Production Breakdown: Doesn’t Anyone Make New Music Anymore?

In the Old Testament's Book of Ecclesiastes, depressive narrator Qohelet* famously declares, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.“ To my mind, that statement is both crucial to understanding today's pop music landscape, and totally, dangerously misleading.

On one hand, as you know, I'm all about looking back and showing how things that seem fresh and new actually have a long and fascinating history that, in the end, makes them seem even fresher. On the other... well, let's say you walked up to the Mr. Qohelet one day with a battery-operated boombox blaring the latest single by Nicki Minaj. Would he maintain that aloof, ironically-detached attitude, wave his hand, and say “Been there, done that”? Um, no – I'm, pretty sure he'd wet his robes in terror and, after running away and hiding in a nearby cave, think to himself, “You know, maybe that thing I said back in chapter 1, verse 9 was a little bit of a hasty generalization.”

I'm getting a little ahead of myself, though. As much as I believe the borrowing and reconxtextualization of musical ideas is not only an unstoppable force but one crucial to pushing the game forward, I, like, well, every human being on the planet, can't help but make certain mental judgments on what I'm hearing. And things get really interesting when I hear something that falls right in the middle of my fine line between “original” and “derivative.” Like, say, up-and-coming singer Razah's latest single, “I Remember,” which finds superproducer J.R. Rotem flipping the same Annie Lennox sample (from “No More 'I Love You's”) as Papa Justifi did on Nicki Minaj' hit “Your Love.” For reference, the source material:



Weird and very '80's, but pretty damned catchy. Now, my issue definitely isn't who got the sample first, or anything like that. My question is: is the artist bringing something new to the track and creating something memorable in its own right, or just biding his/her time while letting the sample do all the work? Is the sample only part of the overall package, or is the track coasting by on the sample like... um... a fellow who thinks his massive pectorals will distract women from the fact that he's as dumb as a brick (that was me narrowly avoiding alienating my target audience of busty blondes).

I think Nicki has the edge on this one, if only because her rapping as well as singing on the cut makes for a more distinctive end product, as opposed to Razah's just singing, which makes his record feel more like an R&B version of a freestyle. While I wouldn't say a freestyle can't be single material, that would take a level of ingenuity that I just wasn't hearing in “I Remember.” But, needless to say, that's just one man's opinion.

At the end of the day, is derivativeness one of those things you simply “know when you hear it”? To an extent, absolutely – and to really get to the bottom of how I feel on the matter, I'd probably have to write a whole damn book. To get back to good old Qoholet, though, I think there are two distinct spirits in which a musician can interpret his claim that there's 'nothing new under the sun;' as an excuse to quit trying to be original, and simply strip-mine the past for salable grooves, or as a challenge to attempt the (perhaps impossible) task of constructing something fresh and creative out of the building blocks we've got. I'm hoping that today artists continue shooting for the latter.

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*No, my cat didn't just walk across the keyboard. According to Wikipedia, that's his actual (transliterated) name.