dain saint

A few weeks ago, I was in Jersey with my mother. We often end up talking about music, with her playing the 14-year-old pop lover to my cranky old man. In any event, she tells me, “Hey, there’s this great new Rihanna track you should hear, you’ll love it!” The song in question was “Cheers (Drink To That)” — not a bad song, really, and certainly appropriate for the situations in which you’d most likely hear it, i.e. drunk on a Friday night. The thing that really stuck out to me in the song though was the Avril Lavigne sample that drives the hook, so I naturally pointed this out. My mother, naturally, neither knew that it was an Avril Lavigne sample, nor cared — it was simply a fun Rihanna track.

I point this out because I feel her attitude is largely indicative of the way most people view art nowadays — who cares where it came from if the final product is awesome? And I can’t really blame her, especially since her attitude isn’t one of malice. She’s not exactly sitting there saying, “Man, fuck Avril Lavigne.”

Another example that sticks with me is Jason Derülo’s “Whatcha Say.” Again, I’m sure this isn’t a bad track — reasonably catchy, at least. But the entire song is driven by Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” a song I loved so much I couldn’t hear the two tracks as separate entities. The hook is taken from the absolute climax of the song, a melodic break she takes the entire song building towards, but in Derülo’s rendition all of that impact is lost. When I heard the track, I was upset — so much so that I forced my mother to listen to the original so she could understand why I was so angry.

To her credit, she now likes both versions.

Now the impact of Derülo’s appropriation was dulled a bit for me when I found out that he explicitly asked Heap for permission to use the sample. Many people — most people — don’t really understand that a record label can simply ask the other record label for permission without ever involving the artist, so that act alone shows quite a bit of respect. And I think that on the artist side of things, we’re seeing less blatant stealing without attribution. But the consumers, the people that allow career artists to have careers, are largely unaware of the whole process. I do think that because of Derülo’s use of Heap’s sample Heap got a bit more attention from an audience that may well have ignored her, but how much more attention would she have gotten if she was explicitly attributed? If she had sung on the track, it would have been “Jason Derülo ft. Imogen Heap” for sure, but as a sample? She gets none of that credit.

My point here is not that appropriation is evil or should be stopped; indeed, the entire genre of hip-hop as we know it today would not exist if sampling were not allowed. And god knows I love me some mash-up artists — people just doing phenomenal re-interpretations of songs, changing context and creating juxtaposition, etc. But I do think that if you are going to sample someone, to the point where they practically have a guest spot on the song, then it’s your job to educate your fans. As of now, attribution is regulated to the liner notes, and let’s be honest — hardly anyone read the liner notes even before music sales went digital.

So I’m proposing a new attribution marker for songs: “tt.” It’s pretty simple — if you’ve sampled an artist to a point where they are pretty much making a guest appearance, give them one. So for instance:

• Rihanna - “Cheers (tt. Avril Lavigne)”
• Jason Derülo - “Whatcha Say (tt. Imogen Heap)”

What I like about it is that it’s not only a nice abbreviation for “attribution”, but can easily be interpreted as “Thanks to.”

I feel that, if we start proper attribution on the music side of things, it may well cross over into other areas — like, god forbid, games. Wouldn’t it be nice to see something like this?

• Angry Birds (tt. Crush The Castle)
• I Must Run (tt. Canabalt)
• Ninja Fishing (tt. Radical Fishing)
• Genesis (tt. Auditorium)

Food for thought.