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Shared DNA in Music

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Re: Shared DNA in Music

#51

Post by code_for_monkey »

footlose_3815 wrote: post #21

Why is it "Shared DNA" if all rappers do is sample and totally rip-off music (Logos, artist names etc) before them? The concept of "DNA" with music goes much deeper than some lucky nobody who sampled someone's life work so they could pollute it with lowest common denominator poetry and a Roland Drum Machine. I submit that oogling over people who steal music by sampling is not that deep, and there's deeper methods of…

this is a weirdly anti art view of music as a whole, do you just not enjoy organized sound?

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#52

Post by basisword »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #15

I once had the realization that a riff from Metallica's "The Four Horseman" was the same as that from Tom Petty's "Last Dance With Mary Jane" except, as I learned several years after the realization, it is actually the riff from "Sweet Home Alabama" which was introduced in a session as a joke by the guitarist to make fun of the drummer for having narrow musical knowledge. He was correct in his assumption that the dru…

Funny you mention "Mary Jane's Last Dance". The Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Dani California" overlaps with that (the chord progression is the same and rhythm style is pretty close too).

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#54

Post by [deleted] »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #15

I once had the realization that a riff from Metallica's "The Four Horseman" was the same as that from Tom Petty's "Last Dance With Mary Jane" except, as I learned several years after the realization, it is actually the riff from "Sweet Home Alabama" which was introduced in a session as a joke by the guitarist to make fun of the drummer for having narrow musical knowledge. He was correct in his assumption that the dru…

[deleted]

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#55

Post by freedomben »

cypherpunks01 wrote: post #13

Wow this is super cool! They primarily used the genius.com API, which I didn't know existed. Anyone built any other cool projects with it? Is there a "discovery" player that plays your own Spotify library, but shows you all related tracks by sample, interpolation, cover, etc from the Genius API that you can explore? Kind of like a wikipedia rabbithole, but for music?

We used it to allow pepole to include song lyrics in their letters sent to loved ones. Unfortunately it was a constant source of breakage in the app and we eventually removed it when they pushed a very breaking change and there wasn't any availability to rewrite that part of the app.

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#56

Post by freedomben »

Loughla wrote: post #20
Vaslo wrote: post #6

Wasn’t this Pandoras original claim to fame - that they used 30 or 40 different aspects of music to categorize music and help you find what you liked?

The secret to Pandora is to never give thumbs up but religiously thumbs down anything you don't like. Then it's constantly searching for new things you like related to the original theme! But also, yes that was the original thought process.

100%. I bought into the "thumbs up what you like and get more of it" when I signed up for Pandora, and that quickly led to getting the same thumbs up songs over and over...

Fortunately with Pandora you could create a new station that wasn't aware of the thumbs so it was able to work around, but it took me a while to figure that out and stop thumbing up

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#57

Post by jrm4 »

footlose_3815 wrote: post #21

Why is it "Shared DNA" if all rappers do is sample and totally rip-off music (Logos, artist names etc) before them? The concept of "DNA" with music goes much deeper than some lucky nobody who sampled someone's life work so they could pollute it with lowest common denominator poetry and a Roland Drum Machine. I submit that oogling over people who steal music by sampling is not that deep, and there's deeper methods of…

I'm always weirded out by such "domain-specific knowledgey" statements like this.

I just don't get how someone simultaneously e.g. knows what a Roland Drum Machine is, but also manages to stay wildly ignorant about an entire genre of established music to make such a sweeping statement.

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#58

Post by nyrikki »

jl6 wrote: post #35

What this mostly seems to demonstrate is that hip-pop is endlessly derivative. That might be a consequence of their data source: > To build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were “connected” in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix. Genres where sampling is openly and explicitly acknowledged are going to b…

The same applies to risk-adverse, high profit genres and/or producer heavy ones like pop country. Obviously zeitgeist and even conventions and music theory play a role.

Sir Mashalot had a few videos a while ago.

https://youtu.be/FY8SwIvxj8o

The Blues Traveler trolling with the song Hook using the melody from Pachelbel's Canon with lyrics explicitly calling this out wasn't noticed by almost anyone.

https://youtu.be/pdz5kCaCRFM

Obviously Pop heavily samples too, E.G. Tom Tom Club Genius of Love being used by Mariah Carey's Fantasy, but it goes beyond sampling.

The Rolling Stones pulling from artists like Fred McDowell and Led Zeppelin settled copyright suits on Lemon Song, Whole Lotta Love, Bring it on Home and Dazed and Confused etc...

The invention of the Fairlight Sampler may have lead to groups like the Pet Shop Boys sampling dozens of other works, but as the Stones and Led Zeppelin show it wasn't unique.

Well I guess the Pet Shop Boys were inspired by Grandmaster Flash, and if you listen to the original recording of West End Girls you can hear James Brown samples...not sure if that counts as "hip-hop" in that case or not.

https://youtu.be/PKB2bYYYTYw

As a bad guitar player, I can understand why even Rock and Roll pretty much grew out of artists copying R&B/Gospel artists like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but inspiration vs copying is a fuzzy line.

But basically the tooling changed, not the methods which have complex and intertwined causes, motivations, and effects.

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#59

Post by MrMcCall »

My kids and I were kind of flabbergasted after listening to the "Song Exploder" podcast's episode on the Weezer song "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" about how Rivers Cuomo writes songs.

Basically, he obscures interesting chord progressions of songs he finds by recording his own simplified version without the song's original rhythm. Then he takes his spreadsheet he made over years, of lyrical phrases he came up with that he thinks will sound good in a song, organized by number of syllables and where the accent lands. Then, finally, some time in the futuer, once he has forgotten the original song's construction, he takes out the chord progression and finds places to fit different kinds of lyrical phrases.

It blew us away to know that his lyrics have no meaning whatsoever. In fact, that particular song was the result of a conversation between two teachers he overheard at one of his children's end of year gettogether.

It is quite extraordinary, and he is quite good at it, though we have few Weezer songs in our playlist.

https://songexploder.net/weezer

Re: Shared DNA in Music

#60

Post by MrMcCall »

jl6 wrote: post #35

What this mostly seems to demonstrate is that hip-pop is endlessly derivative. That might be a consequence of their data source: > To build this project, we used the dataset of hundreds of thousands of songs on Genius.com accessible through their API, over 200,000 of which were “connected” in some way by sample, interpolation, cover, or remix. Genres where sampling is openly and explicitly acknowledged are going to b…

I wonder, do you find Outkast's ATLiens album to be derivative? Especially "Elevators" and "Wheels of Steel". I certainly don't know enough music to answer that question definitively, if anyone does.

Even though some of the lyrics have certainly not aged well, I do like its minimal aesthetic, and I was in Decatur, GA at the time, and it sure beat the crap Diddy and Mase were putting out at the time.

Side note: WCLK Clark Atlanta University radio station was the absolute best radio station I've ever heard, where I found my favorite music of all-time: AfroCuban jazz. Their Hip Hop and Jazz programs were fantastic. That's also where I learned of the magical spoken word intro version of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World".

"No one's musical education is complete."

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