Multiple Discovery
What if history's great innovators chose different paths and never made their breakthroughs? Would our world be different? Would we be further behind?
This is one of my favorite segments from the original Everything is a Remix series. It didn't fit in the new version, but I still wanted to update it and share it.
NEW VIDEO: Will the Law Stop AI?
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a brand new video! This is a commission I made for Bloomberg Law. It’s written, directed and narrated by me. It explores the legality of generative AI and features a debate between copyright lawyers Mark Lemley and Ian B. Crosby. You can read more about it over at Bloomberg Law.
Everything is a Remix: The Complete, Updated 2023 Edition
Ladies and gents, after two years of hard work, the new-and-improved Everything is a Remix is complete! All four parts have been combined into a single, hour-long video. This is now the definitive Everything is a Remix experience. I made some minor edits but the episodes are basically the same as when they were first published.
And that's a wrap for my career as an internet filmmaker, folks! I'm shifting to a new phase of my life and career. I'll update you all on what's next in a bit.
Thank you all so so much for your time and attention over these many, many years. I’m still here, just in a different and still emerging form.
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Music Playlist: Spotify, Apple Music
My swan song, Artificial Creativity
I am enormously proud to present Everything is a Remix Part 4: Artificial Creativity. I’m very happy with how this video turned out and I hope you all enjoy it.
As some of you know, this is my last video. I’ll update you all shortly on what this means. Let me just say for now, I will still be pursuing interesting topics, I’ll just be doing it in a different way. Again, update coming in a bit.
Everything is a Remix Part 3
Everything is a Remix Part 3!
New and improved! Featuring Apple, Wordle and Fortnite!
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Normal is Dead
My latest collaboration with Lindsay Crouse for The New York Times, Normal is Dead.
Everything is a Remix Part 2
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HOW SAMPLING ALTERED THE UNIVERSE
HOW SAMPLING ALTERED THE UNIVERSE: a journey from Kool Herc to Janet Jackson to The Avalanches. If you have any thoughts, leave them in the comments on YouTube because they might get incorporated into the final video.
HOW SAMPLING ALTERED THE UNIVERSE: a journey from Kool Herc to Janet Jackson to The Avalanches. If you have any thoughts, leave them in the comments on YouTube because they might get incorporated into the final video.
TRANSCRIPT
In the early seventies in New York City, a new technique for creating music starts to form. At parties DJs are looping the dancers’ favorite parts of songs.
An early pioneer is DJ Kool Herc, who extends instrumental breaks by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record. And as many black entertainers had been doing for a long time, he sometimes speaks rhythmically over these beats.
Boom: rap music is born. And starts to grow.
Sylvia Robinson spots this new trend and assembles a team to record an actual rap song. She creates a group called The Sugarhill Gang, they copy the rhythm from Chic’s “Good Times”, and score rap’s first hit, “Rapper’s Delight.”
Grandmaster Flash takes Kool Herc’s simple idea, refines it and turns it into a new art. He records the first music created with turntables, and brings together Chic’s “Good Times” with a song it inspired, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”
This technique of taking old bits of music and using it in new music becomes known as sampling. At first rap samples are mostly r&b, soul, and funk–lots of James Brown.
But soon artists are sampling different sorts of music, like rock. Run DMC and producer Rick Rubin sample The Knack’s “My Sharona” in “It’s Tricky.”
A Tribe Called Quest uses the bass line from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in “Can I Kick It?”
The sampling gets more and more eclectic and more and more complex.
Public Enemy uses nonmusical sounds: speeches, sound effects, noise.
De La Soul brings together sixties rock, seventies soul, and eighties pop into a single song.
And the Beastie Boys and producers The Dust Brothers unite hundreds of samples in their album Paul’s Boutique.
Sampling spreads outside hip hop, into mainstream pop music.
Janet Jackson samples Sly and the Family Stone in “Rhythm Nation.”
A riff by Tom Tom Club first used by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and then over a decade later shows up in a number one megahit by Mariah Carey.
The group Len samples a forgotten disco hit by Andrea True Connection in their smash, “Steal My Sunshine.”
Madonna samples ABBA in her dance floor hit, “Hung Up.”
Meanwhile, in the adventurous outer realms of popular music, artists are sampling too.
Radiohead takes a fragment from an obscure piece of early computer music and around that construct their song, “Idioteque.”
M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” samples The Clash, a punk band that grew to incorporate rockabilly, dub, r&b, reggae and more.
Portishead record themselves playing instruments, press these recordings onto vinyl, then loop these records. They sample themselves.
Sampling reaches its pinnacle with The Avalanches’ album “Since I Left You,” which merges perhaps thousands of samples into a swirl of sound unlike anything else. The album is layered together from distorted bits of obscure songs, sketch comedy, and movie dialogue. The title track loops and speeds-up a variety of forgotten songs from the sixties and seventies, then slices up, pitch shifts, and rearranges a vocal into an entirely new melody.
Rap even transforms country music, where hip hop beats become standard. And some country artists are now using samples. Sam Hunt’s song “Hard to Forget” uses samples from a country classic by Webb Pierce.
But remixing is much older than hip hop. Earlier musicians were remixing too. They couldn’t sample, but they could still copy.
Just like rap is a remix, so is rock.
NEW VID: JOE ROGAN IS A LOST CAUSE
My latest explores Joe Rogan's weird alliance with one of the internet's worst people. (Please note: this video features some gross stuff.)
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