¿De quién es la melodía que estás cantando?

We ask ourselves

• If I take a piece of somebody else's record and put it in my song, is the song mine?
• Is copying the recording the same thing as playing the tune again?
• How can a two-and-a-half-minute song have eleven writers?
• When I recognise something in a new song, am I recognising it or being taught it?
• Can you steal a melody without noticing?
• If everything has been done already, what is left to do?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before playing any song all the way through, we sing. Twice, and with no instruments.

First, the class sings the chorus of Please Mr. Postman, The Marvelettes, 1961. Four long notes and a step down. Two run-throughs and it sticks.

Then, with that tune still warm, we sing the chorus of Feel It Still, 2017. Same line. The words are different, the chords underneath are different, the band is different, and the melody is the one from 1961.

Now the second fragment, and this one is whistled. The tune of Young Folks, Peter Bjorn and John, 2006: it fits inside one octave and moves to neighbouring notes. Anyone who cannot whistle in tune plays it on a recorder. Once it works, whistle the theme of I Ain't Worried, 2022. Same thing again.

That is the work done. Now both songs, all the way through, with nobody talking over them.

What changed

What you have just done — taking a piece of somebody's music and putting it somewhere else — is as old as music. What changed in the seventies is that people started doing it with recordings instead of scores.

On 11 August 1973, in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, a DJ called Kool Herc put two copies of the same record on two turntables. When the section arrived where the instruments drop out and only percussion is left — that is the break — he jumped to the second copy and played it again. Fifteen seconds became five minutes.

Nobody composed anything that night: a fragment was chosen and stretched. Choosing rather than inventing is the working method that runs all the way to here.

What changes in the ear is this: you start hearing two eras at once. A 1969 record keeps its hiss, its room and its way of sounding, and all of that travels whole into a song made now. It is not a quotation, it is the object itself. The smallest unit you build with stops being the note and becomes the piece of recording.

Once that fitted inside a machine, it got cheap. The E-mu SP-1200 arrived in 1987 with ten seconds of memory. The Akai MPC60 followed in December 1988, designed by Roger Linn, with thirteen seconds and a price of five thousand dollars. Thirteen seconds for a whole song forces you to choose the fragment very well. The photograph at the top shows the sixteen pads of one of those machines: one recorded fragment per square.

Here is the distinction this unit is named after. A sample means using the recording: the physical sound of the old record goes into the new song. An interpolation means playing the melody again: not one second of the old record is used, but the tune is the same one.

This is not a fine point, because a song has two separate owners. One owns the recording, usually the label. The other owns the composition — melody and lyrics — and that is the writers and their publisher. A sample needs permission from both. An interpolation needs it only from the second.

For a few years none of this was asked for. On 17 December 1991, a New York judge named Kevin Thomas Duffy decided Gilbert O'Sullivan's case against Biz Markie, who had used "Alone Again (Naturally)" without clearance. The ruling opens with three words: "Thou shalt not steal." From that day samples get negotiated before release, and replaying the melody becomes the cheap way out.

That is why both songs in this unit are interpolations and not samples. Nobody copied the Marvelettes' record for Feel It Still: John Gourley sang that melody from memory. Even so, three of the five 1961 writers — Robert Bateman, Freddie Gorman and Brian Holland — are among the ten names on the 2017 song.

I Ain't Worried works the same way: six writers, three of them the Swedes Peter Morén, Björn Yttling and John Eriksson, who never set foot in the studio.

My own view, and I will say it plainly: the credit list explains this better than any definition. It is a public statement of who has to be paid. If you want to know what one song took from another, don't read the encyclopedia entry — look at who gets the cheque.

Hard facts: the break stretched with two turntables, 1973. SP-1200, 1987, ten seconds. MPC60, December 1988, thirteen seconds, five thousand dollars. The 1991 ruling: samples get cleared before release. Feel It Still, 2017: ten writers, three of them from 1961. I Ain't Worried, 2022: six writers, three of them from 2006.

Foto: Motown/Tamla Records, James Kriegsmann (Nueva York), dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Foto: Davinic, CC BY-SA 3.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

The same device elsewhere

Reusing somebody else's material was not invented by hip hop, and it does not always need a machine. These three are worth hearing back to back:

• Uptown Funk (2015) — it contains both cases at once. It samples "All Gold Everything" by Trinidad James, cleared from the start. And in 2015, with the record already out and at the top of the charts, five more writers were added: the writers of the Gap Band's "Oops Up Side Your Head", 1979, because the chant is too close. Eleven writers in total. That song is in the library.

• The L'homme armé masses (15th and 16th centuries) — "L'homme armé" was a mid-fifteenth-century secular song anyone could sing. Composers put it inside the mass as a skeleton, in long notes, while the other voices moved around it. A borrowed melody used that way is called a cantus firmus. Over forty masses are known to be built on it, around thirty of them between 1450 and 1510, by Du Fay, Ockeghem, Josquin, Palestrina and the Spaniard Cristóbal de Morales. The same tune for two centuries, and nobody paid anyone.

• The Jamaican riddim — in Jamaica an instrumental backing is called a riddim, and it does not belong to one song: it belongs to every song built on top of it. In 1985 Wayne Smith recorded "Under Mi Sleng Teng" with producer King Jammy over a preset from a Casiotone MT-40 keyboard. More than five hundred different songs have been counted on that same backing. There it is not a legal exception, it is the normal way of working.

None is better than the others. All three do the same job: take something that already existed and build on top. The only thing that changes from case to case is who has to sign.

And here at home?

Late, and it is worth saying so. Hip hop is born in the Bronx in 1973; the first rap record released in Spain is a compilation called Madrid Hip Hop, from 1989. Sixteen years apart. Ariola put out another one the same year, Rapin' Madrid. Neither sold much, but between them they left a working scene in Madrid.

The record that actually founds Spanish rap arrives in 1994: Madrid Zona Bruta, by Club de los Poetas Violentos (CPV). It sold around two thousand copies, which at the time was a lot, and it turned a hobby into a job.

And in Zaragoza, in 1997, Violadores del Verso come together: Kase.O, Lírico and Sho-Hai on vocals, and R de Rumba — Rubén Cuevas — as DJ and producer. That fourth figure is the one this unit is about: the person who hunts down the records, picks the fragments and builds the tracks out of jazz and funk.

They release an EP in 1998, Genios in 1999, Vicios y Virtudes in 2001 and Vivir para contarlo in November 2006, mostly on the Zaragoza label Rap Solo.

The most interesting move comes later, and it runs this unit backwards. In 2011 Kase.O puts together Jazz Magnetism, a group with live musicians: Hugo Astudillo on saxophone, Juan Pablo Balcázar on bass, Dani Comas on guitar and Dani Domínguez on drums. Instead of lifting the jazz off a record, they play it. That is the step from sample to interpolation, made in Zaragoza, with no judge involved.

Classroom activities

• While Please Mr. Postman plays: half the class sings the chorus melody as it is, and the other half sings the Feel It Still words on top. At the same time, not one after the other. When it locks, nobody needs interpolation explained.

• While I Ain't Worried plays: everyone whistles the tune. The moment it ends, without stopping the music or discussing anything, put on Young Folks and keep whistling the same thing. Hands up at the exact point where it stops fitting.

• While Rapper's Delight plays: count how many times the bass pattern goes round before the first voice comes in. It is a loop played by people, not a record cued up twice.

• Play: we build Feel It Still with the band. The full-band chart and the tab are attached to its own article. Once it holds, sing the 1961 words over it and check that the band has to change nothing.

• Create: take a melody everybody knows and put different chords underneath it at a different tempo. That is an interpolation. Next to it, write the list of who would have to appear in your credits, and why.

Key vocabulary

• Break — el break: el trozo en que se callan casi todos los instrumentos y queda la percusión
• Sample — sample: un trozo de una grabación ajena usado dentro de una canción nueva
• Interpolation — interpolación: volver a tocar la melodía ajena en vez de copiar la grabación
• Cantus firmus — cantus firmus: melodía prestada, en notas largas, que sostiene una obra entera
• Riddim — riddim: en Jamaica, la base instrumental compartida por muchas canciones

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Feel It Still, I Ain't Worried.

The first song of the unit — Feel It Still, Portugal. The Man (2017). Its article, with the full-band chart and the tab, is in the library.

Where its melody comes from — Please Mr. Postman, The Marvelettes (1961).

The second song of the unit — I Ain't Worried, OneRepublic (2022). It also has its article in the library, with chart and tab.

Where its whistle comes from — Young Folks, Peter Bjorn and John (2006).

A backing played, not sampled — Rapper's Delight, Sugarhill Gang (1979). What you hear underneath is "Good Times" played again by session musicians.

The original — Good Times, Chic (1979). Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards ended up credited on the song above.

The borrowed melody of the fifteenth century — L'homme armé, by the Oxford Camerata. This is the tune that over forty masses come from.

The same melody inside a mass — Kyrie from Josquin's Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales, by The Tallis Scholars.

One backing for five hundred songs — Under Mi Sleng Teng, Wayne Smith (1985).

Jazz played instead of sampled — Kase.O Jazz Magnetism at The Furious Sessions. A note for the teacher: the lyrics are adult, so watch it first.

• More from this era — "1990s Grunge and Hip Hop", in the library.
• Both cases in one song — "Uptown Funk", Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars (2015), in the library.