Tag: hip-hop

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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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I Heard a Record and It Opened My Eyes

I was pulling into my friend Thomas Durdin’s driveway. By the volume of the AC-DC sample that forms the backbone of Boogie Down Productions’ “Dope Beat” (the first song on the second side of their 1986 debut album, Criminal Minded), I knew his mom wasn’t home. Along with the block-rocking decibel level, I was also struck by how the odd and primitive pairing of Australian hard rock and New York street slang sounded. It was gritty. It was brash. It rocked.

De La Soul’s 1995 record Stakes is High opens with various voices answering the question, “Where were you when you first heard Criminal Minded?” — knowing that moment was the door opening to a new world.

There was the one definitive moment
Well, did it mean it to you?
There was that one definitive moment
When it was something new.
— Pretty Girls Make Graves, “Speakers Push the Air”

Wayne Coyne once described this phenomenon to me as the “punk rock” moment, remembering the first time he heard something other than Foreigner and realized that Foreigner really wasn’t all that good. Listening to fans of The Replacements describe the way certain records changed them forever in Color Me Obsessed (What Were We thinking Films, 2011) is often painful. That moment is so difficult to describe without sounding stupid. So much so that many of them preface their testimonies with phrases like, “this is going to sound cheesy, but…” And it does. Mark Schwahn (creator of One Tree Hill) described the moment well in sober tones, saying that you know your life is different when you hear that sound than it was the moment before you did.

In that same movie, everyone also has a stoic opinion about which Replacements record was “the last good one.” In an old issue of Seattle’s The Stranger, Josh Felt wrote. “Authenticity is subjective. Case in point: The person who thinks Nirvana was the height of authentic rock and therefore disdains any post-grunge band for being phony is obviously someone who had an important moment along the lines of that day in their bedroom listening to Nevermind when they were jarred into consciousness about the homogenous teen culture surrounding them.” Once the moment happens, it often poisons the experiences that follow, some of which were potential epiphanies. The new is tired because it’s not like the old stuff. “Authenticity comes from the moment you’re living in,” continues Felt, “not from the product you’re buying.”

Psychologists call this “imprinting.” Certain experiences during certain times of your life just stay with you. Whatever you listened to in the decade somewhere between ages twelve and twenty-one is likely the most important music you’ll ever hear. Explaining what it means to you is one thing; making someone else understand, someone who didn’t have the same experience, is damn near impossible. Our experience with music is what my friend Josh Gunn calls “radically subjective.” We try and try to translate the experience with language and it always falls short.

I feel like I’ve had that moment many, many times in my life. Hearing Criminal Minded for the first time was one of them, and one that still informs my listening today. There’s no escaping the imprinting of the punk-rock moment.

When was yours?

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Here’s the video for Pretty Girls Make Graves’ “Speakers Push the Air” [runtime: 2:57], which I think captures the feeling pretty well: “Yeah, nothing else matters when I turn it up loud!”:

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Special thanks to Josh Gunn, Wayne Coyne, and Barry Brummett for the many discussions that informed this piece, and to Thomas Durdin for playing me the good stuff back in high school.

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Soundtrack to the Apocalypse

In anticipation of the new Justin Broadrick solo project, Posthuman, under his old Techno Animal moniker JKFlesh, I’ve been listening to lots of similar sounds. Not only old Godflesh (since I’m hoping to write a book about their debut long-player, Streetcleaner, for Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 Series), but also other 3by3 Music releases (e.g., Cloaks and Dead Fader), as well as Ad Noiseam stuff (e.g., Larvae and Oyaarss). Thanks to one of my past students (Thanks, Felicity!), I’ve also gotten into Death Grips, which brings me to the point.

In the mid-1990s, there was an almost-genre that I still don’t know what to call. It consisted of bands like Jawbox, Helmet, Barkmarket, Unsane, Tar, Unwound, and many others. It was kinda Metal, kinda Punk, but really neither of those. At the time, everything that didn’t have a genre got lumped into the nondescript “alternative” bin. If it meant anything, it meant that Red House Painters and Helmet had something in common (They don’t, at least not aesthetically).

I don’t know what to call Death Grips. Having signed to Epic records this year and just release The Money Store today, their first “official” release (even though Ex-Military is as proper a record as any), they’re set to do something. Like those bands from the 1990s, their sound is a weird conflation of genres: It’s part Punk, part Industrial, part Rap, and part something else (Hella’s Zach Hill plays drums for freak’s sake). It reminds me simultaneously of the Sex Pistols, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Whitehouse, as well as Cloaks, Dead Fader, and Oyaarss with maniacally appropriate vocals. Here’s a video from their Ex-Military (2001) release [runtime: 3:47]:

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Honestly, what is that? It’s so dirty and gritty, yet so futuristic. It’s like the first time I heard Public Enemy in 1987, Godflesh in 1989, or dälek in 2002. Here’s one from the new record called “Get Got” [runtime: 2:52]:

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Speaking of Godflesh, I have their main-man Justin Broadrick to thank for my finding Cloaks. These two guys do a 21st-century kind of industrial music that is heretofor unheard. This is “Detritus Version” from their latest (Versions Grain), which is a collection of remixes from their last full-length (Versus Grain) [runtime: 3:33]:

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I don’t know what this stuff is, but if it isn’t the soundtrack to the apocolypse, then I don’t know what to call it.

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Hip-Hop Theory Talk

I’ve been working on a new book called Hip-Hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture about how Hip-hop culture preconfigures many of the forms and norms of the now. I gave the following talk to my class at The University of Texas at Austin, which shows me fumbling through some of the major concepts from the book [runtime: 37:01]:

Here’s a brief overview of the book:

The many innovations of Hip-hop now undergird our Western culture. From appropriating technology and reinventing language to street art and advertising, as well as the intertextual nature of our evermore connected mass media and communication. The DJ’s innovative use of the turntable preconfigured sampling technology and made the sample a viable currency of music making and sampling itself the battleground of creative work and copyright law. To wit, technologically enabled cutting and pasting are now preeminent practices not only for musicians but also filmmakers, designers, storytellers—culture creators of all kinds. Graffiti artists’ repainting of the urban scenery with images and letters prefigured the ubiquity of street-styled advertising. This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of Hip-hop appropriation – allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and self-reference – inform the new millennium, how an understanding of Hip-hop culture is also an understanding of 21st century culture.

Thank you (and my classes) for indulging me. I’ll post more on this project as it develops.

 

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Aesop Rock’s Skelethon: Trailer and New Song

My dude Aesop Rock‘s new record doesn’t come out until July 10th, but here are a few sneak peeks:

Since Hail Mary Mallon’s Are You Going to Eat That? (RhymeSayers, 2011) was my favorite record of last year, you know I’m ready for what these guys have been up to since. With new records in the works from all involved, this summer is guaranteed to have an ill soundtrack. On to the goodies:

Aesop Rock and Whiskers the Cat star in the album tralier for Skelethon: [runtime: 1:57]:

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Here’s “Zero Dark Thirty” from Skelethon (play this loud):

 
And here’s an odd clip of John Greenham mastering something new [runtime: 0:49]:

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For more on all of the above, check out Aesop’s site and the compendium of dope weirdness, 900 Bats. It’s on like ‘frigerators.

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Reading Hip-hop: No Nostalgia Needed

If you’ve ever gotten the impression that the music industry is run by crooks, reading any part of Frederic Dannen’s Hit Men (Vintage, 1990) will more than confirm your suspicions. The false nostalgia some of us feel with the onset of the so-called digital age sees the past as something to which we need to return. A little research will dispel any delusions one might have about a golden age as far as the music industry is concerned. Nowhere is this feeling more prevalent than in Hip-hop. Ask anyone and they will tell you that it used to be better. Though if you ask them when exactly it was better, they’ll all have a different answer. Most will cite a time period that falls somewhere around 1988, as The Golden Era of Hip-hop is widely considered to be around that time.

A lot of the people who yearn for the years of yore are older. I was in high school in 1988, so one might expect me to feel that the best time for Hip-hop was during my formative years. I honestly don’t feel that way though. As my friend Reggie Hancock would say, “Wow, you’re so very well-adjusted about things that don’t matter,” but in many ways our attitudes do matter. A false nostalgia poisons progress, and Hip-hop is plagued with such attitudes. No one touched by this culture in the 1980s was left unchanged, but shit ain’t like that anymore. Nostalgia implies false or “imagined memories,” memories that are empty, devoid of significance that we fill in with what we imagine they were like. Paul Grainge (2002) points out an important distinction between nostalgia as a commercial mode and nostalgia as a social or collective mood. The former is often enabled by the latter as we drool over reissues of long lost demo tapes or clamor for reunion tour tickets. Thanks to recording technology, we live in an era when, as Andreas Huyssen (2003) put it, “the past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries” (p. 1). With that said, the nostalgic friction that hinders the forward motion of Hip-hop is more about production and distribution, and more than any other genre of recorded music, Hip-hop led the way to the ways of today.

People say that Hip-hop is more than a genre of music–it’s a certain bounce in your stride, it’s the way you shake hands, it’s the ideas that circulate in your head. It’s the ideas that don’t circulate in your head. A philosopher might say it’s a way of being in the world. An authority on the subject, like the rapper Nas, says, “It’s that street shit, period” (Williams, 2010, p. 63).

Surely, the conception of Hip-hop as a lifestyle is part of the problem (as well as possibly part of the solution), but of all the things those folks invented in the South Bronx so long ago, nostalgia ain’t one of them. For those that bemoan the text of Hip-hop but miss the subtext, as Dan Charnas puts it, these words are not for you.

In his massive tome, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-hop (New American Library, 2010), Charnas charts the economics behinds the rise of Hip-hop from minor subculture to global phenomenon. It’s a far further in-depth and far more focused Hit Men, and upon reading it, anyone’s nostalgia for a better bygone era should be summarily squashed. The chapter on Ice-T’s hardcore band Body Count’s “Cop Killer” (“Cops & Rappers”) alone should be more than enough to murder any ideas that things in the music industry used to be better. Even Def Jam, that bastion and beacon of branding and boom-bap was plagued with bad management, back-handed deals, and pathetic working conditions. You’ll wonder why you ever pulled the curtain back on these wizards of your dreams.

It’s unfortunate for some and generates fortunes for others, but Hip-hop is big business. Its hard-earned lesson is this: If you don’t make money a priority, you will never have any. Mind your business lest you lose your mind. The history behind the scenes is trife, rife with broken lives and forgotten talent.

Like me, Sujatha Fernandes was transformed by Hip-hop in the 1980s. Attempting to reconcile the money-grubbing from record labels and the international solidarity felt by fans, in Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip-hop Generation (Verso, 2011), Fernandes seeks the ties that bind all ethnicities behind the music and the movement. Her book is informed by her early 80s induction, all four elements of the culture, and a deep love for all of the above. Close to the Edge is about a whole world of people finding just what they were looking for. From Sydney to Chicago (including an appearance by our man Billy Wimsatt), Cuba to France, Fernandes follows Hip-hop around the world looking for the heart she feels beating so strongly in this culture.

As scholars such as Tricia Rose and Imani Perry claim, Hip-hop is fundamentally a black cultural form. It is also colonized by every other. Who better to study its effects than an expert on colonialism? Jared Ball is that dude. His I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto (AK Press, 2011) posits an emancipatory journalism based on the trope of the mixtape. From jump, he writes, “despite tremendous shifts in image and application, African America (and by extension the rest of the country and world) continues to suffer a process of colonization subsumed within a media environment more pervasive and all-encompassing than any other known in world history and against which alternative forms of journalism and media production must be employed” (p. 3). Ball concurs, as I’ve argued elsewhere that the mixtape is Hip-hop’s unsung mass medium. As Maher (2005) put it, “there wouldn’t be a rap music industry if it weren’t for mixtapes… the development of Hip-hop revolves around [them as] a singularly crucial but often overlooked medium” (p. 138). Ball goes on to argue that the mixtape is the perfect tool for the job. He certainly mixes what he likes, and his crates are deep!

When I found Hip-hop, I lived in the hinterlands of southeast Alabama. Unbeknownst to the nostalgic youth of today, that good ol’ Hip-hop from the golden age wasn’t all over the radio. If you wanted to hear it, you had to go find it. Early on, you only found it on mixtapes. Now every region has their mixtape gurus, and one of those is Atlanta’s DJ Drama. Ben Westhoff‘s Dirty South (Chicago Review Press, 2011) tells the story of the RIAA busting into his spot with dogs and guns looking for “illegal” mixtapes, guns, and drugs. They only found the former, but that didn’t stop them from confiscating those, as well as much of his studio gear, computers, and four vehicles, two of which he never got back (talk about colonization…). I use scare quotes to describe the legality of Drama’s mixtapes because, unlike the well-known bootleggers and indolent crooks, his are made in collaboration with the artists and with label backing. “During the raid,” Drama says, “there were people [at the labels] that were like ‘Why is this happening?'” (quoted in Westhoff, p. 187).

Westhoff’s book tells this and many other stories of southern artists finding their way in an industry once dominated by representatives from the Coasts. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind who’s paid any attention at all that the South is definitively on the Hip-hop map now. The artists are too many to name here, but Westhoff tells all their stories. He dug deep and has returned with the definitive history of the Dirty South.

A chapter on the South is one of the welcome additions to the new edition of That’s the Joint! The Hip-hop Studies Reader (second edition) edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (Routledge, 2011), and if you’re interested in a more scholarly look at the culture, this is your new bible. Since its release in 2004, the first edition has proven indispensable, and the update is fresh. Gone are a few outdated articles, including the error-riddled Alan Light piece (Joan Morgan‘s great piece on Hip-hop and feminism is thankfully intact), and, in addition to Matt Miller’s “Rap’s Dirty South” chapter, there are new joints by Greg Tate, Kembrew McLeod, Imani Perry, H. Samy Alim, and Craig Watkins, among several others (Tricia Rose is noticeably absent). This a one-book crash-course in Hip-hop history, theory, culture, criticism, and politics.

Speaking of one-book crash-courses, Jay-Z’s Decoded (Speigel & Grau, 2010; co-authored by dream hampton) covers everything mentioned above: The growing up with Hip-hop, its moving from around the way to around the world, taking care of the business, and many of Jay’s lyrics are also broken down herein in the style of RZA’a Wu-Tang Manual. Hell, it’s even mildly nostalgic: “The feeling those records gave me was so profound that it’s sometimes surprising to listen to them now.”

While Hip-hop nostalgia in the commercial mode is not ever likely to cease as it is so heavily marketed, and each generation tries to make the next nostalgic for what they miss, our own nostalgia as a collective mood can change. Maintaining the essential tension between tradition and innovation is paramount (Kuhn, 1977), but we have to let it go where it wants. It’s the only way to see what the next generation of Hip-hop heads will create. Reading books that take the culture seriously enough to criticize as well as celebrate is one way to see past our own biases. As El-P once told me, “I don’t hold on to too much nostalgia because I don’t have to.” That, my friends, is the joint.

References:

Ball, Jared. (2011). I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Carter, Sean (Jay-Z). (2010). Decoded. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Charnas, Dan. (2010). The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-hop. New York: New American Library.

Dannen, Frederic. (1990). Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business. New York: Vintage.

Fernandes, Sijatha. (2011). Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip-hop Generation New York: Verso.

Forman, Murray & Neal, Mark Anthony (eds.). (2011). That’s the Joint! The Hip-hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1977). The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maher, George Ciccariello. (2005). Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes. Journal of Black Studies, 36(1), 129-160.

Westoff, Ben. (2011). Dirty South: Outkast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who reinvented Hip-hop. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

Williams, Thomas Chatterton. (2010). Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture. New York: Penguin.

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2011: Are You Going to Eat That?

It’s December and time to reassess the year, and 2011 is a joy to revisit. It was easily my best year ever personally. I signed a book deal, spoke at several conferences with some of my best friends, got engaged to a wonderful woman, built some new bikes, redesigned my website (finally), and finished coursework and comprehensive exams on my way to a Ph.D., among other things.

This year was crazy, from the death of Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall Street to the ramping up of some sort of political happening. I also saw, listened to, and read a lot of good stuff. Here is the best of the media I consumed this year:

Album of the Year: Hail Mary Mallon Are You Going to Eat That? (Rhymesayers):  Hail Mary Mallon is the melding of word-murdering minds Aesop Rock and Rob Sonic and the laser-precise cuts of DJ Big Wiz, all three Def Jux alumni and no strangers to the raps and beats in their own rights. In the interest of full disclosure, these dudes are my friends. To be perfectly honest, if they were wack they wouldn’t be.

These three have been touring and clowning together for years in different guises, and it’s obvious when you hear how well they play together. Are you Going to Eat That? is the dopest record out this year.

Production-wise, “Mailbox Baseball” sounds like an Iron Galaxy outtake, while “Grubstake” evokes the stripped down reduction—all 808s and sparse scratches—of a salad-day-era Rick Rubin. Aes and Rob pass the mic like the Treacherous Three. “Table Talk” is a 21st-century “High-Plains Drifter.” But don’t get any of this twisted: this is not a throwback, it’s a leap forward.

It’s all good (“Breakdance Beach” is dope, though it does get grating upon repeated listens), and the skills are barn-razing and bar-raising. Whether it’s Hannibal Lector or Cannibal Ox, Hail Mary Mallon prove that rap will eat itself.

Here’s their video for “Meter Feeder” [runtime: 3:47] directed by Alexander Tarrant and Justin Metros:

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Close Second: Radiohead The King of Limbs (Waste): “I’m such a tease and you’re such a flirt…” The most important band in the world has returned with another cure for the malaise of the age. Pick one: They’ve saved rock and roll, killed rock and roll, and still emerged from the muck of the music industry well ahead of the curve. Everyone in media keeps them under the microscope to see how they will win. Again. Lean in, here’s the secret:

Radiohead makes great records.

And they do it consistently. They’re also quite adept at parsing the patterns on the horizon of the mediascape, but that wouldn’t matter if their records weren’t good. Damn good.

The King of Limbs is no exception. It’s more mellow than the sparsest parts of Amnesiac, but not nearly as insular. It might be their most even record. Thom Yorke’s voice, which I have to admit used to grate on me as often as it moved me, has gotten mature enough to carry the toughest of tunes. He is the voice of Radiohead, literally and figuratively (no small task either way), and he handles it with confidence and control.

Radiohead was never as joyfully abrasive as Sonic Youth or The Flaming Lips, but The King of Limbs reminds me of the releases of the former’s A Thousand Leaves and the latter’s The Soft Bulletin. All three records are still weird in their ways, but they’re also far more subtle than the previous work of their creators. Radiohead have always been masters of subtlety, and with The King of Limbs, they’ve earned their Ph.D. It’s such a tease and such a flirt.

Even Closer Third: Ume Phantoms (Modern Outsider): If ever a band were poised for the next level, Ume has been teetering there headlong for the better part of the past few years. Phantoms is the kind of record that neuters naysayers and emboldens enthusiasts. Lauren, Eric, and Rachel are some of the friendliest folks you’re likely to meet, but on stage they are ferocious. While Eric (bass) and Rachel (drums) are the stable and able drivetrain, Lauren (guitar and vocals) is the high-octane, internal combustion engine, careening ahead on the edge of control. Theirs is pop music in the sense that it’s explosive. Their live shows are where the real, volatile magic happens, but Phantoms captures their energy serviceably. For further evidence, here’s the video for “Captive” from Phantoms directed by Matt Bizer [runtime: 4:01], the most shared video on MTV.com:

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Runners Up: Wolves in the Throne Room Celestial Lineage (Southern Lord), Seidr For Winter Fire (Flenser), Cloaks Versions Grain (3by3), Jesu Ascension (Caldo Verde), Big Sean Finally Famous (GOOD Music), Knives From Heaven s/t (Thirsty 3ar), Pusha T Fear of God/Fear of God II: Let Us Pray (GOOD/Decon/Re-Up), Random Axe s/t (Duck Down), IconAclass For the Ones (deadverse), Crack Epidemic American Splendor (self-released), Deafheaven Roads to Judah (Deathwish), Panopticon Social Disservices (Flenser), Graveyard Hisingen Blues (Nuclear Blast).
Most Overrated: Opeth Heritage (Roadrunner), Kanye West & Jay-Z Watch the Throne.

Live Show of the Year: Deftones, June 4, 2011, Austin Music Hall, Austin, TX: Say what you will, but it’s absolutely unfair to lump Deftones in with bands they have next-to-nothing to do with (e.g., Limp Bizkit, Korn, Tool, et al). Deftones are as sophisticated as they are heavy and as beautiful as they are aggressive, as much like the Cure as they are Clutch. Their live show confirms all of this and more.
Runners Up: Mogwai, May 16, Stubbs, Austin, TX; Wolves in the Throne Room, September 27, Red 7, Austin, TX.

Comedian of the Year: Louis CK: No one else comes close.

Event of the Year: South by Southwest: SXSW is always a blurry blast, but this year was especially good. I got the opportunity to speak at Interactive and run around with friends seeing great music the rest of the time. You know who you are. Here’s to next year.
Runners Up: SF MusicTech Summit, Geekend Roadshow Boston.
Most Overrated: TEDxAustin.

Book of the Year: James Gleick The Information (Pantheon Books): James Gleick always brings the goods, and The Information is no exception. This is a definitive history of the info-saturated now. From Babbage, Shannon, and Turing to Gödel, Dawkins, and Hofstadter, Gleick traces the evolution of information theory from the antediluvian alphabet and the incalculable incomplete to the memes and machines of the post-flood. I’m admittedly biased (Gleick’s Chaos quite literally changed my life’s path), but this is Pulitzer-level research and writing. The Information is easily the best book of the year.
Runners Up: Insect Media by Jussi Parikka (University of Minnesota Press), The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading by Peter Lunenfeld (The MIT Press), The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark (Verso), remixthebook by Mark Amerika (University of Minnesota Press), Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland (Atlas & Co.).
Most Overrated: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Crown).

Educator of the Year: Howard Rheingold: Howard’s homegrown Rheingold University started this year and quickly established an impressive online curriculum. I took the first class and joined the very active alumni in continuing our co-learning with Howard’s help. It was through this group that I got the opportunity to speak to David Preston’s Literature and Composition class — one of the best experiences I’ve had in education.

Site of the Year: Shut Your Fucking Face and Listen: My man Tim Baker and his band of ne’er do wells have put together a site that’s as hysterical as it is historical. Mostly focused on music, they veer off on pop culture tangents and mad rants that are always more entertaining than their subject matter. Get up on that.

TV Show of the Year: Breaking Bad (AMC): I have Tim Baker from SYFFAL to thank for this one. This show doesn’t just rearrange the furniture in the standard TV drama’s livingroom, it tosses it on the lawn and sets it on fire. I’ve only made it through the first three seasons, but my guess is that by the end of the recently inked fifth and final, this will be hailed as one of the greatest shows ever to creatively corrupt the television medium.
Runners Up: Party Down (Starz); Lie to Me (Fox).

Movie of the Year: The Muppets (Disney): I haven’t laughed so consistently through a movie since maybe first seeing Doug Liman’s Go in the theater. It’s not flawless (maybe one too many metacomments and one too many eighties references), but it is downright entertaining from titles to credits. So good to see a chunk of your chlidhood revived so well.
Runner Up: Tree of Life (Plan B).

Video of the Year: “Yonkers” by Tyler, The Creator: Written, directed, produced, rapped, and eaten by Tyler himself. I’ve already spouted my feelings about OFWGKTA elsewhere.
Runners up: Pusha-T featuring Tyler, The Creator “Trouble on My Mind,” Big Sean featuring Chiddy Bang “Too Fake,” Hail Mary Mallon “Meter Feeder” (embedded above).

So those are a few of the things that caught and held my attention this year. What were yours?

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Sam Seidel: You Must Learn

Sam Seidel is a progressive pedagogue. He chronicles his forays into education reform on The Husslington Post. In his new book, Hip-Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), he drops science on the High School of Recording Arts, where he’s implemented many aspects of the four elements in the classroom. In what follows, we discuss the book, the classroom, and how Hip-hop can help education come correct in the twenty first.

Roy Christopher: Most would agree that modern education needs an upgrade. How can Hip-hop help in this endeavor?

Sam Seidel: Hip-hop innovators have always found value in things that mainstream society has deemed valueless–whether it’s old records, the sides of train cars, or the lives of poor young people. Educators can learn from this by recognizing brilliance and beauty where it is often ignored. Much of the schooling that happens in this country fails to respect or build upon the intelligence and cultural competencies of students. Instead schools–encouraged by standardized accountability measures from the federal and state governments–try to force all students to be homogenous generalists.

RC: It’s more than just rapping lessons and turntables in the classroom, right? What’s at the core of this idea?

SS: The core of the idea is respecting young peoples’ brilliance and culture. Bringing turntables and rap songs into a classroom and acting like an expert on hip-hop culture doesn’t necessarily make you a hip-hop educator. You might be an English teacher who is teaching rap songs as texts. I’m not trying to position myself as the arbiter of who is or isn’t a hip-hop educator, but what I’m excited about is exploring new ways of teaching–and beyond that, new kinds of learning environments and leadership models.

RC: Is the success of the HSRA reliably repeatable?

SS: Just like a rapper using a punchline that has already been used in another rhyme is wack, educators shouldn’t just copy someone else’s work, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t study others’ styles closely. More educators could definitely see results like those at the High School for Recording Arts and there are many aspects of HSRA’s program that they could potentially borrow and build upon, but they shouldn’t necessarily try to replicate everything from the school. People can definitely look to HSRA for inspiration, examples, and even direct consultancy, but there is only one David T. C. Ellis, there is only one Twin Cities (well, I guess there are two of those!), and it would be unrealistic to think that you could recreate what he and his team have done there.

RC: Every time I try to spread the word about the power of thinking through Hip-hop, I invariably meet resistance. Do you find yourself defending your love of Hip-hop?


SS: Not so much. I don’t find those conversations very rewarding and I seem not to attract them. Sometimes people want to point out some of the negative elements of Hip-hop… Okay. I’ve never argued that hip-hop is all positive all the time. It is an immense culture. But, in this day and age, who can really front on the power of Hip-hop? The culture has transcended almost every boundary imaginable. My man, Stephen Buddha Leafloor does life-changing hip-hop workshops with Inuit and first nation young people in remote Arctic communities that can only be reached by plane. Hip-hop artists who started as rappers have clothing lines, footwear, and fragrances sold in department stores across the world. The President of the United States has rap songs on his iPod and uses Hip-hop slang. I recorded a song with an emcee from Mozambique, who rhymed in four languages in one verse. I mean people can say they don’t personally like the music or they think graffiti is vandalism that should be stopped, but they can’t front on Hip-hop’s relevance and power–so my point is, if we know it’s relevant and powerful, then what effect it has is all about how it is engaged.

RC: Why do you think people resist this culture so strongly?

SS: They’re haters. It scares them. I don’t know. Yesterday I was walking across a street in New York City and i heard a rap song rattling out of a dude’s car. The lyrics were, literally, “bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, fuck ’em all.” People hear something like that and form a lot of judgements–as if that song must represent the entirety of a multi-dimensional global culture. Don’t underestimate racism. Or classism. We’re talking about a cultural form that emerged from the hood. There’s a lot of people out there who will hate for that reason alone.

RC: So, it’s much more than just a generational difference?

SS: There can be a generational thing. As George Clinton points out in the Foreword to Hip-Hop Genius, the music of a generation often sounds like noise to the generation before. At the same time, it was my pops who brought home rap records when I was five years old. George Clinton is in his 70s and he loves the culture, so… It’s not just generational.

RC: What can we do to get past the stigma?

SS: We need to stop engaging it so much. People write whole books trying to validate uttering the words “hip-hop” and “education” in the same sentence. There’s a place for those arguments, but I think we need to just focus our energy on building beautiful things and proving that what we know works works. Jay-Z didn’t spend years arguing with music execs who weren’t feeling what he was doing, he went and did it himself and then they started paying attention. This has happened over and over again in the rap game. No Limit and Cash Money had to build their own empires before labels recognized that the south had a rap market. Success has a funny way
of smothering stigma.

RC: Whenever one tries to institutionalize an organic movement as such, there’s always a risk of making it lame and losing the students’ interest. How do we use Hip-hop in the classroom and keep it engaging?

SS: By letting the students run it. If they are creating art that reflects their interests and aesthetics, it will never get stale.

RC: What’s next for you and Hip-hop education?

SS: Now that Hip-Hop Genius has dropped I’ve been getting some great invitations to talk about it. The video we made about Hip-Hop Genius has also gotten a lot of buzz online which has led to other opportunities. I just started a book tour where I go to cities, visit as many cool organizations and schools as I can–specifically those related to Hip-hop arts and empowering young people–and then put on an event that features their work, the work of the High School for Recording Arts, and Hip-Hop Genius. The first few events have been dope! We’d love to bring it to more cities, so holler if you have ideas about locations we should add.

————-
Here’s the book trailer for Hip-hop Genius [runtime: 4:23]:

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remixthebook: Guest Post and Tweeting

In 1997, I wrote a piece about turntablism for Born Magazine called “Band of the Hand.” Years later, I wrote a related piece for Milemarker‘s now defunct Media Reader magazine, called “war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music.” I’ve been revisiting, remixing, and revising these previous thesis pieces ever since. I eventually combined the two and posted them here, but I’ve also written other things that spin off from their shared trajectories.

This week, I am proud to be guest-tweeting for Mark America’s remixthebook (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, I posted a piece on the remixthebook site. remixthebook and its attendant activities situate the mash-up as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. With that in mind, I tried to go back to the writings above and update them using pieces of relevant things I’ve written since. If you will, my post is a metamix of thoughts and things I’ve written about remix in the past decade and a half or so, pieces which also represent material from my other book-in-progress, Hip-hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture. It’s a sample-heavy essay that aims to illustrate the point.

Here are a few excerpts:

Culture as meaning-making requires participation. In addition to the communication processes of encoding and decoding, we now participate in recoding culture. Using allusions in our conversation, writing, and other practices engages us in culture creation as well as consumption. The sampling and remixing practices of Hip-hop exemplify this idea more explicitly than any other activity. Chambers wrote, “In readily accessed electronic archives, in the magnetic memory banks of records, films, tapes and videos, different cultures can be revisited, re-vived, re-cycled, re-presented” (p. 193). Current culture is a mix of media and speech, alluded to, appropriated from, and mixed with archival artifacts and acts.

…

We use numerous allusions to pop culture texts in everyday discourse, what Roth-Gordon calls “conversational sampling.” Allusions, even as direct samples or quotations, create new meanings. Each form is a variation of the one that came before. Lidchi wrote, “Viewing objects as palimpsests of meaning allows one to incorporate a rich and complex social history into the contemporary analysis of the object.” It is through use that we come to know them. Technology is not likely to slow its expanse into every aspect of our lives and culture, and with it, the reconfiguration of cultural artifacts is also not likely to stem. Allusions – in the many forms discussed above and many more yet to come – are going to become a larger and larger part of our cultural vocabulary. Seeing them as such is the first step in understanding where we are headed.

…

Rasmussen wrote, “there is no ‘correct’ way to categorise [sic] the increasing diversity of communication modes inscribed by the media technologies. Categories depend on the nature of the cultural phenomena one wants to investigate.” Quotation, appropriation, reference, and remix comprise twenty first century culture. From our technology and media to our clothes and conversations, ours is now a culture of allusion. As Schwartz so poetically put it: “Whatever artists do, they are held in the loose but loving embrace of artists past.” Would that it were so.

The whole post is here.

Many thanks to Mark America and Kerry Doran for the opportunity and to everyone else for joining in on the fun. Here’s the trailer for the project [runtime: 1:21]:

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