roachboy

geez, this almost makes me wish i had been around over the weekend so i could have got to this before it became a horse and then became a dead one at that.

on the op:
what you're making in the op shauk, is a version of the kind of idiot argument that you run into from folk who wander into a contemporary art gallery, look around and say "i could do that." to which the only answer is "then why didnt you?" from which follows the deeper argument "you couldnt have done that. it would never have occured to you."


in general, i agree with baraka and aberkok and the other comrades whose posts have lined up with theirs.


a short history lesson:

in the history of hip hop, the mc came second.
the form is not entirely about the lyrics.
never was.

the originators of hip-hop were dj who adapted some of the techniques used by jamacain and uk sound system selectors in the context of spinning dub tracks--kool dj herc was from ja, the soundsystem he developed an adaptation of the soundsystem his father brought with him from ja.
the story goes that initially kool herc tried to simply do selector moves using the same records, but folk in the neighborhood wouldnt dance to them--so he switched over to funk records and adapted the techniques.

aside: if the "logic" of the op held any water, you'd have to also conclude just from the above that dub is not music either.
that makes me laugh.


anyway, the center of dj activities early on was the isolation and extension of breaks--the reason to do this was so that people would dance.
hip hop was, then, from the outset, a dance music.
remember breaking?

initially, what the word associated with hip hop did was to provide continuity while the dj re-placed the needle on a break.
(before grandmaster flash developed faders that there weren't any.)
initially, the words were mostly little phrases and name-checks.
it wasnt obvious what to rap about.
it wasnt really until "the message" came out that folk started to assume hiphop was a recorded form that addressed an audience that was not present as the music was happening (hiphop was a live form in its early days) and so began to talk ABOUT the context rather than assuming the context. this switch is not obvious. think about it.

i'm not going to bother to defend what turntablists do.
it requires no defense on musical or any other grounds.
it is self-evidently a musical form---breaking the continuity of a pop recording is an interesting act--the basis for dj practice is collage building (which is the only coherent way to understand what djs did--when turntablism became a separate thing--by the middle 1990s---q-bert (for example) had already developed and catalogued something on the order of 200 techniques for manipulating records and it had already become something more and other than making sound collage--but to my mind, djs make sound collages.)

within early hip hop, the main force behind the flowering of this collage element was afrika bambaata. most electro spins out of his work--and you wouldn't be doing what you're doing in electronic music without afrika bamabaata hovering in the background.

so if hip hop is not music, what you do, shauk, is also not music.
it pays to learn the history of the form you work in, chum.


anyway, by the time you get to the "second wave" of hip hop, by the time you get to what the bomb squad was doing in the context of public enemy, you run into very sophisticated sound collage work---FAR more complex sonically than anything happening in mainstream electronic music that is geared around dance (this leaves aside the legion of folk doing more complex electronic music in various underground scenes....i could go on and on about these forms, but i'll resist the temptation at this point)

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on drops: you can add patterns in 4 to any rhythm pattern. sooner or later, all sequences resolve into 4--or into any other meter than you add in (3, 6, 13: it doesnt matter if the sequence is long enough) allowing the beats to be resolved by the drop (which is inevitably on the 1 largely because the source material for most hip hop is funk and funk is all about the 1) is only AN OPTION for listening.
you can flip it around and emphasize the stream of sound elements, which are sometimes assymetrical with reference to the drop, if you want. for a long time, i was fascinated with drum-and-bass because i understood this form as taking this potential within hiphop and running with it.
it is obvious that you can select the rhythm that you dance to in a drum-and-bass context and that keying on the drop is no more than an option..


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o yeah--one of the main reasons that commerical hip hop sucks in the main these days (so far as i am concerned anyway) is simply that the role of djs has become less prominent--they have been replaced by makers of beats, mot of whom work with a single sample source--this because of the fees required to use recorded materials--the fees were forced onto hip hop by asshat copyright lawsuits during the early 1990s. these lawsuits more than anything else explains why it is that contemporary commerical hip hop is so simple when compared to what was happening in the late 1980s-mid 1990s: most of what gets airplay is based on 1 or 2 samples and that's it.

bomb squad releases were based on hundreds of samples crushed together.
so there is a dicerct link between the state of contemporary commercial hip hop and the attitude outlined in the op:

i interviewed one of the people from the turtles about their suit against de la soul for a 3 bar chunk they bit on "3 feet high and rising"---his attitude toward hip hop was that it wasn't music.
he claimed that a "creative" use of turtles music would have required that de la hire a bunch of musicians to do exact copies of the songs.
using records as raw materials was not music--it was stealing.
i think that attitude incomprehensible--unjustifiable conceptually, appalling aesthetically.

to argue on that basis that hip hop is not music is to argue that collage is not an art, that making collage does not transform the original material by resituating it. a logical extension of this would be to say that max ernst (for example) was not an artist because he made collage.
i dont know how you'd make such an argument.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite