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Looking for spirit in the rhythm

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Cover Design by Andrew Nunez (143292)
Cover Design by Andrew Nunez

By Cynthia E. Griffin OW Managing Editor

June is Black Music Month, and there is no time better suited to understand and explore the evolution of the distinctive ways folks of African descent have used to create this lyrical language.

Charles Wright, legendary leader of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, does not mince words when it comes to music. He thinks that Black music today is “in the dark ages.”

He attributes that, in part, to his belief that all of the better R&B musicians are not in the night clubs like they were in the 1960s and 1970s; they’re in the churches, because that is where “real music is being made.”

Wright considers “real music” as what is made by musicians playing drums, horns, guitar and other instruments.

“Black people used to go out and party and have a good time on Friday and Saturday nights in the neighborhoods. But that is not happening any more in the Black community,” said Wright, who laments the disappearance of the clubs, particularly those that played live blues in the little “dives” that once populated Central Avenue, Broadway and even Figueroa Street.

Coupled with the rise of making music via drum machines rather than with the actual instruments, Wright believes there is something missing from much of today’s Back music—spirit.

“Music (particularly drumming) is a spiritual thing . . . there is something about the drum. They make you laugh; they make you cry. (I think) the drum is the most important instrument in the world. The way (some people explain it) is that the beat of the drum corresponds with the beat of the heart. When you have 500 people coming together to the beat of a drum, something spiritual happens.”

That spiritual connection just does not happen when people are responding to music created with drum machines, believes Wright whose bands were best known for the nine singles to chart on Billboard’s pop and/or R&B Hot 100 lists between 1967 and 1973. These included “Love Land,” “Till You Get Enough,” and “Express Yourself.”

The latter track has been sampled by a number of artists including a remix by the Los Angeles rap group NWA, which included Wright’s newphew—Eazy E—Eric Lynn Wright.

Wright said his new single “Looking for An Ugly Woman” and upcoming album, “Be Careful What You Look For” is about bringing back that ‘real music’ connection. The single is currently playing on YouTube.

In addition to his music, Wright has also created a documentary, “Bring Back the Harmony.”

The point of this film, which was shot at Washington High School in Los Angeles, is to remind contemporary musicians about the need to create music that truly captures the spirit. But not all would agree that Black music is dead.

The new sound of L.A.
By Juliana Norwood OW Editor-in-Chief

In addition to being one of the most prominent cities in the film industry, Los Angeles is also one of the preeminent places on the globe for the creation of recorded music. The overall sound of the city continues to evolve with the ever-changing times, but one staple that remains is the distinctive resonance of the experience that is Black L.A.

From the 1930s and 1940s, when African Americans celebrated a vibrant musical community that congregated around the legendary Central Avenue, and produced such heavy-hitters as Charles Mingus, Buddy Collette, Gerald Wilson, the Larks (famous for the 1960’s dance craze “The Jerk”) and Barry White, to the rise of hip hop and mainstream breakthrough of such seminal rap influences as N.W.A. (Nias with Attitude) as well as G-Funk—the music of Black Los Angeles has always had a distinctive ability to tell a story. (G-Funk is an amalgamation of P-Funk and gangster rap).

Now, as our beloved streets have spawned a new wave of buzzworthy talent that hasn’t been seen since the heyday of rappers Snoop Lion, (formerly Snoop Dogg), and Ice Cube, and the production genius of Dr. Dre, we get to take pride in the success of Los Angeles’ newest prodigies in the likes of Odd Future, YG, Problem, the eerily repetitive yet wildly successful production stylings of DJ Mustard, songstress Jhene Aiko, and of course, the undeniable talent of West Coast rap MVP Kendrick Lamar and the members of his group Black Hippy, which include Ab-Soul, Schoolboy Q, and Jay Rock.

“People are used to music that justifies street culture, but something that’s not touched on is why these kids act the way they act, live the way they live,” said Lamar.

And his music attempts to remedy that. With the release of his first major attention-garnering mixtape “Overly Dedicated” and his highly-acclaimed, independently-released first album, “Section.80,” Lamar related to the masses by telling the stories of growing up in 1980s and ’90s L.A. It was the era of the crack epidemic, extreme gang violence, Section 8 Housing, and government dependence that so many Black youth coming of age in that time knew as normalcy. He followed that pattern with his first label release, “good kid, m.A.A.d city.”

Lamar has been able, arguably better than any artist in the last few decades, to paint the sordid picture of Black life in Los Angeles without omitting the gory details, yet also without glorifying it.

“I got a greater purpose,” he says. “God put something in my heart to get across, and that’s what I’m going to focus on, using my voice as an instrument and doing what needs to be done.”

The continuing level of accomplishment for these new artists shows that the music of Black Los Angeles isn’t dying; it’s simply evolving as it always has. So, although the new sound of our city may rely more heavily on computers than actual instruments, and admittedly, often melody more so than lyricism, there remains a worldwide recognizable reverberation that is distinctively Black L.A.

One of the most distinctive ways of creating Black music does not necessarily involve the typical accoutrements of instruments, batons, metronomes and scores. Called sampling, it’s a technique that has gained tremendous acceptance.

The increasing popularity
of music sampling By Merdies Hayes OW Staff Writer

The first mass-produced take at sampling is generally believed to be the Sugar Hill Gang song “Rapper’s Delight” from 1979. The tempo was taken largely from the disco hit “Good Times” by the group Chic from the same year, and since then the popularity of this method of song production has circled the world and back.

The roots of sampling can be traced to the 1940s. Before tape recorders were around, music engineers used what where then called “disc cutters” to create a variety of sound collages. By 1961, producer James Tenney released “College #1” which took Elvis Presley’s recording of  “Blue Suede Shoes,” clipped out portions, rearranged them and adjusted the song’s tempo here and there to come up with a new twist on the rock ‘n roll classic.

By 1968, The Beatles had reworked one of their earlier hits, “Revolution,” into an experimental track, “Revolution 9”  from “The White Album.” Simon and Garfunkel once sampled themselves by using a portion of their 1967 hit “Sounds of Silence” in “Save the Life of My Child” (1968). But it was not until the late 1970s and early ’80s that sampling seemed to explode within the burgeoning rap and hip hop genres and has remained a staple of the pop recording industry for the past three decades.

This unique production style became popular with East Coast club DJs because they could interact with and manipulate the vinyl records and discovered that the audience liked the way they played and replayed the breaks in funk music. Kool DJ Herc from the Bronx, N.Y., is largely credited with the modern application of sampling, and was quickly followed by others such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who rose to stardom with the 1980 single “Freedom” which sampled “Get Up and Dance” by the rock band Freedom.

The mid-1980s also saw Brother D and the Collective Effort’s “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise” sample the beat and bass line from Cheryl Lynn’s 1978 hit “Got to Be Real.”

The immediate years to the present would see Tone Loc sampling Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin” for his 1988 mega-hit “Wild Thang,” Vanilla Ice with “Ice Ice Baby” (1990) sampling Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” LL Cool J sampling the drum solo from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” for his 1990 song “Moma Said Knock You Out,” and Sean Kingston’s 2007 “Beautiful Girls” which borrowed from Ben E. King’s 1961 classic “Stand By Me.”

Music sampling is subject today to many legal disputes, mostly in the realm of copyright laws as it applies to musical compositions and sound recordings. A court case ensued in 1990 with 2 Live Crew’s album “As Clean As They Wanna Be” that contained a track titled “Pretty Woman” based on Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman.” 2 Live Crew sampled the guitar, bass and drums from the original song without permission from Acuff-Rose Music which said the hip hop group’s unauthorized use of the song “devalued” the original and was considered copyright infringement. The case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1994, which ruled that any financial gain 2 Live Crew received from their version did not infringe upon Acuff-Rose Music because the two songs were targeted at very different audiences. 2 Live Crew’s use of copyrighted material was protected under the “fair use” doctrine—as a parody—even though it was released commercially.

James Brown by a wide margin is the most sampled musical artist. The website WhoSampled last year conducted a survey and found that the late “Godfather of Soul” outdistanced most artists (e.g., Public Enemy, Run DMC, The Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, Michael Jackson, et. al.) by more than 50 percent in terms of “who is sampling who?” Their database covers more than 200,000 songs. According to Rolling Stone: “[Brown’s] polyrhythmic funk vamps virtually reshaped dance music, and his impact on hip-hop, in particular, was huge; in the music’s early years, Brown was by far the most sampled artist.”

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