I'm assuming everyone here has watched
a TED Talk online at one time or another, right?
So what I'm going to do is play this.
This is the song from the TED Talks online.
(Music)
And I'm going to slow it down
because things sound cooler when they're slower.
(Music)
Ken Robinson: Good morning. How are you?
Mark Applebaum: I'm going to -- Kate Stone: -- mix some music.
MA: I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story.
Tod Machover: Something nobody's ever heard before.
KS: I have a crossfader.
Julian Treasure: I call this the mixer.
KS: Two D.J. decks.
Chris Anderson: You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn.
Dan Ellsey: I have always loved music.
Michael Tilson Thomas: Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude?
Daniel Wolpert: Feeling everything that's going on inside my body.
Adam Ockelford: In your brain is this amazing musical computer.
MTT: Using computers and synthesizers to create works. It's a language that's still evolving.
And the 21st century.
KR: Turn on the radio. Pop into the discotheque.
You will know what this person is doing: moving to the music.
Mark Ronson: This is my favorite part.
MA: You gotta have doorstops. That's important.
TM: We all love music a great deal.
MTT: Anthems, dance crazes, ballads and marches.
Kirby Ferguson and JT: The remix: It is new music created from old music.
Ryan Holladay: Blend seamlessly.
Kathryn Schulz: And that's how it goes.
MTT: What happens when the music stops?
KS: Yay!
(Applause)
MR: Obviously, I've been watching a lot of TED Talks.
When I was first asked to speak at TED,
I wasn't quite sure what my angle was, at first,
so yeah, I immediately started watching tons of TED Talks,
which is pretty much absolutely
the worst thing that you can do
because you start to go into panic mode, thinking,
I haven't mounted a successful expedition to the North Pole yet.
Neither have I provided electricity
to my village through sheer ingenuity.
In fact, I've pretty much wasted most of my life
DJing in night clubs
and producing pop records.
But I still kept watching the videos,
because I'm a masochist,
and eventually, things like Michael Tilson Thomas
and Tod Machover, and seeing
their visceral passion talking about music,
it definitely stirred something in me,
and I'm a sucker for anyone talking devotedly
about the power of music.
And I started to write down on these little note cards
every time I heard something
that struck a chord in me, pardon the pun,
or something that I thought I could use,
and pretty soon, my studio looked like this,
kind of like a John Nash, "Beautiful Mind" vibe.
The other good thing about watching TED Talks,
when you see a really good one,
you kind of all of a sudden wish the speaker
was your best friend, don't you? Like, just for a day.
They seem like a nice person.
You'd take a bike ride, maybe share an ice cream.
You'd certainly learn a lot.
And every now and then they'd chide you,
when they got frustrated that you couldn't really
keep up with half of the technical things they're banging on about all the time.
But then they'd remember that you're but a mere human
of ordinary, mortal intelligence
that didn't finish university,
and they'd kind of forgive you,
and pet you like the dog.
(Laughter)
Man, yeah, back to the real world,
probably Sir Ken Robinson and I
are not going to end up being best of friends.
He lives all the way in L.A. and I imagine is quite busy,
but through the tools available to me -- technology
and the innate way that I approach making music --
I can sort of bully our existences
into a shared event,
which is sort of what you saw.
I can hear something that I love in a piece of media
and I can co-opt it
and insert myself in that narrative,
or alter it, even.
In a nutshell, that's what I was trying to do
with these things, but more importantly,
that's what the past 30 years of music has been.
That's the major thread.
See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers,
and they changed everything overnight.
All of a sudden, artists could sample
from anything and everything that came before them,
from a snare drum from the Funky Meters,
to a Ron Carter bassline,
the theme to "The Price Is Right."
Albums like De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising"
and the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique"
looted from decades of recorded music
to create these sonic, layered masterpieces
that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day.
And they weren't sampling these records
because they were too lazy to write their own music.
They weren't sampling these records to cash in on
the familiarity of the original stuff.
To be honest, it was all about sampling
really obscure things,
except for a few obvious exceptions
like Vanilla Ice and "doo doo doo da da doo doo"
that we know about.
But the thing is,
they were sampling those records
because they heard something in that music
that spoke to them
that they instantly wanted to inject themselves
into the narrative of that music.
They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it,
and all of a sudden they found themselves
in possession of the technology to do so,
not much unlike the way the Delta blues
struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton,
and they felt the need to co-opt that music
for the tools of their day.
You know, in music we take something that we love
and we build on it.
I'd like to play a song for you.
(Music: "La Di Da Di" by Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick)
That's "La Di Da Di" and it's the fifth-most sampled
song of all time.
It's been sampled 547 times.
It was made in 1984 by these two legends of hip-hop,
Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh,
and the Ray-Ban and Jheri curl look is so strong.
I do hope that comes back soon.
Anyway, this predated the sampling era.
There were no samples in this record,
although I did look up on the Internet last night,
I mean several months ago,
that "La Di Da Di" means, it's an old
Cockney expression from the late 1800s in England,
so maybe a remix with Mrs. Patmore
from "Downton Abbey" coming soon,
or that's for another day.
Doug E. Fresh was the human beat box.
Slick Rick is the voice you hear on the record,
and because of Slick Rick's sing-songy,
super-catchy vocals, it provides endless sound bites
and samples for future pop records.
That was 1984.
This is me in 1984, in case you were wondering
how I was doing, thank you for asking.
It's Throwback Thursday already.
I was involved in a heavy love affair
with the music of Duran Duran,
as you can probably tell from my outfit.
I was in the middle.
And the simplest way that I knew
how to co-opt myself into that experience
of wanting to be in that song somehow
was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds
and play "Wild Boys" at the school talent show.
So that's what we did, and long story short,
we were booed off the stage,
and if you ever have a chance to live your life
escaping hearing the sound of an auditorium
full of second- and third-graders booing,
I would highly recommend it. It's not really fun.
But it didn't really matter,
because what I wanted somehow
was to just be in the history of that song for a minute.
I didn't care who liked it.
I just loved it, and I thought I could put myself in there.
Over the next 10 years, "La Di Da Di"
continues to be sampled by countless records,
ending up on massive hits like "Here Comes the Hotstepper"
and "I Wanna Sex You Up."
Snoop Doggy Dogg covers this song
on his debut album "Doggystyle" and calls it "Lodi Dodi."
Copyright lawyers are having a field day at this point.
And then you fast forward to 1997,
and the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie,
reinterprets "La Di Da Di"
on his number one hit called "Hypnotize,"
which I will play a little bit of
and I will play you a little bit of the Slick Rick
to show you where they got it from.
(Music: "Hypnotize" by The Notorious B.I.G.)
So Biggie was killed
weeks before that song made it to number one,
in one of the great tragedies of the hip-hop era,
but he would have been 13 years old
and very much alive when "La Di Da Di" first came out,
and as a young boy
growing up in Brooklyn,
it's hard not to think that that song probably held
some fond memories for him.
But the way he interpreted it, as you hear,
is completely his own.
He flips it, makes it,
there's nothing pastiche whatsoever about it.
It's thoroughly modern Biggie.
I had to make that joke in this room,
because you would be the only people that I'd ever have a chance of getting it.
And so, it's a groaner. (Laughter)
Elsewhere in the pop and rap world,
we're going a little bit sample-crazy.
We're getting away from the obscure samples that we were doing,
and all of a sudden everyone's taking
these massive '80s tunes like Bowie, "Let's Dance,"
and all these disco records, and just rapping on them.
These records don't really age that well.
You don't hear them now, because they borrowed
from an era that was too steeped
in its own connotation.
You can't just hijack nostalgia wholesale.
It leaves the listener feeling sickly.
You have to take an element of those things
and then bring something fresh and new to it,
which was something that I learned
when I was working with the late,
amazing Amy Winehouse
on her album "Back to Black."
A lot of fuss was made about the sonic of the album
that myself and Salaam Remi, the other producer,
achieved, how we captured this long-lost sound,
but without the very, very 21st-century personality
and firebrand that was Amy Winehouse
and her lyrics about rehab and Roger Moore
and even a mention of Slick Rick,
the whole thing would have run the risk
of being very pastiche, to be honest.
Imagine any other singer from that era over it
singing the same old lyrics.
It runs a risk of being completely bland.
I mean, there was no doubt that Amy
and I and Salaam all had this love
for this gospel, soul and blues and jazz
that was evident listening to the musical arrangements.
She brought the ingredients that made it urgent
and of the time.
So if we come all the way up to the present day now,
the cultural tour de force that is Miley Cyrus,
she reinterprets "La Di Da Di"
completely for her generation,
and we'll take a listen to the Slick Rick part
and then see how she sort of flipped it.
(Music: "La Di Da Di" by Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh)
(Music: "We Can't Stop" by Miley Cyrus)
So Miley Cyrus,
who wasn't even born yet when "La Di Da Di" was made,
and neither were any of the co-writers on the song,
has found this song that somehow
etched its way into the collective consciousness of pop music,
and now, with its timeless playfulness of the original,
has kind of translated to a whole new generation
who will probably co-opt it as their own.
Since the dawn of the sampling era,
there's been endless debate
about the validity of music that contains samples.
You know, the Grammy committee says that
if your song contains some kind of pre-written
or pre-existing music,
you're ineligible for song of the year.
Rockists, who are racist
but only about rock music,
constantly use the argument to —
That's a real word. That is a real word.
They constantly use the argument to devalue rap
and modern pop,
and these arguments completely miss the point,
because the dam has burst.
We live in the post-sampling era.
We take the things that we love
and we build on them.
That's just how it goes.
And when we really add something significant and original
and we merge our musical journey with this,
then we have a chance to be
a part of the evolution of that music that we love
and be linked with it once it becomes something new again.
So I would like to do one more piece
that I put together for you tonight,
and it takes place with two
pretty inspiring TED performances that I've seen.
One of them is the piano player Derek Paravicini,
who happens to be a blind,
autistic genius at the piano,
and Emmanuel Jal, who is an ex-child soldier
from the South Sudan,
who is a spoken word poet and rapper.
And once again I found a way to annoyingly
me-me-me myself into the musical history
of these songs,
but I can't help it,
because they're these things that I love,
and I want to mess around with them.
So I hope you enjoy this. Here we go.
Let's hear that TED sound again, right?
(Music)
Thank you very much. Thank you.
(Applause)