He came to me like a child asking his father, ‘Can you teach me something?' He was so polite. That was my first time to hug a white man. | | | | Joseph Shabalala (center) with Ladysmith Black Mambazo at Carnegie Hall, New York, Oct. 17, 2006.
(Jack Vartoogian/Archive Photos/Getty Images) | | | | | | “He came to me like a child asking his father, ‘Can you teach me something?' He was so polite. That was my first time to hug a white man.”
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| | rantnrave:// What if you could write—and copyright—every melody that's ever been written and ever will be written, and what if you could do it in less than a week? With a number of caveats that they say could be overcome with the same technique and more raw computing power, technology lawyer and musician DAMIEN RIEHL and computer programmer and musician NOAH RUBIN set out to do exactly that. Their point, Riehl says in this TED TALK, wasn't to corner the market on all possible melodies but to argue the futility of trying to copyright any melody at all. Because melodies are basically math. And because you can't copyright a sequence of numbers. (Which sort of overlooks what music actually is. Which is sort of, Riehl and Rubin would argue, what music copyright lawyers do, too.) It's an argument, really, the beginning of a conversation, a conversation worth having. Riehl and Rubin's "brute-forced" 68.7 million melodies, each exactly 12 notes long, the same way a hacker would brute-force passwords. They're stored as MIDI files on a hard drive—affixed to a physical medium, that is, for copyright purposes—and on this website, where the programmers are also sharing their code. Among the caveats are that, to make their hack manageable, they used only one octave's worth of notes, in a diatonic scale, and they only used quarter notes. Make the scale chromatic, add an octave or two and throw in some rhythmic variation and the project becomes many magnitudes larger. Maybe inconceivable. Or maybe just in need of a faster, more powerful computer. The better to compete with ever faster, ever more powerful copyright lawyers. Or, at least, to sharpen the rhetoric in Riehl and Rubin's rhetorical argument... It came to JOSEPH SHABALALA in a dream in 1964. "It was something new, a big voice, beautiful. The language was not my language. It was not Zulu, it was not English, it was not easy even to differentiate whether they were black or white." That, Shabalala was fond of saying, was the origin of his group LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO's infectious and incredibly influential a cappella style. Or, perhaps, he was just taking the popular Zulu singing style isicathamiya a little further, making it a little more modern—bass-heavy, and colored by the feel of rhythm and blues. Either way, Shabalala, who died Tuesday in Pretoria, would go on to lead one of the most cherished groups in South Africa, a group that helped connect black and white South Africa in the Apartheid era ("white people supported us secretly... but they were not allowed to say anything," Shabalala said), and that helped connect black South African music with the rest of the world at the same time. Ladysmith Black Mambazo was one of the groups whose music inspired PAUL SIMON to travel to South Africa and begin recording what would become GRACELAND, and the group is featured on several songs. Shabalala co-wrote two of them. The story of that album, which changed the lives of so many of the people who made it and the ears of so many people who heard it, has been told countless times; suffice it to say Shabalala and Ladysmith had a flourishing recording and touring career long before "Graceland" and a different kind of flourishing career long afterward. NELSON MANDELA called the group "South Africa’s cultural ambassadors to the world." When Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's president, Shabalala and his group were there. As a cultural force, they had already been there for many years, helping to bring not just a singing style into the future, but an entire country... Deals, we've got deals: SIRIUSXM is investing $75 million in SOUNDCLOUD and is getting a minority ownership stake and two board seats at the free streaming giant, which, by the way, had strong revenue growth, if not profits, in 2019 and is expecting to keep growing in 2020... SPOTIFY is ponying up $250 million to buy the RINGER, according to a BLOOMBERG source. The sale was announced last week but not the price. Spotify, reports Bloomberg's LUCAS SHAW, "has now spent more than $600 million to acquire four companies that can accelerate its podcasting business... Going where OFFSET has gone before, DRAKE has signed a multiyear deal with live-streaming upstart CAFFEINE. He's bringing the battle-rap league ULTIMATE RAP LEAGUE with him... And in the deal with the best synergy of all, JOEY KRAMER didn't want to miss a thing but unfortunately he did, but he's no longer cryin' and he and his bandmates of 49 years are letting the music do the talking again. Which is to say, Kramer and the rest of AEROSMITH appear to have kissed and made up. (And I promise I'll never do that again. I have drawn a line.) | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | diamonds on the soles of her shoes |
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| The founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo's openness to collaboration took the group's isicathamiya music around the globe and won three Grammys. | | |
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| I sat down to talk with Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to copyright every possible melody, and why that's a good thing. | | |
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| Could tech and design principles inform a new way of thinking about releasing music that is more in line with the way art is consumed in the 21st century? | | |
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| Billboard checked in with Harvey Mason Jr., chair of the board of trustees and interim CEO of the Academy, and Laura Segura Mueller, vice president, membership & industry relations. | | |
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| The Fall's Mark E. Smith was both at the center of things—the organizer of the group, the voice of it—and also off to the side. The way to find Mark E. Smith is to look off to the side. | | |
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| The return of My Chemical Romance has led me to rethink my place in emo, and emo's place in black culture. | | |
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| For most of the music industry, awards season ended when the Grammys came to a close the night of Jan. 26. That wasn't the case, though, for Interscope Records, which moved on to the Oscars with just as vested an interest in domination. | | |
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| Even in the capital Beijing, once-crowded streets are now empty, as the 2019-nCoV coronavirus outbreak forces people at home. The solution for live musicians: turn to streaming. | | |
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| Custom apps are helping the UK’s free party crews throw huge raves under the noses of the police. It’s old-skool raving powered by new technology | | |
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| Being a songwriter in the world is the best of jobs and the worst of jobs. It's the best because we make songs. We make order out of chaos, and find harmony within the dissonance. We give meaning to an increasingly crazy world, and create something timeless in a time when nothing seems to last more than a moment. | | |
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| Bands you weren't supposed to like? | | |
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| Lil Wayne rides through Miami with the Elliott Wilson in a 2017 Mercedes Benz G63 to run through tracks from his new album, 'Funeral.' | | |
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| a.k.a. Maybe it's time to reevaluate our relationship with electronic music's favorite medium. | | |
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| Merely a Tony away from EGOTing, the "Joker" composer is also the first Oscar winner to have performed with Throbbing Gristle and Sunn O))). | | |
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| With the needle drop of that familiar, crunchy guitar riff, ‘Birds of Prey’ became the latest to use Heart’s song, joining ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ ‘Jessica Jones,’ and … Sarah Palin. | | |
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| Raine Group partner Fred Davis talks big deals, new money and Daniel Ek. | | |
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| McCraven is a musician, composer and bandleader, but he is also highly regarded for his "chopping" or remixing and re-imagining production skills. We're New Again, his reconfiguration of the late-career classic Gil Scott Heron album I'm New Here, will be one of 2020's top recordings, putting a fresh spin on moving meditations on family, personal history and black identity. | | |
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| “This basic question, what does it mean to know a piece of music, seems to me very close to all of the questions that really matter in life.” | | |
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| This episode goes in-depth on the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, the gang Tekashi 6ix9ine joined in order to boost his rap career. | | |
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| Who’s that thinking nasty thoughts? | | |
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| | | | | | | From the soundtrack to the 1979 BBC Films documentary "Rhythm of Resistance." |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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