Michael Jackson lives
Two things happened this week in my life as a Michael Jackson fan. First, Spike Lee threw an awesome birthday party for MJ in Prospect Park for the second year in a row. I hope he does it every year. Snoop came and did a set, and so did Warren G. I had a lot of fun.
The rest of the photos in this post were taken by my sister at the party. The other thing that happened is that I discovered the Michael Jackson a capella archive on Hip Hop Is Read. A capellas are versions of a song with just the vocals isolated (though the MJ ones include some instrumentation too.) Getting access to these things set me off on a furious wave of sampling and remixing. Enjoy the results below.
The a capella for "Jam" has this awesome electronic percussion which sounds great over the breakdown section from "PYT." So that was a no-brainer. ABC Jam by ethanhein
"Jam" vs "ABC" vs "PYT" vs "Blame It On The Boogie"
mp3 download, ipod format download
My friend Julia observed that a lot of the a capellas are for MJ's relatively lame last few albums. She thought it would be interesting if I showed those songs some tough love, as she put it. It felt like a good challenge. I'm less familiar with that late period stuff, so it was easier to hear the vocals as musical raw material without being hung up on their original context. I think this is by far the best of the three tracks I did, it has the most of myself in it. For percussion, I used drums from "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" along with an atmospheric beat by Aphex Twin and some hand percussion by Glen Velez. Like A Comet by ethanhein
"Gone Too Soon" vs "Earth Song" vs "HIStory" vs "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" vs "Weathered Stone" vs "Golden Seal"
My fantasy for the future of music is that every song gets released in stem format with all of the tracks separated out and conveniently sliced at all the rhythmic events. At this point I mostly view legal high-quality downloads and compact disks as a way to get access to decent-sounding samples. MP3s get a little crunchy with all the compression and decompression. What do you say, copyright holders? Want to make life easier for me? Or do I need to keep scrounging stuff off the web? I really feel like recorded music belongs more to the fans than the recording artist. It's weird and creepy the way music fans want to possess their idols -- I'm as guilty of this as anyone. But there's no harm whatsoever in wanting to possess recordings. The desire to repurpose the ideas that excite you is where all art comes from.
The greatest curse and blessing of Michael Jackson's life was the insane degree to which he belonged to the fans. He never had a chance of developing a personality independent of his absurd fame. In the aftermath of his death, the saddest thing I heard anyone say on TV was when his friend Gladys Knight observed (I'm paraphrasing from memory):
We did this to him. We made him so famous. We just kept taking little pieces of him. Look what we did.
The only good thing about MJ's untimely death is now we can focus our desire to own him where it belongs, on his music. Legally, ownership of the songs still belongs to MJ's estate and creditors, but emotionally, we the fans are in charge of MJ's legacy. I hope we'll treat it well.