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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Charnas
Read between
February 1 - February 9, 2022
Their discoveries were assembled gradually into a canon of break records, many of them obscure to the general public but known to every DJ for the vital moments within them:
As the party DJ became an instrumentalist, busy juggling records, the work of exhorting the crowd over a microphone passed to a “master of ceremonies.”
The rhymed routines of the MCs became as sophisticated as those of the DJ, and the “rapping” part of this new culture soon eclipsed its musical innovations.
In the recording studio during hip-hop’s early days, the disc jockey’s turntables were mostly silent. But the drum machine made the DJ a programmer, a producer, a beatmaker. The machine’s takeover of hip-hop began in 1982 with Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock.”
Both songs riveted ten-year-old James Dewitt Yancey in Detroit, introducing him to the unfamiliar East Coast vocabularies and disciplines of the drum machine, the turntable, and the MC.
Still, most of Detroit’s young music-makers shared one thing—the gift of space, made possible by the sprawl of the city as it emptied out. Attics and basements became greenhouses for a new generation of musicians.
his realization that James was quietly excellent at almost everything, so good that Frank sometimes jokingly called him an alien.
James taught music theory to Derrick by citing examples of the concepts within the latest hip-hop jams.
he sometimes seemed withdrawn, but he was always watching, always listening. And they found that James’s reserve belied a stubborn will.
James knew exactly what he wanted and pursued those things with determination. You were coming along for the ride or you weren’t. And if you got in his way, you’d witness a temper that seemed to flare from out of nowhere. That, too, was James.
At a new label called Def Jam in New York, founder and producer Rick Rubin found ways to bring both the DJ and the sounds of the breaks back into the mix.
The job of the hip-hop record producer was now about making music from pieces of music that were already made; recording new records by piecing together pieces of old records.
The best producers, like Rubin and Marley Marl, became sonic collage artists.
With considerable time and effort, James could create a music bed made of looped breaks and—with a second dual cassette deck—layer vocals, scratches, or sounds from a small drum machine he’d bought, almost like a rudimentary multitrack studio.
James had a way of relating to rhyme-as-rhythm that coincided with his own.
Amp Fiddler knew the wisest way to spend this money was not to buy time in a recording studio, but to build his own, in the basement of his home in Conant Gardens.
Amp had already judged James to be a natural after listening to those pause tape beats. But every day that passed and every new beat that he heard, Amp felt like he was witnessing something altogether supernatural.
The two MCs, with Waajeed positioned as the DJ and Que.D the dancer, were soon calling themselves Slum Village—a nod to Conant Gardens, diminutive and diminished.
James loved making music on machines, but he understood by now that music lost something when the machines took over: the unpredictability of a human playing an instrument that told you it was a human being playing it.
those mistakes—man-made, machine-made mistakes—were thrilling to James. They reminded him of messy house parties, and the interminable rehearsals of his childhood, and the discord of musical devotion in the sanctuary of Vernon Chapel, the unity made from the chaos of humans interacting.
The sound of error stayed with him. It remained until he found a way to make those errors on purpose.
It remained beyond that, into a future that he could scarcely imagine, a future in which much of popular music would sound uncannily like that last scene from A Piece of the Action—simply because musicians an...
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Linn devised the “timing correct” function, whereby the user could reduce the resolution of the grid to a sixteenth note, or an eighth note, and any errant note would be pulled onto the nearest gridline, a process later called “quantization.”
The sounds of drums placed on this timing grid, when played back, were precise. But in their precision, they had lost, again, that ineffable quality of a human playing drums.
Ask a computer to keep time and the computer will produce consistent results. Ask a human to keep time and you will get variations that, no matter how tiny, manifest obviously if not consciously.
Many great drummers, Russell said, don’t play perfectly straight. They shuffle their timing just slightly.
What Russell was saying is that great grooves come from drummers playing somewhere between perfectly straight and perfectly swung.
The 808 had a kick drum sound that, when detuned, shook floors and walls and tailed off for what seemed like days. That vast, detuned 808 kick became the sound of hip-hop by the mid-1980s.
When Michael Jackson wasn’t using drum machines for his 1982 album, Thriller, his studio drummers imitated the machine’s unerring timing, as Ndugu Chancler did in the song “Billie Jean.”
Few besides Roger Linn knew that when they heard that trademark “Prince clap sound,” they were really hearing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers put their hands together in slow motion.
A few months later, a friend of Linn’s connected him with a Japanese electronics company, Akai, that had just gotten into the professional audio market with digital tape recorders and samplers. They wanted to know if Linn would be interested in designing their first sampling drum machine.
At the center of it all would be Linn’s sequencer, capable of storing sixty thousand notes. Akai dubbed it the MIDI Production Center, or MPC60.
The larger the chunk of audio you sampled, the more of the groove you imported.
As long as the last beat of the loop was equidistant from the beat before it and the One of the loop after it, the groove would be seamless.
The ability for drum machines to loop larger pieces of sampled audio meant that the looser, more human groove of real-life drummers could be imported and kept in perfect time with any electronic elements.
DJ-producers began to search not just for drum sounds, bu...
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A triggered drum loop reached back into time and made the past present.
This lineage attracted beatmakers like DJ Jazzy Jeff and DJ Premier, the first to employ samples of jazz music in hip-hop.
His 1992 production, “They Reminisce Over You,” melded bits of James Brown drums with a saxophone melody and ambient vocal harmonies lifted from a 1967 Tom Scott recording of the song “Today.”
Pete Rock was sampling jazz music, yes. But what made him jazzy was the virtuosity he developed in the art and craft of sampling.1
these producers, though competitive, were all friendly, seeing themselves as part of a joint quest for the sublime. James didn’t know it yet, but he was family.
Salley was convinced that even though Motown Records was long gone, the talent that made Motown possible was still here in Detroit. But Salley knew next to nothing about the music industry.
The latter of the two, a towering, boulder-sized teen, had acquired his own nickname, “Paul Bunyan,” on account of his resemblance to that mythical Midwestern lumberjack, but his real name was Paul Rosenberg.
John Salley used his celebrity and R. J. Rice his industry connections to bring the Slum Village demo to record companies in New York.
he never regretted advocating for James. He just had a feeling that the kid was going places.
DJ Head had dormed at Michigan State with Paul Rosenberg, who was trading his visions of a rap career for one in entertainment law.
Rosenberg religiously attended the battles at the Hip Hop Shop, where he would meet the young man who would become his first client, another of Proof’s protégés and, like Paul, a white rapper of some skill: Marshall Mathers, who went by the MC name “Eminem.”
By the time James made a song with Phat Kat called “Front Street” in early 1994, recorded in part at Amp’s place, his personal style had coalesced: a melodic jazz sample, the top frequencies filtered out to make the music more amorphous and gloomy, over hard drums, in the vein of A Tribe Called Quest or Pete Rock.
It was the first beat from James Dewitt Yancey that would sound to future listeners just like a beat from James Dewitt Yancey.
Amp Fiddler never forgot his pledge to James.
