Monks, Andrew_Paper #1_History of Sonic Art.md

On "You're Nogood" and its relationship with Hip Hop

Andrew Monks

October 14, 2015

History of Sonic Art

Terry Riley recorded "You're Nogood" in 1967 or 1968, but it was lost and unreleased until Organ of Corti / The Cortical Foundation put it out on CD in 2000, along with a new extract cut from the Poppy Nogood (and the Phantom Band All Night Flight) performance. The founder of a Philadelphia 'experimental nightclub' attended Riley's All Night Flight concert, described in the liner notes as, "A form of happening where Terry improvised on soprano saxophone and tape-delay feed-back system, otherwise known as the "time-lag accumulator"¹ The founder was so excited by Riley's music that he commissioned Riley to make a theme for the nightclub. The result was "You're Nogood". The track incorporates synthesized audio along with tape samples of "You're No Good", by Harvey Averne on Atlantic Records. Writing for AllMusic, Brian Olewnick calls it "very unsettling," "jarring", and "bizarre."² Although the record was lost for more than 30 years, "You're Nogood" predicted many of the elements that would a few years later become hip hop.

To talk about "You're Nogood"'s use of tape, I have to go back to Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer more-or-less invented sampling by cutting up tapes of "non-musical" sounds. Kim-Cohen posits that after the Second World War, Schaeffer wanted nothing to do with anything German³. Of course, much of the canon of western music is German, so Schaeffer had to turn in a new direction. It was a reactionary, challenging music, described by some as noise. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali said, "It is necessary to ban subversive noise because it betokens demands for cultural autonomy, support for differences or marginality: a concern for maintaining tonalism, the primacy of melody, a distrust of new languages, codes, or instruments, a refusal of the abnormal -- these characteristics are common to all regimes of that nature. They are direct translations of the political importance of cultural repression and noise control."⁴ Musicque Concrete, and then Minimalism, are political musics. They are subversive. They "support differences or marginality."

In its early stages, Hip Hop was also called noise by those with cultural agency. It is a highly political music. According to Megan Sullivan, writing in Cornell's "Discoveries" publication, "Rap represents the volatile musical response to a series of transgressions against the African-American community. Rap, also called hip-hop, emerged at a time when the voices of African-American leaders—political, popular, musical, and otherwise—were distinctly lacking."⁵ Hip Hop and "You're Nogood" share a subversive support for marginality. Going beyond these broad strokes about its context, "You're Nogood" uses specific techniques which would later make it into Hip Hop.

By sampling Harvey Averne, Riley begins the tradition (continued by Hip Hop) of cutting rhythmic loops from R&B records. In fact, Pete Rock's classic remix of House Of Pain's "Jump Around" samples the same Harvey Averne record to great effect. Specifically, Riley uses the technique of playing through most of the original record before allowing it to fall into a looped groove. That technique is used by "countless ... hip hop beats."⁶ Not only do Terry Riley's "You're Nogood" and the genre of Hip Hop share subversive, marginal contexts, but they use the same techniques.

Although in 1967, Terry Riley likely had no inkling that Hip Hop would ever come to exist, his recording "You're Nogood" comes from a similar place, and predicts techniques that would later come to define Hip Hop. He uses a basic form of sampling, a technique specifically developed by Pierre Schaeffer to deconstruct the expectations of Western music and totalitarianism, much like Hip Hop rejected and deconstructed black radio⁷. He cuts up R&B, a technique later used in hip hop to transform radio (white)-friendly music into what was described as "noise." Furthermore, his sampling uses a formal structure that would later become a cornerstone of hip-hop sampling. Finally, Riley allows short samples to repeat until they lose their original significance and transform into rhythmic elements, another technique used throughout Hip Hop, especially post-J Dilla.

Citations (not MLA style but I get that they'll have to be in the future)

1. You're Nogood liner notes, Cortical Foundation, as transcribed on Discogs

2. AllMusic's review of Youre Nogood

3. Seth Kim-Cohen, in-class lecture on 9/23/2015

4. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music page 7

5. this paper, 35

6. Kieran Hebden AKA Four Tet discussing "You're Nogood"

7. Jesse Thorn talks to Russell Simmons on Bullseye, http://www.maximumfun.org/2015/09/28/bullseye-jesse-thorn-russell-simmons-carl-wilson