Landmarks of technology in Popular Music

1. Grandmaster Flash - The Message



The Message is a hip hop song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. It was released as a single on Sugar Hill Records in 1982 and went platinum in under a month. It is thought of as one of the original hip hop records and is often regarded as the best hip hop record ever made.

Although it was not the first rap song to talk about the struggles of ghetto life, it was slower and more focused on lyrics which made it such a socio-politically important song. The song was written and performed by Sugar Hill session musician Ed Fletcher and Furious Five MC Melle Mel.

Grandmaster Flash was a pioneer of the hip hop movement and is credited for many innovative DJ techniques such as extending breaks using two copies of the same record, using volume faders on a mixer to accentuate certain melodies and rhythms, and scratching. Although he is not credited with the invention of scratching records, he definitely perfected it and developed it as a way to create new music from existing songs. The turntable had a massive technological impact upon hip hop music and Grandmaster Flash used it to create new music and bring this new music to a much wider audience. Through his music he was able to demonstrate the social inequalities that he and other hip hop musicians were experiencing in their day to day life.

2. The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony



Bittersweet Symphony is a song by The Verve which was released in 1997 and reached number 2 on the UK singles chart. It used the new technology available to sample the Andrew Oldham Orchestra recording of The Rolling Stones' song ‘The Last Time’.

After its release it stirred up great controversy and financial disagreements with the original owners of the music which had been sampled. Although The Verve had reached an agreement with the owners of the song, after the release the owner argued that the Verve had used 'too much' of the sample and won in court.

The songwriting credits ended up going to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and the copyright of the song belongs to ABKCO Records, a record company which own all of The Rolling Stones’ song rights from the 1960s.

This was the first financial case of its type and marked a new era in music technology. It brought about great debate as to who actually owned the song as The Verve had added other parts and used original lyrics. Since then sampling has been used extensively in many genres of popular music.

3. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy

Crazy was a song by Gnarls Barkley, the collaboration of multi-instrumentalist/producer Danger Mouse and vocalist Cee-Lo. It was released in 2006 after much radio play in 2005, and became the first song to show the power of digital downloads in the music industry. After its release as a digital download in the UK, the song debuted at number one on the UK Official download chart. The song then went straight to number one on the UK singles chart, due to the rules that digital downloads will be counted if the CD had not yet been released. The song sold over 31,000 downloads in a week and demonstrated the potential power of digital downloads as a source of income for the music industry. It also showed the shift in preference by music consumers from CDs and other physical media to the digital domain of MP3s.



4. Doobie Brothers – Long Train Running

Long Train Running was a funk song written and performed by the Doobie Brothers in 1973. It took influence from the 1960s funk style and was composed through a series of live jams with a very organic feel.



Almost twenty years later in the 1990s, the song was covered by girl group Bananarama in 1991 and remixed in 1993. The remixed version became very popular in the dance music/club scene and showed that a remix is a powerful form of popular song. It also reflected and capitalised upon the ideology of hip hop, by recycling existing music and bringing it back into the modern eye with a new feel. The original funk style fit well with the new disco vibe and revived the attraction of funk music in the 1990s pop/dance scene.

Although the remix was an electronic take on an organic funk song, it showed the potential of electronic composition as a competitor to acoustic and live instrumentation in the 1990s popular music climate. This attitude towards electronic music led to the fast development of dance music throughout the 1990s and 2000s.