As I prepare to teach various classes about ragtime (and its roots), I’ve returned to Dale Cockrell’s recent book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019). It’s a revelatory peek at the roots of popular music and dance in the public houses, dives, brothels, and concert saloons of New […]
As I prepare to teach various classes about ragtime (and its roots), I’ve returned to Dale Cockrell’s recent book, Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (Norton, 2019). It’s a revelatory peek at the roots of popular music and dance in the public houses, dives, brothels, and concert saloons of New York city — a demimonde that, demi or not, created a whole world of music, one which we still arguably inhabit. A world, it is important to acknowledge, forged on the backs of sex workers, as Cockrell begins with a sober acknowledgement: Dedicated to the untold thousands of women upon whose anonymous bodies an American music was built. We must never forget. That discomfiting fact is, of course, key to gaining perspective on the contexts for the kind of music making that would pave the way for the ragtime revolution. But as Cockrell notes, the music itself is frustratingly elusive. It’s a steady, implicit, sometimes even remarkable presence in the historical record, on the one hand, and a murky collection of distortions on the other. As Cockrell notes in the preface, the working-class people whose lives he is working to reconstruct “tended to live below … the horizon of record” — To many of these people, the spoken word weighed more than the written, for they were an oral lot. Narratives were vaporous, and of the moment. Then, too, it is in the very nature of documents and artifacts that they tend to be preserved in a ratio commensurate with the social standing of the subject; archives are seldom maintained for those of a low social class. In order to reconstruct the lives of the working-class actors in this book, I have often had to rely on the words of literate middle-class witnesses who, as a group, condescended to those beneath their place. It is likely that their biases are embedded in their accounts. Given that, one should be suspicious, as I have tried to be, of many of my sources’ historical accuracy. As a rule of thumb, disparaging views written by urban middle-class reporters about the urban hoi polloi should probably be dialed back a notch or two, sometimes even more. Still–and importantly–enough common ranting across a body of narratives likely indicates some underlying truth. (xii-xiii) Cockrell is thus faced with the challenging task of recovering a musical history that was obscured from the start. He attends, then, to “the contexts in which the music flourished and what they might suggest implicitly about the nature of music-making” (4). This interpretive act demands a certain degree of inference — If, for instance, the blood of dancers was said to be “on fire” and images from the time showed “high-kicking” female dancers and leering male dancers, and it was in the best interest of the musicians’ livelihood to keep the dancing at a high pitch, then the music was likely to be hot, energetic, tremendous fun, made-up, and open-ended enough in form to keep the dancers dancing. (4) For people “impoverished in material resources but rich in music,” Cockrell argues, The music provided them the freedom to imagine and express made-up ideas not bound by economic circumstance. From that came an improvised music that emphasized the offbeat accents between regimenting downbeats and prompted provocative dance moves that those who considered themselves respectable considered rude and wildly inappropriate. (ibid.) This is, of course, a story about class and race as much as sex. Cockrell suggests ways to re-imagine the broad outlines, and some specific stylistic details, of the music that drove all this dance and social life at a crucial time for the making of American popular music. In the spirit of continuing to imagine and recover what that soundtrack was, allow me to catalog other musical flashes and fragments that surface in Cockrell’s book. /// Estimating that by the 1860s the dance halls on Water Street would have provided “regular employment … for several hundred musicians,” Cockrell reconstructs the instrumentation of such “orchestras,” which included anywhere from 3-6 players: Fiddles, often described as “wheezy,” were the melodic instruments of choice in practically all. Nearly as common and more important for establishing and maintaining dance rhythms were tambourines. … A surprisingly large number of reports also placed a string bass in the dance band. The musicians were all practiced and skilled in setting the pace for the evening’s fun, with energetic rhythms feeding the joys of the dance, which was most commonly a Virginia reel…” (50) Again, according to middle- and upper-class observers– …the sounds made in these places [i.e., concert saloons] were manifestly not transcendently beautiful; they were rather–in some of their own words–out of tune, wheezing, hideous, wild, cracked, thumping, execrable, wailing, wiry, low, squalling, jangling, murdering, savage, and lunatic. (62) Between 1879-82, agents of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents listed a total of 86 song titles, “thus providing a useful cross section of the music heard in that day’s concert saloons and variety theaters”– They ranged from old ballads (“Sally in Our Alley”) and eighteenth-century patriotic songs (“Yankee Doodle,” “Hail Columbia”) to Scottish and Irish songs (“Scotch Lassie Jean,” “The Irish Fair”) and older popular songs (“Old Folks at Home,” “What Are the Wild Waves Saying”). But by far the majority of songs noted were the day’s most popular, with titles such as “Cradle’s Empty, Baby’s Gone” (1880), “De Golden Wedding” (1880), “Little Log Cabin in the Lane” (1871), “The Mulligan Guard Picnic” (1878), “Silver Threads Among the Gold” (1873), “A Violet from Mother’s Grave” (1881), and “When the Robins Next Again” (1883). Many popular songs heard in concert saloons were undoubtedly performed as published… But published songs could also be reshaped to fit the situation. Concert saloons had pianos, but musicians also played violins, cornets, French horns, banjos, tambourines, bones, guitars, and more. With such rich musical resources available, songs must often have been “arranged” or, perhaps more accurately, improvised–made up on the spot and never written down. In fact, the urge toward ad-hoc music-making is a long-standing and salient characteristic of American popular music performance. (79-80) Notably, Cockrell documents the rise of ragtime and one key context for its emergence (and denunciation among middle-class moralists): gay dive bars, known as “slides,” that catered to gay men and women. Testifying to a committee investigating police links to brothels and saloons, one witness drew a clear connection between ragtime music and dance and “gay New York,” reporting that: They danced the rag time there. By the rag time I mean a decidedly immoral dance. That is one of the evils of this thing. You will find the word “rag time” used in high social circles. The people do not know what it means. They do not know where it emanated from. If they did they would blush for shame. (123) This opposition to ragtime and insistence on its original contexts helps us to remember that Although ragtime has come to be thought of as a piano-based concert music, at the start people expected to dance to its intoxicating rhythms–called “negro dance time” by one reviewer. Ragtime dancing quickly supplanted the cancan as the most sensuous and lascivious dance in New York. As a black American dance form much loved and practiced by gay New Yorkers–not white, European, and straight, like the cancan–it was a target for the authorities on both counts. Indeed, the president of New York’s Police Board (Theodore Roosevelt’s old position) was unequivocal–“‘rag-time’ dancing in public halls is to be stopped.” That did not happen. Instead, ragtime dancing grew into such a phenomenon that it became not a single dance, but descriptive of a whole style of dancing. Virtually any moves to syncopated dance music qualified as ragtime dancing, a dance fashion that would last for two decades. The phrase itself, though, had a short life and was soon supplanted by “tough dancing,” which better described the wide variety of new moves and steps. (125) Cockrell describes the shift in attitudes heralded by ragtime as such an “acute” articulation that “New Yorkers would inevitably perceive their lives, music, dances, and bodies in new, fundamentally different ways”– In dance, before the 1890s most legitimate styles had prescribed steps, moves, and ways of holding partners; afterward, there would be a wide variety of imaginative tough dances, with moves borrowed from the waltz, the polka, the cancan, clogging, jigging, the cakewalk, and others, and put to vastly different effect. And in American popular music, while syncopation had been a feature for decades, highly exaggerated, ragged rhythms now made for a new music that was vibrant, palpably alive, deeply exciting, and soon to be ubiquitous. The Age of Ragtime had begun. (127) To place this in greater historical perspective, Cockrell notes that Few, if any, decades in the history of American dance featured a wider array of wildly provocative dances than the 1910s. … Most all of the dances featured bodies jammed up close to each other–“hollow to hollow,” as Stockdale liked to report. … What the investigators witnessed were moments in an especially dynamic time when young people from a wide range of ethnicities were hearing flashy, invigorating, and heavily syncopated ragtime rhythms and moving their bodies to the music in fresh, sexy, uninhibited ways. (166-7) Because the committee reports of such investigators “are rich in particulars on dancing, but … no better than earlier [reports] at providing useful details on music making,” Cockrell contends that we might indulge a little synaesthesia and try to hear the music as we read about the dance: To a dancer, the music is interpreted in the dance; bodily movements are performances of the aural experiences of the the music. In an important way, dance is music made manifest. To a musician, the way the dancers move prompts the way the music is made; playing is in some part an expression of seeing. So, concomitantly, music is dance made manifest. Reading about dancing in the reports and visualizing what it was like is a form of synesthetically hearing the music-making over in the dark corner. If the agents thought the dancing “vulgar,” “indecent,” “suggestive,” “disgraceful,” or “utterly and superlatively rotten,” they probably also thought the music “wild,” “alleged,” and “discordant”–and often called it just that. (168) At the same time, because they could see the instruments, agents’ reports offer more particulars on that count: They chronicled pianos, violins and fiddles, guitars, banjos, harmonicas, a zither … , accordions, harps, drums … An “orchestra” might minimally consist of a piano and a violin/fiddle or, less frequently, a piano and a percussion instrument–drums of various sorts, bones, clappers, a trap set, “anything to make a big noise,” in Stockdale’s phrasing. Other frequently mentioned ensemble combinations were piano and guitar, piano and banjo, guitar and banjo, and piano and harp. Four-piece orchestras typically consisted of piano, drums, and two violins/fiddles. Just about whoever was around with whatever instrument was handy seems to be at the heart of the story here. (168) Ultimately, Cockrell sets the stage for understanding social, cultural, and economic shifts signaled by the Jazz Age, as well as the links between jazz and the musical styles that preceded it in New York city– The explosive arrival of jazz in New York has generally been ascribed to developments in the recording industry and to the arrival in the city of “Great Migration” black musicians. A more immediate explanation would take note of the legions of black and white musicians long in New York. Already practiced in an energetic, syncopated dance music–ragtime–they had lost easy access to a secure, demimonde musical economy and so necessarily moved into a new and insecure public economy. There they naturally played for dancing, music-loving patrons the noisy music they had long known how to make, but now inflected by a closely related, jazzy new idiom. (197) I’ll finish with Cockrell’s summary of the shape of jazz to come, following the shuttering of the tenderloin districts that, in 1910, were estimated to employ as many as “one in three professional, full-time male musicians” (202). By 1920, Musicians who managed to retool and rise to the challenges of a new world shaped by new social expectations did so in a vastly different musical environment than ten years before. A typical tenderloin dance band in 1910 was two to four musicians, suitable for the smaller concert saloons, dance halls, and dives, many unlicensed, that hoped to avoid wide public scrutiny while maintaining their patronage, which was often multiracial. By the 1930s, combos would feature five to seven musicians and big bands were even larger, better numbers for the grand restaurants, theaters, and nightclubs that sought wide public attention, places like the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club, where the performers were black and the audiences white. Music as an intimate, backroom, black-and-tan experience was in rapid decline; music as a public, big-space, segregated experience was in high ascendence. This was a track that would have broad ramifications for subsequent developments in American popular music and its consumption. (202) I find all of this perspective deeply useful as I try to re-imagine the trajectory of American popular music every semester, working always to better flesh out the picture for students and for myself. I’m deeply appreciative of the careful, archival work Cockrell is doing here, and I couldn’t recommend this fascinating book more highly. Elusive as the music remains in the fragmented, biased historical record that Cockrell deftly interprets, I also find myself rather inspired to think about what this raucous pre-ragtime dance music really sounded like. While there’s no way to ever truly recover it, I wonder how a “cover band” devoted to this “repertory” might approach it. I’ve got a string bass here at home; let me know if you’d like play fiddle or tambourine and make some “alleged” music together!
Ragtime Country / American Clave, A Mini-Essay and Mega-Mix
It all started when I tried to learn to play Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag on the piano. I never really got past the first couple of bars. Instead, I just found myself banging out this particular rhythm with my right hand. Loving such collections of 3s and 2s, I started counting along: 1-2, 1-2-3, […]
It all started when I tried to learn to play Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag on the piano. I never really got past the first couple of bars. Instead, I just found myself banging out this particular rhythm with my right hand. Loving such collections of 3s and 2s, I started counting along: 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2. This particular configuration (2+3+3+3+3+2) had never really leapt out at me, but once it did, I couldn’t stop hearing it. There it was in the horn line of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” and in Scotty Moore’s guitar licks on Elvis Presley’s version of “Mystery Train”; and there again, rearing its head in countless disco songs, in bluegrass jams and “American primitive” guitar riffs, in Louis Armstrong solos, in house and techno, and even in rap cadences by 50 Cent, Kendrick, and Eminem. It seemed like there was a story here. But I wasn’t quite sure what sort of claims I could make. Over the last 5 years, I collected dozens and then hundreds of examples, and I consulted all the musical experts I could: finger-picking guitarists and erudite scholars of American pop, Brazilianists and Cubanists, old time fiddlers and Ghanaian master drummers. In the end, the story seemed to get more legitimately remarkable. I couldn’t find many examples outside of the United States — a rare thing for a rhythm so clearly Afrodiasporic in character — and I couldn’t find any examples that pre-date the ragtime era. Indeed, the earliest example I could find was, for better and for worse, Ernest Hogan’s 1896 bestseller, “All Coons Look Alike to Me” — one of the first ragtime numbers to appear on sheet music and the inaugural “coon song,” an up-to-date extension of blackface minstrelsy that would dominate Tin Pan Alley for the next 15 years. Indeed, it turns out that for some, such as black vaudevillian Tom Fletcher, author of 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (1954), ragtime itself — and all that flowed from it — was inextricable from this particular rhythm (sometimes referred to as “secondary ragtime,” though that seems like a misnomer), and in Fletcher’s determination, all of that stretched right back to Hogan: True, ragtime has been played in many different styles since it was first brought out, automobiles have also been made in many different styles since they were invented, and they are still automobiles. So whether you call it swing, jump, boogie woogie, syncopation, jazz, or what have you, it is still ragtime, and it is the rhythm that was discovered and introduced by Ernest Hogan in “All Coons Look Alike To Me,” copyrighted and published by Witmark and Sons in New York City in 1896. The up-to-date-ness and blackness of this rhythm was part of its initial — and I would argue, its ongoing — allure, and yet the more I listened for it, the more I heard it carrying the opposite meaning on the other side of the “color line”: as a familiar figure evoking “old time” music, the putatively “white” “country” traditions that record companies first started marketing as such (despite their cross-racial heritage) beginning in the 1920s. After several years of tracking the rhythm and working to assess the kind of claims I could make about it, I was finally inspired to bring it into public shape when I saw a call-for-papers for a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies devoted to the untold stories of country music. The story of this rhythm, which I had begun calling “American clave” (again, for better or for worse), seemed like a great candidate. I was thrilled when the editors deemed my proposal worthy of inclusion, and that they shared my excitement about submitting the piece as a mini-essay and mega-mix. I needn’t say more about it at this point, as I’ve already said more than enough in the mini-essay, the accompanying blog-post, and in the mega-mix itself (see the last link for audio and video versions of the mix and several “breakout” mini-mixes), which, I hope, says a lot of things that I can’t say myself — i.e., it lets all these recording artists “say” it themselves, together, in their own times and places and in their own revealing ways. This feels like a real culmination of my adventures in technomusicology over the last decade, and I’m so excited to finally get it out there. Thanks, always, for listening along.
Sound System Outernational #6: Virtual Edition
It’s a strange time to do anything other than shelter in place or get out in the streets, but I’m looking forward to next week’s virtual gathering for Sound System Outernational #6, a conference and set of performances which I will help to kick off with an opening plenary next Tuesday, June 9. I’m grateful […]
It’s a strange time to do anything other than shelter in place or get out in the streets, but I’m looking forward to next week’s virtual gathering for Sound System Outernational #6, a conference and set of performances which I will help to kick off with an opening plenary next Tuesday, June 9. I’m grateful to Julian Henriques, David Katz, Leonardo Vidigal, and other organizers for inviting me and pushing ahead with the event despite the disruptions of COVID-19. Originally, we were supposed to gather together this April in São Luís do Maranhão, and I’m very sorry that we couldn’t do so after all. As recounted by David Katz in a piece for Afropop Worldwide, São Luís is renowned for its vibrant and distinctive reggae / soundsystem culture, and I was excited to experience it for my own ears. That will have to wait for another moment, but the organizers have put together an interesting program, and I hope that the virtuality of the event means that even more people around the world might be able to join us. My plenary is titled “Sounds of Affiliation: Records from Foreign and Diasporic Belonging,” and I will use the opportunity to discuss the remarkable ways that Jamaica’s soundsystem culture — originally devoted to playing imported sounds from the US — has been replicated elsewhere across the diaspora and localized in wonderful ways. Other presentations in the program will help to flesh out some of these pictures, whether in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Baranquilla, NYC, London, or elsewhere. You can find the full program here, which is also where you can sign up to be a part of the event. Be sure to send your email to soundsystemouternational@gmail.com by June 8 in order to be included in the Zoom invite. Hope to “see” you there — and to gather together in São Luís in person someday.
I first worked with Todd Burns back in 2013 when he commissioned me to write a “loop history” of one of my fave loops of all time: dembow. Of course, RBMA is no more, nor are various other outlets for music writers. In the light of this changing and precarious landscape, Todd has been devoting […]
I first worked with Todd Burns back in 2013 when he commissioned me to write a “loop history” of one of my fave loops of all time: dembow. Of course, RBMA is no more, nor are various other outlets for music writers. In the light of this changing and precarious landscape, Todd has been devoting a lot of attention and space to the craft — and the plight — of music writing today via his newsletter, Music Journalism Insider. He has also been trying to incorporate more academic voices, including those of us who walk the line between music studies and music journalism. In that context, Todd reached out to interview me about my recent article on Fortnite dances, race and gender, and appropriation. The interview is now only available to subscribers, but Todd gave me permission to post it here after its initial public run. Here it is– Wayne Marshall Interview Todd L. Burns I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more. On Wayne Marshall’s website, it says “Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist by training, a technomusicologist by calling, and an erstwhile blogger/DJ.” That seems to do as quick a job as any in describing the many hats that Wayne has worn over the years. For this interview, I wanted to talk to the academic Wayne, specifically the one that penned an article last year entitled “Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media: Fortnite, Online Video, and the Jook at a Virtual Crossroads.” Can you please briefly describe yourself and what you do? These days I often just say I teach music history. At times, I might reach for musicologist, but I’m also proud of my training as an ethnomusicologist and my work as a self-proclaimed “technomusicologist” who shares research in the form of musical media like mashups or mixes. For the last five years, I’ve hung my hat at Berklee College of Music, where I teach courses on the histories of American music and dance. What about this area of study is so interesting to you? I’m mostly interested in what we might call American popular musics, interpreting all of those terms pretty broadly. Popular music contains so many rich, revealing stories about our cultural and social histories, and listening “historically” can help us understand how we produce, interpret, and use music in our contemporary lives. From questions of social and economic organization to the ways that aesthetics implicate social priorities and cultural values, it’s all quite fascinating. Whether we’re talking reggae or ragtime, there is a ton of edifying scholarship—and good journalism—to grapple with, not to mention primary sources like recordings. Given the interdisciplinary character of such a subject as American popular music, I find it intellectually inexhaustible. Can you briefly summarize your article? The article attempts to place our present social media “dance craze” into historical perspective, comparing it to previous historical moments when vast numbers of Americans found themselves caught up in a kind of collective choreography. There are strong parallels between the spread of moves like the Milly Rock (or the Swipe, in Fortnite’s rebranding) to the rise of such dances as the Twist in the 1960s via shows like American Bandstand, or the ragtime-era animal dances that scandalized society balls in the 1910s (until tamed into the likes of the Foxtrot). But while these previous crazes have often been represented as transgressing established codes around race, gender, and class, I argue that the TikTok / Fortnite-era craze seems less easily celebrated: not only is there intense corporate enclosure and exploitation, including classic questions of racial injustice, the dances themselves, despite being drawn from vibrant social dance scenes, seem often to be put to anti-social uses on the internet and even IRL. How did you first find out about the subject / realize it was something you wanted to pursue? As someone who has long written and taught about DJ cultures, I decided that I needed to focus more on the role of dance in these scenes—a totally critical, central dimension and yet one that doesn’t receive nearly as much attention as, say, what DJs are doing. The ways people dance—and the ways that other people try to police such dancing—reveal longstanding and ongoing struggles around race, class, gender, age, and social order. I’ve been teaching a class at Berklee on “DJ Cultures and American Social Dance,” which has helped me gain a perspective on such things as “dance crazes” and their relationship to new media. Even though a lot of dance craze scholarship focuses on the 1910s or the 1960s, in the class we found ourselves frequently making connections to dance in the age of YouTube, Vine, TikTok, and Fortnite. What was the most surprising thing that you found in your research? Having initially thought of the Fortnite phenomenon as a mostly positive one, in which all kinds of people found themselves willing to shake a tailfeather in public, the most surprising thing I learned in my research—and I credit Brian Friedberg at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center with alerting me to this dimension and helping me think through it—is that at the same time these dances were being put to more innocent uses, they were also being deployed, especially online, as tools of cyberbullying and cringey shitposting in the service of reactionary, chauvinist, and supremacist political ideologies. This was rather stunning to me at first, and it seemed to connect with what may be a special affordance of the online mediation of this current “craze”: i.e., one can “participate” without being in the real-space presence of peers (and the forms of social sanction that may come with them). Where would you like to see more research done around this topic? I think it’s happening, both in journalism and in scholarship, especially with regard to TikTok and discussion of what Lauren Michelle Jackson has called “digital blackface.” There remains a lot of work to do on this question as it becomes a more and more pervasive part of online culture. I spoke recently about the phenomenon with a journalist Tatiana Walk-Morris, who also consulted my colleague Kyra Gaunt (who is doing some necessary, critical work in this sphere). In the wake of the Renegade dance and attempts to acknowledge and reward its creator, 14-year-old Jalaiah Harmon, for her “viral” creativity, it’s been fascinating to watch how something as seemingly “unimportant” as an internet-mediated dance craze could become a lightning rod for the contemporary conversation about race, ownership, appropriation, and exploitation. In that regard, I only scratch the surface of the copyright question in my article, and there’s much more to be said along those lines too: who gets to own/exploit a “social” dance that is, by definition, more of a collective product than an individual’s invention? By creating a commodity with their “emotes,” Fortnite has capitalized on such moves in a way that no single creator or choreographer ever could; likewise, white TikTok “influencers” enjoy far more power to exploit such forms than their black peers. Can you point us to any further research on the topic that you think is relevant? The phenomenon is so new that there’s still relatively little written about it, especially by scholars. Check my bibliography from the article, of course, for some leads. But I would certainly recommend Kyra Gaunt’s 2015 essay, “YouTube, Twerking, and You: Context Collapse and the Handheld Co-Presence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus” in the Journal of Popular Music Studies (vol. 27, no. 3: 244-73). If you look at my list of works cited, you’ll also see that I lean heavily on a volume called Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig (Univ of Illinois Press, 2009). It doesn’t quite get into the 21st century, but it offers invaluable perspective on other moments in social dance history. I’ve been using it as a textbook in my class. What sort of music should we check out to get a better sense of the topic? The funny thing is, the music is not the most important dimension of the phenomenon in this case. People do these moves to a wide variety of genres, though of course many of the moves are associated with Atlanta style rap music—and even particular songs—and many dancers (especially influential inventors of new moves) make use of that style’s architecture to hit a trademark gesture on the 4th beat of each measure. Of course, as these moves are popularized and decontextualized, they lose a lot of connection to that specific dance culture. There have been a couple great journalistic pieces written about this aesthetic, one by Rembert Browne for Grantland and one by David Turner for MTV.
Pitchfork’s Sunday Review is a weekly forum where writers revisit a “significant album from the past” that has not been reviewed at Pitchfork before. As someone who really enjoys reading these deep dives, it was a thrill to be invited to contribute one of my own — and one that focused on a classic reggae […]
Pitchfork’s Sunday Review is a weekly forum where writers revisit a “significant album from the past” that has not been reviewed at Pitchfork before. As someone who really enjoys reading these deep dives, it was a thrill to be invited to contribute one of my own — and one that focused on a classic reggae album. While reggae has generally been — and remains — a singles-driven genre, there are plenty of great albums to consider, whether from roots reggae’s heyday, decades of mesmerizing dub sets, or (soundboy) killer efforts from throughout the dancehall era. My editor suggested Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston, one of reggae’s first albums to hit as a worldwide sensation, and a wonderful vehicle for exploring what it meant to make reggae — and to make reggae for an international audience — at the moment the genre was beginning to crest in popularity. I’ll leave you with the opening below, but go ahead and read the whole thing over here. /// After a shuffling drum intro, a steady groove invites us to let down our guards and open our ears. With another drum roll, the band pivots to the “one-drop,” Jamaica’s reigning rhythm since the ska days. The kick drum and rimshot anchor the backbeat, often emphasized by an organ stab, while the bass moves a simple, sinuous pattern and the rhythm guitar chops chords between each beat. To heighten our appreciation of this interlocking ensemble texture, the instruments are panned across the stereo field, the lead guitar plucking a lightly bluesy, bubbling counterpoint across the room from the steady offbeat skank. Centered in the mix, Frederick “Toots” Hibbert begins to preach in terms downhome and direct, in a Jamaican country brogue plain enough for all to understand. Sleep won’t come. The rent is too high. Your brother can’t find a dollar, and neither can I. Time tough. In a sly inversion of hip slang, everything is out of sight, but not in a good way—life is so hard even the basics seem out of reach. Today is judgment day, so let us pray and all join in a rising refrain of higher and higher. But this isn’t about spiritual transcendence or ganja-fueled meditation. What’s getting higher is the cost of living. It’s 1974, and the future is unclear. Yet somehow this group playing secular church music in rubbery sync, with chapel-ready backup harmonies and a lead singer in the throes of ecstasy, lift the song itself up to show that deliverance is possible if we band together. “Time Tough” immediately frames Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston as a wry testament to the shared circumstances of the black and working-class masses. It registers the depth of struggle, while offering grounds for celebrating the ways life can and does go on. As its title reveals, the album courted an international audience by nodding to what was then the latest form of black musical currency, a suggestion Toots received from Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, who was impressed by the unlikely crossover success of “Funky Nassau” (1971) by Bahamas-based band The Beginning of the End. Funky was a style Jamaican artists like Toots were proud to pull off with unique swagger. Read the rest…
Next week I’ll help kick off a 3-day “spatial sound” festival at MIT’s Black Box theater as one of about 20 acts diffusing sound/music through a 360-degree soundsystem powered by d&b audio. (My own set will probably be from ~9-9:30pm on Wednesday, Feb 19.) No doubt the performances will run the gamut as far as […]
Next week I’ll help kick off a 3-day “spatial sound” festival at MIT’s Black Box theater as one of about 20 acts diffusing sound/music through a 360-degree soundsystem powered by d&b audio. (My own set will probably be from ~9-9:30pm on Wednesday, Feb 19.) No doubt the performances will run the gamut as far as shapes and styles, and part of the aim is to explore as many ways of using spatial sound as we can. For my part, I’m eager to investigate the affordances for listening to simultaneous versions and renditions. In other words, I’ll be playing some spatialized (s)mashups of alternate takes, cover songs, and riddim jugglings, hoping that by spreading them out we can better attend to their similarities and differences. Imagine listening to Ella in one corner, Billie in another, and Satchmo in a third as they all sing their way through the same song. Or hearing Charlie Parker duet with himself over the same changes, three years apart and across the room. What about 6 different voicings on the same dancehall riddim at the same time? If I play my Louis Dembow Gottschalk mix with the piano on one side of the room and the dembow on the other, will different listeners find their sweet spot? Can I expand a Venn diagram of taste … with space? We shall see! (& hear!)
Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media
A few years ago I started teaching a class at Berklee called “DJ Cultures and American Social Dance.” We survey the history of social dance across the Americas, with particular attention to the era of DJing, but we try to place that cultural turn within the long-view of how dance has functioned in different societies, […]
A few years ago I started teaching a class at Berklee called “DJ Cultures and American Social Dance.” We survey the history of social dance across the Americas, with particular attention to the era of DJing, but we try to place that cultural turn within the long-view of how dance has functioned in different societies, from the US to Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, and Brazil. Teaching the course has helped me to cultivate a perspective on social dance history (and race and gender and class), which has spilled into my other classes and lectures, and I’m especially excited that it has also begun to inform my research. Last spring when the Journal of Popular Music Studies put out a call for someone to write about dance in the age of Fortnite, I jumped at the chance. It’s a topic we had been discussing in class and presented set of questions I found myself increasingly drawn into, especially vis-a-vis the longer history of dance, race and gender, transgression and appropriation. It seemed to me that the Fortnite dance phenomenon was, in some ways, a lot like previous dance crazes abetted by emergent media (whether instructional pamphlets, short film reels, network television, MTV, YouTube, Vine, etc.). As I discovered writing the article, however, there are other ways in which it seems fairly different in character. In December, I published the essay in the JPMS, which you can find here (as well as here): Wayne Marshall, “Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media: Fortnite, Online Video, and the Jook at a Virtual Crossroads.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 31, no. 4 (2019): 3-15. [PDF] While Fortnite seems less a part of the conversation these days, in just the short time since it was published, the predicament of (black) social dance on (anti-)social media has become a hot button topic — on social media (see e.g. or e.g.) and more traditional media. I spoke with journalist Tatiana Walk-Morris, who found me via the JPMS article (!), for an article on the subject published last week: Wayne Marshall, assistant professor at Berklee College of Music, says white users posting #CripWalk videos may not come off as explicitly anti-Black, but there is a bigger question around cultural appropriation that needs to be addressed. “It’s often been sort of a mark of white American modernity to be able to walk right up to that line, maybe touch that line, maybe cross that line but have the power to enjoy the play with that line,” Marshall says. “Part of it is just a really long-standing problem that’s only going to continue if we still have that power differential here in the cultural and economic space.” Just a day later, the NYT published a piece examining how some young black creators are being “robbed” on TikTok similar to the ways they were being “robbed” by Fortnite: To be robbed of credit on TikTok is to be robbed of real opportunities. In 2020, virality means income: Creators of popular dances, like the Backpack Kid or Shiggy, often amass large online followings and become influencers themselves. That, in turn, opens the door to brand deals, media opportunities and, most important for Jalaiah, introductions to those in the professional dance and choreography community. Obtaining credit isn’t easy, though. As the writer Rebecca Jennings noted in Vox in an article about the online dance world’s thorny ethics: “Dances are virtually impossible to legally claim as one’s own.” But in this case, unlike many of the contested Fortnite dances, given that it’s a relatively long sequence of moves, I would say that Jalaiah would be within her rights to copyright the Renegade routine as choreography (one of the rare “protected” forms of dance, as I explore in the article, in part because of its “legibility” as art). Either way, it’s great that Jalaiah is both getting this level of attention in the media and more direct forms of credit — and promotion — on social media. So much to tease out and sort out, and clearly the conversation will continue. Here’s hoping my article might provide a little anchor for those who’d care to wade into such waters.
I started contributing to Pitchfork last year, and I just want to flag the reviews here. (You’ll also find them collected at the Journalism & Criticism page.) I meant to do so sooner, but my WordPress had gotten pretty gnarly over the last couple years. Anyway, back in business! So far, I’ve only reviewed reggae […]
I started contributing to Pitchfork last year, and I just want to flag the reviews here. (You’ll also find them collected at the Journalism & Criticism page.) I meant to do so sooner, but my WordPress had gotten pretty gnarly over the last couple years. Anyway, back in business! So far, I’ve only reviewed reggae releases. I guess that’s my lane, though I hope to expand my remit this year. All three of these are definitely worth your time (the releases, if not the reviews); the VP set is a treasury — https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/equiknoxx-eternal-children/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/i-jahbar-and-friends-inna-duppy-skrs-soundclash/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-down-in-jamaica-40-years-of-vp-records/ This was a fave tune of 2019 for sure, great vid too–
MIT’s Stefan Helmreich and I have collaborated on a mega-mix of music that evokes or otherwise represents ocean waves. Building on Stefan’s anthropological work with ocean scientists and my ideas about telling musical stories musically, this mix carefully stitches together 70 pieces in a 3 movement, 44 minute montage. The pieces were composed between 1830-2018 […]
MIT’s Stefan Helmreich and I have collaborated on a mega-mix of music that evokes or otherwise represents ocean waves. Building on Stefan’s anthropological work with ocean scientists and my ideas about telling musical stories musically, this mix carefully stitches together 70 pieces in a 3 movement, 44 minute montage. The pieces were composed between 1830-2018 and range across a wide number of genres and approaches — classical, romantic, modernist, minimalist, electronic and experimental, not to mention surf rock, reggae, bossa nova, jazz, and techno. We’re pleased to have the mix published via The Wire as a Wire Mix, and I’m grateful to Stefan for putting together a video — see below — which tracks and traces the appearances and layering of each piece in the mix (including full credits) as well as for taking the lead on the brief, evocative essay that accompanies the video (reprinted below, with tracklist). It’s been a wonderful collaboration, over a year in the making — and, no doubt, the most intricate mega-mix I’ve ever worked on — and we’re thrilled to share it with the world and to see what sort of waves the mix itself makes. Thanks, always, for listening along. Here’s an MP3 (100mb, 44min) if you’d prefer to listen “offline,” whatever that means these days. WAVE COUNT is a montage, in serial and parallel, of mostly instrumental musical pieces meant by their composers to evoke or represent the sense and sound of ocean waves. Selections range from the years 1830 to 2018 and include classical, modernist, electronic, and experimental compositions, with pieces drawn primarily, though not exclusively, from traditions in European art music, American avant-garde composition, Afrodiasporic musics, and Japanese experimental work. The sequence rolls out common and uncommon wave-inspired phrases, turns, and arrangements — cataloging and connecting recurring formal musical motifs (or “topics”) as well as the more acoustic, sonic, timbral, and onomatopoetic qualities that have come to texture compositional representations of waves.[1] The montage charts shifts across three loose epochal moments. Movement 1: Species of the Sublime, begins with Romantic composers’ attempts formally and texturally to represent the timbre and sublimely relentless arrival of ocean waves (and see Kieffer 2015), spooling out instances that suggest storms, martial enterprise, dreams of maritime glory, and fears of drowning, outlining the multiple meanings of the sea as a space of reverie, fantasy, memory, violence. Movement 2: Electricity and Experiment, charts more abstracted mid-to-late 20th century electronic-music emphases on the periodic, spectral, or mathematical quality of ocean waves, tracking compositions that treat waves as abstractions that might be lifted out of the water and given a parallel life in, say, synthesizer reproductions.[2] Movement 3: Thalassocene, maps early 21st century trends to revisit and repurpose canonical wave motifs, but also registers how, with the rise of sound art and compositions based on empirical field recording and sonified data, waves have been pressed to get “back in the water.” In such compositions, listeners might almost be hearing the sound of waves with no human presence around to hear them — underscoring a concern with today’s ecological disasters and with a post-Anthropocene time to come, where waves wash over history and relic buoys send signals to no one. Ocean waves — stormy, sublime, frightening, regular, rippling, underwater — manifest across the montage as untamed wildness, as meditative nature, as forces of foreboding, as abstract inspiration, and as harbingers of a world in the wake of death. At every moment, waves are represented or audited through conventions of listening; the splash, hiss, surge, and more are not mere facts of waves, but implicate shifting and varied cultural modes of hearing, experiencing, and thinking about the music, sound, and noise of waves. by Stefan Helmreich and Wayne Marshall, version of May 2019 Full discography with credits to performers and record labels at end. Notes 1. Sometimes composers have mobilized musical icons: signs (and groups of signs) that they imagine to have some likeness to the way ocean waves sound or appear (think of arrangements of notes, chords, or rhythms — or of the timbre of specific instruments). At other moments, they have worked through indices: signs composers take to have a causal or existential relation to the waves they represent (think of field recordings of waves or of captures of frequency spectra of a crashing wave). At still other moments, composers have approached the matter through symbols: signs that stand for their object by convention (think of military march music to represent dynamics of disciplined, steady succession). Often enough, they have done all at once, rendering the distinction between those key semiotic terms — icon, index, and symbol — blurry, awash in overlaps and confusion. See Schweitzer 1911 on a “wave motive” (76) in Bach’s cantata, Siehe, ich will viel Fiscer aussenden (No 88). And see also Monelle 2000, which argues that “the commonest musical icons — portrayals of waves, clouds, storms, horses — are not at all ‘pure,’ but are dependent upon well-known conventions” (77), underscoring the porosity of musical icon, index, and symbol. 2. We are prompted to this recognition by the pathbreaking writings of electronic musician Tara Rodgers (2011), who has examined how sound waves have been given biographies — “lives” — in electronic composition. References Kieffer, Alexandra. 2015. “The Debussyist Ear: Listening, Representation, and French Musical Modernism.” 19th-Century Music 39(1): 56-79. Monelle, Raymond. 2000. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rodgers, Tara. 2011. “‘What, for Me, Constitutes Life in a Sound?’: Electronic Sounds as Lively and Differentiated Individuals.” American Quarterly 63 (3): 509–530. Schweitzer, Albert. 1911. J.S. Bach, Volume II. London: Breitkopf and Härtel. Acknowledgments Thanks to Ian Condry, Walker Downey, Raviv Ganchrow, Marta Gentilucci, Josh Levine, Keeril Makan, David Novak, Emily Richmond Pollock, Tara Rodgers, Nika Son, and Evan Ziporyn. First Movement: Species Of The Sublime Johann Sebastian Bach Preise Dein Glücke, Gesegnetes Sachsen, BWV 215 (1734) Felix Mendelssohn Hebrides Overture, Op 26, Fingal’s Cave (1830) Camille Saint-Saëns Prelude To Le Déluge, Op 45 (1875) Richard Wagner Das Rheingold, Prelude And Scene 1: Das Rheingold: Scene I: In The Depths Of The Rhein: Weia! Waga! Woge Du Welle (1869) Edvard Grieg 12 Melodies, Op 33 (Arranged For Piano), III Du Fatter Ej Bolgernes Evige Gang (You Cannot Grasp The Wave’s Eternal Course) (1873–80) Giuseppe Verdi Otello, Act 1: Una Vela! (1887) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov By The Sea, Op 46, No 1 The Wave Breaks Into Spray (1897) Wilhelm Peterson-Berger Frösöblomster (Frösö-Flowers), Book 2: No 5 Vagor Mot Stranden (Waves Against The Shore) (1896–1914) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov By The Sea, Op 46, No 5 The Waves Rise Up Like Mountains (1897) J?zeps V?tols Song Of The Waves, Op 41, No 2 (1910) Iosif Ivanovici The Waves Of The Danube (1880) Juventino Rosas Sobre Las Olas (Over The Waves) (1888) Claude Debussy Jeux De Vagues (La Mer, L 109, No 2) (1903–05) María Grever A Una Ola (1903) Ethel Smyth The Wreckers, Overture (1902–04) Ralph Vaughan Williams Symphony No 1, A Sea Symphony: III Scherzo: The Waves (1903–10) Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Meg Blane, Rhapsody Of The Sea, Op 48 (1902) Max Reger 4 Tondichtungen Nach Arnold Böcklin, Op 128, No 2 Im Spiel Der Wellen (Waves At Play) (1913) Béla Bartók The Wooden Prince: Dance Of The Waves (1914–16) Jean Sibelius 2 Schybergson Songs, JS 224: No 2, Brusande Rusar En Våg (The Roaring Of A Wave) (1918) Rued Langgaard Music Of The Spheres, BVN 128: IV Like The Refraction Of Sunbeams In The Waves (1919) Ernest Bloch Poems Of The Sea: I Waves (1922) Henning Mankell 3 Preludes, Op 56 No 1 Waves (1923) Jean Sibelius Tempest, Op 109, Overture: The Ship Sinks Beneath The Waves (1925–26) Heitor Villa-Lobos Seventh Symphony, Odisséia Da Paz (A Peace Odyssey) (1945) Fletcher Henderson Tidal Wave (1934) Nikos Skalkottas Island Images, III Sea Waves (1943) Margaret Bonds Troubled Water (1952–67) Second Movement: Electricity And Experiment Vladimir Ussachevsky Underwater Waltz (1951) Benjamin Britten Peter Grimes, Op 33, Glitter Of Waves (1944) Xenakis Polla Ta Dhina For Children’s Choir & Orchestra (1962) Guo Tai Gong On The Docks – Beijing Opera Symphonic Suite: A Single Stone Has Stirred Up Innumerable Waves (1964–65) Dick Dale Tidal Wave (1964) The Upsetter Tidal Wave (1969) Yoko Ono Don’t Stop The Waves (1971) Antonio Carlos Jobim Wave (1967) Takehisa Kosugi Wave Code #E-1 (1975) Luigi Nono ….Sofferte Onde Serene…. For Piano And Magnetic Tape (1975–77) R Murray Schafer String Quartet No 2, Waves (1978) La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela Oceans (1969) Lisan Wang Impressions Of Paintings By Higashiyama Kaii: IV The Sound Of Waves (1979) Patti Smith Wave (1979) Barry Truax Wave Edge (1983) Aaron Jay Kernis Symphony In Waves: IV. Intermezzo (1989) Drexciya Wavejumper (1995) Huichang Yan Fighting The Waves/Dauntless Spirit/Cuihua/Confronting The River (1994) Tristan Murail Le Partage Des Eaux (1997) Drexciya Digital Tsunami (2001) Third Movement: Thalassocene Kaija Saariaho Près (Pour Violoncelle Et Dispositif Électroacoustique) (1992) Robert Paterson Deep Blue Ocean, III Accents And Waves (2010) Mary Ellen Childs First Wave (2013) John Luther Adams Dark Waves (2007) Ying Wang Wave In D (2008) Yuko Ohara The Wave Transformation (2013) Bob Chilcott, Iain Farrington & The Sirens Making Waves (2009) Keiko Abe The Wave (2008) Ying Wang Wave In D (2008) Peter Bruun Spejlbolger (Waves Of Reflection): IV Wave (2000) Vijay Iyer Mutation VI: Waves (2013) Annea Lockwood Water And Memory (2017) Mary Ellen Childs Second Wave (2013) Alexis Kirke Sound Wave (2012) Justin Lombardi reverses Kanye West Waves (2016) Nika Son The Wildness Of Waves (2016) Jana Winderen bára (2017) Ayako Sato Namimani (Among The Waves) (2011) John Melillo/Algae & Tentacles Waves 1 (2013) Bob Sturm Pacific Pulse (2003) Spanner (Paul Bendza and Rob Power) Wave (2006) Lou Hoyer Symphony For Wind And Waves (2018)
This month’s New York magazine features a set of articles about popular music today and why questions of plagiarism seem to dog so many hit songs. I was happy to contribute an article teasing out the controversies around Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” by taking a musicological deep-dive into the disputed musical figure in question, a […]
This month’s New York magazine features a set of articles about popular music today and why questions of plagiarism seem to dog so many hit songs. I was happy to contribute an article teasing out the controversies around Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” by taking a musicological deep-dive into the disputed musical figure in question, a resurgently popular rhythm that some would call a Scotch Snap. You can find an online version, complete with technomusicological examples — a few mashups and a mini-mega-mix! — over at Vulture. They’ve gone and slicked up the Ableton screengrabs I made, which is nice, but I also like the charm and simplicity (especially the ability to track audio, notation, and video) of the originals. Here, for instance, is the Scotch Snap megamix I worked up — just follow the bouncing cowbell! I first started noticing the Scotch Snap a while back, and I flagged it on the blog here in March 2014, proposing that the “remarkable spread” of the “stuttered, splattered, staccato syllables” popularized by Chicago rappers Lil Reese and Chief Keef made it second only to the Migos flow. I noted that it was already a trope among such pop singers as Rihanna and Beyonce, and I suggested that “perhaps I need to make a supercut to make my point.” Well, it only took me 5 years, but here we are. How funny to look back, especially in the wake of this Ariana Grande piece, and see myself writing that “far as I can tell, that Chicago drill flow has less of a history than 8th note triplets.” Now I can tell farther. Far farther. As I explore in the article, while it’s important to recognize how rappers have crucially contributed to the vogue for this rhythm, the Scotch Snap has a long history, spanning all manner of music in the United States and pointing back to Scotland (as well as West Africa). In the words of musicologist Philip Tagg, The Scotch snap is used by Henry Purcell, Béla Bartók, Mahalia Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Stevie Wonder, Ry Cooder, James Brown, Buck Owens etc., etc., etc. You’ll find it in Strathspeys, traditional English ballads, Appalachian fiddling, string band music, spirituals, white gospel, black gospel, rock music, even in West African time lines, but you won’t hear it in mariachi, mbaqanga or MPB, nor in the musics of South or Central Europe, including (continental) European art music. I’m indebted to Tagg’s amazing video on the Scotch Snap for helping me connect all these dots. Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t reference his video in that blog post. I count Tagg as a technomusicological pioneer and have been assigning his videos in my classes for years. (Tagg’s Milksap Montage is a classic mega-mix of 52 midcentury pop songs using the same 4 chords, and it helped convince me that mega-mixes and montages could compellingly tell musicological stories.) Going through my records, I see that I even emailed him back in May 2011, as soon as he shared his video with the IASPM list. I was eager to report that one could also hear the Scotch Snap in current rap songs, such as Travis Porter’s “Make It Rain” — an example that I probably should have included in my mega-mix, especially as it comes out around the same time as “Pretty Boy Swag,” which Soulja Boy would like to pose as patient zero for this rhythmic meme. While we’re on the topic of additional examples, if I had another crack at the mega-mix — and thought people could deal with a few more minutes of follow-the-cowbell — I would definitely add Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” BTS’s “Fake Love,” Rich Brian’s “Dat $tick,” and Florida Georgia Line’s “Swerve,” each of which shows how the rhythm, as (re-)popularized by rappers, has gone global and jumped genre-lines. But telling as much of the story as my mini-mega-mix does is maybe enough, and a little late is better than never. That said, having filed the story and produced the mix back in February, I was gutted to get scooped by popular YouTube music-explainer, Adam Neely, who published a Scotch Snap video covering a lot of the same ground — and also pivoting on Ariana Grande — in the middle of March, as my own work was slowly working its way through fact-checking and other editorial processes. So it goes. Like the rhythm itself, this story has been in the air, and “7 Rings” made as good a platform for telling it as any. Neely’s a Berklee alum, and my students brought his work to my attention last year. I like what he does (especially his Giant Steps / music+math piece), and he did a fine job on the Scotch Snap story. In the end, Neely gets more into the musical and linguistic weeds, where my article focuses more on the historical context and questions of plagiarism and appropriation. They can complement each other, to be sure. (I just wish my own video could do numbers like his, which, in under a month, has netted nearly half a million views!) I’m grateful that he linked to my montage and added my name to the credits, where, par for the course, I discovered that a French fellow was walking this trail back in October 2018 (and used the same Purcell sample that I grabbed via Tagg). That said, I suppose this blog is as good a space as any to express some skepticism over Neely’s suggestion that the beat of dancehall and reggaeton is derived from the rhythmic tendencies of Jamaican English and Spanish. While there may be some happy overlap between that 3+3+2 beat (aka dembow) and idiomatic stress patterns in those languages, that beat is at bottom a dance rhythm — not a speech rhythm — and is far older than those languages, and more African. I’m also not convinced that the Scotch Snap is all that (relatively) rare in Jamaican music and language, especially given that Scottish-African cultural interplay happened there too. Off the top of my head, I can recall that Elephant Man’s “The Bombing” (2001) drops Scotch Snaps throughout the verses, though I’ll have to start listening more closely for it across the reggae repertory. While we’re talking Jamaica, allow me to include here my favorite of the souped-up videos in the article. In this case, the video design, combined with the text I prepared, serves to make clear what we’re hearing when we’re hearing it (especially if you use headphones) — far better than I do waving around my cursor. I’m glad to finally share this story with the world, especially since, although Junior Reid apparently enjoyed the mashup, he lost interest in the lawsuit and it never went anywhere. I would have been quite curious to know how persuasive this may have proven in court (or in settlement negotiations), or in the court of public opinion, to which I now submit it. One of the problems I noticed when scanning the Scotch Snap literature is that the data — i.e., the corpora — referenced in studies such as the Temperleys’ (PDF) are deeply Eurocentric, making it difficult to come to broader conclusions about the geographical distribution of the rhythm. I’d be very curious to know what sort of patterns and proclivities would emerge given a wider, larger, and much more global sample. Perhaps the increasing popularity and recognition of the Scotch Snap will help spur more research in that vein. I’ll be keeping my ears peeled, and now, I suspect, so will you.