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Interview/remix with Martin Urbach

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I have been practicing my semi-structured interviewing skills on Martin Urbach. I did a few rounds of recording interviews on my phone, and what I learned from that is that my phone is not an adequate recording device if I want people to listen to the recordings afterwards. Then I got myself a Zoom recorder, and the mics in it are exquisite. Here’s the first interview we recorded on the new setup. As is my method, I remixed the audio using the music we were talking about.

This is excerpted from a two hour conversation. I kept everything in the same chronological sequence. I did a little repeating of key phrases for effect, but otherwise you’re hearing our natural speech.

After editing the conversation down to a few highlights, I edited in the music.

  • Martin begins by talking about his interest in sample-based production. I use “Bars & Twists” by J Dilla.
  • Next, Martin talks about how his students use J Cole type beats from YouTube. I searched “J Cole Type Beat” on YouTube and this was the first result.
  • When Martin talks about transcribing Art Blakey, I use Blakey’s solo from the Jazz Messengers’ recording of “Caravan.”
  • When Martin talks about “Old Town Road,” I obviously use the song, but I also put in a recreated instrumental I found on YouTube.
  • When Martin talks about “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang, I use the Reflex Re-Vision.
  • When Martin talks about Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” I loop sections of the beginning and end of the song. Martin talks about an interview in which Lizzo explains how she wrote the song, and I include excerpts of that interview.
  • I accompany the rest of the interview with more samples of Blakey’s “Caravan.” The main purpose of this long sample was just to get the track length over ten minutes, which is the minimum length track that you can post on Mixcloud.

Here are some excerpts of my dissertation proposal in progress explaining why I’m doing this:

In addition to a traditional manuscript, I will also create a mixtape, a collection of tracks combining music created by my informants and myself with excerpts of ethnographic recordings. The mixtape draws on arts-based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), multimedia ethnography (Goldman-Segall, 1995), and technomusicology (Marshall, 2010), the process of examining digital media using those same media; e.g., studying remixes by creating remixes. In hip-hop, “technological mediation becomes the sign of the authentic” (Nielson, 2010, p. 1264), and combining samples of existing music with original material is likewise expected. Presenting research on hip-hop in the form of hip-hop music aligns form and content.

My research data will consist of field notes, audio and some video, documenting interviews, field recordings, and pieces of music. I will edit and present this material in the form of remixes and sample-based tracks, organizing my scavenged fragments of sound in order to motivate affective and kinetic pleasure in my listeners. DJs use remix methods to make musical arguments, for example, by using juxtaposition and combination to point out connections between songs (see Rose, 1994, p. 89, and Schloss, 2013, p. 64). Remixers make implicit critical judgments as well, by presenting their preferred alternative versions of their source material. Remixers can make the strange familiar, and make the familiar strange (Margulis, 2013). Remixing can be an avenue for Greene’s (1988) practice of noticing, being attentive to what is “ordinarily obscured by the familiar”, and in so doing, to defamiliarize familiar things, “to make them strange” (p.122). Creating sample-based music entails prolonged close listening; in the course of preparing my interview remixes, I listen to the recordings repeatedly a great many times. By the same token, it is my hope that the pleasure of listening to my tracks will prompt listeners to engage more closely and deeply with their critical and scholarly content.

Like hip-hop, I was born in the Bronx in the 1970s, and I loved Run-DMC and A Tribe Called Quest growing up. However, as I began to learn to play rock, country and jazz, I learned from “real” musicians to reject rap and other producer-driven musics for their supposed artificiality and lack of musical substance. I was only able to disabuse myself of my prejudices as an adult, and to hear the beauty and depth of the music I had instinctively been drawn to as a child. As I began trying to create hip-hop music myself, I learned how much craft was required, and I was struck by the breadth of its cultural reach. In particular, I saw revelatory significance in the idea of using existing recordings as raw material for new music. As an instrumental performer, I had been exasperated by the fact that so many people prefer recorded music to “the real thing.” However, as a sampler and remixer, I was exhilarated by the ability to speak back to recorded music, and to connect to the intimate emotions that familiar recordings evoke. As I began to work with and observe hip-hop artists, I was impressed by their ability to use digital production in the service of improvisation, community-building, and the speaking of plain emotional truths.

According to the consumerist mindset, music is a product, and the processes giving rise to that product are opaque and inaccessible. Sample-based hip-hop producers see the products of the commercial music industry quite differently, as raw material for new expression, the starting point of the process as much as its endpoint. Since any sample-based track can be further sampled and remixed, there need never be any final, stable product at all. The endless fluidity of music is reinforced by streaming technology, enabling artists to continue to edit and tinker with their music even after its commercial release, as Kanye West did with his 2016 album The Life of Pablo. Digital audio production has therefore renders the product/process distinction effectively moot. “Perhaps the digital musician is making a new kind of music, and the musical situation is once again coming to resemble the informal, process-based, communal activity of some parts of the non-Western world” (Hugill, 2012, p. 222). The communal aspect is particularly visible in widely used samples like the drum break in “The Funky Drummer Parts One and Two” by James Brown (1970). This break appears in hundreds of commercial releases and uncountably more amateur productions. While the break legally belongs to James Brown’s estate, producers treat it as part of a de facto public domain.

For examination and presentation of audio data and music alike, I use a method of my own devising that I call ethnographic remixing. This approach was inspired in part by Marshall’s (2010) concept of technomusicology, which he uses to describe the process of examining digital media using those same media. For example, one might study remixes and mashups by creating remixes and mashups. Marshall draws a parallel between using digital audio technologies to study digitally produced musics and using music notation to study notated musics. The process of remixing a track requires close attention to its existing sound and structure, while also imagining possible ways to alter it and combine it with other sounds. By juxtaposing and layering tracks, the remix directs the listener’s attention to aspects of those tracks that might have gone unnoticed. Barone and Eisner (2011) argue that “the clear specification of a referent by a symbol is not a necessary condition for meaning. In the arts, symbols adumbrate; they do not denote” (p. 2). This adumbration is the goal of my ethnographic remixing.

The idea of blending recorded interviews with the music under discussion has long been a practice of electronic music producers. For example, “Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb (1991) includes samples of a radio interview with the artists themselves discussing their creative process, one of “layering different sounds.” Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” (2017) includes a sample of Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera criticizing Lamar’s earlier music. Some DJs perform real-time musical ethnography as well, for example by mixing together a rap song and the soul song that it samples—Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of The Roots is a master of this technique. These artists use music to speak for itself, an approach that I intend to bring to bear on research.

Because there is such a smooth continuum because speech and singing in rap, the spoken words of hip-hop practitioners can inform their music particularly closely. It is important to me to include my participants’ voices as audio in addition to written text. “The ability to represent and otherwise co-construct participants in/as/through sound simultaneously removes a layer of translation while adding important affective and sensual information… representing sounds sonically allows participants give voice for/to themselves while retaining information lost when translated to text” (Gershon, 2013, p. 259). It is true that my listeners are only hearing participants’ voices through my “cut”, my selection (Goldman-Segall, 1995, p. 170). However, all presentation of audio evidence requires editing. The hip-hop aesthetic offers the audio ethnographer an advantage: choppy, conspicuous and fragmented edits are desirable aesthetic traits. This creates the opportunity for me to foreground the technological medium of my work, and to proudly show its seams, rather than trying to present an illusion of a unitary whole.

References

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2012). Arts-based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Gershon, W. S. (2013). Vibrational Affect. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 257–262.

Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Goldman-Segall, R. (1995). Configurational validity: A proposal for analyzing ethnographic multimedia narratives. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 4(2), 163–182.

Hugill, A. (2012). The digital musician (2nd ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Margulis, E. (2013). On repeat: How music plays the mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marshall, W. (2010). Mashup poetics as pedagogical practice. In N. Biamonte (Ed.), Pop-culture pedagogy in the music classroom (pp. 307–315). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Nielson, E. (2010). “Can’t C me”: Surveillance and rap music. Journal of Black Studies, 40(6), 1254–1274.

Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America (1st ed.). Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan.

Schloss, J. G. (2013). Making beats: The art of sample-based hip-hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.


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