Full transcript of the episode (it gives away every surprise)
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You know this song
Start the loop, and let it go around at least once. You know this song. In fact, you know hundreds of them.
A loop of four chords (C, G, A minor, F) plays with a pop beat. A list of famous songs built on these same chords appears: Let It Be, No Woman No Cry, With or Without You, Someone Like You, Let It Go… A button starts the loop on the minor chord instead, and the mood turns melancholy.
Four chords. Hundreds of hits.
Let It Be, No Woman, No Cry, With or Without You, Someone Like You, Let It Go… They all rest on the same progression of four chords, or on a rotation of it.
Four Chords and a Loop
The loop, the sample, the drum machine, the corrected voice: four ideas made today’s music.
Why those four? Because they play exactly on your expectations.
The first chord sets up home. The second moves away from it and creates tension. The third, a minor chord, casts a shadow of melancholy. The fourth calls for the return… to the first. The loop closes, and your brain wants more.
The loop: it may be the most powerful idea in today’s music. And it was born in the rec room of an apartment building, one summer night, in New York.
August 11, 1973. At 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, a teenager named Cindy Campbell throws a party to pay for her back-to-school clothes.
On the turntables: her brother Clive, 18, whom everyone calls DJ Kool Herc.
Herc has noticed that dancers wait for one particular moment in funk records: the break, those few seconds when everything stops except the drums.
So he puts two copies of the same record on two turntables. When the break ends on one, he starts it again on the other.
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Two turntables, one break
The same record is spinning on two turntables. When the break ends on one, start it on the other, at just the right moment: it must never stop.
Two turntables play the same imaginary record: a verse, then a drum break. By switching from one turntable to the other just as the break ends, the reader stretches the break out indefinitely, like DJ Kool Herc.
The break never stops. Hip-hop has just been born.
Herc called it the merry-go-round. Over these drum loops, kids in the Bronx started to dance, and others started to talk in rhythm. Fifty years later, hip-hop is the most listened-to genre in the United States.
Among the most beloved breaks, there is one that lasts six seconds.
In 1969, a soul group from Washington, D.C., The Winstons, recorded a B-side, “Amen, Brother.” In the middle of the track, the drummer Gregory Coleman plays alone, for four bars.
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Chopping up the break
Here is a beat inspired by that break, replayed on a synthetic drum kit. Cut it into sixteen slices, rearrange them, speed it up: you are inventing jungle.
A drum beat inspired by the “Amen” break is cut into sixteen slices that the reader can rearrange and speed up, like the jungle and drum and bass producers of the 1990s.
Question for the reader
How many tracks have sampled these six seconds of drumming?
- About a hundred
- About a thousand
- Several thousand (correct answer)
If you answer “About a hundred”:
Far more: several thousand.
If you answer “Several thousand”:
Yes: several thousand.
Hip-hop, jungle, drum and bass, pop, commercials, TV theme songs: it is one of the most reused recordings in history.
Gregory Coleman never earned a cent from it.
He died homeless in Atlanta in 2006. In 2015, two British DJs started a fundraiser for Richard Spencer, the band’s singer and the writer of the track: £24,000, given by musicians and fans from all over the world.
1980. The Japanese company Roland releases a drum machine, the TR-808. Its sounds are nothing like a real drum kit. Critics find them ridiculous, and the machine is a flop: production stops in 1983.
So 808s are resold secondhand, for next to nothing. Hip-hop, electro and house musicians grab them, and discover their kick drum: a deep note that stretches out and rumbles in your stomach.
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The 808 kick drum
Set its pitch, its length, its slide. Then play the pads. With headphones or good speakers, the bass is felt more than heard.
The reader tunes the kick drum of a TR-808 recreated by synthesis: a deep sine wave whose pitch drops, then slowly fades away. Pads let you play a bass line.
Today, the 808 is everywhere: it is said to appear on more hits than any other drum machine. Trap, rap and a good share of pop owe their bass to it.
One last invention. In 1996, Andy Hildebrand, an engineer who had spent years analyzing seismic echoes to find oil, applied his calculations to the human voice.
His software, Auto-Tune, detects the pitch of a voice and discreetly corrects it, to smooth out the wrong notes.
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The corrected voice
A synthetic voice sings slightly off key. Push the correction: how far does it stay human?
A synthetic voice sings a slightly off-key melody. A slider sets the speed of the correction: slow, it discreetly nudges the notes into place; instant, it makes the voice jump from note to note like a robot.
In 1998, Cher’s producers pushed the correction all the way, just to see: the voice jumped from one note to the next like a robot.
“Believe” went to number one in some twenty countries. The mistake became a style, and the effect, the signature of a whole generation.
Sampling. Reusing a fragment of a recording as an instrument. Music is no longer only played: it is rebuilt out of itself.
Music cuts time into loops. Cinema cuts it into slices: twenty-four per second. And every one of those slices is a lie.
Sources
- Hooktheory, statistics on the chord progressions of popular songs.
- Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, 2005.
- Nate Harrison, Can I Get an Amen?, 2004; BBC News, “Amen break: Why was the band never paid?,” 2015.
- Alexander Dunn, 808, documentary film, 2015.
- Antares Audio Technologies; Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, 2009.
- Nielsen Music, U.S. year-end report, 2017.