This comic lays out 2000 years of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself.
To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ's turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing - extensively borrowing - from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process?
The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race - again and again, race - and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are.
The history in this book runs from Plato to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire's attempts to standardize religious music using the first great musical technology (notation) and the inevitable backfire of that attempt. You will read about troubadours and church composers. You will see diatribes against jazz for corrupting musical culture, against rock and roll for breaching the color-line.
To understand this history fully, one has to roam wider still - into musical technologies from notation to the sample deck, aesthetics, the incentive systems that got musicians paid, and law's 250 year struggle to assimilate music, without destroying it in the process.
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