COMM202/Hip hop approach

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Contents 1 Intro (2:40) 2 What is "hip-hop culture"? (2:45) 3 Case study: history of hip-hop mixtape technology (2:55) 3.1 Documentation: Grandmaster flash 3.1.1 Generative tools 3.2 Sounds that don't fit into pop industry: Ron G 3.3 Circumventing consolidation: DJ Clue 3.4 Circumventing exclusion: 50 Cent & Whoo Kid 3.5 Transmediating hip-hop: Lil Wayne 3.6 The Visual turn: Soulja Boy and post-mixtape examples 4 Precarious labor? 5 Jump offs (3:10)

Intro (2:40)

Transition from Zittrain

• Can't discuss "remix" without talking about hip-hop
  • Lessig's "remix" doesn't have an entry for hip-hop in the index
• Social justice and responsibility
• Studying the technology of hip-hop culture challenges widespread stereotypes of young black men

What is "hip-hop culture"? (2:45)

Two dominant versions:

• Pop industry
  • As celebrated: Young Money, Def Jam, "get money"
  • And criticized: "players, pimps, hos"
• Idealized history
  • Nostalgia, for the 70s, for the 80s, for the early 90s, etc.
  • "4 elements": rapping, DJing, breaking, graffiti
• Are these familiar to students?

Hip-hop culture, emphasis on culture

• Popular, participatory culture (Fiske, Jenkins)
• Organized around music but not limited to music
• Not reducible to a single style (though fans derive considerable pleasure debating this! Nas v Jay v Puff v Wayne v Nicki)
• Competitive
• Creative, innovative
• Regionally-specific
• Inclusive of fans, practitioners, entrepreneurs, industries, technologies, representations, critics, sounds, images, dances, capital, cities, nations, slanguage, fashion
• Highly technical and technological
• How does this fit with student expectations?

"Hip-hop approach"

• Mode of engaging with one's material and social surroundings
  • In interviews: "How you walk, how you talk, the clothes you wear, ..."
• Imagined community to which one belongs ("the hip-hop nation")
• Compare to the Hacker ethic
• Global pop idiom
• Side note: comparison to country-western, corridos, and cumbia remezclas as a meeting point.

Competition and creativity

• "Originality" is highly valued but non obvious to outsiders
  • Social norm, "Biting"
  • "Style"
• Where can creativity take place? Many layers...
  • Some self-evident for a popular music culture: Dance, music production, rapping, slang
  • Others less-so: business, use of media/comm technologies
    • Great example: Chuck D's Rapstation and online music business

Innovation in the technologies

• Music production: samplers, tape decks, turntables, software
• Communication technologies: radio, pagers, mobile phones, laptops, tumblr/twitter, myspace
• Institutions, infrastructures: networks, industries, markets, language
• Hip-hop practitioners are not always "early" adopters
  • They often locate the generativity in tools that have be discarded or rejected by elites and entrenched stakeholders
  • e.g. drum machine, sampler

• Techniques developed in hip-hop used by all genres
• Most obviously in techno, house in the 1980s, 90s
• Note on country-western
  • Three primary forms of distinction between these genres: age, race, technology

Case study: history of hip-hop mixtape technology (2:55)

Brief methodological notes

• Texts and context
  • Texts: records, tapes, CDs, promo materials, articles
  • Contexts: laws, economics, industry, politics, other musics
• Historiography

What do I mean by "mixtape"?

• A category of hip-hop artifacts
  • Not a specific arrangement of materials
• One outcome of applying the hip-hop approach to music-making, distribution
• What is it today?
  • Zip with mp3s and jpegs
  • Difference between a mixtape and an indie album?

Note about tools

• Watch the tools change but the practices persist
• Tools designed for one population, incorporated by hip-hop fans/practitioners

Note about class

• Don't need to take notes
• Focus on listening, what do we learn from the sounds
• Listening to hip-hop in class is awkward. Full stop
  • "Making strange"

Documentation: Grandmaster flash

Flash tape from ballroom 1975

• No hip-hop records, no hip-hop radio, no access to pop media industries
• Documentation of a lived, embodied experience
• Entrepreneurship: home duplication, p2p distribution
  • Creating a hip-hop industry

What can you DO with tapes?

• Copy them for friends
• Play them in cars
• Play them in boomboxes
• Play them in walkmen
• Populate your aural environment
  • Hip-hop isn't just party music, now it's driving, hanging, doing homework music

Generative tools

Popular need: In the party environment, they needed a way to extend particular passages of records

• Non-stop mixing (already at play in disco clubs)
• Blending live vocals with pre-recorded audio (already happening in dancehall)
  • Note Wayne Marshall making this connection in DJ Kool Herc

4 characteristics of generativity:

• Leverage: Making difficult jobs easier
• Adaptability: Broad range of uses
• Ease of mastery: Does not require specialized skills, tools
• Accessibility: Easy for people to encounter and adopt, low barriers of entry

My notes on generativity:

• Designers can't anticipate the uses or users for their tech
• Accessibility is tied to regulation and economy
• "Old", "dead", "obsolete" tech does not necessarily lose its generativity
• Generativity may vary considerably in different cultural and historical contexts

Generative tools? (Make a slide with these images)

• Turntables
• Mixers with cross-faders
  • Some of them modified by hip-hop engineers (e.g. Flash)
• Double tape decks

Special note about samplers + drum machines:

• Designed and produced for professional music studios: shortcut tools
  • Instead of hiring a drummer to do a demo, use a drum machine
• These were rejected by the industry
• Hip-hop producers found new applications for them
• Failure to replicate the feel of a live drummer:
  • Drawback to intended user
  • Feature to the hip-hop user
• Sampler automated a practice that was already happening on the turntable (leverage!)

Sounds that don't fit into pop industry: Ron G

Video of Kid Capri and Ron G from Yo! MTV Raps

• Certain sounds and modes of engagement that don't fit into the pop industry
  • Copyright Act of 1976
  • Betamax decision
• Temporal innovation: Raps can fit into a 2 min pop song, a DJ set cannot
  • Constructed in a studio, addressing the listener
  • Borrowing from radio aesthetics
  • (Compare with discussion of podcast aesthetics)
• Aesthetic innovation
  • "Blend tapes" (excorporated as digital "mashups" in the early 2000s)

See also: DJ Screw in Houston innovating on these techniques

• Local, geographic
  • Houston and the South are disrespected (Outkast at the Source awards) and excluded from the pop industry
• Creating a sustainable local hip-hop economy, middle class
• "Dre Day"
  • Dre's version
  • Blended with Whodini - Friends
  • Not only do they mix chaotically but there is a thematic tension between Dre's lyrics about betrayal and Whodini's lyrics about loyalty
  • Lyrics are mushed out by the screwing + chopping so there is an expectation that the listener is already familiar with the songs apart and at normal speed

Circumventing consolidation: DJ Clue

Hip-hop incredibly valuable pop commodity

• DMX in 1998

Radio consolidation

• Telecomm Act 1976

Clue tapes

• Not mixed on TTs, sequenced, not a performance
• Exercising social capital, constructing powerful social network
  • Leaks
  • Remixes
  • Exclusives
• Not tapes
  • Burned to CDs
• Not just speaking to audience
  • But marking territory (shouting over the tracks)

Circumventing exclusion: 50 Cent & Whoo Kid

Scene from Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Locked out of the pop industry

• 50 Cent & Whoo Kid craft single-artist "mixtape" in the form of a Clue tape
• Essentially an independent album
• Rapping on other people's tracks
  • "Beat jacking"
  • Contrast to DMCA 1998

Transmediating hip-hop: Lil Wayne

Child star re-emerges

Drama / Wayne Gangsta Grillz is in the Whoo Kid model

• Audioplay: Narrative unfolds linearly from Track 1 to the end
  • Coherence across 80 minutes
• Contrast to mp3 fragmenting of the "album" as a form

Constant flow of new material

• Each track or video is spreadable
• But the whole corpus is drillable (Jason Mittell)
• Leaks, remixes, radio appearances, live songs, guest verses
• No central authority: Wayne rarely identifies a song as a single or an album
  • Mixtapes assembled and distributed locally
• Compare with transmedia
  • Collecting and pursuing material, compare to Pokemon
  • Sharing, trading

Online distribution, "born digital"

• Many mixtapes never duplicated to CD nor tape
• Datpiff

Continuity / Multiplicity

• Which Wayne do you know?

Fans choose the hits

• I Feel Like Dying, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cykGnl1KvcM&fmt=18
• Karma - Once, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l26ml7CPFXQ&fmt=18

Intentional hits:

• Lollipop, so conventional in context to the rest to seem almost parodic
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IH8tNQAzSs&fmt=18
• A Milli, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BOt9auqOuk&fmt=18
  • Producerly text: Jay Z - A Billi; etc.
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VePhdjVOr4w

• Mixtape OF remixes
  • What happens if the songs all use the same beat?
  • Think of Kid Capri and Ron G?
  • "Beat juggling", in reggae, "riddim juggling"
  • http://www.datpiff.com/Shotz-The-Best-Of-a-Millie-Remixes-mixtape.15550.html

Not disconnected from the conventional pop industry

• Carter III is platinum selling album
• But does anyone actually listen to the CD once they buy it + rip it?
• Contra common wisdom of the litigious music industry (suing its fans)

The Visual turn: Soulja Boy and post-mixtape examples

Long history of skepticism and exploitation

• "Black roots, white fruit"
  • Chapple, Garofalo, "Rock and roll is here to pay"
• No Limit and Cash Money: own your masters, NoLA
• Jay-Z, self-branding, "I'm not a business man. I'm a business, man."
• Waka Flocka tells people not to sign deals
• Others question why they should be signed at all?

Many of the values of the mixtape persist

• Though the formal conceit of producing a "mixtape" is largely absent

Radio and MTV are almost entirely inaccessible

• This marks a highly VISUAL turn in hip-hop's popular culture
• Homemade videos emerge and circulate long before "official" videos
• Home video tools: mobile phones, flipcams, webcams, Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, YouTube, MySpace Video, Vimeo

Select two Crank Dat vids

• Screencap Myspace

Crank Dat Soulja Boy

• Dance, snap
  • Regional affiliation
  • Home vids

Peer learning, sharing

• • How-to videos
  • Competitive communities online

New kinds of tools?

• "Virtual" recording studio software (pirated)
• Photoshop
• Social web
• Mp3
• Home video
• YouTube
• Messageboards
• MySpace
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• File-hosting sites (Hulkshare, megaupload, rapidshare, etc.)

Precarious labor?

DJ Drama raid video

• No support from Lil Wayne
• Legal dept doesn't know what marketing dept is doing

Would SB or OF happen without the labor of fans?

• Distributing, redistributing, editing the output
• Myth-making

Jump offs (3:10)

• For history and context, Jeff Chang
• For critique from inside, Tricia Rose
• For techno-social implications, S. Craig Watkins