Snips: Recent Episodes

View Details

Beyonces new record Break My Soul has been at the center of a handful of discussions around house music over the past week or two. Something that's been interesting to me however is the credit given to Robin S and a handful of other writers of the hit single Show Me Love. Many of you assume Beyonces record sampled Show Me Love or at the very least reinterprets part of the melody. It actually doesn't and simply just uses the same synth patch on the Kory M1 keyboard. I think that what we're actually seeing is the fallout from the court case around Robin Thicke and Pharrell’s Blurred Lines. Where the Marvin Gaye estate were able to sue them based on the records similarities to Marvins Got to give it up. Previously sample laws were fairly clear. If you sampled a recorded piece of someone's music or replayed or resung part of the lyrics or melody, you’d be liable to give up a percentage of your publishing to the sample artist. The Blurred Lines case was one of the first cases in history where the case was one simply on the record sounding to similar. There were no samples, replayed melodies or lyrics from Marvin’s original song. This set a dangerous precedent because like with any law, ambiguity opens room for interpretation, which often leaves a decision to fall in favor of the most powerful party. While Beyoncé is obviously a powerhouse and is unlikely to be on the losing side of an ambiguous plagiarism case. I do believe she got ahead of the curve and offered a small amount of her publishing to Robin S as a way to avoid any potential lawsuit. Robin S has not been active in recent years and even as little as 5% of the publishing on a Beyoncé lead single is a huge offering that is unlikely to make any noticeable dent to Beyonce's pockets. However with pun fully intended it does continue to blur the line between just and unjust accusations of plagiarism, which is only going to have a negative effect on the creativity of artists moving forward.

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

View Details

Cultural ownership. So what exactly does it mean? Is it a term that we use to credit the creators of a culture? or has it become a term that allows identity politics to help people who don't go outside win arguments on Twitter? I'm gonna say it's increasingly becoming the latter. We now discuss culture in such linear and absolute terms when in reality culture doesn't happen in a vacuum and ownership is a very nuanced and complex discussion. Often several stars have to align to birth a culture of multiple things come into play to nurture it. If you look at Hip Hop for example, it was birthed from multiple factors that go beyond simplified racial or class identities. The political climate in that specific location at that specific time are key ingredients to the creation of that particular culture. That's not to say hip hop isn’t Black music or isn't native to New York City, It absolutely is, But to simplify focus solely on those two things is simplistic and hugely reductive. Picking the convenient ingredient in a culture that relates to your own personal identity maybe a great way to silence a discussion on social media but in reality it bares little relevant to the wider conversation. When Grandmaster Caz was asked to comment on the discussion around guests in Hip Hop, his response was that everybody outside of those who were instrumental in creating if are guests. Now when you remove the constant need to center yourself in a conversation that makes perfect sense. Whether it's race, class, sexuality, location or religion, those things may represent a shared experience among people but to suggest they are representative of a monolithic experience is hugely misinformed. Culture is a malleable concept that takes shape through multiple factors. if it only consisted of one ingredient, it would stay exactly as is and would never have evolved into anything new.

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

View Details

House music is back. Well, it didn't ever really leave and I think most of us invested in the music know this already. It is, however gaining new levels of attention on social media due to the recent offerings by Drake and Beyonce. Now I'm not here to entertain debates on the origins or ownership of House as its a complex and nuanced discussion. I think anyone with even a slight interest is aware that House, Garage and Techno music were simultaneously birthed out of the experience of the working class, Black and predominantly Gay communities in Chicago, New York and Detroit. Now while I think identity politics play a part in understanding and preserving music history and origin, when they become more important than the music itself, they essentially have the reverse effect when aesthetic override the authenticity of the actual music. While there's been an adaptation to appease mainstream white audiences, the core of the music has continued to stay true to its roots, going relatively unnoticed by not only mainstream audiences but also audiences of genres that were once considered more adjacent, such as Hip Hop and RnB. In the late 2000s when artists like Usher and Ne-Yo began making dance music the narrative surrounding it was that they were making mainstream pop music. What they were doing is ironically not too dissimilar to what we're currently seeing with Drake Beyoncé. The reason for the current celebration is rooted in the discourse around reclaiming House music and taking it back to its roots, which is obviously a necessary and important conversation. However, in this context not only are you ignoring the contributions of producers like Spinna, Waajeed, Andres and many more who continue to push to create an antithesis to mainstream dance music but you also propping up the very sound that the core audience are trying to counteract, solely because they aesthetically fit the narrative that’s been sold by those who had zero interest in the music until recently.

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

View Details

So we've recently seen sampling regain some popularity after a trap filled hiatus of preset synths and 808s over the past decade. Even Kanye West who flew the flag for sample based production has fallen back on the soul loops in favor of a more synth based kind of production. Naturally, just like in the golden era of sample based production producers are digging back into the music of their youth for inspiration and recently legendary engineer Young Guru in fact pointed this out in a tweet. However when we look closer we do see some differences. In the eighties producers used quite obvious loops for the backdrop of their songs, but by the time the sample laws tightened up in the nineties, the art was based around sampling obscure records, or at least obscuring the more obvious. Either way, the goal was to go unrecognized which very obviously is not the goal now. The other important thing to note was that producers sampled various styles of music and they made it hip hop. What we're seeing today is hip hop producers re-sampling hip hop. Now not only are they sampling the same genre of music that they're making but they're often sampling a record that was initially made using samples in the first place. Hip hop had such variant styles and sounds because it drew from so many genres of music. If we're now solely looking back to the same genre of music and re-sampling the same thing, are we not going to hit a creative brick wall at some point? At what point does a sample of a sample of a sample of a sample become uninspiring and boring?. Now I'm an avid Sampler and will continue to take something new out of something old but if all you're doing is remaking the same thing, using the same overused ingredients, it's going to become uninspiring quickly. If you don't want to go down the vinyl route to dig, the Internet is your oyster.

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

View Details

Revisionist history is a term we use a lot when talking about Hip-hop. For the most part, we use it to describe when an event or era gets discussed in an Ill informed way by someone who didn't experience it the first time around. This is normally in order to paint his or her narrative of an event or a time in a way that favors their own tastes, Or sometimes it's just a clear lack of misinformation or research that leads to a skewered perspective that when told enough, essentially becomes the norm. There is however another side of revisionism that's becoming more and more popular. Back in the mid to late nineties there was a clear divide in Rap Music between the mainstream and the underground. While some of us were able to see the best of both sides of the coin and hold an MC like Jadakiss in the same regards as a Mos Def, many felt the need to pick a side. Essentially this feud ended when a clear winner was declared. The clear winner of course being capitalism and big business. Underground or the more popular umbrella term of “Boom Bap” has now become a dirty word nobody wants to associate with. Ironically, specifically by those most passionate about it at the time. In fact, many of those fans not only shunned the sound in recent years but many have chosen to pretend that they were never fans in the first place. This is possibly one of the saddest phenomenons I’ve witnessed in hip hop over the past few decades. Predominately middle-aged men denouncing their personal taste to impress teenage fans who consumed history from a “winners perspective”. Now while I understand that for some, revisiting the music of the era that you shunned at the time could be positive and maybe you get to enjoy an artists catalog you ignored and were twenty-five years late on, but please be honest. I know nobody wants to be on the wrong side of history but it's important to remember it's only deemed the wrong side of history due to corporate interest and misinformed revisionism. It's okay to admit you preferred Kool Keith over Harlem World

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

View Details

Streams versus physical products. Now there’s pros and cons to which is the best option for you. This is really for you to take into account whether or not you’re a major label artist, an indie artist or you're releasing a form of music that's better serviced by DJs who play vinyl. If you're in the underground hip hop or dance community you may want to do that. Obviously, if you have dreams of wanting to be a pop star, you may want to take the major label route, which can better help target a demographic that are going to be more susceptible to streaming. What I wanna do though is really break down how an artist can generate $10,000 on either medium. So first thing to take note of is that if you're a major label artist in order for you to generate $10,000 in streaming, you essentially need to generate $67,000 as you will only see 15% of the profits. So if we take into account that apple pay 1c per stream and Spotify pay 0.4c, I've worked out an average that for you to get $1000 worth of streams, you're looking at 201,515 streams on average. Times that by 67 and you're looking at 13,500,000 streams. Now if you want to sell physical copies of vinyl. Let’s say 1000 copies pressed that you're going to sell at $25, 80% of those sold to a distributer at a wholesale price of $15 minus 20% for distro fee, you're looking at $12 per record. That comes to $9600 profit. Out of the remaining 200, If you sold them directly on bandcamp for $25 minus 20% for digital fees, that's another $4000. Now you want to minus about $2500 for pressing costs, you’re looking at about $11,100 remaining. That's the profit from selling 1000 copies of your own product.

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm

View Details

Why is it sales are such a relevant part of discussions within hip hop music? If you think of Hip hop as a counter culture, validating an artists existence within that culture by the metrics of popular reach is essentially oxymoronic. To really unpack why this is counterproductive in Hip hop We kind of need to unpack who's actually buying and streaming the music. So the vast majority of popular music, hip hop included is consumed by one particular demographic… which is suburban white teenagers in middle America. Now I'm a big believer that music should be enjoyed by whoever it resonates with and crosses boundaries of color, class, creed, religion, race, gender. I also believe that those at the core of the culture should be the ones who are dictating and pushing it forward. To give you an example of what I mean, in the early nineties M C Hammer and Vanilla ice outsold the vast majority of Hip hop artists popular at the time. This never equated to them being held up within the culture itself as being the most important artists at the time. So if we fast forward to 2022 where those lines are blurred and we are comparing artists like Jack Harlow and Freddie Gibbs, Jack's obviously a higher selling artist than Freddie But The difference in those numbers is not made up of those closest to the core of the culture. So we're establishing the large majority of those furthest away from the culture are what makeup those numbers. We’re essentially trying to win arguments on an artists importance by using the least relevant demographic to their cultural standing, which is of course completely ridiculous. Please, stop doing it

Check out the replies and reactions on Beams.fm