puffy, gounod, and the liturgy
I'm thinking about Puff Daddy, Gounod, Bach, disco, Sting, Andy Summers, MC Hammer, and the Roman Liturgy.
What happened was that I overheard someone offering the standard-issue grouse about hip hop: it's derivative nonart made by people who can't come up with their own music so they talk over someone else's. So easily dismissed.
But is that a fair depiction? Surely lots of music is derivative without being invalid. Are these the same people who called Jules Massenet "Mrs. Wagner?"
In medieval times, composers actively sought to come up with stuff that wasn't new; they'd take a familiar folk song like "Oh Susannah," add to it an old Gregorian chant like "O Come O Come Emmanuel," and then write their own melody to it, using lyrics from a contemporary poet. The resulting mayhem wasn't mayhem at all: it was tightly conceived tapestry. The best composers used the texts to comment on each other, so that the Dies irae from a Mass written for a warlike king would have as its counterpoint the popular drinking song "Le Soldat," and as its cantus firmus — its chant-foundation — Beati pacifici, a setting of "Blessed are the Peacemakers," repeated over and over in slow motion underneath the main melodies. Ingenious! And the medieval mind was energized by all those layers.
So, when MC Hammer takes the main hook of Rick James's "Super Freak" ("she's a very kink-ay girrrll") as the cantus firmus of his song "Can't Touch Dis," is it because he's lazy and can't come up with something of his own? Or is it because he's making a clever connection that you and I wouldn't have thought of?
Puff Daddy's elegy "I'll Be Missing You" takes as its basis the Police hit "Every Breath You Take." The song was written by Sting, but when we say "song" we mean that the lyrics and melody were written by Sting, so that he gets the royalties. What really makes the song work, though, what gives it the creamy hypnotic texture that likely turned Puffy on, was Andy Summers's arpeggiating riff. Play a few notes of it and anyone in the Western world will recognize it. (That Summers gets not a penny of royalties for Puffy's sample, but Sting does, is proof that copyright law is unrelated to any reality.) Puffy's new lyrics, and the spoken verses that go between them, are words of mourning, apostrophized to his dead friend Biggie Smalls. Or was it Tupac? Can't recall. Nonetheless, his choice of the beautifully undulating Police riff speaks volumes: the original song also mourns a loved one gone, but it's a woman who left the speaker, and the speaker vows that he'll be watching her every move and step. It's a song about dark obsession; that tone leaks through to Puffy's simple grieving and infects it with something of the menacing atmosphere in which both Tupac and Biggie (and Puffy) lived.
Nothing new, really: even after the Renaissance, composers did the same thing with each other's stuff. Charles Gounod, for instance, decided in 1853 that Bach's simple Prelude Number One from The Well-Tempered Clavier would make an excellent background for a melody. He did some cutting and pasting, and some composing of his own, and wound up with a hit. In 1859 he decided to add another layer: the classic church text of the Hail Mary. Why? Who knows what lurks in the hearts of composers? The result was an even bigger hit. An ancient text, a hundred-year-old riff, and a simple added melody.
You could say it like this:
There's nothing new under the sun.
(Not an original quote; it's from Ecclesiastes.)
What happened was that I overheard someone offering the standard-issue grouse about hip hop: it's derivative nonart made by people who can't come up with their own music so they talk over someone else's. So easily dismissed.
But is that a fair depiction? Surely lots of music is derivative without being invalid. Are these the same people who called Jules Massenet "Mrs. Wagner?"
In medieval times, composers actively sought to come up with stuff that wasn't new; they'd take a familiar folk song like "Oh Susannah," add to it an old Gregorian chant like "O Come O Come Emmanuel," and then write their own melody to it, using lyrics from a contemporary poet. The resulting mayhem wasn't mayhem at all: it was tightly conceived tapestry. The best composers used the texts to comment on each other, so that the Dies irae from a Mass written for a warlike king would have as its counterpoint the popular drinking song "Le Soldat," and as its cantus firmus — its chant-foundation — Beati pacifici, a setting of "Blessed are the Peacemakers," repeated over and over in slow motion underneath the main melodies. Ingenious! And the medieval mind was energized by all those layers.
So, when MC Hammer takes the main hook of Rick James's "Super Freak" ("she's a very kink-ay girrrll") as the cantus firmus of his song "Can't Touch Dis," is it because he's lazy and can't come up with something of his own? Or is it because he's making a clever connection that you and I wouldn't have thought of?
Puff Daddy's elegy "I'll Be Missing You" takes as its basis the Police hit "Every Breath You Take." The song was written by Sting, but when we say "song" we mean that the lyrics and melody were written by Sting, so that he gets the royalties. What really makes the song work, though, what gives it the creamy hypnotic texture that likely turned Puffy on, was Andy Summers's arpeggiating riff. Play a few notes of it and anyone in the Western world will recognize it. (That Summers gets not a penny of royalties for Puffy's sample, but Sting does, is proof that copyright law is unrelated to any reality.) Puffy's new lyrics, and the spoken verses that go between them, are words of mourning, apostrophized to his dead friend Biggie Smalls. Or was it Tupac? Can't recall. Nonetheless, his choice of the beautifully undulating Police riff speaks volumes: the original song also mourns a loved one gone, but it's a woman who left the speaker, and the speaker vows that he'll be watching her every move and step. It's a song about dark obsession; that tone leaks through to Puffy's simple grieving and infects it with something of the menacing atmosphere in which both Tupac and Biggie (and Puffy) lived.
Nothing new, really: even after the Renaissance, composers did the same thing with each other's stuff. Charles Gounod, for instance, decided in 1853 that Bach's simple Prelude Number One from The Well-Tempered Clavier would make an excellent background for a melody. He did some cutting and pasting, and some composing of his own, and wound up with a hit. In 1859 he decided to add another layer: the classic church text of the Hail Mary. Why? Who knows what lurks in the hearts of composers? The result was an even bigger hit. An ancient text, a hundred-year-old riff, and a simple added melody.
You could say it like this:
Charles Gounod Puffy Combs
used
J S Bach's Andy Summers's
catchy arpeggiating riff
as the basis for
Ave Maria his own lyric
which he set to
his own Sting's
melody.
There's nothing new under the sun.
(Not an original quote; it's from Ecclesiastes.)
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