When Drake released the double album Scorpion at the end of last month, I got a message from a former student of mine, William Hinson. William wrote:
So on Drake's new album, he samples an unreleased
recording from Michael Jackson. Everybody online is
freaking out coz....it's Michael Jackson. But what is your
opinion of effectively exploiting the talents of a dead
person?
I finally got around to listening to the track and doing a little bit of research on it. The song in question, "Don't Matter to Me" is credited as featuring Michael Jackson, and I'm quite sure that Drake has permission to use these vocals, so there is no legal debate about this work. They come from an unreleased recording that Pitchfork deduces must have come from around 1983, since Paul Anka also sings on the track, and he collaborated with Jackson in that year.
But William wasn't asking about the legal status - he was asking about ethics. The first thing this question made me think of is guitarist Pat Metheny's scathing critique of Kenny G's posthumous duet with Louis Armstrong (which is where the title of this blog post comes from). Metheny is worth quoting at length:
This type of musical necrophilia - the technique of overdubbing
on the preexisting tracks of already dead performers - was
weird when Natalie Cole did it with her dad on "Unforgettable"
a few years ago, but it was her dad. When Tony Bennett did it
with Billie Holiday it was bizarre, but we are talking about two
of the greatest singers of the 20th century who were on roughly
the same level of artistic accomplishment. When Larry Coryell
presumed to overdub himself on top of a Wes Montgomery
track, I lost a lot of the respect that I ever had for him - and I
have to seriously question the fact that I did have respect for
someone who could turn out to have such unbelievably bad
taste and be that disrespectful to one of my personal heroes.
But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to
defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz
musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive,
pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up
playing all over one of the great Louis tracks (even one of his
lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined
possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious
and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical
of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians
past and present who have risked their lives by going out there
on the road for years and years developing their own music
inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought
to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a
musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default,
everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with
improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new
low point in modern culture - something that we all should be
totally embarrassed about - and afraid of. We ignore this, "let it
slide", at our own peril.
It's savage. And it's funny - because Kenny G is considered lame, and it's fun to make fun of him. But Metheny's argument doesn't stand up, because he's basing his judgment on taste. His assessment of Kenny G's playing as "wimped out" and "fucked up" is not a statement of fact. And my own assessment of Drake's music as boring (pace, Drake fans) shouldn't affect my view on the ethics of collaborating with ghosts.
My initial reaction to the Drake/MJ collaboration was to wonder what Jackson's reaction would be. The vocals in question come from an unreleased track - but why was it unreleased? Was Jackson unhappy with his performance? If so, he might be unhappy, even embarrassed, at the thought of that performance being widely heard. Rolling Stone reports that the Jackson family haven't made any details about the track available, so it's impossible to say.
My concluding thoughts are to point to the benefits of creative artistic expression for a society. Many people have pointed to copyright term extension as a hindrance on creativity, which I agree with. So-called "musical necrophilia," when done with permission or with a recording from the public domain, is legal. Who are we to condemn it based on taste?