LECTURE 4 Flashcards
Elements of Paper Planes -
Tempo;
- 86 bpm
Structure;
- Verse / Chorus
Sampled guitar chord
progression and lead line;
- Four bars, looped
throughout.
Vocals;
- sung, non-melodic
style
- lyrics: political
content
Drum beat;
- syncopated
(double) kicks
- Sampled hi hats
- synthesized
handclaps (beat 3)
Samples (sound effects);
- Gunshots, cash-register
Sub Bass
M.I.A. – Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam
Born 1975, in London of Sri Lankan parents
At six months old, moved to Jaffna, in Tamil-controlled northern Sri Lanka.
Father became activist with Tamil/LTTE aligned student group.
Sri Lankan civil war breaks out in 1983;
- LTTE Tamil Tigers ‘defeated’
in 2009 Sri Lankan
government forces.
Mother moves family (minus father) back to London in 1986 where they are housed as refugees.
Maya learns to speak English while at school from age 11.
Completed a degree in fine art and film at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2000.
Has recorded five albums in various locations: India, Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica, Australia, Japan, the UK and the United States.
Latest album ‘AIM’ released September 9th, 2016.
So what is the London-raised daughter of Tamil Sri Lankan parents doing in Brooklyn NYC rapping over a punk-rock guitar riff and a hip hot beat?
Musical influences on M.I.A
- Is active in multiple art forms: visual art, film, fashion design and
music. - Musically is often referred to as a‘rapper’
- Stated early musical influences are Jamaican dancehall, reggae and late 1980s hip hop, all of which she heard around the neighbourhood on radio;
0 Yellowman (Jamaica)
0 Public Enemy (USA)
0 London Posse (UK) - Later influences include punk rock from the 70s/80s
0 The Slits
0 The Clash
0 Malcolm McClaren - Early musical output mostly performed with a Roland MC-505—a combination synthesizer, sequencer, midi controller and drum machine
- Her first big hit ‘Galang’ was recorded using the MC-505.
About Jamaica;
- Island in the Caribbean Sea
- settled by indigenous people of South America between 4000 and 1000 b.c.
- Under Spanish Rule 1509 - 1655 (Columbus arrived 1494)
- Conquered by British in 1655 who ruled until Jamaican independence in 1962
- British continued the importation of African slaves (practised also by Spanish) as labourers on sugar cane plantations
- By 1670 Africans were the majority; many of the remainder were Irish political prisoners
- By the time slave trade abolished in 1807, blacks outnumbered whites 20:1 (full emancipation not declared until 1838)
- British Nationality Act of 1948 gave British citizenship to all people living in Commonwealth countries
- By 1962 (year of Jamaican independence) over 180,000 Jamaicans had immigrated to Britain (mainly to London)
Jamaican Sound System Culture from 1950
- In 1950 a modest turntable and speaker cost the average Jamaican a year’s wages.
- American R & B
records, popular with
younger (poorer)
Jamaicans
were by definition
imported and therefore
very expensive also - Some of those fortunate enough to own a home system—normally a turntable and radio—would hold ‘listening parties’ in their homes.
- Businesses such as shops and liquor stores used sound systems to attract customers
- ‘For hire’ sound
systems (such as that
pictured) began to
multiply - Hedley Jones, a radio repair shop owner, began manufacturing amps in the 1950s for sound system owners.
- Jones’ ‘Williamson form’
amp, including the
innovation of the
‘splitter’, enabling the
independent
manipulation of treble,
mid-range and bass—as
wattage increased,
emphasis was
increasingly placed on
the bass freqeuncies.
- Jones’ ‘Williamson form’
- Jones and his
apprentices constructed
many of the next wave of
much larger systems that
dominated Kingston’s
nightlife.
- Among those Jones built
for were pioneers Arthur
‘Duke’ Reid (calling his
system ‘The Trojan’) and
Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd
(calling his ‘Downbeat’).
Reid and Dodd came to dominate Jamaican ‘Dancehall’
Birth of Jamaican ‘Dancehall’
Sound systems grew to enormous size and could be heard for miles around.
The culture grew into organised events at open- air venues, initially called ‘lawns’ and later ‘dancehalls’—most of these in downtown Kingston.
The sounds were generally controlled by two people:
1) the selector (‘selecta’), who would choose and play the records; as time went on and the technology enabled it, mixing techniques were steadily developed.
2) the ‘deejay’, who would introduce the records (sometimes speaking over the top of them) and interact with the crowd.
As more and more systems emerged, competitions known as ‘clashes’ became a part of the culture.
Crucial to success in these ‘clashes’ were size and power of the system, but also the possession of hard-to-get or exclusive records.
From Imported R&B to Homegrown Production: ‘bluebeat’ & ‘ska’
Initially, in the 1950s the sound system culture began to kill off locally made music—it was less expensive to import than to make records.
As the US moved away from R&B toward Rock & Roll, new R&B records became scarce—in response, sound systems began recording local musicians in local studios.
These new recordings were intended mostly for dance halls rather than for commercial sale in record stores; they were intended as crowd pullers for the producer’s own sound system.
With exclusivity still paramount, these recordings were pressed onto one- off ‘dubplates’, capable of only limited plays before decaying.
Eventually exclusive ‘dubplates’ were used to build demand for commercial release.
The emergent new sound, a fusion of US style R&B with local Jamaican sounds became known as ‘bluebeat’ and later ‘ska’
Homegrown Production: ‘Rocksteady’ and ‘Reggae’
- The island’s recording industry grew along with technology—the first two- track mixer being installed at Federal Studios in 1963
- The practice of ‘Jamaican Stereo’ was developed whereby the band was recorded on one channel and the vocals on the other
- By the mid 1960s the ‘ska’ sound had been replaced by ‘rocksteady’
Taking advantage of the relatively new electric bass guitar, ‘rocksteady’
featured prominent deep bass melodic lines. - On the rhythmic side, ‘rocksteady’ was characterised by the ‘one drop’ drum beat which placed accents on beats 2 and 4, often with the combination of kick and snare.
- The ‘rocksteady’ sound would later grow into ‘reggae’, that, due to the enormous amount of immigration during the 50s became just as much a UK phenomenon as a Jamaican one.
‘Version’
- The culture of the dub plate led to the first ‘proto-dub’ instrumentals
- In late 1967, allegedly while preparing dub plate of the ‘rocksteady’
track On the Beach by The Paragons, engineer Byron Smith recorded
it with the vocals accidentally cut out:“the dance get so excited that them start to sing the lyrics over the
riddim part and them have to play it for about half an hour to an
hour! The Monday morning when I come back into town I say,
‘Tubbs, boy, that little mistake we made, the people them love it! So
(King) Tubby say, ‘All right, we’ll try it.”
- Bunny Lee quoted in Dub, 2002
The practice of creating a dubplate with the vocals removed became known as
‘Version’ — this became standard practice for instrumental b sides.
‘Version’ is the root of modern remix culture—music made from existing backing tracks, re-recorded alongside other elements, themselves pre-existing or otherwise.
Commercial appeal led eventually to ‘versions’ being sold to the public on vinyl, rather than their previously much more temporary existence on acetate dubplates.
‘Dub’
One of the original names for a Dub version was a ‘drum and bass mix’.
‘Dub’, as Paul Sullivan puts it:
“begins at the point where engineers and producers did not just subdue or remove a vocal, but stripped a song to its naked skeleton of drums and bass”.
The new deconstructive approach paved the way for other post-production studio experimentation: adding tape-based echo and reverb, dramatic pauses and breakdowns.
Soon other innovations such as rewinding or ‘backspinning’ were introduced, as well as taking out and dropping in bass through channel splitting amps.
It is in Jamaican dub where the modern remix DJ/Producer originates.
The ‘toasting’ deejay
Early 1950s sound system ‘selectas’ normally only had one turntable, so would often chat between records to fill the empty space.
Influenced by ‘jivetalking’ US radio disc jockeys, selectas became more verbally creative—this practice was termed ‘toasting’ and became an artform in its own right.
In the 1950s, ‘Count’ Machuki was the first deejay to work verbal interjections into the music itself— going along with the rhythm of the track.
In the 1960s, deejay U–Roy developed a melodic ‘singjay’ style, inserting his own lyrics in combination with the originals–his popularity spurred others to follow.
By the early 1970s there were an estimated 50-60 deejays operating in Kingston.
Rapping – DJ Kool Herc
Rapping, or MCing as it was originally known was a form of competition—having the most impressive rappers was a way for DJs to distinguish themselves
The Bronx, New York City, early 1970s: DJ ‘Kool Herc’ began the practice of extending the ‘break’ of a song, specifically to accomplish two things:
1) provide a space in the song for ‘b-boys’ to dance (so becoming ‘breakdancing’)
2) to provide a space for his MCs to energise the party, an even beat over which to rhyme—the practice became known as rapping (perhaps drawing on boyhood memories of dub-toasting)
With the above innovation of extending the ‘break’ between two turntables, DJKool Herc provided the foundation for what would become to be known as hip hop.
Early rappers drew from two main sources:
1) ‘jive talking’ radio disc jockeys (as did Jamaican dub toasters)
2) orators, normally black activists such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King
UK Sound System Culture & UK Hip Hop
Jamaican sound system culture in the UK developed almost in parallel with that in Jamaica.
Three notable records brought hip hop to the UK in the early 1980s
- Grandmaster Flash’s
Adventures on the
Wheels of Steel (1982) - Afrika Bambaataa and
the Soul Sonic Force’s
Planet Rock (1982)
- Malcolm McClaren’s
Buffalo Girls (1983)
Locally (UK) produced hip hop in the mid-eighties broke in two main directions:
1) immitation of the US style, including rapping in American accents
2) that which was brought up through sound system culture
London Posse, formed to support The Clash for a 1986 tour of the US were among the first to abandon the immitation of US acts and rap in London accents
“When we started doing hip hop it was about more than being Jamaican … We weren’t Jamaican and we weren’t American. A lot of rap acts in the UK were mixing the reggae thing … we were the first to chat in the accents so blatantly. We were black kids from the UK and that’s how we wanted to sound”.
Rapping - Public Enemy, London Posse and M.I.A.
Compare the ‘rapping’ style of these three songs (all can be found on YouTube).
Compare also M.I.A.’s style of rapping with the ‘singjay’ style of Jamaican dancehall, for instance the earlier example from U-Roy or most of Yellowman’s material from the 1980s.
Straight to Hell by The Clash
- The guitar riff/ progression that forms the basis of Paper Planes was taken from Straight to Hell by The Clash. M.I.A. names herself, Diplo and The Clash as co- authors of Paper Planes
