Ample examples of chartable samples

In this week's newsletter, we have some music — specifically, the innovative way in which Tracklib illustrates the art of sampling. I also look at new data on ICE detentions (sigh) and the gold rush on naming generations that occurred a few decades ago. There is also a photo of a raccoon waaaaaay at the bottom, but you're not allowed to jump ahead.

Chapter 1
Seeing the recipe for mom's spaghetti

Like many of us, I used to be younger.

I was once so young, in fact — and this is true — that I can remember when hip-hop and electronic music were still relatively new. My parents lived through the emergence, evolution and maturing of rock. I (and probably many of you) lived through the birth and adolescence of music made by computers, DJ turntables and mixing boards.

Perhaps this music isn't to your taste. Fine. Your taste has a significant gap in it, but: fine! To each his own! Live and let live! But the art of creating music with something other than traditional instruments is a vibrant one.

It also poses an interesting question: When part of your song is a part of another song, how do you depict what you've sampled? This is one way in which modern music works, as you probably know. Hip-hop artists in particular pluck a snippet of beat or melody, repeat it or change the speed, and it becomes part of a new song entirely. But it's not something that you can easily indicate on sheet music.

Enter the Swedish company Tracklib. By day, Tracklib (as in "track library") is a clearinghouse for samples, offering musicians licensed clips of music for use in their own compositions. On social media, though, the company has built a huge audience by showing where samples come from and how they're altered for use in popular songs.

The videos are brilliant, both in form — simple visualizations of waveforms depicting the sample and how it is reused — and in function. They're bite-sized analyses of already popular bite-sized things. Perfectly tailored for the social media world.

"People's impression [of the music] always used to be, like, 'Oh, this artist just stole this song'," Tracklib's art director Viktor Korchounov said when we spoke over Zoom this week. "We wanted to show to people in an intuitive way that sampling is an art form and that a sampler is an actual instrument. We wanted to give those artists some credit, and show that it's an actual art form and not just stealing people's music."

The first of the company's visualizations that went viral was an explanation of the Daft Punk song "One More Time," which samples a 1979 song "More Spell on You" by Eddie Johns. An initial draft of the video, shared by Korchounov, showed a more literal interface of a turntable and then a sampling pad.

Eventually, it was simplified, centering on the waveform and the parts of the sound that were clipped and repeated by Daft Punk. The original had explanations for what was being done and how; the videos now just show the samples and let visitors hear how they're reused.

As you might expect, this is not always easy. Some albums include the original sampled track in liner notes, some don't. Even when you find the original source, though, your work isn't done.

"Step two is trying to confirm what's actually the sampled part and how they've done it, which is very manual," Korchounov said. "Just by ear, trying to pick all the parts you can hear in the finished song and then try to make them match one to one — especially if they've been distorted or tweaked or flipped."

"Doing electronic artists is such a pain," he added with a sigh, "because they do way too much to their sounds. At some point, you can't even figure it out anymore."

Korchounov originally pitched the idea for the videos to Tracklib and worked with the marketing team, including former CMO Per Stenius, to develop them into what they are. And, again, what they are is great — tremendously effective visualizations that can't be easily conveyed in an email newsletter format. They work even if you don't like electronic or hip-hop music.

And for those of you who don't: the "mom's spaghetti" joke in the chapter title up there was a reference to a very famous Eminem song. You need to know about these things, if only because Eminem has been referenced in the New York Times crossword more than 40 times or to do well in LearnedLeague or to impress your children.

(I just asked my eight year-old if he was impressed I knew Eminem lyrics. He was not. Your mileage may vary.)

Chapter 2
Mapping the administration's immigration crackdown

And now onto grimmer fare.

Over the past ten months, as you know, the federal government has shifted its immigration enforcement focus from "dangerous criminals" to "everyone." There's been a big jump in the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement who have criminal records or pending criminal charges, but a huge jump in the number of detainees who have neither.