an outline by grp
“One thing Pop history has taught us over and over again is that taste is driven by technology.”
Tik Tok is the latest era we’re in of that relationship- these new technologies offer new ways recordings are dispersed and therefore, multiplies their copies into new channels of distribution.
This relationship stretches all the way back to the acetate record, the vinyl, the cassette, the cd, boomboxes, walkmans, tape machines, DAWs, etc. What all of these do is disperse in new ways, with new means of access. They all deal in the circulation of compressed copies.
Radio engineers began compressing signals before broadcast to prevent overmodulation; people got used to the sound and liked it.
Compression here extends beyond something that is run through a compressor. Distortion is compression, clipping is compression, downsampling is compression, magnetic tape becomes more compressed as it's used: in essence, compression is a loss sustained in transmission, a loss sustained in order to transmit. Compression is latent in any technology of dispersion.
Technology is essential within the entire history of recorded music. Recording technology serves as the infrastructure for popular music, and once was its biggest barrier of entry. However each evolution of recording technology further diminishes these barriers of entry and opens new channels of distribution in the process. This relationship stretches all the way back through the vinyl, the cassette, the cd, boomboxes, walkmans, tape machines, etc. These all deal in the circulation of compressed copies.
Compression here extends beyond something that is run through a compressor. Distortion is compression, clipping is compression, downsampling is compression, magnetic tape becomes more compressed as it's used: in essence, compression is a loss sustained in transmission, a loss sustained in order to transmit. Compression is latent in any technology of dispersion. Originally, radio engineers began compressing signals before broadcast to prevent overmodulation; people got used to the sound and liked it.
“You know that feeling you get when you listen to a classic vinyl album? It’s like that. But bourbon.”
TV Broadcast had rules about the audio of commercials not being louder than the program. But in the ad-based streaming era, the privatized nature of the service allows for ads to be drastically louder than the program. The loud and compressed ads stand in drastic contrast to what's being streamed, it immediately overwhelms attention. The entire goal of their quality is to only grab attention, whatever the audio sounds like comes second.
The actual sound of that commercial is in direct contrast to the quieter, distorted material of a vinyl record, employed here completely for its fetish value (compare to Poor Image film argument).
Commodification of certain sounds from technologies of recording/access.
In 2011, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, made sure commercials could not be distinctly louder than the program. Loud noises attract our attention: are guaranteed too. In the new era of privatized streaming services, the unregulated Advertisements are drastically loud and compressed bursts of audio inserted into media with a much lower level. The age of streaming thrives on autoplay, and while a TV show may be tuned out in the background, a loud advertisement will still grab your attention from an adjacent room. These advertisements are loud and compressed because their function is to grab your attention now matter the quality of the audio: this is secondary to demanding attention from your brain on even a subconscious level.
Something quiet requires an investment in order to properly listen. It requires deliberate attention and focus. It demands engagement. It creates its own value through its method of engaging the audience.
This makes the Old Forester commercial quoted above all the more interesting. Vinyl is notably quieter medium than the commercial evoking its commodifiable fetish value. The commercial is signaling a value through nostalgia, while communicating in a way antithetical to that value. Its message is conservative while its method is aggressively progressive. The mega-compressed audio quality of streaming advertisements have more methodological alignment with Hyper-Pop (the most important musical development at the moment) than anything on a classic vinyl album.
“The biggest distorter is the LP itself.”
Rudy Van Gelder hated the LP and embraced digital recording when it emerged. He oversaw albums from their recording to the master cut on the acetate. His opinion of vinyl stands in stark contrast to its modern fetish commodity value.
The materiality of vinyl hindered expression for him, his techniques as an engineer can be understood as preparing sound for the material limitations of vinyl. Its innate qualities, the distortion, the RIAA curve, the curvature of the record, are completely neutral.
The fetish value of vinyl used by the Old Forester commercial is analogous to Steyerl’s breakdown of 35mm’s fetishization within film. Vinyl distortion [compression] is due to its material substance: it is a neutral element of the medium. The fetish value assigned to it all conservatively reifies the same power structures that the 35mm cult does [poor image quote].
Rudy Van Gelder oversaw albums from their recording to the master cut on the acetate, and he hated the distortion and material limitations of the vinyl LP. His opinion of vinyl stands in stark contrast to its modern fetish commodity value. The materiality of vinyl hindered expression for him, his techniques as an engineer (pre-digital) can be understood as preparing sound for the material limitations of vinyl. Its innate qualities which limit and compress audio on the vinyl record; the distortion, the RIAA curve, the curvature of the record itself– these are completely neutral. For RVG they were obstacles needed to be overcome, now they are fetishized for alcohol advertisements.
RVG embraced digital recording technology early on, and his RVG Remaster series treated audio in a way that would not have been appropriate for vinyl’s materiality. The innate compression/distortion that comes from the medium was distasteful to him and very tasteful to others. These oppositional values are assigned to the same intersection of technology and medium/materiality, highlighting just how fluid value can flow around neutral qualities of medium and material.
“...with an SP-1200, if you stuck the ¼” jack halfway in, it took off all the high end.”
Hank Shocklee as a counterpoint used his SP-1200 to further creative expression. The innate qualities of the SP-1200 contribute a lot of the aesthetic pillars of golden age of sample-based music (late 80’s into golden age of hip-hop).
SP-12 sampled at a 26.04 khz sampling rate with 12 bit depth, making its samples a distinctly different quality than the source it was copied from. Since the SP-1200 only had 10 seconds of sample time, 33 ⅓ rpm records were played at 45 rpm, and then pitched down. This increased sample time and further degraded the resolution.
Every sampler leaves a compressed imprint on its copy. These samples themselves become samples in new technologies.
RVG was a very teleological mix engineer. He was there to use the available technology to best preserve and prepare audio for the materiality of vinyl. He has thousands of credits across more than half a century, music is still being released with his name on it and he died in 2016. For RVG, the compression of vinyl is a loss in value, but because of his approach, that loss was never an opportunity.
Samplers marked a watershed moment in popular access to audio reproduction and manipulation. Hank Shocklee of the Bombsquad used the SP-1200 to disrupt audio through sampling, and in the same instance disrupted the very technology of the sampler. Here, creative interaction recontextualizes the value of the intersection of technology and medium/materiality.
The innate qualities of the SP-1200 contribute a lot of the aesthetic pillars of golden age of sample-based music (late 80’s into the golden age of hip-hop). Both the low sample rate and bit rate (26.04khz/12 bit) change the sample quality. On top of that, 33 ⅓ rpm records were played at 45 rpm, and then pitched down to extend 10 second sample time. Loss is again incurred (on multiple levels) in order to transmit.
It is implied here that what is being sampled is vinyl. Crate-Digging is what the pioneers of hip-hop did with their SP-1200s. Old vinyl is prized for its worn quality before its downsampled and warped further. While that is intimately tied to the history of the Sp-1200 (and the other samplers as well, the original SP-12, the MPC, the SK-1, Akai S-series, etc.), the larger point is that every sampler leaves a compressed imprint on its copy: these samples themselves again become samples in new technologies. Regressive views of sampling posit one sampled medium and one sampling technology as above the rest. What is important in the context of the Poor [Sample], is the compounding compression required for compounding proliferation.
“This is Why I’m Hot / She got it on her phone / Top 10 download #1 Ringtone”
Todd in the shadows quote: about ringtones in context of quote- mentions not only the popularity of songs that would be good ringtones spiking in short-term popularity (laffy taffy as well of course), but also the big marketing push ringtones got as a form of musical sale, a stand-alone commodity within music consumption.
Itunes and “the mp3 album (druqks)”/P2P file sharing of the early 2000s plays a significant role in why ringtones became a new novel way to purchase music.
TiWIH set record for most writers on a #1 hit because of it’s samples of samples. Shook Ones- mpc, G Thang- hi-fi recreation, Jesus Walks- asr-10. These samples gain acceleration now through a ringtone playing in public off a speaker.
These samples cost him a lot of money— but samples that follow this acceleration don't have to be pre-existing commodities that need to be paid for in order to use.
Those samples usually cost a lot of money tho. In a traditional definition, a sample is taken from a commercially released recording, protected under copyright and intellectual property laws– sampling traditionally implies commodity. But this insists on an original, which is nonexistent in recorded music [originality copy chosen by artist quote].
When This Is Why I’m Hot went to #1, it set a record for the most credited writers on a #1 song. Samples fold into samples fold into an even more compressed format, the ringtone. Ringtone’s got a big marketing push from the music industry, a new and novel way to purchase music. This was post-napster/itunes, where songs could be picked and chosen from an album, essentially dissolving “the album” as one concise product/unit [aphex twin quote].
The samples in This is Why I’m Hot all came from radically different machines and methods of sampling. Shook Ones pt II has 2 samples in it, Jesus Walks has 1, Nuthin But A G Thang has a hi-fi recreation of a sample (still sampling tho). This is Why I’m Hot condenses all of these down time periods, regions, and methods into a singular transmission from one tiny speaker. Songs that represent vastly different genres, messages and approaches compress into one sound bite designed for most effective travel. It is a radical acceleration of sampled material.
This instance is notable because Mims had to pay for all of them, all were from very well known songs that in turn were sampling songs. According to Mims, it cost him “millions of dollars” in royalties. But the vast proliferation of sampled sound is not relegated to what is defended under copyright and intellectual property law.
“Damn Son Where’d Ya Find This?”
Sounds that carry throughout specific genres and mediums. Their origin exists but is lost– damn son/The Wilhelm scream
Stock fx
The Young Chop snare
Stock sounds are built for mass distribution. There are official archives for stock sounds, and there are .zip’s and .rar’s filled with infinite variations of the same noises, phrases, chants, fx, one shots. Many of these sounds have documented origins, and many do not. Unlike a traditional sample, the origin is not a pre-existing commodity. The point of stock is to spread, with a Creative Commons license or not. Stock sounds repeat in different pieces of art and reveal the infrastructure that connects them.
The Young Chop snare has probably been in more songs than the Wilhelm Scream in movies. Stock sounds travel between mediums, from movies to music to video games. They can be the same sound in isolation or sound recorded directly from the media it was embedded in, taking whatever is on top of it too. Sounds that were not stock become stock as they are absorbed into a shared collective memory. Something like the Young Chop snare, something that once signified Chicago Drill, a very specific place at a very specific time, has now mostly lost that connotation through its complete ubiquity.
Young Chop only popularized the snare, and did not make the sound himself. He found it from an online drum kit, and the sound is made from a combination of sounds from the 808. That singular drum machine is the most singularly defining instrument in modern pop music. The 808 kick (now the titular “808”) has made the leap to a fully melodic instrument through modern sampling, and has its Young Chop equivalent in the Spinz 808.
“That’s it, that’s the preset, it’s the Rock 1 preset.”
Clint Eastwood made out of a preset. Compositions of stock sounds.
Gorillaz directly engages with this Audio Kitsch- the pre-creations that come loaded in any production hardware/software.
Umbrella stock drum loop / Love in this club– “exposed” as stock sounds
The 808’s stock sounds are omnipresent in the modern pop landscape, but that’s because the 808 is an instrument, something with infinite artistic potential. But what about full stock preset songs? Both Usher’s Love in This Club and Rihanna’s Umbrella have well known stock sounds as their foundation, and the popular consensus was that using preset sounds was artistically bankrupt at best, a con at worst (wrt: love in this club exposed!). This debate was reignited this year over the video of Damon Albarn revealing that the Gorillaz’s iconic song Clint Eastwood was almost entirely a stock preset from a keyboard.
Unfortunately a lot of people treated this like a betrayal. But why does this degrade the song at all? The Gorillaz’s are conceptually born out of this audiovisual kitsch– MTV as the glue holding cartoon apes and rock presets together. ANY Goriallaz’s song could be a preset, it is where they naturally exist as a band that doesn’t exist.
Reggae got one of it’s most used riddims from a rock preset off the Casio MT40: the sleng teng riddim. That preset was made Hiroko Okuda, who listened to a lot of reggae prior to working at Casio (it is apparently still based on a rock song tho). It clearly struck a chord, and was ushered into reggae with Wayne Smith’s “Under mi sleng teng.” Reggae’s relationship with sampling and appropriation is a lot more lax, and its evolution into Dub is foundational to later sample based music like hip-hop, the uk dance scene, and reggaeton. The foundations to all of these extremely important genres (rap, reggaeton, and drum n’ bass literally make up most popular music now) is described by AUTHOR as [post-modern anarchic folk music quote]. They not only sample and appropriate material, but create their own means of distribution as well. They exist outside of commercial infrastructure and value hierarchies (ie the album).
“It’s just a mixtape, man, ain't got titles.”
The line between mixtapes and albums have become increasingly blurred over time (come back at end for mixtape structure -> modern streaming album structure)-- mixtapes traditionally exist outside of the commercial album hierarchy, in construction, function, medium, and distribution.
MixTAPES– cassette tapes were the first available medium that could be easily recorded/copied/distributed– became primarily cd-distribution (DJ DRAMA RICO), and then datpiff internet era post rico case
Mixtapes offered a great template for post itunes/napster streaming markets (post “they’ll just download the songs [or ringtones] they like and move on APHEX TWIN Druqks as mp3 dump album cause he just ripped the best songs anyway” –moved albums to longer forms that function to sustain attention enough to not play something else until it ends.
Lil wayne leaks up until Tha Carter III, difference between the “official” wayne tapes and unofficial mixtapes of leaked material, the official release of “the leak”-- That music came into the world in random YouTube leaks, in supernova guest-verse appearances, and in mixtapes. Many of my favorite albums in those years weren’t albums at all; they were the mixtapes where Wayne hijacked other rappers’ beats and then obliterated those rappers’ original tracks..
The history of mixtapes is a history of alternative distribution as much as it is a history of appropriation and recording. Cassette Tapes were the first medium that was easily recordable, copyable, and transportable– therefore, mixtapes. Mixtapes were essential for rap’s development in combination with the boombox. By the time the federal government hit DJ Drama with a RICO case, cassettes were out of fashion for the modern mixtape circuit (they confiscated over 80,000 cds from DJ Drama).
After the 2007 RICO case, online circulation of mixtapes rose to prominence, and sites like Datpiff serve as an invaluable archive of this music. With this change in medium again the form of the mixtape adjusted. Datpiff gave rise to the sharing of self recorded material that didn’t require a mixtape DJ like DJ Drama himself. Mixtape DJs by no means disappeared, but the distinction between mixtapes and albums as formats shifted less to be about their production and more about their non-commercial adherence. Mixtapes like Acid Rap are simply non-commercial albums, which still need to undergo a lengthy process of post-release sample clearance in order to be up in full onto Spotify.
Lil Wayne may have claim to the greatest mixtape of all time, but which one is it? DJ Drama’s own Dedication 2 and Da Drought 3 are the two standard picks. But Dedication 2 and Da Drought 3 are official mixtapes, and Lil Wayne also had a lot of unofficial mixtapes. The beauty of the mixtape is that, official or unofficial, it's still a mixtape. Da Drought 2 is a compilation of songs from Tha Carter III sessions, and a fan favorite. A lot of music leaked from those sessions, and both original songs and freestyles over other rappers' beats flooded non-commercial distribution channels in the leadup to Tha Carter III, his only commercial output in two and a half years. That 2005-2007 run of Lil Wayne is the first time in modern popular music where an artist's influence and status in the popular sphere is defined by leaked and non-commercial output.
“PLAY TAXI!”
Poland being a leak and then getting official release
The journey of Pissy Pamper as Kid Cudi being unofficial leak on spotify and charting
“PLAY TAXI”-- legacies of both Playboi Carti and Charli XCX
Jay electronica album leaking and then getting official release with misspelled title as now official title on tidal
Instagram snippets
The internet has only grown and exacerbated the leaking of music, making the music more popular than ever as music consumption exists mostly online. Snippets are put on instagram or played on twitch. These in turn get compiled, edited, and redistributed. Fans already know all the words when the songs are debuted live. Whether official commercial releases or not, leaked music has never been more popular.
The 2 artists whose legacies have been most defined by their leaked material are Charli XCX and Playboi Carti. Charli’s unreleased work with SOPHIE (RIP) redefined Pop’s architecture and is fundamental to the development of Hyper-Pop. Playboi Carti has done the same to rap, and his baby-voiced leak “Kid Cudi” (now recognized as Young Nudy’s Pissy Pamper), charted #1 on Spotify’s viral chart as an unofficial upload. The best record of both of their careers (XCX World???) can be found somewhere uncompiled and unreleased among the mass of leaked material.
First announced in 2007, Jay Electronica’s Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn) was abandoned and then leaked in an unfinished (but near complete) state in 2020. The celebration of such a mythic piece of lost media prompted a short official release on TIDAL before it again disappeared from any official network. Whether or not Act II is commercially available or not feels like an unimportant footnote to its history and legacy.
“You got to stand in front of the ‘Grammy Family Freestyle’ live? No one has ever seen me perform that, you got to stand in front of that?”
There technically is a recording of Grammy Family Freestyle, a recording of the performance that Jay-Z gave on Hot 97. What makes Grammy Family interesting in this context, especially Jay-Z’s intention in the quote, is that Grammy Family exists outside of the measurable hierarchies that structure the competition of a Verzuz Battle.
While the end intention of mixtapes, or leaked material, is still a recording. The master copy chosen by the artist to represent all further copies. The recording of Grammy Family Freestyle is completely incidental to what Grammy Family Freestyle is. This makes it immeasurable as a hit song, or even a song, yet its recording still exists, proliferates, and gains immense mythos and knowledge. Grammy Family Freestyle is not a secret, or kept hidden, or obscured (intentionally that is), it's on the Hot 97 Youtube channel.
“Field recording” v incidental recording
There technically is a recording of Grammy Family Freestyle, a recording of the performance that Jay-Z gave on Hot 97. What makes Grammy Family interesting in this context, especially Jay-Z’s intention in the quote, is that Grammy Family exists outside of the measurable hierarchies that structure the competition of a Verzuz Battle.
While the end intention of mixtapes, or leaked material, is still a recording. The master copy chosen by the artist to represent all further copies. The recording of Grammy Family Freestyle is completely incidental to what Grammy Family Freestyle is. This makes it immeasurable as a hit song, or even a song, yet its recording still exists, proliferates, and gains immense mythos and knowledge. Grammy Family Freestyle is not a secret, or kept hidden, or obscured (intentionally that is), it's on the Hot 97 Youtube channel.
“Grammy Family Freestyle” is an incidental recording, a document simply of existence. It is marginalia not text. The songs lyrics contain “Please may these words be recorded,” but the recording itself is ambivalent to it, both the audio and video of Grammy Family Freestyle are low resolution. What “Grammy Family Freestyle” is demands to be considered outside of these value hierarchies of resolution, song, product, commodity.
“My bitch bad like battle rappers that make albums.”
Battle rap is rap that lives in the ultimate intensity of the moment, not even constrained by musical structures, only social and linguistic ones. (That is not to say Battle Rap isn’t music, it is, music is made entirely of social and linguistic structures.)
Battle rap is the arm of rap that exists completely outside of recorded material, but this does not mean that it isn't recorded at all.
GZA opening Liquid Swords with Battle-Rap chant. The history of Battle Rap becomes reified as ontology within record along with james brown drums and kung-fu movies: These are now all the same and of equal importance.
IR sample is evocative because of its placement into a mass of constantly warping recording, an album that can only exist because of this moment in recording, and the history of recordings that is folded into it. They sampled that battle rap clip from Youtube.
Battle Rap is the traditional branch of rap music that operates completely outside of recorded industries. Battle rap is rap that lives in the ultimate intensity of the moment, not even constrained by musical structures, only social and linguistic ones. (That is not to say Battle Rap isn’t music, it is, music is made entirely of social and linguistic structures.) Battle Rapper’s however, make notoriously terrible albums themselves.
GZA’s Liquid Swords starts with a battle rap chant after a vhs sample of [the dub of] Shogun Assassin. The world of this album, these are the same thing. Injury Reserve’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix begins with a battle rap sample taken from youtube, and after that no other piece of sound on the album is spared from the overwhelming digital manipulation.
By the Time I Get to Phoenix, is an album that could only exist from recordings and rerecordings. Recordings of recordings of recordings. The intensity of the moment comes from the manipulation, the constantly shifting textures on the samples and vocals. Superman that is built on a literal live recording. By the Time I get to Phoenix exists in an explicitly digital landscape (as most IR records do), where the flow of old to new, live to recorded. It is an album reflective of the internet's omnivorousness toward the audio running through it.
“And I sampled it from Youtube. It was an amazing piece of music. It was the only way I could get it, so I’m going to get my hands on it.”
Conclusion around archives— untrue / OPN album / blue chips
Sample bots
Youtube to mp3 sites getting taken down
DJ Drama rico case (again??)
Datpiff being taken down
All the way back to napster???
Knx youtube page
Ethos of poor sample beyond aesthetic/religious hierarchies of value-> motion above any medium or technology.
A lot of songs have sampled audio from Youtube. Entire albums have been made this way. Youtube stands as one of the most popular hubs of access for an unfathomable amount of music and media. Blue Chips was made with funk samples from Youtube, OPN’s Replica was made from commercial samples from Youtube. Knxwledge’s Youtube page has some of the best music ever made. Bot’s comb Youtube to flag copyrighted material. And the various Youtube to Mp3 sites are getting taken down.
Not only are Youtube to Mp3 sites being taken down, but Datpiff itself is closing, a massive archive of underground music. The federal government in collaboration with the RIAA engineered DJ Drama’s RICO case. Napster was sued by Metallica. Non-commercial distribution has always been an inherent threat to national commercial media infrastructure.
The poor sample is defined by its motion, and so it moves with or without this infrastructure. While archives are being shut down the poor sample survives because to travel is to be copied. Whether or not the poor sample exists outside of commercial distribution, its status is one most connected with the modern reality of music production and consumption.
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