tuba city

Riddim Nation

Last week I stumbled upon Sasha Frere-Jones' new singles column in The New Yorker via O-Dub's blog Pop Life. Frere-Jones used to play bass in the post-rock double-bass trio Ui and has consistently been one of my favorite music writers over the last several years, partly 'cause he tends to review popular/commercial releases in an intelligent and analytical way, placing them into a larger musical context and pointing out how simultaneously innovative and enjoyable some of them are. In this particular column, Frere-Jones makes a good jam-of-the-summer case for Nina Sky's "Move Ya Body", currently #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. As Frere-Jones points out, one of the most interesting things about this very catchy song is that it is one of several new tracks that use the "Coolie Dance" rhythm/riddim created by Jamaican producer Cordel Burrell. I haven't yet heard the Pitbull track that Frere-Jones mentions, but the hot new Elephant Man/Twista remix of "Jook Gal" is yet another jam propelled by the bouncy Coolie Dance beat. We played the "Jook Gal" remix twice at last Friday's Hell party and it's definitely a dancefloor burner as far as I'm concerned.

I'd love to learn more about any licensing/marketing/copyright details and processes surrounding these Jamaican rhythms, because there's something fascinating about the way many of them end up being used on so many different tracks. Of course, this sort of versioning has been going on in Jamaica for decades, but the recent explosion of Jamaican influences in American hip-hop/R&B has had me thinking a lot more about what appears to be an alternate economic model for, uh, "information exchange" (for lack of a better vague term). This seemingly viable model appeals to me in much the same way that open source, open standards, and open access do. Instead of the more closed American model, where a producer like The Neptunes or Timbaland typically sells a beat exclusively to one particular artist, a Jamaican producer like Burrell releases a hot rhythm out into the world, where singers, toasters, and rappers all have the chance to take it and use it ("improve upon it", if you will). If one or more of these tracks succeed in the competitive marketplace, both the producer and the singer/toaster/rapper reap the rewards. Because even with the imperfect open source analogy, I don't mean to suggest that Burrell is not getting paid....or that he didn't work out some arrangement with the artists using his rhythm. After all, this Billboard chart lists "C. Burrell" in the songwriting credits for two of these Coolie Dance tracks. Perhaps this Jamaican/American dichotomy is a bit of an oversimplification, since there are definitely some American breaks/beats records out there and American tracks can definitely pop up in remixes and subsequent samplings. And I admit that I don't know much about how the Jamaican tracks are actually distributed or licensed. Regardless, these Greensleeves rhythm albums remind me that I'd still love to see some sort of variation on this Creative Commons license that would encourage the creation of derivative works for commercial purposes, with the stipulation that the license-holder got a proportional piece of the action should the derivative work become commercially successful in some regard. Oh, and a Neptunes rhythm record would be nice, too.