On November 7th the beginning of our class was dedicated to funk. A characteristic of funk is that not a lot of chords are used. A hero of the funk genre is James Brown, which is ironic because when he first began his music career with the song Please, Please, Please it is more rhythm and blues, and to find out he transitions into funk is interesting. James Brown’s style was different in the 60’s, but funk is all about the rhythm and grove, which he presented in his later styles of music making him such a funk hero. To compare funk to something like pop music is not difficult because the average number of chords being used in pop music is going down and down and is more harmonically static-which brings us back to the 4 chords song we were presented at the beginning of the school year. A reason behind the harmonically static could be deprived from Latin music and Bogaloo movement, which has also been cited as an origin of funk. Because of harmonically static you can “sample” music aka take pieces from song and make it your own. Mellotron was the first sampler which was each tape went down to keyboard and when you pressed down on a certain key it would trigger the sound. Over time mellotron is replaced by electric samplers which are developed using records, which would repurpose something to make it new (turntables). By the late 80’s it was more affordable to buy “digital samplers” for about $2,000, but I still find that expensive for that time period. I personally do not think I would have spent $2,000 on a digital sampler for my own personal use, which makes me realize how much music means to people to pour so much money into it. What is interesting is that Claude Shannon anticipated inventions like this would happen. The coolest part of this class was the Powerpuff Girls theme song is sampled from the drum beat of a funky drummer, like who in the world would ever think that while watching Powerpuff Girls. We concluded class watching a video about The Art of Sampling which described the process. What I learned from this video that fascinated me the most was that if you sampled a song you can not be nominated for song of the year because it is an Emmy rule. On November 9th, we started class with the genealogy of a guitar part. The class was shown a video of Chuck Berry’s trademark sound he played with his guitar as well as T-Bone Waker, who was a blues guitarist, that played “west coast swing”. T-Bone Waker reminded me a lot of Elvis mixed with some soul music. What surprised me the most about this class was to learn Elvis never wrote any of his own music and mainly just did covers. We were shown the 2 versions of That’s Alright (Mama) by Arthur Crudup who wrote the song vs. Elvis who covered it and it made it a sensation. What Elvis consisted of was more of a country beat with no drums bass player. Elvis coded to people to be “dangerously black” because of where he bought his clothes, where he grew up, and how he did covers of black songs that he made famous but was marketed to white teens because it sounded black, but was white because the singer (Elvis) was white. This is just completely absurd to me because of where in town you buy your clothes does not make a white man black nor should it even matter. Many people in this time period saw mystery train as the difference between being white and black in America, since it originally was sung by a black man but re-sung by Elvis. In the 50’s white music was louder and faster, which is ironic because it has totally shifted and I believe it is the opposite today. Not to label music by a race, but if someone asked me what black music is Rap or Hip-Hop would come first to mind because of its origin, which I believe is louder and faster. We learned how copyrighted certain music is and how sampling it may cost you in the end. For example, Sting made nearly $1,000,000 a year for 5 years because they owned the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police, which was sampled by Puff Daddy in the song ‘I’ll Be Missing You’. Andy Sommers felt robbed by this because he created the guitar part yet Sting was the one being paid, but a nice gesture was made by Sting awarding Sommers 15% to compensate. This class really showed how you can lose millions by sampling improperly and how well sampling worked in the cards for Elvis.