‘theme’ song, went: I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say, ‘Funky-butt, funky-butt, take it away.'”

Through funky butt, the connection of funk to music starts to coalesce. In Queen New Orleans, it is referenced as a club or venue where a “small, bulkily built boy listened nightly to the silver magic of Buddy’s notes. No one paid attention to him then. He was a young Louis Armstrong” Which suggests that the term funky was connected to music for quite some time before it started being used widely as such in the 1950s.

(Later in a 1958 issue of Life Mag: “Funky Butt Hall, that place was wild, and they all kinds of coon shouters””

Funky butt is also a song referenced in a 1950 issue of Jazz Music, in an article by Max Jones. It was “A kind of popular tune. . . A standard blues with more solos than this group [The Mezzrow-Bechet Quintet] usually features.”

In the late fifties, many music publications start to examine the qualities of “funk” or “funky” music

My thought process has been complicated by the fact that minstrelsy is not really based on anything really African or African American. Even its source material is “miscegenated” or “mongrelized. ”
I think many of my classmates were right when they suggested that the true danger of something like minstrelsy is the possibility that it is not derived from truth, but somehow is “truth-making”. Not that the stereotypes of people that it depicts become true, but that it gives the public an excuse to accept those damaging stereotypes as true.
That is only loosely connected to the sense that I got in our last class, that history as “history” is often suspect. That might not be the way to word it but I was fascinated by how little our modern conception of slavery and the civil war resembled the perspectives of the primary sources we looked at.
More than anything, those primary sources seemed to complicate our imagination of what the past was like. The past is as full of the contradiction and complication that we are aware of in our own time. This makes it hard to draw simple thesis about things like black soldiers in the Confederate ranks. When the social forces that fostered the popularity of the minstrel show, or the north’s true ambivalence toward slavery disappear, where do they go? How can one adequately map the “sentiments” or sensibilities of any period when the sensibilities of our own time have colored our perceptions of the cultures of the past?

If I’m listening in class, I think, on one level, what we are talking about when talking about minstrelsy, is a cultural “performance,” maybe even an art, that on one hand, lifted elements of African culture to the level of public art, a national pastime. On the other hand, it dictated that this art must be an appropriation. Paradoxically, art could not come from its authentic birth place. then it would be something different.
Too ignorant of its own transcendence? This sounds like a racist justification?
Too painful, being the songs of enslaved people? This seems unlikely, considering the garishness of the caricatures of black people they relied on.
Either way, it is clear that blackness was imagined as an entirely different set of characteristics, a set of characteristics that could be inhabited only by people who were not black, and could not be removed by people who were.
So rationalization: like makeshift birth certificates, the ability to “put on” blackface delineated who was not black.
Embedded in that are he roots of an argument: art is intentionally created and self-aware. People “as they are” (black-ness) isn’t art.
I think there is a statement about authenticity in there. We think we want to live the opposite art theory today. Feeling must be “real” somehow in the music we listen to.
even though we know that that isn’t how the music industry works. The brazen pretending of the minstrel show is still buried in the radio, even along racial lines.

No the question for me isn’t whether commodified music, especially as it relates to race, is new, but if there has been any time in American music when it was not the case.
The ability to study music and re-create what black people didn’t have to “learn” was considered more “impressive” or acceptable than the authentic act. Probably for many different reasons. But those reasons are never expressed clearly. It’s like they were internalized in the consciousness of the period.
Is it possible that resistance to commodified music is a protest against a state of society?

How has rationalization contributed to the “splitting” of the persona? (Georg Lukacs mentions that in commodity-centric societies, workers think of themselves, their own functioning as a commodity.)
How is that splitting different from the splitting that The Shallows refers to when it discusses reading and the internal voice.
What consequences does splitting our own personalities have for our relationship to things we enjoy? What is the “use-value” of music, and has its use-value been elevated above its exchange value because no one buys music anymore? Is music an un-commodifier? If so how come it is also mass produced and rationalized?

Quoth Myself.
I felt sadly inarticulate when I blurted that out in class at a loss for words, but I was hoping to make more than a subjective (unprovable) claim. I guess I was trying to tie hip-hop’s market viability to a claim that hip-hop is actually a complex, interesting, artful form of music that doesn’t rely on classical concepts like dynamic range to succeed as music. I think the best counterargument to the reading of “loudness” as decline is that the presence of loudness or absence of dynamic range does not equal musical simplicity, and the presence of dynamic range does not necessitate musical mastery. (Also related: musical mastery does not imply challenging or interesting music. See: The Ramones.)
So I guess Hip-Hop is a solid study on how loudness doesn’t defeat the challenge and complexity of music, and Hip Hop might be really good (question mark) because it has endured and really thrived among a wide fanbase ranging from popular radio fans to music critics.

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