Afrika Bambaataa's archive

Bambaataa's record collection, amazingly, is now held at the Cornell University Library, in its Hip Hop Collection. Learn about it here, as archivist John Kugelberg shows it to us, and Bam himself discusses it and how his method of collecting and his incredibly eclectic use of it onstage.

Questlove (of The Roots) on the Failure of Hip-Hop

Kufiya'd ?uestlove in promo material for "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon"

Writing in Vulture on 22 April, 2014, Questlove observes:

Hip-hop has taken over black music...

Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant...

The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range — social contract, anyone? — but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there — and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin’ and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there’s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it’s departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that...

When hip-hop doesn’t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what? 

Rap lyrics research tool: Rap Stats

"Rap Stats...can help you figure out the migratory patterns of drug dealers, when hip-hop became big business, and whether money really is over bitches

Perform your own searches at http://rapgenius.com/rapstats and tweet your favorites with the #RapStats hashtag!"

For example, an illustration of the decline of "conscious rap":

Bronx Photos

Some great photos of the South Bronx here, dating from the early hip-hop era.

Here's hip-hop pioneers the Cold Crush Brothers.

And here are the Cold Crush Brothers from the film Wildstyle. That's the Puerto Rican Charlie Chase you see on the deck, right at the beginning.

SPIN magazine's oral history of Chuck Taylors

which you will find in full here

MARKY RAMONE (drummer, the Ramones, 1977–83, 1987–96) You gotta understand, the Ramones were greasers. We were Fonzie with longer hair. The greasers and gangs in Brooklyn all wore Chuck Taylors and leather jackets. Either you copied basketball players or you copied greasers...

 ARABIAN PRINCE (N.W.A, 1986–88) Crips would wear blue Chucks or white ones with blue laces. Bloods would wear red. That's the OG hood way. N.W.A liked being different — we knew they weren't popular on the East Coast, where people were wearing the big, space-boot basketball sneakers. Dre and Cube even did a song that made fun of "My Adidas"...

 MARK ARM (singer-guitarist, Mudhoney) Everyone in Seattle — Eddie Vedder, Kurt — we were all punk and hardcore fans. So it wasn't really an aesthetic choice to wear Chuck Taylors; it's just kind of what you did. The reason, I think, we wore them is that it was either those or Doc Martens, and if you wore Doc Martens and jumped into the crowd, you could really hurt someone. Though doing anything in Chuck Taylors didn't feel that great either...

ANDREW W.K. I have no integrity, so I was fine with everything. [W.K. recorded "I'm a Goner" with Soulja Boy and Matt and Kim for Converse in 2011]. Converse is in an interesting position. It's like when Pabst Blue Ribbon realized that hipsters were drinking their beer, and they started marketing to hipsters, and now maybe it's not as cool. Whenever a brand positions itself to mean something to people, they risk losing people who don't like to be marketed to.
 
ELLIOT CURTIS At this point, Converse's number-one demographic for Chuck Taylors is teenage girls.

Big Fun in the Big Town: Rap 1986

Film by Dutch filmmaker Bram Van Splunteren, shot in New York City in 1986. The DVD is just, now, finally, out. I especially love the beatboxing of Dough E. Fresh in this trailer.

Jeff Chang on Rap and the LA Riots of 1992

Courtesy: Los Angeles Review of Books.

it was Dr. Dre's The Chronic, released 10 days before Christmas, that became the quintessential post-riot album...Against the backdrop of the reintensified culture wars and the patently empty promises to "Rebuild LA," The Chronic seemed a heaven-sent balm, a handshake extended by capital to the kids... Dre's songs spoke less explicitly than Kam's, but no less powerfully, to the atmosphere of the truce parties, the ecstatic freedom of rolling down the street without having to worry, for once, about cops or enemies... 

But separated from the prospect of a potential war between armed united gangs and the LAPD — for which authorities were at one point reportedly preparing — The Chronic could also be heard as the beginning of a guiltless, gentrified gangsta: no Treaties, rebuilding demands, or calls for reparations: just the party and bullshit. It was the product that finally and seamlessly closed the gap between the vanilla exurbs and the chocolate inner-cities: a brand-conscious "G" Thang ready for easy consumption.

Queer rappers

An article in Resonance (issue 53, 2007) discusses the 2006 documentary about queer hip-hop, Pick Up the Mic, by Alex Hinton. Unfortunately, it's not available on the web.

The article discusses the following artists: Scream Club, QBoy, Miss Money, and Johnny Dangerous.

For the moment, this is just a resource.

'Cash Rules Everything Around Wu'

Great piece on the Wu-Tang Clan from Jeff Weiss and Tal Rosenberg.

The music [on Wu-Tang Forever] was even more dense and abstract than Enter the Wu-Tang. In his review for SPIN, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that “Wu-Tang Clan are basically selling avant-garde music as pop to the world. “The first single off the album, a $1 million video directed by Brett Ratner, had no discernible chorus, and featured some of the most complex, intricate rhyming by the Clan members. It is also nearly six minutes long, the “Like a Rolling Stone” of the hip-hop era.

8 Openly Queer Rappers

Via Color Lines, a list of five, from the inimitable Detroit rapper Invincible. Miz Korona, Mz Jonz, Thee Satisfaction, Las Krudas, and Skim. From Juba Kalamka, three more: Collin Clay, Wheelchair Sports Camp, and Big Freedia. Be sure to read about them.

And for more queer rappers, check out this earlier post on Yo Majesty.

Keen insights into hip-hop and feminism

from the Crunk Feminist Collective.

Salt 'n' Pepa, "Shoop"

Hey, yeah - I wanna shoop, baby

[Oooo, how you doin', baby?
No, not you
You, the bow-legged one, (ha-ha) yeah
What's your name?
Damn, that sounds sexy]

Here I go, here I go, here I go again (again?)
Girls, what's my weakness? (Men!)
Ok then, chillin', chillin', mindin' my business (word)
Yo, Salt, I looked around, and I couldn't believe this
I swear, I stared, my niece my witness
The brother had it goin' on with somethin' kinda...uh
Wicked, wicked (oooo) - had to kick it
I'm not shy so I asked for the digits
A ho? No, that don't make me
See what I want slip slide to it swifty
Felt it in my hips so I dipped back to my bag of tricks
Then I flipped for a tip, make me wanna do tricks for him
Lick him like a lollipop should be licked
Came to my senses and I chilled for a bit
Don't know how you do the voodoo that you do
So well it's a spell, hell, makes me wanna shoop shoop shoop

Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

Ummm, you're packed and you're stacked 'specially in the back
Brother, wanna thank your mother for a butt like that (thanks, Mom)
Can I get some fries with that shake-shake boobie?
If looks could kill you would be an uzi
You're a shotgun - bang! What's up with that thang?
I wanna know how does it hang?
Straight up, wait up, hold up, Mr. Lover
Like Prince said you're a sexy mutha-
Well-a, I like 'em real wild, b-boy style by the mile
Smooth black skin with a smile
Bright as the sun, I wanna have some fun
Come (come) and (hmmm) give me some of that yum-yum
Chocolate chip, honey dip, can I get a scoop? (please)
Baby, take a ride in my coupe, you make me wanna...

Shoop shoop ba-doop (Baby, hey)
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop shoop ba-doop (Don't you know I wanna shoop, baby)
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

Well let me bring you back to the subject, Pep's on the set
Make you get hot, make you work up a sweat
When you skip-to-my-lou, my darling
Not falling in love but I'm falling for your [super sperm]
When I get ya betcha bottom dollar you were best under pressure
[Yo, Sandy, I wanna like, taste you]
Getcha getcha lips wet cuz it's time to have Pep

On your mark, get set, go, let me go, let me shoop
To the next man in the three-piece suit
I spend all my dough, ray me, cutie
Shoop shoop a-doobie like Scoobie Doobie Doo
I love you in your big jeans, you give me nice dreams
You make me wanna scream, "Oooo, oooo, oooo!"
I like what ya do when you do what ya do
You make me wanna shoop

Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

[Oh, my goodness, girl, look at him
He's the cutest brother in here
And he's comin' this way! Oooo!]

S and the P wanna kick with me, cool (uh-huh)
But I'm wicked, G, (yeah) hit skins but never quickly (that's right)
I hit the skins for the hell of it, just for the yell I get
Mmm mmm mmm, for the smell of it (smell it)
They want my bod, here's the hot rod (hot rod)
Twelve inches to a yard (damn) and have ya soundin' like a retard (yeah)
Big 'Twan Love-Her, six-two, wanna hit you
So what you wanna do?
What you wanna do?
Mmmm, I wanna shoop

Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop
Shoop shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop
Shoop ba-doop ba-doop ba-doop

Oh, you make me wanna shoop
Hey yeah, I wanna shoop, baby

some lesbian rap: Yo Majesty

And that is how a lesbian rap group from Florida got an uptight Manhattan crowd to relax a little.

Julianne Shepherd, in The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008, on the out lesbian rappers Yo Majesty & others.

Yo Majesty ([TIM SACCENTI)

It’s a lackluster time for mainstream female rappers, with M.C.’s like Foxy Brown and Remy Ma making more headlines for jail stints than for their music. Lil’ Kim hasn’t gone platinum since 2003, Eve’s comeback album has been delayed several times, and Missy Elliott’s first record in three years isn’t due until late spring. Fergie, with her singsong chants about her feminine wiles, is the closest thing to a female rap superstar these days. [OUCH!--T.S.] But in the wake of the critical favorite M.I.A., a new crop of young, multicultural, female hip-hop acts is causing a stir on the Internet and in indie-label conference rooms.

To wit, Yo Majesty, Santogold, Kid Sister, Amanda Blank.

Be sure to check out Yo Majesty's e.p., "Kryptonite Pussy." Yo Majesty has toured in the UK with The Gossip (of Searcy, Arkansas fame). And check out Shunda K, live, performing with Peaches in Berlin on "Buck You Like a Billionaire."

Pop Music: Licensing Everything

The notion of "selling out" seems to have completely gone by the wayside, as this article by Jon Pareles from today's New York Times shows. I really like Santogold and I thought she was kinda 'indy,' so I'm just astonished that 3/4 of her album has already been licensed.

Pareles lays out all the reasons why today's musicians are resorting to licensing, and it seems that we, the consumers, who are not buying albums and are doing lots of free downloading, are in part, or largely, to blame.



But is there no limit? Are their corporations that are just beyond the pale? What about Mary J. Blige shilling for CitiBank? Why would she want to align herself with a corporation so up to its neck in the subprime mortgage scandal, and the recipient of largest government bailout in history?

Read on:

Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan

By JON PARELES

In “Creator,” the rawest track on Santogold’s debut and self-titled album, the singer Santi White boasts, “Me I’m a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar.” It’s a bohemian manifesto in a sound bite, brash and endearing, or at least it was for me until it showed up in a beer commercial. And a hair-gel commercial too.

It turns out that the insurgent, quirky rule breaker is just another shill. Billboard reported that three-quarters of Santogold’s excellent album has already been licensed for commercials, video games and soundtracks, and Ms. White herself appears in advertisements, singing for sneakers. She has clearly decided that linking her music to other, mostly mercenary agendas is her most direct avenue to that “place up on the radar.”

I know — time for me to get over it. After all, this is the reality of the 21st-century music business. Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now that free copies multiply across the Web.

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand.

Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living. Why wait for album royalties to trickle in, if they ever do, when licensing fees arrive upfront as a lump sum? It’s one part of the system of copyright regulations that hasn’t been ravaged by digital distribution, and there’s little resistance from any quarters; Robert Plant and Alison Krauss croon for J. C. Penney and the avant-rockers Battles are heard accompanying an Australian vodka ad.

The question is: What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use? That creates pressure, subtle but genuine, for music to recede: to embrace the element of vacancy that makes a good soundtrack so unobtrusive, to edit a lyric to be less specific or private, to leave blanks for the image or message the music now serves. Perhaps the song will still make that essential, head-turning first impression, but it won’t be as memorable or independent.

Music always had accessory roles: a soundtrack, a jingle, a branding statement, a mating call. But for performers with a public profile, as opposed to composers for hire, the point was to draw attention to the music itself. Once they were noticed, stars could provide their own story arcs of career and music, and songs got a chance to create their own spheres, as sanctuary or spook house or utopia. If enough people cared about the song, payoffs would come from record sales (to performer and songwriter) and radio play (to the songwriter).

When Moby licensed every song on his 1999 album, “Play,” for ads and soundtracks, the move was both startling and cheesy, but it did lead to CD sales; an album that set staticky samples of blues and gospel to dance-floor beats managed to become a million seller. Nearly a decade later, platinum albums are much scarcer.

For all but the biggest names — like AC/DC, which made Wal-Mart the exclusive vendor for CDs of its long-awaited “Black Ice” album, got its own “store within a store” and sold more than a million copies in two weeks — a marketing deal is more likely to be its own reward rather than spawn a career. With telling ambivalence, Brooklyn Vegan, the widely read, indie-loving music blog, recently started a column, “This Week in Music Licensing: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore,” but soon dropped the “selling out” half of the title. There’s no longer a clear dividing line for selling out, if there ever was.

And as music becomes a means to an end — pushing a separate product, whether it’s a concert ticket or a clothing line, a movie scene or a Web ad — a tectonic shift is under way. Record sales channeled the taste of the broad, volatile public into a performer’s paycheck. As music sales dwindle, licensers become a far more influential target audience. Unlike nonprofessional music fans who might immerse themselves in a song or album they love, music licensers want a track that’s attractive but not too distracting — just a tease, not a revelation.

It’s almost enough to make someone miss those former villains of philistinism, the recording companies. Labels had an interest in music that would hold listeners on its own terms; selling it was their meal ticket. Labels, and to some extent radio stations and music television, also had a stake in nurturing stars who would keep fans returning to find out what happened next, allowing their catalogs to be perennially rediscovered. By contrast, licensers have no interest beyond the immediate effect of a certain song, and can save money by dealing with unknowns.

As the influence of major labels erodes, licensers are seizing their chance to be talent scouts. They can be good at it, song by song, turning up little gems like Chairlift’s “Bruises,” heard in an iPod ad. For a band, getting such a break, and being played repeatedly for television viewers, is a windfall, and perhaps an alternate route to radio play or the beginning of a new audience. But how soon will it be before musicians, perhaps unconsciously, start conceiving songs as potential television spots, or energy jolts during video games, or ringtones? Which came first, Madonna’s “Hung Up” or the cell phone ad?

Not wanting to appear too crass, musicians insist that exposure from licensing does build the kind of interest that used to pay off in sales and/or loyalty. Hearing a song on the radio or in a commercial has a psychological component; someone else has already endorsed it. Musicians who don’t expect immediate mass-market radio play — maybe they’re too old, maybe they’re too eccentric — have gotten their music on the air by selling it to advertisers. That can rev up careers, as Apple ads have done for Feist and for this year’s big beneficiary, Yael Naim, whose “New Soul” introduced the MacBook Air. (Sites like findthatsong.net help listeners identify commercial soundtracks.)

The Sri Lankan art-pop-rapper M.I.A. already had all the hipster adoration she could ever want for her song “Paper Planes,” which compares international drug dealing to selling records, and it turns gunshots and a ringing cash register into hooks. But having the song used in the trailer for “Pineapple Express” was probably what propelled the song to a Grammy nomination for record of the year.

(Grammy voters often seize on music from everywhere but the albums they purport to judge; they seem particularly drawn to film soundtracks.) And if the song now conjures images of the movie trailer for many listeners, that’s the tradeoff for recognition.

The old, often legitimate accusation against labels was that they sold entire albums with only one good song or two. Now there’s an incentive for a song to have only 30 seconds of good stuff. It’s already happening: Chris Brown’s hit “Forever” is wrapped around a jingle for chewing gum.

Apparently there’s no going back, structurally, to paying musicians to record music for its own sake. Labels that used to make profits primarily from selling albums have been struggling since the Internet caused them to lose their chokehold on distribution and exposure. Now, in return for investing in recording and promotion, and for supplying their career-building expertise (such as it was), they want a piece of musicians’ whole careers.

Old-fashioned audio recording contracts are increasingly being replaced by so-called 360 deals that also tithe live shows, merchandising, licensing and every other conceivable revenue stream — conceding, in a way, that the labels’ old central role of selling discs for mere listening is obsolescent. Some musicians, like the former record company president Jay-Z, have concurred, but by signing 360 deals not with labels but with the concert-promotion monolith Live Nation.

Maybe such dire thoughts are extreme, since some people are still buying music. The iTunes Music Store has sold more than five billion songs since 2003. But it’s harder and harder to find a song without a tie-in. It took Guns N’ Roses 15 years between albums to complete “Chinese Democracy,” certainly long enough to receive worldwide notice when the album was released this year. But instead of letting the album arrive as an event in itself, the band licensed one of the album’s best songs, “Shackler’s Revenge,” to a video game that came out first. >Metallica fans have complained that the band’s new album, “Death Magnetic,” sounds better in the version made for the “Guitar Hero” video game than on the consumer CD, which is compressed to the point of distortion so it will sound louder on the radio. But they take for granted that the music will end up in the game in the first place. Consumers reinforce the licensers almost perversely: they pay for music as a ringtone, or tap along with it on the iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, but not as a high-fidelity song.

Perhaps it’s too 20th century to hope that music could stay exempt from multitasking, or that the constant insinuation of marketing into every moment of consciousness would stop when a song begins. But for the moment I’d suggest individual resistance. Put on a song with no commercial attachments. Turn it up. Close your eyes. And listen.

East End X Yuri: J-Rap

According to Ian Condry, it was two 1995 hits by East End X Yuri that put rap on the map in Japan., and spawned the popular, "fun" brand of mainstream rap known as J-rap. The singles, "Maicca" and "Da.Yo.Ne" both sold about a million copies.

I think this is the song "Maicca":



Here's "Da.Yo.Ne":

Reeves: review

Check out this rap timeline, courtesy Jeff Chang and Mother Jones.

And go here for incisive critiques and updates on hip-hop activism, from Jeff Chang.

More music and video for Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

DMX, "Get At Me Dog."



DMX, "Who We Be."

Eminem, "My Name Is."

Eminem, "White America"



Eminem, "Mosh."

More music/video for Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

Notorious B.I.G., "Big Poppa."



Notorious B.I.G., "Hypnotize." Biggie goes Bond.



Jay-Z, "Hard Knock Life."



Jay-Z, "Big Pimpin'" (sample: Abdel-Halim Hafez).

here

Music and vids for Chapter 8, Reeves, "Somebody Scream!"

(I guess we can credit Pac for popularizing this ugly style innovation?)

Tupac Shakur's "I Don't Give a Fuck," from 2pacalypse Now, 1991. Unlike much of his later work, the song is strongly anti-racist and critical of police violence.



"Brenda's Got a Baby," from 2pacalypse Now, the poignant story of a 12-year girl who becomes pregnant, in which Tupac expresses tremendous sympathy for his subject.



"Keep Ya Head Up," from Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993), where Tupac expresses his support for stron sistas.



Video for "I Get Around," from Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.. Fun and games, poolside.



"I Get Around"--the sound is better here than on the vid above.



"Holler If Ya Hear Me," from Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.. Thug Life.



"Dear Mama," from Me Against the World (1995). A heartfelt account of Pac's relationship with his mother.



"So Many Tears," from Me Against the World. Pondering mortality.



"Skandalouz," from All Eyez on Me (1996). New levels of thug misogyny?



"California Love," from All Eyez on Me (1996). Hedonism, materialism, in Southern Cali. Gone are the urban blues and the resistance to police repression.

Music for Chapter 7, Marcus Reeves' "Somebody Scream!"

"Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang," from Dr. Dre's The Chronic (1992), which introduces the world to Snoop Doggy Dogg. And g-funk.

"Let Me Ride," from The Chronic. Cali car culture, g-funk stylee. The video ends with footage of George Clinton's band Parliament, whose "Mothership Connection" and "Swing Down, Sweet Chariot" are extensively sampled in the song.




"Gin and Juice," from Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle (1993), which gave a boost to Tanqueray and Seagram's sales.



"Who Am I? (What's My Name?)" from Doggystyle. You listen and you think, could g-funk ever have been possible if it weren't for George Clinton?



"For All My Niggaz & Bitches," from Doggystyle, "which turned venomous words for blacks and black women into badges of honor for all (including whites) to claim and wear proudly" (Reeves, 148).



Reeves doesn't mention it, but one of the best g-funk songs ever is Warren G's "Regulate" (1994).



And, "Cop Killer," from Ice-T's side project, thrash metal band Body Count (1992). This caused a major uproar, and prompted major labels to drop a number of hardcore acts. Eventually Ice-T agreed to take the song off the album Body Count. It's basically a punk "revenge fantasy." Listen to it here.