(Picture updated — thanks Blaise, for keeping me honest…)

After our first comic (which has been downloaded over 300,000 times from our site alone and which also sold lots of copies despite being available for free)  one question I got asked a lot was “how do you actually create a comic?”  For me, learning how to design and write the comic (Keith does the drawing) was both very hard and a lot of fun.  If you are an academic, your minimum atomic unit of linguistic meaning is the paragraph, maybe the page.  Having to reduce complex, technical ideas into images and speech bubbles — no footnotes!  no complex dependent clauses! — was a form of creativity unlike anything I’d done before.

This is the first page of the comic… at least so far.  Jennifer and I do the initial design.  We send Keith a script with parallel columns — images on one side and text on the other.

The instructions look something like this

AK It is 1812, and that’s Francis Scott Key watching Fort McHenry being bombarded by the British..

(cannon ball soars from scene, drops in water in front of AK, JB, JJ… steaming)

..he wrote a poem about it in 1814, called “The Defense of Fort McHenry”,

.. AK picks it up at first it reflects him and then changes to show Anacreon drinking scene

but it didn’t achieve true fame until he set it to the tune of “The Anacreontic Song” – a British drinking song from 1778 – and it became

[Cannon ball clouds and clears to show 15 star flag]

JB, JJ together
“The Star Spangled Banner”….

AK Which became the musical emblem of the nation.

[flag morphs into butterfly shape…]

AK ..so in 1898 when Puccini wrote Madame Butterfly, he made it the theme of Pinkerton, the American naval officer…

[Butterfly morphs into Stratocaster]

AK ..but even a Pinkerton detective couldn’t have imagined what the song would sound like, 71 years later, played by a young man called….
JB and JJ  Jimi Hendrix!!

Then Keith applies his genius and sends us a sketch that looks something like this.

Our research on the borrowing in US patriotic songs becomes a list of instructions like this

which in turn becomes

Then we revise and redesign by phone and skype — there are always more words you can cut, more ways to use images to convey the meaning.  We  try and catch our errors and we are given our instructions for revision. (Jennifer is not only a researcher extraordinaire, she is also the queen of the task list.)  Keith redraws more firmly, the final stage before inking…

The comic flies through 2000 years of musical history, the development of the unruly technologies that allowed us to think that music can be owned (notation, printing, recording, digital distribution), the changes in musical practice and attitudes towards composition, quotation and owning, and the introduction of the law into it all.  Researching it has been utterly fascinating — and writing it has been a blast.  What does the final inked version look like?   If all goes as planned, sometime in Spring 2011 you’ll be able to find out.

The song was written by the Legendary K.O., a hip hop duo who were volunteering in the Houston Astrodome. Here’s the video that ‘the Black Lantern’ made to go with their song.

But where did the song come from?  The first source, of course, was Kanye West’s Gold Digger off the album Late Registration

Kanye West was sampling from Ray Charles’ song I’ve Got a Woman also available here as an MP3 download.

As I show in the chapter, Charles was borrowing extensively from a song called “I’ve Got a Savior” probably written by Clara Ward and performed by the Bailey Gospel Singers.  That, of course, I can’t share with you — there is no commercial version available and the only way you can find it is to go to the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and ask them to let you listen to it.   But if you want to hear a short combined excerpt, alternating between the original song and Charles’ transformation of it, because of the law of fair use, you can listen to it here.   igotawomansavior

Clara Ward, the probable composer, was herself an amazing talent.  We know that Charles borrowed from one of her other compositions This Little Light of Mine to make a song called This Little Girl Of Mine
You can hear the original here  Meetin’ Tonight! or here in MP3 (The song segues from Meeting Tonight to This Little Light of Mine.)

(The sheer virtuosity of the sustained notes in the latter half of this song is beyond human capacity.  I’d say it was breathtaking — except no breathing appears to interrupt the singing!)

Nowadays, as the Chapter explains, almost all of the borrowing described here would be illegal. Now it is possible that if we treat musical notes like stock certificates and require clearance and payment for each act of cultural bricolage, then we will still get a remixing genius like Charles, still get genre-transforming musical fusions like the  creation of soul out of the blues on one side and gospel on the other.   Jazz musicians could pre clear every quotation in their performances. “Get a license or do not solo.”  It will be a wonderful future of musical creativity!!

Yeah, right.