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Of Bullhorns and Lightning Rods

In the March 19, 1990 issue of Newsweek, they unsurprisingly attack Hip-hop with everything from unfettered racism to ignorant fear-mongering. I say “unsurprisingly” because in March of 1990, rap music was still the bane of popular culture. Yo! MTV Raps had barely started its decade-long run, N.W.A. had yet to release records from their separate ways, Public Enemy was just on the verge of dropping Fear of a Black Planet, and Tipper Gore’s PMRC was advising parents not to let their kids listen to rap. In Newsweek‘s cover story, “Rap Rage,” with the cover copy, “Yo! Street rhyme has gone big time, but are those sounds out of bounds?” Jerry Adler attempts to describe music made by groups “most Americans may never have heard of,”

…music so postindustrial it’s almost not even played, but pieced together out of prerecorded sound bites. It is the culture of American males frozen in various stages of adolescence: their streetwise music, their ugly macho boasting and joking about anyone who hangs out on a different block—cops, other races, women, and homosexuals (p. 56).

Bill Adler (1999; absolutely no relation) writes of the cover story,

It was so off-base that 49 music writers, led by Entertainment Weekly‘s Greg Sandow (and representing publications including Time, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice) wrote a letter to the editors of Newsweek insisting that [Jerry] Adler had “invented a nightmarish and racist fantasy about ignorant Black men who scream obscene threats. This is more than artistic misjudgement. Adler has slandered a major strain of contemporary Black culture” (p. 145).

To the Newsweek‘s left in the photo above is the October 18, 2012 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times in which they do much the same thing over 22 years later, furthering Chicago’s Chief Keef’s place as an ephemeral media lightning rod. All the bias, misinformation, and well-worn themes from the past two decades of mainstream Hip-hop coverage are here, from jail time boosting record sales to record companies exploiting violence. I call Keef’s treatment ephemeral because comparing him to Tupac and T.I.—as Thomas Conner does—is ludicrous and illustrates how little these writers know about their subject matter or care about reporting it accurately. It also shows how desperate their employers have gotten, especially when major news outlets sport inset “tl;dr” boxes in their articles, as if that makes them hip instead of hopeless.

Keef has popularized a rap style called “drill music” that originated in Chicago’s south side. Its use of truncated half-bars made up of single statements chanted one at a time rather than rap’s signature flowing poetry over beats makes it a distinctive vocal expression, possibly only prefigured by other one-offs like early-1990s dis-rapper Tim Dog or NOLA’s hoarse-voiced Mystikal. It’s a style that other rappers sound cramped attempting to emulate, as proven by Kanye West’s remix of Keef’s one hit “I Don’t Like,” featuring the ample vocal skills of Pusha-T, Jadakiss, Big Sean, and West himself—all veterans compared to the 17-year-old Keef. “Mr. West has rarely sounded so out of place,” writes Jon Caramanica, “and the original trumps the remix in every regard. ‘I Don’t Like’ is all hard angles and concrete walls, resistant to whatever nuance Mr. West wanted to add.” The drill sound’s closest contemporary analogue lies in the gang-fueled, club anthems of Atlanta’s Waka Flocka Flame, which feature a little more in the way of flow but are no less clipped and shouted. He’s already outlasted his critics’ expectations though and has made the transition from street tough to entertainer with a sort of gangster’s grace. That shift still remains for Keef, and for argument’s sake, here’s the original house-arrest version of his break-out hit “I Don’t Like” [runtime: 5:09]:

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I do like the song as well as his mixtapes, but I can’t say that I hear evidence of a talent like Tupac, T.I., or, more germanely, Tyler, The Creator. Mark Brown opens his Chicago Sun-Times article about record labels exploiting violence such as the gun waving seen above, by writing, “There probably ought to be a rule against a guy like me writing about somebody like teen rapper Chief Keef, the gulf between our worlds so vast that there’s no way I can relate to his life experiences let alone his music” (p. 5). You might be onto something there, Mark. He adds later, “I decided long ago there’s no value in old white guys wagging their fingers about the dangers of rap music lyrics that glorify guns, drugs, violence, and other criminal activity. I don’t like them. So what?” (p. 5) So, why did you just spend nearly 800 words doing just that?

Chief Keef’s raps are like Tweets: one-line, stand-alone missives; all comment, no story. Another Sun-Times article that emerged as I was writing this revisits how social media fuels public feuds. Much has been written about the role Twitter played in Keef’s rise to infamy, mainly due to gang rivalries that bubbled up into the music and possibly resulted in the death of his south-side rap rival Lil Jojo. “THE defining document of hip-hop’s current evolutionary state isn’t a song, or a music video or a concert,” writes Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, “Years from now cultural archaeologists will do much better to look back over the Twitter account of the 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who’s been exploding, or imploding, depending on how you look at it, one short burst of text at a time.” The immediacy of such a channel—someone once called it “the death of the unspoken thought”—lends it to hotheaded responses and eventual regret. “I think it’s pretty likely that instantaneity means there is no chance to ‘count to 10’ in hopes that things might cool off a bit,” says my colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Steve Jones, who’s quoted in the Sun-Times article. “I don’t pin that on Twitter, though, as that is the case with other synchronous media — Facebook, [texting], etc. . . . There’s probably some perceived advantage to the public-ness of Twitter, that it seems like more of a mass medium than other options at this point. It also has the perceived advantage of having messages amplified via retweeting. If Facebook is a wall, Twitter might be a bullhorn.” The bullhorn is the perfect symbol for the nodal point I’m trying to reveal here.

In writing about these articles, I feel kind of like the people who wrote them, like I’ve gone looking for something to be outraged about. And that’s a large part of the problem: If you go looking for something to be bummed about, you will find it. Unless you want to be up on the latest trends in rap music, Chief Keef is really none of your damn business. Journalism is like the postal service: They’re both dying businesses that continually do their jobs more and more poorly. So much so that they’re redefining what it means for media to “go viral” and what it means for someone to “go postal.”

It should also be noted that Newsweek announced last week that they are folding their print edition at the end of the year. I hope it means the end of their shitty rag in all its forms. Fuck them.

References:

Adler, Bill. (1999). Bill Adler’s Top 5 Mainstream Media Rap Coverage Travesties. In Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, & Brent Rollins (Eds.), Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists. New York: Ego Trip Publications.

Adler, Jerry. (1990, March 19). The Rap Attitude. Newsweek, CXV, 12, p. 56-59.

Brown, Mark. (2012, October 18). Record Companies Feed Off Violence. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 5.

Caramanica, Jon. (2012, October 4). Chicago Hip-Hop’s Burst of Change. The New York Times.

Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 18). Jail Time Might Not Hurt Sales. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 4.

Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 20). Rappers’ beefs sizzle on social media. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 3.

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Many thanks to Stacey Spencer who boosted me the one copy of Newsweek I’ve ever owned and to Zizi Papacharissi and Tim Baker for additional links and input.

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Aesop Rock: Perpendicular to Everything

Anyone who questions the lyrical skills of Aesop Rock isn’t listening carefully enough. Or at all. His records reward the repeated listen, the close reading, the attentive ear. His beat-building abilities are on par with his bars making him the complete Hip-hop package. Put that together with his visual art background and his knack for surrounding himself with creative friends of all stripes, and you’ve got one of the most interesting artists of the twenty-first century.

I met Aes in 2005 while backstage at the Showbox in Seattle, and though I have tested our bond by embarrassing myself in front of him many times, we’ve been friends ever since. Whether it was dumping a box of shirts into the street after a show or drunkenly crying during Kimya Dawson’s set at Home Slice Pizza during SXSW in 2011, Aes has always had my back. He’s a good dude that way.

Aesop was most recently one-third of Hail Mary Mallon along with fellow Def Jux expatriates Rob Sonic and DJ Big Wiz. When the following interview went to press, Aesop Rock had a brand new record out (Skelethon on RhymeSayers Entertainment), and was on the road, “until forever,” he said.

Roy Christopher: Last time we hung out, I got kinda tipsy and annoyed the shit out of Rob Sonic. The time before that, I did the same and dumped a box of your merch all over East 10th street. Why do you even still talk to me?

Aesop Rock: Hm. These are facts. You dumped the merch, but you were trying to help so that gets a pass. The other was at a SXSW, so on one hand, exposure to drunken company is expected. Still, you are technically an adult. I want to like you.  Our friendship is so complex. It’s like a strange riddle whispered into an elder sled dog’s ear seconds before starting his final Iditarod. What does it all mean?  Who is Rob Sonic really? Why is Roy drunk and crying at a mid-afternoon, outdoor gig behind a pizza shop? Then I think to myself, “Ah, we are all dogs in this race. It’s cold as shit and there’s a lot of ground to cover. Mush!” That and you have been extremely supportive of me for many years, and I appreciate it a lot.

RC: Oh, of course! The last time we talked formally interview-wise, you said, “As I get older I get less obsessed with details and more obsessed with finding real general ways of saying a lot. Like an old man who doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s some weird, clever statement that somehow sums up everything: That’s what I wanna be.” Does that statement still stand?

AR: That’s gross. Don’t quote me to me, man. I am a fucking supreme idiot. I think I obsess over some things, while other things go completely neglected.  Obsession is the spice of life – you discover something, your brain gets zapped and you are alive in a new way, actively seeking information, being productive, finally finding some details worth paying attention to, etc. Musically speaking, I know I have reworked individual lyrics and sounds to extremes nobody who wasn’t obsessed would bother with, or redoing things that sound exactly the same to others 800 times until it hits what I was looking for – whatever that means. Details rule, and I assume are emphasized by the stuff we neglect, whether artistically, life-istically, whatever. You might leave an obvious fuck-up untouched because it’s the right fuck-up. Different things take different amounts of attention to become realized. Sometimes you wanna cut paper slowly and precisely with scissors to get a clean edge, sometimes you wanna tear it to show the rip. That’s my updated take on “details,” which I just re-read and feel is as vague as my 2005 version, with way more words. The second half of my ’05 comment sounds beyond douche-y, and I’m sorry I put you through hearing somebody say those words out loud. Let’s say that we’re officially even for the merch drop now.

RC: Deal. You’ve really taken to the web lately with Twitter and various websites. What’s the aim of 900 Bats?

AR: It’s pretty much aimed at not having any aim. Albums take me a little while to make, and I guess I wanted to have a home for some public fuckery, beats, videos: just an outlet for crap when I felt like making it, as well as contributions from others looking for the same. I had some like-minded friends and we made 900 bats. Sometimes I stay super busy with it and try to gather content, make stuff, etc. Other times it goes untouched for weeks. I think it’s a tiny arena where I can be creative with zero pressure or expectations, and I hope the others that have added things to it feel the same. It’s been hard to keep up with now that I’ve been consumed with Skelethon stuff, but I find it a rewarding outlet to have when I need it.

RC: New York City seems like the place to be for Hip-hop, but you bounced to the Left Coast. How’s the Bay Area different from New York for the way you approach this stuff?

AR: I have a really different life than I had in NY for many ever-evolving reasons. It was a big move. It’s not a bus-ride away, which is the furthest I had ever lived previously. I kinda nurse this need to be alone while yelling about feeling lonely. That has led me to a relatively isolated life. Socializing in general, in the sense of hitting a bar at night, etc. never was my thing, but now that I live out here I find it even easier to escape/hide, to a perhaps unhealthy extent. Making songs has always been something I did at night while other people were out, or at least that’s what it felt like. When I was younger, painting was like that: I would rather make some shit than go out. Jumping to the other side of the country enables that for better or for worse. It kinda seals the deal on a lot of the socializing because quite frankly I don’t really know very many people here. The approach feels like “me vs. me” more than ever.

RC: When you’re not messing around in the studio, you’re out on the road. Which do you prefer?

AR: I prefer the studio because I like making things. That said, because Rob, Wiz and I are all over the country these days, touring is a nice chance to hang with those guys. Because songs have felt like the byproduct of antisocial behavior for me, hitting a point in my life when someone was like “ok, time to tour!” – I was just like… “ummm what?” I mean, in ’01 I finally quit my day-job to do my first official “tour,” and I sorta freaked out and didn’t even end up going. It felt like the exact opposite of what I was putting into the songs, and I just couldn’t wrangle it in. It still feels that way. “Performing” is an awkward thing for me. I kinda hate it. I love it, but I kinda hate it. I mean it feels undeniably fantastic to be in a room with people getting loud for you and your songs, but I will never not find it fucking terrifying. I think over the years I have adapted to the point of coping, but the entire “on tour” experience hasn’t been something I have found comfort in. Regardless, I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.

RC: This is for the premier BMX ‘zine, so I have to ask, you ever ride BMX?

AR: Skateboarding played a gigantic roll in my youth, from elementary school through my young 20’s. In maybe 7th grade however, I was coaxed over to the local dirt track behind Pumpernickels restaurant. I’d say for about a year or so I abandoned skating and rode a bike. I enjoyed it, but ultimately had picked up skating again by the time high school came around. BMX is sick as fuck and I will still sit and watch that shit any time.

———————-

Here’s the video for “Zero Dark Thirty” from Skelethon [runtime: 3:32]:

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Ed note: This interview originally appeared in Mike Daily’s Aggro Rag Freestyle Mag #13: The Hip-hop Issue in July, 2012. As that issue is now nearly out of print, I’m posting it here by kind permission of Mike Daily for those that missed out. Many thanks to him, Chrissy Piper, Dana Meyerson, and, of course, Aesop Rock.

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Documenting Hip-hop: Ice-T’s The Art of Rap

Though he rarely gets his due outside of hardcore heads, Ice-T has always been one of Hip-hop’s best storytellers. Songs like “6 ‘N the Mornin'” (1987), “Colors” (1988), and “Drama” (1988) set the bar high for poetic narrative. These songs were gritty tales from the streets of L.A., “gangsta rap” before it was so-called (back then Ice-T called it “crime rhyme”). Now he’s set out to tell the story of Hip-hop itself in the documentary Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (Indomina, 2012).

In addition to his pedigree as an emcee, Ice-T also knows every veteran of the game. On the selection of rappers in the film, he told Soul Culture (embedded below; runtime: 6:48), “I just went through my phonebook, that’s all it was. It wasn’t an intent to cut out the young kids or anything. I just said I’m going to do a movie (and) I can’t offer money. I can only get favors, so let’s call my friends. And I called up the people I toured with.” That explains a lot of the inherent omissions of a documentary of this nature. With that said, the film is a fun collection of thoughts from a range of Hip-hop luminaries. What it lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in breadth.

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There is a literacy to Hip-hop. “It’s just like a language,” says DJ Premiere, “You have to know how to listen to it… And if you don’t know how to listen to it, it doesn’t make sense.” The Art of Rap is similar in that it helps to already have a knowledge of the history of the culture, its major players, and their relationships with one another. For instance, when fellow West Coast rapper Ras Kass asks if Ice is getting an interview with Xzibit for the film, Ice says he can’t find him. Ras calls XZibit at his house down the street, and Ice-T makes it his next stop. Or when he’s up in Eminem’s studio. After talking with Eminem at length, Ice is chopping it up with Royce Da 5’9″, and Em comes in rapping Ice-T’s “Reckless” from Breakin’ (1984).

When Ice-T sits down with many of these folks, it’s obvious that they’ve been friends and colleagues in this for years–especially people like Ras, Dr. Dre, Snoop, Ice Cube, Rakim, Redman, MC Lyte, Q-Tip, and Lord Jamar. With others, Ice doesn’t even step in front of the camera (if he’s even there; it’s especially noticeable during the Kanye West spot). The Art of Rap gives one glimpses of the heavies in the game, but knowing a bit of their backstory helps those glimpses go together.

Of course, Hip-hop has been explored in previous documentaries. Peter Sprier’s The Art of 16 Bars (QD3, 2005), DJ Organic’s Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (Bowery Films, 2000), and Doug Pray’s Scratch (Palm Pictures, 2001) provide a decent overview of the complexity of this art form. But Ice-T brings a special touch to the film. He knows almost everyone in this movie in a way that other documentarians of same do not.

If you lack the interest or the time to read some of the great books written about the genre and culture, Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap won’t school you completely, but it’s a fun companion piece to your further knowledge. As always, Ice-T tells the stories well.

Here’s the trailer [runtime: 2:33]:

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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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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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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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Erik Blood: Aural Sex

Confession: My all-time favorite band is Oingo Boingo. It’s been that way since Keith Vandeberg introduced me to them in the sixth grade. Oingo Boingo showed me that music could be about something, that it could evoke meaning as well as feeling, that it could tell stories as well as be rebellious. I found out much later that mastermind Danny Elfman also scored films. This made sense to me, given what his band had taught me about the power of music.

Erik Blood will soon release one of the best records I’ve ever heard. The only thing that my Oingo Boingo anecdote has to do with this is that, in addition to making music that feels good as well as means much, Blood also happens to score films. The ability to put music to images undoubtedly aids the ability to create images with music. Touch Screens (2012) illustrates Blood’s vast skills in the area. His work echoes eras past, but its sources remain untraceable, folding in on each other just when you get a taste. This is stuttery, gooey, taffy-like pop in the vein of Brad Laner and Kevin Shields, but Blood puts these things together with that third thing, the thing that comes from more than just nailing the essential tension between tradition and innovation. With a porn-related concept and a cover reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s painting for Dead Kennedys’ Frankenchrist poster, Touch Screens is ripe for controversy — The early-Prince kind of controversy, who incidentally also did music for films.

Music is a four-dimensional plotting grid that often describes hundreds of moving vectors for us, at once and in real time. It implies a capacity to manipulate information for which we have scarcely given ourselves credit. — Roger Hyde

“Most of [the shoegazers] couldn’t rock their way out of a paper bag,” once quoth Simon Reynolds (DuBrowa, 2002). Not so with Erik Blood. There’s as much Loop as there is Main, as much Anton Newcombe as there is Courtney Taylor-Taylor. I also hear some Can and Neu!, which he claims he likes but doesn’t consider an influence. “Though I guess everything one hears is an influence,” he concedes. Blood broadcasts these soundtracks from some unplaceable future, some unknown space out of time.

There are songs, but we were thinking differently. I personally was thinking in terms of chamber symphonies. A little bit loud and noisy, but the same thing. And not bound only to words. — Holger Czukay, Can

Prior to his latest, porn-influenced release, Blood recorded The Way We Live (2009), and the score to Steven Richter’s Center of Gravity (2011), as well as working with Seattle’s inimitable Shabazz Palaces and TheeSatisfaction, among others.

Roy Christopher: Touch Screens incorporates so many sounds from so many eras, yet still sounds fresh. Without giving away too much, are you consciously alluding to particular pieces of the past?

Erik Blood: There are times that I borrow sounds from the past or even try to emulate an era, but I didn’t try to do that with this album. I just made sounds that I knew how to make and made up sounds I hadn’t made before. The only thing I consciously did was try not to be too conscious of what I was doing. If it sounded good or made me feel something, I’d keep it. I threw away the stuff that didn’t.

RC: Tell me about the Touch Screens story. I know it’s all about pornography, but unlike actual pornography, the record is often warm and very human.

EB: It is about porn, but it’s not pornographic and I am not trying to make any statement about pornography. I have a fascination with pornography that comes from growing up in a time when it wasn’t readily available to young people like it is today. It was friend’s parents and older brothers usually who had a tape or a magazine that we would all gather around to check out. It was fun and exciting and usually the actual porno was fun and exciting. I’m talking “golden age” shit like Radley Metzger (aka Henry Paris) and Joe Sarno, later in life Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole. My album is at times a love letter to those films and those times as well as a little nod to some of the actors. Other times I’m just describing a sensation or experience related to pornography.

RC: So, it’s a concept record, but there’s also this feeling that the voice is used as just another instrument.

EB: I’ve always thought of the voice as an instrument. It’s a purveyor of melody above all else to me.

RC: How has Hip-hop on one end and your music for films on the other affected your songwriting techniques?

EB: I don’t think I approach them any differently because my aesthetics aren’t different. They may change or expand, but they’re always there, a filter that everything I do has to pass through. Every project I do, or new venture, changes and expands my palette but it’s always me the music comes through.

RC: Seattle is my adopted home, and I’ve always found living there (four different times) strangely poised between isolation and connection. How does the city resonate with you and your music?

EB: It’s hard for me to say because I’ve lived here my whole life. Born in Tacoma, I moved to Seattle at 18 and never left. Sometimes I feel like that wasn’t the best thing for me, but I’m also really happy with my life and my work, so I don’t have a real issue with it. Seattle’s a beautiful place and even if I decide to leave it, I know I’ll be back.

RC: What’s coming up for you next?

EB: I’m working on “scoring” a 45-minute slideshow for this thing called Slideluck Potshow that’s going down in August. Also doing a lot of mixing in the lab this summer. Hoping to get started on some new Shabazz tracks very soon. And after the album comes out, I’ll have a nice little Touch Screens remix EP to put out with mixes by Shabazz, OC Notes, Crypts and a few others.

—————

Here’s the trailer for Touch Screens [edited by Brian O’Shea; runtime: 2:04]:

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References:

Hughs, Rob. (2011, November). Masterworks: Tago Mago by Can. Prog, No. 21, pp. 56-59.

Hyde, Roger. (1996, Spring). Priests of Another Knowledge. Whole Earth Review, No. 89, pp. 94-99.

DuBrowa, Corey. (2002, March/April). Going Blank Again: The History of Shoegazing. Magnet, No. 53, pp. 55-64, 106-107.

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Nick Harkaway: A Dynastic Succession of Trouble

I’ve been away, immersed in Nick Harkaway’s intricately constructed yet sprawlingly seductive second novel, Angelmaker (Knopf, 2012; His first is The Gone-Away World; Knopf, 2008). To wrap a genre around this book is to force it into a jacket that doesn’t fit. It’s noir, it’s science fiction, it’s steampunk, it’s a lot of things — informed by a lot of other things (William Gibson calls it, “The very best sort of odd.”). “We live in a muddled-together age where the past continues to play out in the present,” Harkaway wrote on his site, “…with Angelmaker, I wanted that sense of the storylines of the past rolling on and on through us to the future, and a dynastic succession of trouble.” “Harkaway” isn’t Nick’s real last name, and his father is also a writer who doesn’t use his real name (John le Carré). Even given his own dynastic succession of trouble as such, I’m not sure whom to compare Harkaway to. His writing is more fun than David Mitchell, smarter than Chuck Pahlaniuk, richer than Neal Stephenson, and just plain better put together than most science fiction. He excels at story and style.

Another Nicholas (Negroponte) wrote in 1995, “Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people” (p.207). In Angelmaker, machines communicating is part of what signals the book’s major crisis. To wit, Harkaway recently wrote an updated version (of sorts) of Negroponte’s Being Digital (Knopf) called The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World (John Murray, 2012).

Roy Christopher: Your dad’s a writer too. Did he have an influence on your becoming a writer and subsequently on you as a writer?

Nick Harkaway: Not so much an influence as an understanding that it was a possible thing. For most people, writing is a mystery, and a career path for lunatics — I still get asked what my day job is. On the other hand, a lot of people think it’s a soft touch, which it most assuredly is not — but I knew from very early on that it was both possible and demanding. That’s a huge factor in determining whether someone takes the plunge or not, I think — just knowing it’s possible. (On that score, of course, I’d also already been a scriptwriter, so I knew I could wrestle with a story, turn out work fast, and respond to pretty robust criticism.)

As to Angelmaker, no doubt about it — I told my own story, of course, but I also slightly teased my dad. His work, after all, transformed the spy novel from high adventure to Cold War commentary; from dashing Bond to self-despising Leamas. And here I come along and take it back to this heightened romp, more like Modesty Blaise or Billion Dollar Brain or something. But there are similar roots, too — we both love Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, Dumas…

RC: I’m almost finished with Angelmaker and am only hoping it doesn’t become a movie because I don’t want my head’s version tampered with. How has your screenwriting experience influenced your novels?

NH: I see things in my mind’s eye very clearly. Not always, but I can’t write action sequences without being a little specific. At the same time, I know that everyone wants to imagine them flowing the way they do on the best movies, so you can’t explain the mechanics of Ippon Seio Nage, say, while you’re having the fight. At the same time it needs to feel as if you just did… It’s sleight of hand, all of it.

And I suppose I have a tendency to use movie shapes — like the Classic Myth Structure George Lucas used for Star Wars — because they’re dramatic and recognisable and they keep you on track. Writing the kind of books I write, with lots going on, you need not to get lost. Structure helps. A story spine is vital. And so is knowing what the voice is, the tone. With those, you can go all over the map and come home safe, and you know it, and your reader gets that confidence in you and settles, so you can take liberties and amaze them. The less secure they are, the less likely they are to go with you when you do something unusual — and that unusual thing is often why you’re there, so that’s bad. They close the book. And once they do that, you have a hell of a time getting them to open it again.

RC: You mentioned in this year’s Summer Reading List that you and William Gibson approach writing in different ways. As a writer and one interested in other writer’s processes, I wonder if you could elaborate on this.

NH: Gibson has a little piece about how he writes at the beginning of Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2012), and it’s amazing. It’s incredibly him. He starts with a sentence, out of nowhere. To me, that’s the hardest thing you can possibly do. To sit there and carve out a piece of writing from nothing, using a beginning to leverage a world inside your head. So here we go:

Abernathy, like a church mouse, craved simplicity and the smell of wood polish above all things; the intrusion of these men, these police men, into his world was like the arrival of a visiting bishop’s cat.

Here’s the thing: that sentence has enough tone to turn into a story. There’s a world buried in there but it is wedged and cracked and fuzzy and difficult. I’m quite tempted by it, but it would be an uphill struggle to bring it out. And it can go wrong. You can go down a blind alley and find that you’re just wrong about everything and you have to start again. The Coen Brothers once said that the best writing comes when you write yourself into a corner and then write out again, and you can see that in their stuff: sometimes they do and you can’t believe your luck, sometimes they don’t and you think “oh, ouch!” I do not like that feeling when it applies to my own work. It makes me feel sad for weeks. I like having a strong sense of the story before I start writing – not a roadmap, but a vibe. Like: “We’re going to Canada!” Okay, cool. Now let’s start the car.

I tend to start with a blinding image or a concept. An idea hits me and it has crackling energy all around it, tensions and balances made in. Basically it’s a fizzing bomb. And then I crank the beginning up and up and up so that it can support this fizzing thing, and the story is basically the position of items so that when the idea explodes they all fly along the right sort of paths and in the right direction.

I will admit, in honesty, that right now I’m incredibly drawn to Abernathy. I will have to try this kind of approach one day soon. I can see in him the beginning of that kind of bomb, but it feels like doing the whole thing in reverse, in the mirror. And you can already see that my instinct is to place him in conflict immediately, in media res, to flag that possibility of cat and mouse pursuit, and so on. I am or I have been so far a busy writer — not that I always produce busy writing – but Gibson has this incredible feeling of restraint, of time enough in the world. Which is deceptive, because he can wallop you with tension and pace whenever he wants. He’s that guy from all the martial arts movies with the wispy hair who sits all day long in stillness — and then you try to pour a glass of water on his head, and you can’t because somehow he already drank it and now he’s holding your shoes. I’m more like a conjuror. I stack the deck.

RC: I can relate. I never start from a blank page. Whom else do you enjoy reading?

NH: Oooooh, so many people. I just read Robin Sloan’s fabulous Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident (Bloomsbury, 2013) — I got sent early copies of both, by editors with great judgement for what I’m going to like — but I love all kinds of things. Jeanette Winterson and Don DeLillo, Lois Mc Master Bujold and Rex Stout… I just finished John Scalzi’s Redshirts (Tor, 2012), and I thought it was stunningly good. It made me cry at the end, although that’s not hard because I’m basically a wuss. But if you want to see something interesting, examine Redshirts alongside Teleportation Accident. There’s a really interesting structural mirroring which I think comes from which of them is writing for which audience, but they’re closing on one another in this really intriguing way.

RC: You’re primarily known as a novelist, so how did The Blind Giant come about?

NH: The short version is that the John Murray imprint came to me and asked me to do it, and I wanted to. The slightly longer answer is that in the UK I was one of the first and loudest objectors to the Google Book Settlement, which I thought took a brilliant idea (a global digital library) and saddled it with the wrong method (a private company making an end run around the legislative process – consider that in the context of, say, BP) and the wrong endgame (a private company being the only entity with the right to display some books and becoming the de facto library of record). From that I ended up talking about digital books and the broader issues of digitisation a lot, and here we are. Well, no, that’s not quite true — I’ve always been a student of politics and society, and their relationship with science, technology and the individual.

RC: Tell me about the book. I’m avoiding reading it right now as I fear it may out-mode my current book-in-progress.

NH: Oh, yes, I know that feeling. I’m binge-reading right now because I’m between books. Well, okay, The Blind Giant is broad by design. That’s to say that it tries not to get into drilldown about specific issues or to “solve” them, but to look at where each issue folds into the next and how they all relate to one another. I realised after finishing the book that the whole discussion is framed in my mind partly as a conflict between our intentional actions and the emergent ones which come from our collective and somewhat undirected or unconsidered choices. We have a chance for the first time to begin to understand, in real time, what world we’re making, and even to change the direction of that making. That’s superb. (Hence the title: imagine for a moment that all your sense data arrived five or ten minutes late: You’d constantly be falling over, misunderstanding conversations, and breaking things. Our body politic has had a delay of ten to fifty years until very recently. No wonder it keeps getting into fights and staggering around like a drunken sailor.)

So the book embraces a little bit of recent history, an overview of the last hundred years, a discussion of deindividuation (the process by which ordinary people can do appalling things to one another, as seen in the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment), some stuff of the science of the brain and the sociology of the digital environment, the politics of us, the connection between copyright and privacy, the jurisprudence of intellectual property… It goes where the digital debate goes, because the thing about digital is that it’s our reflection. It’s not separate. It’s neither specially good nor specially pernicious. It’s us. And I didn’t try to crush opposing positions. The book has some footnotes, but they’re not like “nyah nyah, you are broken on my genius” footnotes, they’re like “this is where I got this idea from, okay?” So it’s a digital book in that sense too: it takes an iterative approach to the right answer – fail, get closer, fail, get closer. Although whether there’ll ever be a revised edition… who knows? The idea was that the iterations would be conversations arising from the text, persisting in the public sphere rather than falling back to paper. Because, you know, less work for me.

RC: What are you working on next?

NH: I have a first draft of a new novel — I’m calling it Tigerman Make Famous Victory, Full of Win, and I can already feel my editors wincing and wondering how to persuade me that’s an appalling title, but I’m really determined about it. It’s about a guy on an island which is about to be destroyed to contain a chemical waste problem. As a consequence, the island has become… Casablanca-ish. It’s a bit different from my first two. After that I have this thriller burning a hole in my pocket, and then there’s my story about cryonics and the other one about cricket and another one about a six thousand year old child… Oh, and there’s one which is basically a crime novel about tortoises which is also about the publishing industry, and… Let’s just say I have a lot of work to do.

————

Here’s the book trailer for Angelmaker [runtime: 2:01]; highly recommended reading:

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Please Support Adult Rappers

Sorry for the late notice, but there are only five days to go in this campaign. Please support my dude Paul Iannacchino, Jr. in his endeavor to document the aging of Hip-hop:

From the Kickstarter page:

In 1999 I moved to the L.E.S. of NYC during the hottest summer on record to pursue rap fame as the next hottest thing to the weather. With little more than a mattress and my MPC 2000 I was lucky enough to go on to make some records (when they still made those) with names like Mr. Lif, Aesop Rock, Cage, C-Rayz Walz and others before ultimately signing to El-P’s Definitive Jux label as one third of the rap power-trio Hangar 18. I got my first shot at a legitimate tour courtesy of Def Jux and The Hangar hit the road in support of The Multi-Platinum Debut LP, the most platinumest album of 2004. We did lots of shows in lots of places from Compton to Connecticut (peace Connecticut) and sold some CDs (when they still made those) but shortly thereafter came to the realization that the “rap game” was not for me. It was on a tour bus actually – sitting next to Shock G…but that’s another story. This is not a film about yours truly.

That said, many of my friends new and old either were or are actively pursuing a career in hip-hop…and “the game” is a cruel, cruel bitch with little to give but heartache, bad credit and chronic wanderlust.

So not too long ago I embarked on a journey to talk to some of my friends. Many of whom, like me, grew up in what’s considered the Golden Age of hip-hop. And many of whom, like myself, remember a time before hip-hop and it’s current ubiquity across our pop culture landscape. And many of whom, like I, have watched as our peers have struggled to maintain relevance and earn a paycheck as the torch is passed to a new generation of rappers that cut their teeth on You Tube instead of YO! MTV Raps. The journey to date has given me the chance to talk to a wide range of rappers, past and present, from indy to mainstream. Some you’ll know, others you should act like you do. So far that list includes; Yesh aka Yeshua DapoED, Soul Khan, J57, Alaska, Blockhead, DJ Js1, DJ Elle, Despot, J Zone, Jams F. Kennedy, Bobbito, Masta Ace, Eternia, Torae, Luckyiam, Brooker T, Jensen Karp aka Hot Karl, Cryptic One, RA the Rugged Man, Homeboy Sandman, Jarobi, Slug, Blueprint, Louis Logic, Open Mike Eagle…and the list grows like a 90’s posse cut everyday.

If you know what day Ed Lover Dance day falls on, what EPMD stands for AND you can name all the groups that make up The Native Tongues Family? You might just be an Adult Rapper. I think you’ll enjoy our story.

So if you’ve ever wondered what the other 23 hours (off stage) of a working rapper’s life looks like in the 21st Century – look no further. It’s a story we’re anxious to tell. It can be both inspiring and heartbreaking so YouTube millionaires take heed. Only some 30 years after the birth of the music we’re wondering – where does it go next? As rappers get older, their music arguably stays the same age. Will we see rappers age gracefully and perform well into their winter years like so many Jazz greats? Will Kane still rock the Apollo at 70? Do rappers have expiration dates, and if so, do they know it? How does a rapper get a real job after years on the grind? We explore all this and more through a series of in depth interviews with a line-up that would makes Eddie Ill and DL jealous.

We will be eternally grateful if you support our film. With your support we will wrap up shooting in NY, LA, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and everywhere else a great interview awaits. While a little luck and a lot of emails have gotten us this far, a little money will bring this labor of love down the home Stretch (& Bobbito).

Thank you.

Paul Iannacchino, Jr.

Help us make this happen.

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Pass the Mic: MCA RIP

I’ve spent the last several days reflecting on Adam Yauch and the Beastie Boys, their music, their projects, and their place as a cultural force. Growing up when I did, the Beasties were unavoidable. Every car, every boombox, every top-ten radio countdown had License to Ill (Def Jam, 1986) on blast. I hated it, but as much as I was repelled by the frat-boy antics of that record, it was impossible to ignore the significance. You knew you were witnessing something historic, that somehow things were different after that. And they were.

I didn’t get into the Beastie Boys music until they made the jump to the Left Coast and released Paul’s Boutique (Capitol, 1989) And, like most people, I didn’t recognize that record’s greatness until it’d been out a while. By the time they started running projects like Grand Royal Magazine, Grand Royal Records, and X-Large clothing, I had become a fan. Their undisputed comeback was with Check Your Head (Capitol, 1992). That record set the tone for the 1990s in a way that no other album did, and it shed new light on Paul’s Boutique, introducing a whole new crop of fans to the Beastie phenomenon. In the wake of the live instruments played on Check Your Head, a practice the Beasties had abandoned after Poly Wog Stew (Rat Cage, 1982), the sample-saturated Paul’s Boutique garnered new meaning. After the various sampling copyright lawsuits at the end of the 1980s, it was no longer a record one could make. Today it would be a free mixtape, and still have to dodge litigation from multiple parties. The Beastie Boys had moved on and on.

Their early success became a burden rather than a boon to their being taken seriously. Where Paul’s Boutique flirted with maturity, Check Your Head showed they meant business. It was still playful, still fun, and still silly, but it also proved that they weren’t a parody act, that they could downright rock things other than the mic, and that they were here to stay. Eventually these two records will get their due as two of the most important documents of the sound of their time, deserving their placement in the alphabet and their placement among music legends: right between The Beach Boys (Pet Sounds) and The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band).

Grand Royal was a magazine that I wish had lasted longer than it did. Its pages were driven by the interests of Adam Horivitz, Mike Diamonds, and Adam Yauch. That meant that just about anything could end up in there. From a fold-out dedication to Billy Joel (a.k.a. “The Fourth Beastie”) to an interview with a not-yet-famous, basement-recording Kid Rock, and from Biz Markie flexidisc to a calendar featuring demolition scenes, all put together with the inimitable Beasties flair. Their record label of the same name boasted a varied roster including acts like Atari Teenage Riot, At the Drive-In, Luscious Jackson, Jimmy Eat World, and Techno Animal, among many, many others. Their extended family includes The Dust Brothers, Mario Caldato Jr., Money Mark, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, Sean Lennon, Ben Lee, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, Kim Deal, Eric Haze, Q-Tip, Rick Rubin, and John Doe, just to name a few. The reach of this network of creative souls is utterly impossible to gauge.

After Ill Communication (Capitol, 1994), the Beasties’ music and I parted ways again. We grew apart just as we’d grown together years before. I always kept an eye on what they were up to, but it was never mine again.

All of this stilted reminiscing over the Beastie Boys legacy is just to say that they are important, much more important than the bands that get the attention as such. The loss of Adam Yauch is a huge loss for all of us.

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Here’s a recently unearthed, unaired clip of the Boys on Dave Chappelle’s show [runtime: 2:40] showing the raw sound they brought to the masses:

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