Mixtapes

From Driscollwiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

New/Old Media Objects

Connections to earlier topics

On modes of listening

On the recording studio

  • Capturing live performance
  • Crafting the impossible, multitrack

Use and circulation of recordings

  • Among friends
  • As tangible commodity
  • In radio broadcast
  • In public

Piracy, copyright

  • "Remix", "read/write", "participatory" culture

Questions to keep in mind

When is a mixtape ... (Fikentscher)

  • ... documentation of a "performance"?
  • ... itself a "tangible, authoritative text"?

Thinking about the word "mixtape"

  • What is being mixed?
  • Why "tape"?

How does this sit alongside contemporary recording artifacts?

  • Why is it made? Why is it shared?
  • What else is happening in the world at the time?

Where do they go in a month? In a year? In a decade?

What is "hip-hop culture"?

Two dominant versions:

  • Pop industry
    • As celebrated: "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

TODO video of flash party tape

Hip-hop culture, emphasis on culture

  • Popular, participatory culture (Fiske, Jenkins)
  • Organized around music but not limited to music
  • 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

Not reducible to a single style (though fans derive considerable pleasure debating this! Nas v Jay v Puff v Wayne v Nicki)

  • Hip-hop and disco emerge around the same time in close geographic proximity (Fikentscher)
  • Whereas disco is defined to some extent by specific aesthetics, hip-hop is sonically omnivorous - almost anything goes.

Hip-hop approach

  • Mode of engaging with one's material and social surroundings
    • Comparable to Fikentscher's "disco concept" (295)
    • In interviews: "How you walk, how you talk, the clothes you wear, ..."
  • Imagined community to which one belongs ("the hip-hop nation")
  • Global pop idiom

Competition and creativity

  • "Originality" is highly valued but non obvious to outsiders
    • Social norm, "Biting" v Citing
    • "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

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, norms persist
  • Tools designed for one population, incorporated by hip-hop fans/practitioners

Documentation: Grandmaster flash

TODO insert image of flash_partytapes.png

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

TODO insert image of the gemini mx2200 TODO insert image of the 1200 TODO listen to flash live mp3

What is Flash doing?

  • Same techniques...
    • Slip-cueing, cutting, "quick mix"
  • And technologies...
    • Turntables, mixer with a cross-fader, amps
  • As Fitkenscher identifies with the disco "console"

How long were Flash's sets?

  • Hours + hours
  • Much longer than this tape!
  • Compare with Junior Vasquez playing from midnight to noon - how do you capture that on cassette?

TODO insert image of double tape deck

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

NOTE: most of this is in their reading, so we can skip through it...

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

Designers can't anticipate the uses or users for their tech

  • "Old", "dead", "obsolete" tech does not necessarily lose its generativity

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

TODO: insert image of the mpc60, s900, sp1200

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

TODO insert images of Beanie records

Hip-hop singles are now commercially available

  • Frequently produced by DJs
  • Including "instrumentals", "dubs", "remixes" just like the disco records described by Fikentscher
  • Taking advantage of the affordances of the 12-inch single

TODO insert video of Yo! MTV Raps

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

  • Certain sounds and ways of playing are not compatible with the pop industry
    • Copyright Act of 1976
  • Many of the most creative DJs excluded from hip-hop's pop visibility
    • Becoming producers, remixers to make a living

TODO listen to opening few minutes of the Ron G Mixes 1 tape

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
  • Still hearing evidence of a performance
    • ... for an imagined audience

Aesthetic innovation

  • "Blend tapes" (excorporated as digital "mashups" in the early 2000s)

TODO insert image of DJ Screw 3 N Da Morning Part 2

TODO listen to clip of Screw version of Dre Day

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
    • But you don't actually HEAR the words in this version
    • 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 media consolidation, exclusion

Hip-hop incredibly valuable pop commodity

  • DMX in 1998

TODO insert image of clear channel logo

Radio consolidation

  • Telecomm Act 1976

Consolidation: DJ Clue

TODO listen to dj clue - clue for president

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)

Exclusion: 50 Cent & Whoo Kid

TODO insert image of 50 cent / Whoo kid mixtapes

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

TODO watch scene from get rich or die tryin

Transmediating hip-hop: Lil Wayne

TODO collage of Carter 2 + 3, Dedication 1 + 2

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
  • But regionally specific, marking territory

TODO listen to clip from Gangsta Grillz Dedication 2

  • "Everyone knows [...] you gotta go through Drama"

Constant flow of new material, in and around these mixtapes

  • 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

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)

Continuity / Multiplicity

  • Which Wayne do you know?
  • 3 example encounters...
    • Check in with student familiarity...

Lollipop: Intentional hits

TODO watch lollipop video

I Feel Like Dying: Fans choose the hits

TODO listen to I feel like dying

A Milli: Mixtape OF remixes:

TODO listen to Lil Wayne versions of A milli TODO listen to Jay-Z versions of A milli TODO listen to R. Kelly versions of A milli TODO insert image of Best Of... mixtape cover

What happens if the songs all use the same beat?

  • Think of Kid Capri and Ron G?
  • "Beat juggling", in reggae, "riddim juggling"

Precarious labor?

TODO view DJ Drama raid video

DJ Drama raid video

  • How does this square with what we've been talking about?
  • Legal dept doesn't know what marketing dept is doing

The visual turn: Soulja Boy and post-mixtape examples

TODO insert image of SB myspace

Long history of skepticism and exploitation

  • "Black roots, white fruit"
    • Chapple, Garofalo, "Rock and roll is here to pay"

Toward greater independence

  • 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, even as the material practices are transformed beyond recognition

  • 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

TODO insert How-To image TODO insert video-within-a-video

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.)

Fan labor?

Would SB or OF happen without the labor of fans?

  • Distributing, redistributing, editing the output
  • Myth-making
Retrieved from "http://www.kevindriscoll.org/wiki/Mixtapes"
Personal tools