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Shift Happens: Power to the Pedals

Those disgruntled with our current “technopoly,” as Neil Postman famously called it, often argue for returning to a simpler time. This is, of course, impossible, as even their visions of simpler times include technology. For example, in The Nature of Technology (Free Press, 2009), Brian Arthur envisions a world where all of our modern technologies disappear, yet we’d still be left with some. He writes, “We would still have watermills, and foundries, and oxcarts; and course linens, and hooded cloaks, and sophisticated techniques for building cathedrals. But we would once again be medieval” (p. 10). As ludicrous as such an argument appears, I would like to return to a time that never happened, an alternate universe where bicycles dominated the roads, as well as the construction and spread thereof. I’m not alone in this fantasy. Many of us take to the streets on two wheels instead of four, and movements like Critical Mass try to take them over completely on a regular basis.

Critical Mass Chicago, 2007.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is… one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
— David Harvey

For the uninitiated, Critical Mass is a monthly ride aimed at taking back the streets from cars, demonstrating the presence of bicycles, and reminding everyone that they’re on the road, too. The event is known for blocking thoroughfares, pissing off motorists, and regular arrests. Shift Happens: Critical Mass at 20 (Full Enjoyment, 2012), edited by Chris Carlsson, LisaRuth Elliott, and Adriana Camarena, is a twenty-year, global retrospective of the trials and triumphs of Critical Mass. It’s a monthly revolution that will start its third decade this week. The scope of these essays is as global as the movement, from Budapest to Berkeley and Paris to Ponce, and its birthplace in San Francisco, as well as from my beloved Portland to my current Chicago.

Strangely, the recent economic downturn might be a great opportunity. Sustainability, public transport, and bike lanes aren’t scoffed at anymore. — David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

For a look at the social forces that created the bicycle as opposed to the ones it has created, it gets no better than The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (The MIT Press, 2012), edited by by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch. I first encountered this volume — and its use of the bicycle as an astute example of technological change (in Pinch and Bijker’s essay “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other”) — in Andrew Feenberg‘s “Philosophy of Technology” class at San Diego State. It has since been treated to a much-deserved anniversary edition (the original version hit shelves in 1987). This collection established the approach of the social construction of technology (SCOT) as a viable methodology, and it’s not all about bicycles: eighteenth-century cooking stoves, twentieth-century missile systems, and thirteenth-century galleys get their due. The aforementioned chapter on the social construction of bicycles is still my favorite though.

Also, Bijker’s own Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (The MIT Press, 1997) is another interesting set of explorations and applications of this approach to these themes.

The mere fact of riding a bicycle is not in itself sinful, and if it is the only means of reaching the church on a Sunday, it may be excusable. — 1885 reply to a letter from a young lady

If you’re looking for more focus on the bike itself, rather than its urban and sociological implications, there’s Bicycling Science (The MIT Press, 2004), by David Gordon Wilson, which is now on its third edition (its original having come out in 1982). This book has everything to do with human-powered wheeled vehicles — bicycles in the broadest sense of the term: from the general (e.g., basic concepts of human power, the history of the bicycle, etc.) to the specific (e.g., physics, aerodynamics, bearings, materials, braking, steering, etc.), and the weird and the future of bicycles. If you’re looking for the mechanical minutia of bicycles, Bicycling Science is likely to be the only book you need.

I’m admittedly biased, but I think the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions in the history of technology. I’ve been riding one since the age of four, and they’ve been my primary means of transportation for the past fifteen years. If you don’t ride a bike regularly, give it one shot. Bicycles are fun, and that one ride might be the door to a whole new world. These three books go a long way to covering both the history of that world and its implications in the twenty-first century. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Critical Mass, do yourself a favor, and, in the words of Mike Daily, ride first, read later.

References:

Arthur, Brian. (2009). The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. New York: Free Press.

Bijker, Wiebe E. (1997). Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bijker, Wiebe E. , Hughes, Thomas P., & Pinch, Trevor. (2012). The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Byrne, David. (2009). Bicycle Diaries. New York: Viking.

Carlsson, Chris, Elliott, LisaRuth, & Camarena, Adriana (eds.). (2012). Shift Happens: Critical Mass at 20. San Francisco: Full Enjoyment.

Harvey, David. (2008, September/October). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53.

Wilson, David Gordon. (2004). Bicycling Science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Woodforde, J. (1970). The Story of the Bicycle. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

 

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Separated at Birth: New Candidates

We’ve all seen how much Will Ferrell and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith look alike, and I always mix up Josh Duhamel and Johnny Knoxville, as well as having to double-take Paul Reubens and Alan Cumming.  I have a couple more specimens I’d like you to join me in comparing.

Will Ferrell and Chad Smith

I was watching The Cure in Orange (1987) last night, and it reminded me how much their very-soon-to-be keyboardist Roger O’Donnell looks like James Spader.

Roger O’Donnell and James Spader

Also, in Jay-Z’s Fade to Black (2004), there’s a clip of Jay in the studio with Rick Rubin working on “99 Problems.” Mike D. of The Beastie Boys happens in on the session. Re-watching the DVD a while back, I was struck by how much Mike D. looks like Perry Farrell.

Perry Farrell and Mike D.

Celebrity doppelgängers abound. Anyone else have any new candidates?

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It’s All in the Risk: The Creative Edge

There are plenty of people trying to get at the heart of creativity, where it comes from, and how to get there. All of us at some point need that creative spark, and sometimes it can be so elusive it’s difficult to imagine it happening at all. Knowing more about the cognition of creativity is like knowing how a car engine works: It doesn’t make you a better driver. Finding the creative Edge is a far more personal quest.

The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists. — William Gibson, “New Rose Hotel”

Part of conjuring that Edge is making space for it to happen. Finding the space rarely works, so you have to tip it in some way. Just going for it is one way. Setting aside all of your fears of failure, self-editing, and just getting out of your own way. Ice-T puts it bluntly and succinctly [runtime: 1:37]:

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Playing it safe isn’t interesting. — Ryan Kidwell

As Ice-T mentions, Edge gets you right in the middle of that creative process.* you have to step outside of your comfort zone and find that space where it happens. Like the dreamers in Inception (2010), creating and experiencing the world simultaneously.

If you’ve ever seen anyone rap off the top of their head or improvisation well done, you know what getting in the middle of that process looks like. When someone is truly, spontaneously in the present moment. You can do it with any creative endeavor. Writing and riding are the two activities where I most find I need the Edge, and sometimes lightning does strike, but it’s all too rare.

Alex Burns described that zone to me as “hot space,” the place where creativity is happening in your head right then. After bouts with creative blocks, it’s namesake, Queens 1982 record Hot Space, was recorded in short bursts of studio time. Here’s a clip of them recording “Under Pressure” with David Bowie [the first half of the clip or so; runtime: 7:02]:

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Each of us have different limits, but we all have to venture outside of them once in a while. If you never cross the line, you’ll never know where those limits are, and you may never find the Edge you need to get past your obstacles. Push Your Self.

————

*This isn’t the first time the worlds of William Gibson and Ice-T have collided. The Iceberg was the leader of the Lo-Teks, “J-Bone,” in the Gibson-penned, 1995 movie, Johnny Mnemonic.

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Kickstarting Ume’s New Record

My dear friends Lauren, Eric and Rachel, collectively known as Ume, have been perched on the verge of the next level for a while now. With the interest of Grammy-winning producer Adam Kasper (Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, Seaweed, etc.), they have a chance to finally break through. And we can help them.

Ume, being the DIY-minded folks that they are, have started a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to book studio time with Kasper. These are hard-working, hard-rocking, talented musicians, good people, and good friends. Help me help them get this thing done.

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Revealing Poetry: The Art of Erasure

Maybe it’s apt that I don’t remember, but I somehow came across Tom Phillips‘ “treated Victorian novel,” A Humument (Tetrad Press, 1970), nearly a decade ago at San Diego State University. Phillips took William Mallock’s A Human Document (Cassell Publishing, 1892) and obscured words on every page, leaving a few here and there to tell a new story. It’s part painting, part drawing, part collage, part poetic cut-up, and all weirdly, intriguingly unique (You can view full pages from the book at its website).

Phillips claims that he picked A Human Document because of its price-point (“no more than three pence,” he said), but Mallock’s “novel” is oddly suited for Phillips’ repurposing. The original novel is a scrapbook of sorts of journal entries, correspondence, and other ephemera left behind by two deceased lovers. Mallock wrote of these scraps in his introduction that “as they stand they are not a story in any literary sense; though they enable us, or rather force us, to construct one out of them for ourselves” (p. 8). N. Katherine Hayles (2002) characterizes this introduction as “uncannily anticipating contemporary descriptions of hypertext narrative” (p. 78).

Tom Phillips is not the only nor the first to do such a work. According to Wikipedia,

Several contemporary writer/artists have used this form to good effect. Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her “Dictionary Columns” book art. d.a. levy also worked in this mode at about the same time. Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os is a long poem deconstructed from the text of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Tom Phillips’ A Humument is a major work of book art and found poetry deconstructed from a Victorian novel. Similarly, Jesse Glass’ Mans Wows (1981), is a series of poems and performance pieces mined from John George Hohman’s book of charms and healings Pow Wows, or The Long Lost Friend. Jen Bervin’s Nets is an erasure of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Janet Holmes’s The ms of my kin (2009) erases the poems of Emily Dickinson written in 1861-62, the first few years of the Civil War, to discuss the more contemporary Iraq War.

@shaviro At St Marks bookstore. Realized that I no longer fetishize books as objects in the slightest (which I used to do). Prefer etexts now. (Tweeted August 24th, 2012)

The move to digital texts, which is gaining more and more zeal by the day, has put the not only the fetishization of books as objects in jeopardy but also seemingly the want or need for them at all. It’s not that repurposed books are a last-gasp marketing ploy by the publishing industry—like pretty CD packages with bonus DVDs or 3D movies are—but that there is a reason to fetishize them. As Jonathan Safran Foer (see below) put it, “When a book remembers, we remember. It reminds you that you have a body. So many of the things we may think of as burdensome are actually the things that make us more human.”

Books are only metaphors of the body. — Michel de Certeau

With that said, Austin Kleon stole like an artist and created a best-seller using only markers and copies of The New York Times. His Newspaper Blackout (Harper Perennial, 2010) takes Tom Phillips’ methodology to its basic tenet: poetry as erasure.

“How to Learn About Girls” from Newspaper Blackout.

Taking a step up instead of down, Jonathan Safran Foer opted for literal subtraction, creating a textual sculpture. Foer treated his favorite novel, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (Penguin, 1963), by cutting out words, creating Tree of Codes (Visual Editions, 2010).

The book as conceptual art: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.

Giving due credit to his forebears, Foer told The New York Times, “It was hardly an original idea: it’s a technique that has, in different ways, been practiced for as long as there has been writing — perhaps most brilliantly by Tom Phillips in his magnum opus, A Humument. But I was more interested in subtracting than adding, and also in creating a book with a three-dimensional life. On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it has a body.” Foer also acknowledges the project’s constraints as well as the power of his source material, adding,

Working on this book was extraordinarily difficult. Unlike novel writing, which is the quintessence of freedom, here I had my hands tightly bound. Of course 100 people would have come up with 100 different books using this same process of carving, but every choice I made was dependent on a choice Schulz had made. On top of which, so many of Schulz’s sentences feel elemental, unbreakdownable. And his writing is so unbelievably good, so much better than anything that could conceivably be done with it, that my first instinct was always to leave it alone.

For about a year I also had a printed manuscript of The Street of Crocodiles with me, along with a highlighter and a red pen. The story of Tree of Codes is continuous across pages, but I approached the project one page at a time: looking for promising words or phrases (they’re all promising), trying to involve and connect what had become my characters. My first several drafts read more like concrete poetry, and I hated them.

As opposed to the anyone-can-do-it tack of Kleon, Foer took the tools and text at hand and made something truly new. Like A Humument before it, Tree of Codes is a unique object worthy of thoughtful consideration. As DJ Scratch once said, “The reason we respect something as an art is because it’s hard as fuck to do.” Taking elements of others’ work and making it your own is one thing. Taking the whole damn thing and completely transforming it into something else is art.

——–

Here’s the making-of video for Tree of Codes [runtime: 3:34]:

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References:

de Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. (2010). Tree of Codes. London: Visual Editions.

Hayles, N. Katherine. (2002). Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Heller, Steven. (2010, November 24). “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Book as Art Object.” The New York Times.

Kleon, Austin. (2010). Newspaper Blackout. New York: Harper Perennial.

Mallock, William. (1892). A Human Document. New York: Cassell Publishing.

Phillips, Tom. (1970). A Humument. London: Tetrad Press.

Wagner, Heather. (2010, November 10). “Jonathan Safran Foer Talks Tree of Codes and Conceptual Art”. VF Daily.

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Gilman Girls: Metal Madness Memories, 1998

During my brief stint in the Bay Area nearly fifteen years ago, I managed to go to 924 Gilman Street—the Left Coast’s answer to 315 Bowery—a few times with my friend Brian Peterson. I know one time we went to see our favorite math-rock masters, A Minor Forest, and another time was to see them do pre-…And Justice for All Metallica covers for the Metal Madness Show.

jan 31 sat: Metal Madness Show: East Bay bands doing metal 
covers: 
       Creeping Death, Rocket Queens, American Metal, 
       Iron Vegan, Motley Jews, Blizzards Of Schnozz, 
       Anal Tap    at 924 Gilman a/a $5 8pm *** @ 
       ($1 off with proper metal attire)

Iron Vegan was comprised of members of Neurosis, Noothgrush, and Lost Goat, and was the closest I’ve come to seeing any of those bands play. Their set was all Iron Maiden covers, of course, which was the closest I’ve come to seeing them live as well.

Iron Vegan: Taste the Metal.
I missed Rocket Queens (doing Guns N’ Roses songs) because this cute, blonde girl who wanted to piss off her boyfriend invited me outside to take a walk…

I made it back in time to catch A Minor Forest plus two (as Creeping Death, but not this one) and Brian shaking his head at me. A Minor Forest used to play some of the most intricate, tightly woven compositions ever conceived by a three-piece. As far as them doing other people’s music, Rush covers were what crowds wanted to hear when we’d see them play as A Minor Forest proper. Their doing old Metallica material, with the aid of the two additional members (a second guitarist and a singer), was impressive, but not quite as impressive as they normally were. They’d taken hints from Metal before though, using the line “A Minor Forest supports the destruction of humanity” in the inside cover of their first record, Flemish Altruism: Constituent Parts 1993-1996 (Thrill Jockey, 1996), which their guitarist Eric Hoversten told me they’d lifted from the masthead of a Black Metal magazine belonging to Steve Albini’s girlfriend at the time.

According to the Matador Records website, Creeping Death may have had a larger impact than I would’ve imagined:

With revolving members from A Minor Forest, The Threnody Ensemble and Weakling, Creeping Death could have been responsible for the short-lived metal cover band phenomenon, which swept San Francisco in the late ’90s. Headlining shows with such bands as Iron Vegan, Rocket Queen, and Sleigher, the members of Creeping Death found that being in a cover band paid better and drew bigger and more responsive crowds than any of their respective “real” projects.

I guess when your “real” projects play songs with gamelan structures and time signatures no one can follow, a good ol’ “Ride the Lightning” cover is just the break everyone needs. It’s not just esoterica versus Metallica though, as Chuck Klosterman illustrated while comparing a cover band to a “real” metal band, writing, “One can only wonder how the real guys in Dokken feel about being as popular as five fake guys in [Guns N’ Roses cover band Paradise City]” (p. 67). Something about the inauthenticity of a cover band makes the event more fun, lighter, more intimate. I would argue that this is the only reason Weezer ever had a career (well, that and creative, Spike Jonze-helmed videos). Something to do with the levity of enjoying a cover band.

There’s also the silent sting of nostalgia. No one goes to see a band from their youth do new material. Whether it’s a reunion tour or the latest of many, past-their-prime recordings, it’s all about the legacy, the hits from the day. It’s about reliving a piece of the past.

Memories don’t live like people do
They always remember you
— Mos Def, “Travelin’ Man”

924 Gilman Street Membership Card from 1998.

Somehow my 924 Gilman Street membership card has survived in my wallet intact since 1998. I wouldn’t still have it, but every time I’ve switched wallets, I’ve seen no reason to take it out. It’s a totem, a token from a time long past that was about another time long past, a copy of a copy of a copy. It doesn’t make me particularly nostalgic—I only went to Gilman a few times—but it does make me smile. As the best memories should.

Speaking of, the girl I made out with that night is almost in her thirties now. Memories don’t live like people do.

References:

Def, Mos. (1998). Travelin’ Man [Recorded by Mos Def & DJ Honda]. On h II [LP]. New York: Relativity Records.

Klosterman, Chuck. (2003). Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. New York: Scribner.

Lesser Biography. (2003). Matador Records website.

 

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Floating Signifiers: The Haunting of Hip-hop by the Ghosts of Emcees Passed

You know the story. On September 7, 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot as he waited at a traffic light in the passenger seat of Suge Knight’s car on the Las Vegas strip. He died on September 13. Six months later, on March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace a.k.a. Biggie Smalls was gunned down in Los Angeles.[i] The two had been embroiled in a media-abetted, bi-coastal battle for Hip-hop supremacy, dividing the majority of the Hip-hop nation into two camps, East versus West.[ii]

On April 15, 2012, Tupac’s ghost performed to a packed crowd at the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California. The appearance of this apparition stunned and delighted those in attendance. The continued presence of both Shakur and Wallace represents an opportunity to examine how the genre represents a hauntology based on its use of pieces of the past in musical samples, lyrical references, and puffed-up personas, and how this haunting plays out in the larger contemporary culture.

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Hip-hop is haunted by a number of dead performers (e.g., Adam Yauch, Jam Master Jay, Guru, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Big L, Big Pun, Eazy-E, Proof, Pimp C, et al.). Their ghosts continue to release records, do duets with living acts, and appear on its magazine covers. Over a decade later, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur are the two most prominent of these ghosts. They are deities subsequent emcees must pay homage to by mentioning them, performing posthumous duets with them (of course, having done a record with one or both before their deaths is the most respected position), or aspiring to become them. At the end of the music video for his song “99 Problems,” Jay-Z is gunned down on the streets of New York City. The song is from his Black Album (2003), which was supposed to be his last release. Preparing to retire from the hustle of recording and performing, Jay-Z simulated his own death, imitating the high profile and unsolved slayings of two of his contemporaries, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.

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Hov got flow though he’s no Big and Pac, but he’s close.
How I’m supposed to win? They got me fighting ghosts.
— Jay-Z, “Most Kings” (Unreleased), Decoded, p. 98.

The practice of literally sampling previously recorded pieces of music, vocals, and sounds has remained integral to the process by which Hip-hop music is created. Hip-hop’s practice of sampling and manipulating sounds and voices lends itself to haunting. Schwartz writes that sampling “ultimately erases the line between the quick and the dead,”[iii] and Peters adds that mediated communication via recording “is ultimately indistinguishable from communication with the dead.”[iv] The DJ in Hip-hop combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create new compositions. Indeed the pioneers of the genre had little more than records, record players, and speakers.[v] “That’s how rap got started,” says Public Enemy emcee Chuck D, “Brothers made something out of nothing.”[vi]

Derrida calls our obsession with recording “archive fever,” writing, “The archivization produces as much as it records the event.”[vii] Nowhere is our feverish archiving of things for the future more powerful than in digital recordings. As Rimbaud puts it, “Capturing these moments, storing them, and redirecting them back into the public stream enables one to construct an archeology of loss, pathos, and missed connections, assembling a momentary forgotten past in our digital future. It is a form of found futurism.”[viii] Sterne adds that the advent of sound recording maintains the promise of future archeology, writing, “sound recording is understood as an extension of the art of oratory—a set of practices that depended heavily on the persona and style of the speaker and relations between the speaker and audience.”[ix] Sterne’s analogy to oratory rings true with the emcee in Hip-hop.

Hip-hop music is an artistic and aesthetic form similar to that of literature, and sampling is a similar practice to that of reference, allusion, and quotation in literature.[x] Regarding European novels, Meyer stated that the “charm” of quotation lies “in a unique tension between assimilation and dissimilation: it links itself closely to its new environment, but at the same time detaches itself from it, thus permitting another world to radiate into the self-contained world” of the piece.[xi] The use of quoting, or sampling, therefore creates “a new entity greater than any of its constituent parts.”[xii]

Further conflating sound recording and literature, Peters writes, “The phonograph, as the name suggests, is a means of writing.”[xiii] McLuhan stated that, “the brief and compressed history of the phonograph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word,”[xiv] and Peters points out that the phonograph “is a medium that preserves ghosts that would otherwise be evanescent.”[xv] Biggie and Tupac haunt us in the same way that the ghosts of literature do. Quoting Philip Auslander in their discussion of haunting in music, Shaffer and Gunn argue, “‘listeners do not perceive recorded music as disembodied’. Rather, he argues that listeners and performers fashion a ‘fictional body’ or personae when listening to music, an imaginary corporeality that is ultimately associated with a ‘real person.’”[xvi]

As many other so-called “gangsta rappers” have claimed, Tupac Shakur hoped to exact change by exaggerating ghetto narratives, stories of poverty and neglect.[xvii] The son of a Black Panther, Shakur grew up painfully aware of the disadvantages of his minority status.[xviii] Once the Panthers dissolved, Shakur’s mother, Afeni, raised him alone, often without a job and sometimes without a home due to her off and on affair with crack cocaine.[xix] In many ways in his short life, Tupac Shakur faced every ill with which the American black man struggles.

Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls; The Notorious B. I. G.) lived a similar, truncated life story. Raised by a single mom, Wallace came up hustling in Brooklyn and rapping on the side.[xx] The hours of standing on street corners, selling crack afforded Wallace plenty of time to rehearse his street-borne rhymes. At the time of their deaths, they were also entangled in the largest battle in Hip-hop history. Shakur was shot five times outside of a studio in which Biggie was recording.[xxi] The coincidence was too much to be ignored and helped launch the much-discussed East Coast/West Coast Hip-hop battle, which was primarily waged between Tupac and his label Death Row Records and Biggie Smalls and his label Bad Boy. The feud, largely conducted via lyrical shots, eventually ended in both of their deaths.

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While Biggie was posthumously honored with a film biography in 2008 entitled Notorious, Tupac remerged in 2012 at Coachella as a “hologram.” The ghostly image, which was accompanied on stage by Tupac’s peers Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, was actually a nineteenth century special effect known as a Pepper’s Ghost, a trick that’s been used to create apparitions in haunted houses. John Henry Pepper, after whom the effect is named, along with Henry Dircks developed the technique to make ghosts appear on stage.[xxii] And that’s just what visual effects company Digital Domain did at Coachella, much to the awe of the music fans present and those who have seen it via the internet.

Viewing Hip-hop as a hauntology illustrates how deep our culture’s ghosts run. From the musical samples, lyrical references, recorded memories, and now rapping revenants, the haunting seems endless. Thanks to recording technology, we live in an era when, as Andreas Huyssen put it, “the past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries,”[xxiii] and more than any other genre of recorded music, Hip-hop is willfully haunted by its own ghosts.

Notes:

[i] Joy Bennett Kinnon, “Does Rap Have a Future?” Ebony, June 1997, 76.

[ii] Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

[iii] Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 311.

[iv] John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 176.

[v] Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Yes, Yes, Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-hop’s First Decade (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).

[vi] Quoted in Russell A. Porter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 73.

[vii] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16-17.

[viii] Robin Rimbaud, “The Ghost Outside the Machine,” in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 131-134.

[ix] Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 308.

[x] For further discussion of the correlations between literature and rap music, see Richard Shusterman, “Challenging Conventions in the Fine Art of Rap,” in That’s the Joint: The Hip-hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 459-479, and Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

[xi] Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 6.

[xii] E. E. Kellette, Literary Quotation and Allusion (Cambridge: Heffer, 1933), 13-14.

[xiii] Peters, Speaking into the Air, 160.

[xiv] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

[xv] Peters, Speaking into the Air, 160.

[xvi] Tracy Stephenson Shaffer and Joshua Gunn, “‘A Change is Gonna Come’: On the Haunting of Music and Whiteness in Performance Studies,” Theatre Annual 59 (2006): 44.

[xvii] Tricia Rose, The Hip-hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008).

[xviii] Eric Michael Dyson, Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (New York: Basic Civitas, 2001).

[xix] Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 46-47.

[xx] Jake Brown, Ready to Die: The Story of Biggie Smalls, Notorious B.I.G. (Phoenix, AZ: Collossus Books, 2004).

[xxi] Dyson, Holler if You Hear Me, 2001.

[xxiii] Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Ed Note: This is an edited excerpt of a chapter from my book-in-progress, Hip-Hop Theory. It was originally a much longer and much different piece co-written with Joe Faina for Josh Gunn’s “The Idiom of Haunting” seminar at UT-Austin (which is being offered for the last time this fall). Many thanks to Josh Gunn for his knowledge and guidance on this topic.

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How I Got Over The Roots

I put The Roots collective head out over on my man Tim Baker’s SYFFAL site in a column they call “Old Yeller’d.” The idea is to kill off some cultural sacred cow that’s just gone on way too long. I picked Illadelph’s finest.

Here’s an excerpt:

It’s been a decade since anyone should’ve been paying any attention to The Roots (Phrenology for those of you keeping score at home). They probably peaked before that, and it wasn’t on that heavy-handed, overrated Things Fall Apart joint. It’s hard to innovate with that many crocks on the counter. How many dudes are in this band? I can’t imagine how they ever got paid, laid, or fed. It’s only fitting that they became a house band, slowcooking into onscreen oblivion.

It gets worse, and it’s only partially in jest. Read the rest on SYFFAL.

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Aggro Rag: Ride First, Read Later

I’ve expounded elsewhere at length about how zine-making during my teen years informed my life’s path, and I’ve mentioned fellow traveler Mike Daily before, but I haven’t really given him due credit. Mike Daily is a founding member of The Plywood Hoods, one of the most influential BMX crews in the history of our little sport. He also made one of the first BMX zines ever: Aggro Rag. Echoing my own feelings about making zines, Daily told Jared Souney in an interview for ESPN BMX in 2010, “Working with the printed page in mind has always been my way of creating something, from the early ‘zine designs to my cut-and-pasted writing journals. I like to lay things out visually, so the collage approach helps hone poems, lyrics for songs and fiction/non-fiction I’m working on. It’s more of a calling than a career — that kind of gnawing feeling that compels you to make stuff.”

Well, Daily’s never stopped making stuff. From his novels and zines to his complete rebuild of his original CW California Freestyle bike, he’s stayed on the make. His latest missive is a new issue of Aggro Rag, the premiere BMX zine’s first appearance since 1989. Each of the 500 copies is signed by original Plywood Hoods Brett Downs, Mark Eaton, Kevin Jones, Jamie McKulik, Dale Mitzel and Daily himself. Contributors include Mark Lewman, Spike Jonze, Peter Relic, Drob Meyer, and Pecos B., among many others. There are interviews with flatland undergrounders like Mark McKee, Aaron Dull, Gary Pollak, Chris Day, Jim Johnson, Derek Schott, Gerry Smith, Dave Nourie, and several others, as well as Hip-hop undergrounders like Dark Time Sunshine and Sole. You can snag a copy right now, and I suggest you do so.

As for me, Daily asked me to interview my dude Aesop Rock, which I did gladly. It’s an honor to be a part of the zine I read so avidly in my youth. Here are two of my friends and heroes celebrating the release of Aggro Rag #13 at Portland’s Wonder Ballroom on July 19th, 2012:

If the return of the zine weren’t enough, this issue precedes the forthcoming 443-page book, Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag! Plywood Hoods Zines ’84-’89: The Complete Collection, coming out January 1, 2013.

It’s going to be so dope, but as Daily always said, “Ride First, Read Later.”

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Ordering instructions can be found at the Aggro Rag site.