I contributed several entries to the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture, including ones on Gangsta Rap, Horrorcore, Rap Metal, and 1500 words on the hip-hop scene in my beloved Pacific Northwest, where I first lived from 1993 to 1998 (and three other times after). Here’s an excerpt from the latter:
Underground Hip Hop nationwide saw a resurgence during the mid-to-late 1990s. Having remained primarily underground since its inception, Pacific Northwest Hip Hop soldiered on… Wordsayer (Jonathan Moore, 1969-2017) formed the group Source of Labor in 1989. After moving back to Seattle in 1992, Moore, along with members of Source of Labor and soul group Beyond Reality, formed Jasiri Media group. “The artists in Jasiri forced the Seattle hip hop scene to move from the grandiose, self-aggrandizing rap of Sir Mix-a-Lot to a more educated, meaningful form of musical expression” (Key, 2010, p. 294). Fighting the Teen Dance Ordinance, which had all but killed all-ages events in Seattle since its implementation in 1985, Moore promoted “Sure Shot Sundays” in 1999 to open up possibilities for local youth to experience and perform Hip Hop. He passed away at age 47 in March of 2017 of kidney failure.
Labels like Loose Groove, Do the Math, Impact Entertainment, and Conception Records released definitive compilations showing and proving that the Pacific Northwest’s underground was rife with intriguing and engaging Hip Hop artists in the 1990s. 14 Fathoms Deep: Seattle Hip Hop Compilation (Loose Groove 1997) featured Source of Labor, the Ghetto Children, and Prose and Concepts. Do the Math (Tribal Music, 1998) featured Wordsayer, DJs Topspin, B-Self, and Vitamin D, and three tracks by the Ghetto Children. Classic Elements (Impact Entertainment, 1998) boasted Ghetto Children’s love letter to classic Hip Hop, “Hip Hop Was?” Walkman Rotation (Conception Records, 1998) was a DJ-blended mixtape, a form popular in the underground at the time, mixed by J-Rocc of the Beat Junkies. Other local DJs include Vitamin D, B-Mello, and Topspin.
This massive, 500-page encyclopedia of all-thing hip-hop is out now!
Reference:
Key, Rachel. 2010. From the SEA to the PDX: Northwest Hip Hop in the I-5 Corridor. In Mickey Hess (Ed.), Hip-Hop America: A Regional Guide. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, pp. 287-314.
During my undergraduate days, my friends and I used to play a silly game. Whenever a situation or topic came up and they pointed to me, I would attempt to recite a relevant rap lyric. Sometimes it was a stretch to get Ice-T or the Beastie Boys to fit a late-night Waffle House run, but I was rarely stumped.
As Gorham and Gilligan (2006) put it, “media allusions represent an important way in which audiences make use of the cultural products around them to form relationships with others and build community out of shared media experiences” (p. 3). That is, we determine which texts are appropriate for appropriating and which resonate with the shared beliefs of our community (Linde, 2009). We run around in these collective “textual communities” (Stock, 1983). Members of said communities allude to the same, shared texts in their personal narratives. The shared texts are where we “compare notes” on our collective experiences, as I used to do in college. The fans of a particular cultural artifact (e.g., fans of the band Rush, fans of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, etc.) do not constitute a textual community; textual communities are constituted by their sharing of similar texts in their personal narratives (Linde, 2009). A lot of these texts come from song lyrics.
Sometimes this sharing is called intertextuality, but the term is often misused and abused (Allen, 2000; Irwin, 2004; Orr, 2003; Roudiez, 1980). As originally coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966, the term meant “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another” (Roudiez, 1980, p. 15; emphasis in original). Therefore, while lyrics, media allusions, and conversational sampling can all be considered intertextual, their intertextuality does not indicate a cohesive system of signs.
Reguardless, intertextuality says there is something outside the text — more texts. Building on Gérard Gennette’s work in art and literature (see Gennette, 1982; 1987; 1994/1997) , The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music (University of Michigan Press, 2018), edited by Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, aims to explore those texts in popular music. I did my own dissertation research on allusions in rap lyrics, so I immediately gravitated to the chapters on hip-hop: “Rap Gods and Monsters: Words, Music, and Images in the Hip-Hop Intertexts of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West” by Lori Burns and Alyssa Woods would’ve been invaluable in my earlier research; “Intertextuality and Lineage in The Game’s ‘We Ain’t’ and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘m.A.A.d. City'” by Justin A. Williams also immediately grabbed me; “Mix Tapes, memory, and Nostalogia: An Introduction to Phonographic Analogies” by Serge Lacasse and Andy Bennett overlaps with a couple of new areas of my research.
It’s not all rap lyrics and samples though: Everything from French Vaudville and Neil Young to Genesis, E.L.O., and Eurythmics get a spin. And it’s not all just research either: The Pop Palimpsest is that rare academic collection that’s exhaustively researched and meticulously assembled, but also damn fun to read. The book has inspired dueling desires: I wish it had not only come out earlier but also that I could have contributed.
References:
Allen, Graham. (2000). Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge.
Genette, Gérard. (1982/1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Genette, Gérard. (1987/1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Genette, Gérard. (1994/1997). The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gorham, B. W. & Gilligan, E. N. (1997, May). And now for something completely different: Media allusions, language, and the practice of everyday life. A paper presented to the Language and Social Interaction division, ICA, Montreal.
Irwin, William. (2004, October). Against Intertextuality. Philosophy and Literature. Volume 28, Number 2, pp. 227-242. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Linde, Charlotte. (2009). Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Orr, Mary. (2003). Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge: Polity.
Roudiez, L. S. (1980). Introduction. In J. Kristeva, Desire in language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-20.
Stock, B. (1983). The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I contributed several entries to the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture, including ones on Gangsta Rap, Horrorcore, Rap Metal, and 1500 words on the hip-hop scene in my beloved Pacific Northwest, where I first lived from 1993 to 1998 (and three other times after). Here’s an excerpt from the latter:
