I’ve finally found some space to set up a website for our course! From now on I’ll post our agendas over there and we can finally skip these corny ads.

The title of tomorrow’s reading (see below) presumably alludes to the funk classic embedded above (fun fact: this is the first popular song to utilise a drum machine!).

Prep

• Paul Gilroy, ‘It’s a Family Affair’, in Neal and Forman (2012). keywords: afrocentrism, authenticity, black nationalism, diaspora, ethics of antiphony

In Class

I. Attendance

II. Sampling 101 (Slight Return)

We’ll also take a look a brief look at the idea of ‘chopping’ and ‘flipping’ samples. Forgive me if this sounds like an unnecessary geek-out — my hope is that it will help you understand what hip-hop DJs and producers are doing in order to create sounds and patterns that we often take for granted. I’ve written a few bits of code to demonstrate this using the ‘Amen Break’ that we’ve talked about before.

Finally, we’ll take a look at a virtuoso demonstration of sampling, looping, chopping, and flipping by producer Mark Ronson; Ronson uses the turntable scratching and looping techniques pioneered by Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore, but he’s using a Digital Vinyl System (DVS) that allows his turntables to access and manipulate digita audio and videol files on his laptop. He’s also using a digital sampler by Akai called the MPC to sample additional sounds and then sequence and loop them as drum patterns and other backing tracks.

III. David Samuels, ‘The Rap on Rap: The “Black Music” That Isn’t Either’ (1991): Slight Return and a Brief Critique

• Excursus: Wesley Morris on ‘Black Music’

IV. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic

For Next Time

• Gilbert B. Rodman, ‘Race … and Other Four-Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity’, in Forman and Neal (2012)