Illegal Art's treasure trove

Thanks to @foo242 for pointing me to some great stuff on the website of Girl Talk's label, Illegal Art:

The world's most important 6-second drum loop

Via http://chillipaprika.com/?p=687:

Perhaps not for everybody, as you will have to bite through the Stephen-Hawking-like voice, but if you want to know the history behind this super-important piece of sound, I know you will love this: 

This video narrates the history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from 1969, used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music — a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures.

Wikipedia update

Unfortunately, after substantial discussion, the Wikipedia editor community seems to have settled on the result (if not the consensus) that Wikipedia is not the right place for the crowd-sourced list and timing of samples in All Day and other mashup albums (e.g. Feed the Animals).

Fortunately, Wikipedia keeps all prior versions of its pages (and I've stashed my own copy as well) so we still have the All Day sample data from Dec. 9 and Feed the Animals sample data from Dec. 8. I have, however, taken down the option to pull data from the live Wikipedia site for the time being, since we can't rely on the data being there.

So, where do we go from here?

As in the case of Night at the Hip-Hopera and mass.rsrction.7 I can just work from a data file like this one. But I'd really love to provide a way for mashup fans to crowd-source the sample data, and a wikipedia-like interface (with version control, history, and discussion) would be ideal.

Wikipedians and crowd-sourcing gurus: what do you suggest?

Just posted: Kleptones, Scntfc, and more Girl Talk

Just posted some new breakdowns!

Here’s what we’ve got:

It was especially fun to exchange ideas with Eric and Andy re: directions for the site; hoping to put some of that into action soon.

Want more breakdowns? Here’s how to make it happen.

Find a missing sample? Add it in!

Know your music well enough to find a sample on All Day that's missing from Mashup Breakdown? Don't keep it to yourself -- add it in! Here's how:

1. Go to the track listing on Wikipedia's All Day page.

2. Find the edit link for the track where you found the sample, and click it.

3. You'll then see a little text editor for that section of the page.  Just add in the sample you found, following the format of the other entries. Be sure to save when you're done.

That's it! By updating the Wikipedia page, you've updated Mashup Breakdown To see your change, choose "Wikipedia (Live)" from the "Source info" drop-down menu.

We've still got almost 100 samples to find, so let's get to it!

Huge thanks to AllDaySamples

Tremendous shout-out to Travis McLeskey, creator of AllDaySamples.com. Lots of folks started identifying the list of samples in All Day as soon as the album was released, but in creating AllDaySamples Travis undertook the heroic quest to work out all the start and stop times of those samples. As far as I can tell, until now AllDaySamples has been the only public source of stop times, which are essential for making any visualization look good.

With Travis's agreement I've integrated those stop times into the All Day page on Wikipedia, and so going forward Wikipedia will be the default data source for Mashup Breakdown. Already others have started refining the data, and you can see the most up-to-date version by choosing "Wikipedia (live)" as the Sample Info source.