Tag: hip-hop

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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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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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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.

————

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.