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Оглавлениеchapter 2
“It’s about Playing Records”
History
In this chapter, I will discuss some of the developments that have led to current hip-hop sampling practice, beginning with a brief history of hip-hop sampling itself. Having done this, I will discuss the process by which individuals become hip-hop producers. A major influence on both of these processes has been the close historical and social relationship between deejaying (manipulation of turntables in live performance) and producing (use of digital sampling in the studio). Producers see deejaying as an essential element of hip-hop production, to the extent that elements of the practice are often read as symbols of an individual’s commitment to hip-hop history and communal identity. Finally, I will address some of the ways in which tropes of masculinity have become encoded in this educational process.
With regard to all of these subjects, I try to stress the ways material reality and specific social pressures have influenced the decisions of individual creators. As I will argue throughout this study, I believe that analyses that focus on more general political and social concerns have tended to understate the agency of the people who have created hip-hop. As journalist and hip-hop pundit Harry Allen notes,
That’s the challenge. And this is a really interesting issue about history … to talk about the choices that people make as historical figures…. When we talk about history not just [as] a set of triumphal moments, but as decisions people make as they try to wrestle with obstacles and … address fissures and questions and things that are not coming together. I think all people can relate to that…. They can relate to the idea of “I’ve got to do something different to get to someplace different.” (Allen 2003)
Accordingly, before addressing the specifics of sampling history, I want to call attention to—and dispute—the scholarly tendency to naturalize hip-hop’s emergence as a cultural force. In reading about the music’s history, one often gets the impression that given the social, cultural, and economic circumstances in which it arose, hip-hop was inevitable; that if none of hip-hop’s innovators had been born, a different group of poor black youth from the Bronx would have developed hip-hop in exactly the same way.
Although he is intentionally overstating his case for literary effect, Robert Farris Thompson exemplifies this approach when he writes that “in the Bronx at least, it seems the young men and women of that much-misunderstood borough had to invent hip hop to regain the voice that had been denied them through media indifference or manipulation” (Thompson 1996: 213; emphasis in original). Or, as Jon Michael Spencer puts it,
The current emergence of rap is a by-product of the emergency of black. This emergency still involves the dilemma of the racial “color-line,” but it is complicated by the threat of racial genocide: the obliteration of all-black institutions, the political separation of the black elite from the black working class, and the benign decimation of the “ghetto poor,” who are perceived as nonproductive and therefore dispensable….
Both the rapper and the engaged scholar seek to provide the black community with a Wisdom [sic] that can serve as the critical ingredient for empowering the black community to propel itself toward existential salvation, that can overcome disempowering, genocidal, hell-bent existence. (Spencer 1991, v; emphasis in original)
In short, Thompson and Spencer are saying that hip-hop developed primarily as a form of collective resistance to oppression. While I certainly agree that the dire factors Spencer cites were significant in the lives of the individuals who developed hip-hop, I question whether their existence constitutes a sufficient explanation for the emergence of hip-hop’s specific musical characteristics.
In fact, as the historian Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, the unquestioned association of oppression with creativity is endemic to writing about African American art, in general:
[W]hen social scientists explore “expressive” cultural forms or what has been called “popular culture” (such as language, music, and style), most reduce it to expressions of pathology, compensatory behavior, or creative “coping mechanisms” to deal with racism and poverty. While some aspects of black expressive cultures certainly help inner-city residents deal with and even resist ghetto conditions, most of the literature ignores what these cultural forms mean for the practitioners. Few scholars acknowledge that what might also be at stake here are aesthetics, style, and pleasure. (Kelley 1997: 16–17)
Moreover, I would argue that, in addition to the misdirected focus that Kelley criticizes, such analyses may also promote several specific deterministic misconceptions.
The first of these is that a culture can exist outside individual human experience. Hip-hop was not created by African American culture; it was created by African American people, each of whom had volition, creativity, and choice as to how to proceed. This becomes apparent when one remembers that hip-hop did not emerge fully formed. Like all musical developments, it grew through a series of small innovations that were later retroactively defined as foundational. GrandWizzard Theodore, for example, was not forced by his oppressive environment to invent scratching when he deejayed in the mid-1970s; it was a technique that he discovered by accident, liked, and chose to incorporate into his performances. And if he hadn’t, there is little realistic reason to assume that someone else would have. While his sociocultural environment nurtured and embraced his innovation, it did not create it.
In addition to cultural determinism, there is also a great deal of class determinism evident in the scholarly discourse of hip-hop. Although certain elements of hip-hop culture, such as b-boying or b-girling, graffiti writing, and emceeing may well be the products of economic adversity, other aspects, particularly deejaying and producing, are not: they require substantial capital investment. This, in and of itself, is not particularly significant, except to the degree that it contradicts the narratives of those who would characterize hip-hop as the voice of a dispossessed lumpenproletariat, a musical hodge-podge cobbled together from the discarded scraps of the majority culture. David Toop, for example, writes:
Competition was at the heart of hip hop. Not only did it help displace violence and the refuge of destructive drugs like heroin, but it also fostered an attitude of creating from limited materials. Sneakers became high fashion; original music was created from turntables, a mixer and obscure (highly secret) records; entertainment was provided with the kind of showoff street rap that almost any kid was capable of turning on a rival. (Toop 1991: 15).
Although Toop’s examples are certainly accurate historically, one must be careful of letting the very real influence of material circumstance on individuals become inflated into either a motive or an aesthetic for an entire movement. To do so demeans the creativity of the artists involved, suggesting that they had no choice but to create what they did because no other path was open to them. It virtually precludes the possibility that people chose hip-hop’s constituent elements from a variety of options and thus ignores the cultural values, personal opinions, and artistic preferences that led them to make those choices. Toop marvels that “original music” could be created from the “limited materials” of “turntables, a mixer and … records.” But exactly how are these limited? The idea that an individual could have access to a deejay system and thousands of obscure records, but not to a more conventional musical instrument (such as a guitar or a keyboard), is difficult to accept.
New York–based producer Prince Paul, for one, disputes the assertion that hip-hop’s innovators did not have access to other musical instruments:
You know, everybody went to a school that had a band. You could take an instrument if you wanted to. Courtesy of your public school system, if you wanted to.
But, man, you playing the clarinet isn’t gonna be like, BAM! KAH! Ba-BOOM-BOOM KAH! Everybody in the party [saying] “Oooohhhhh!” It wasn’t that “Yes, yes y’all—y’all—y’all—y’all,” with echo chambers. You wasn’t gonna get that [with a clarinet]. I mean, yeah, it evolved from whatever the culture is. But it’s just an adaptation of whatever else was going on at the time….
It wasn’t cats sittin’ around like, “Man. Times are hard, man…. a can of beans up in the refrigerator. Man, I gotta—I gotta—I gotta —do some hip-hop! I gotta get me a turntable!” It wasn’t like that, man.
Ask Kool Herc! He was the first guy out there. I know him, too. We talked plenty of times. A good guy. He’s not gonna sit there and be like, “Man. It was just so hard for me, man. I just felt like I needed to just play beats back to back. I had to get a rhymer to get on there to make people feel good, ’cause times was just so hard.”
Yeah, cats kill me with that. (Prince Paul 2002)
DJ Kool Akiem of the Micranots also questions the notion of poverty as the decisive factor in the development of early hip-hop:
DJ Kool Akiem: “They were too poor to get instruments.” Yeah, right. They were too poor for classes. Somebody came along with a hundred-dollar sampler.
Man, those samplers were [expensive] back then! I mean, you gotta have money, some way, to put your studio together…. Producing takes more money than playin’ a instrument. You play an instrument, you buy the instrument and then you go to class, you know what I mean?
Joe: Even deejaying costs more money than playing an instrument….
DJ Kool Akiem: I mean deejaying, if you’re serious, you’re gonna have to spend a thousand dollars on your equipment. But then every record’s ten bucks. Then you got speakers and blah, blah, blah.
Even saying that is kinda weird. Obviously, [the academics] just probably didn’t think about it. The most important thing to them is, “Oh, the kids are poor,” you know what I mean? Not even thinkin’ about it. Just like, “Well, that must be it: they’re poor!” (DJ Kool Akiem 1999)
As Prince Paul continues, in addition to broad social and economic trends, there were also significant aesthetic, personal, and even romantic factors that came into play when hip-hop was being developed:
Deejay stuff was more expensive back then than it is now. I mean, like, way more expensive. So for them to even say that is crazy. [Hip-hop] was cool! It’s like: we liked the music. Deejaying was cool….
Yeah, there’s some socioeconomical issues and everything else that goes on, but that wasn’t everybody’s, like, blatant reason for making the music. There’s some other stuff that people don’t talk about. Like showing off, you know what I’m saying? There’s stuff like girls. Loving the music in general. It’s just the feeling that you get when you deejay. Especially back in the days. You can’t even describe the whole feeling of how it was, because everything was so new and so fresh…. It was all about fun. And it was a lot of fun. (Prince Paul 2002)
In 1986, when sampling achieved its initial popularity, the least expensive version of the E-mu SP-121 carried a list price of $2,745—well beyond the budget of most inner-city teens (Oppenheimer 1986: 84). And while the current popularity of hip-hop music has led to an increased demand for inexpensive equipment, the Akai MPC 2000 (the most popular digital sampler used by hip-hop producers at the time of this writing) lists for $1,649 (Musician’s Friend Catalog 2002). The enormousness of the initial investment required of hip-hop producers raises another question as well: how does one develop the capital and infrastructure necessary to make beats? Most of the producers I spoke with worked long hours at mundane jobs, received the equipment as gifts from their parents, or were given used equipment by older siblings or peers who had lost interest in using it. In other words, the reality in most cases is precisely what hip-hop’s critics would presumably like to hear: a story of hard-working, close-knit families with a certain amount of disposable income and a willingness to invest that income in their children’s artistic pursuits.2
Collective History
The rap DJ evolved from the party DJ, whose ostensible role was merely to play pre-recorded music for dance parties; like their audiences, these DJs were consumers of pop music. Yet by taking these musical sounds, packaged for consumption, and remaking them into new sounds through scratching, cutting, and sampling, what had been consumption was transformed into production. (Potter 1995: 36)
The basic deejay system consists of two turntables and a mixer that controls the relative and absolute volume of each. Using this equipment, a new record could be prepared on one turntable while another was still playing, thus allowing for an uninterrupted flow of music. As has been extensively documented elsewhere, the central innovation of early hip-hop was the use of this system with two copies of the same record for various effects, particularly the isolation of the “break.”
As Toop relates,
Initially, [Kool DJ] Herc was trying out his reggae records but since they failed to cut ice he switched to Latin-tinged funk, just playing the fragments that were popular with the dancers and ignoring the rest of the track….
A conga or bongo solo, a timbales break or simply the drummer hammering out the beat—these could be isolated by using two copies of the record on twin turntables and, playing the one section over and over, flipping the needle back to the start on one while the other played through (Toop 1991, 60)
Tricia Rose notes that these breaks soon became the core of a new aesthetic:
Samplers allow rap musicians to expand on one of rap’s earliest and most central musical characteristics: the break beat. Dubbed the “best part of a great record” by Grandmaster Flash, one of rap’s pioneering DJs, the break beat is a section where “the band breaks down, the rhythm section is isolated, basically where the bass guitar and drummer take solos.” … These break beats are points of rupture in their former contexts, points at which the thematic elements of a musical piece are suspended and the underlying rhythms are brought center stage. In the early stages of rap, these break beats formed the core of rap DJ’s mixing strategies. Playing the turntables like instruments, these DJs extended the most rhythmically compelling elements in a song, creating a new line composed only of the most climactic point in the “original.” The effect is a precursor to the way today’s rappers use the “looping” capacity on digital samplers. (Rose 1994: 74)
The development of elaborate deejaying techniques in the middle and late 1970s lead to an increased intellectual focus on “the break.” Deejays, who are acutely conscious of audience reaction, now realized that they could play a good break even if the song it came from was not considered worthy of listeners’ energy. Breaks—played in isolation—came to the fore. Songs, albums, groups, and even genres receded into the background as units of musical significance.
This, in turn, inspired deejays to cast an increasingly wide net when looking for useful breaks. Since they were only playing a few, often unrecognizable, seconds from each song, they were no longer bound by the more general constraints of genre or style; All that mattered was a good break. In fact, many deejays are known to have taken a special delight in getting audiences to dance to breaks that were taken from genres that they professed to hate.
Pioneering deejay Afrika Bambaataa made precisely this point to David Toop in 1984: “I’d throw on ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ —just that drum part. One, two, three, BAM—and they’d be screaming and partying. I’d throw on the Monkees, ‘Mary Mary’—just the beat part where they’d go ‘Mary, Mary, where are you going?’—and they’d start going crazy. I’d say, ‘You just danced to the Monkees.’ They’d say, ‘You liar. I didn’t dance to no Monkees.’ I’d like to catch people who categorise records” (Toop 1984: 66).
The breakbeat focus of the Bronx deejays set in motion a number of social trends that would give birth to the music now known as hip-hop. These included the development of a substantial body of knowledge about the nature and location of breakbeats, an oral tradition and culture to preserve this knowledge, a worldview that valorized the effort necessary to find breaks, and an aesthetic that took all of these concerns into account.
The looping aesthetic in particular (which I discuss more extensively in chapter 6) combined a traditional African American approach to composition with new technology to create a radically new way of making mu sic. As breaks are torn from their original context and repeated, they are reconceived—by performer and listener alike—as circular, even if their original harmonic or melodic purposes were linear. In other words, melodies become riffs. The end of a phrase is juxtaposed with the beginning in such a way that the listener begins to anticipate the return of the beginning as the end approaches. Theme and variation, rather than progressive development, become the order of the day. And, although it would be easy to overstate this aspect, there is clearly a political valence to the act of taking a record that was created according to European musical standards and, through the act of deejaying, physically forcing it to conform to an African American compositional aesthetic.
At some point in the late 1970s, the isolation of the break, along with other effects (such as “scratching,” “cutting,” and so on), began to be considered a musical form unto itself. In other words, hip-hop became a musical genre rather than a style of musical reproduction when the deejays and their audiences made the collective intellectual shift to perceive it as music. This is often portrayed as a natural evolutionary development, but, as Russell Potter (1995) points out, it requires a substantial philosophical leap, one whose implications could not have been foreseen even by those who were at its forefront. One important force in the shift from hip-hop-as-activity to hip-hop-as-musical-form was the incursion of the music industry, which introduced significant distortions:
Hip-hop’s remaking of consumption as production was the first thing lost in this translation; despite its appropriation of Caz’s rhymes, “Rapper’s Delight” [the first major rap hit] was first and foremost a thing to be consumed, not a practice in action; its relation to hip-hop actuality was like that of a “Live Aid” t-shirt to a concert: a souvenir, a metonymic token. Hip-hop was something goin’ down at 23 Park, 63 Park, or the Back Door on 169th Street; you could no more make a hip-hop record in 1979 than you could make a “basketball game” record or a “subway ride” record. (Potter 1995: 45–46)
Before sampling was invented—in the late 1970s and early 1980s—this de contextualization presented a very specific hurdle for the record industry: although playing a popular funk record at a hip-hop show made sense, playing a popular funk record on a record did not. It seemed strange (not to mention illegal) to release recordings that consisted primarily of other records. Early hip-hop labels, such as Sugar Hill, therefore, relied on live bands and drum machines to reproduce the sounds that were heard in Bronx parks and Harlem recreation centers. As Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc (bassist and drummer respectively in the Sugar Hill house band) recalled in 1987, there was a conscious attempt on the part of the record company to capture the essence of these performances:
Doug Wimbish: The reason you hear tunes [on Sugar Hill raps] and say, “Damn, I heard that tune before” is that you did hear it before….
Keith LeBlanc: Sylvia [Robinson, Sugar Hill president and producer] would be at Harlem World or Disco Fever, and she’d watch who was mixing what four bars off of what record. She’d get that record, and then she’d play us those four bars and have us go in and cut it better. (Leland and Stein 1987: 28)
But in the mid-1980s a new technology developed that was better suited to the needs of hip-hop musicians: digital sampling. In its earliest incarnation, sampling was seen as a strategy for expanding the tonal palette of the keyboard-based synthesizer, as in this definition from a 1986 issue of Electronic Musician magazine:
Sampling is like magnetic tape recording in that both technologies involve the capturing, storing and recreating of audio (sound) waves. In fact, many of the standard terms associated with this technique (e.g. loop, splice, crossfade, etc.) have been borrowed directly from the world of magnetic tape recording. Sampling is the digital equivalent of music concrete, wherein common sounds are manipulated (and sometimes integrated with traditional instruments) to produce musical compositions.
Sampling allows the musician to record sounds from other instruments, nature, or even non-musical sources, and transpose and play them chromatically on a standard piano or organ keyboard. This new and emerging technology greatly expands the creative horizons of the modern composer. (Tully 1986: 27–30)
Another use, however, soon began to emerge. With the SP-12 in 1986, E-mu Systems introduced the “sampling drum computer” (Oppenheimer 1986: 84). Unlike earlier samplers, which were intended to provide musicians with novel sounds for their keyboards, the SP-12 was created to allow a producer to build rhythm tracks from individual drum sounds that had been previously sampled. In order to facilitate this process, it boasted three separate functions: the ability to digitally record a live drum sound (“sampling”), the ability to manipulate the resultant snippet to the operator’s liking, and the ability to precisely organize many samples within a temporal framework (“sequencing”). Hip-hop artists would take the process two steps further. While the new technology was intended to shift the drum machine from synthesized, preloaded drum sounds to more realistic “live” sounds, hip-hop artists were soon using the machine to sample not their own drumming, but the sound of their favorite recorded drummers, such as Clyde Stubblefield from James Brown’s band, or Zigaboo Modeliste of the Meters.
It wasn’t long, though, before hip-hop producers would go even further. They soon began to use the SP-12 not only to sample drum sounds from old records, but also to sample entire melodies. This technique would not have appealed to musicians from other genres, who wanted the freedom to create their own melodies and had no interest in digital recordings of other people’s music. For those trained as hip-hop deejays, however, the ability to play an entire measure—a break, in this case—from an old record was exactly what they were looking for.
The credit for exploiting this possibility is generally given to Queens-based producer Marley Marl. As Chairman Mao writes, “One day during a Captain Rock remix session, Marley accidentally discovered modern drum-sound sampling, thus magically enabling funky drummers from his scratchy record collection to cross decades and sit in on his own productions.” (Chairman Mao 1997: 88). The innovation was quickly embraced, and almost immediately ended the era of live instrumentation. In fact, as I will discuss later in this chapter, many current artists characterize hip-hop’s brief use of live instruments as merely a deviation, a capitulation to circumstance, rather than a step in hip-hop’s evolution.
Hip-hop sampling grew out of the deejays’ practice of repeating breaks until they formed a musical cycle of their own. The segments favored by early hip-hop producers tended toward funk and soul breaks, which—even in their original context—were clearly defined. An untrained listener, for example, can easily hear the beginning and end of the break in James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” (1969), perhaps the single most-exploited sample in hip-hop music history. The break begins when everything but the drums stops playing and ends eight measures later when the other instruments resume. This conception of the break is consistent with that of the earliest hip-hop deejays; the drums are by far the most important element. In fact, the idea of a break with lackluster drums would actually be contradiction in terms.
But the advent of sampling yielded a significant change: because more than one loop could now be played simultaneously, producers could take their drums and their music from different records. With samplers, any music could be combined with a great drum pattern to make what is essentially a composite break. Moreover, different loops (and “stabs”—short bursts of sound) could be brought in and taken out at different times.3 This substantially broadened the spectrum of music that could be pressed into service for hip-hop.
Today, the term “break” refers to any segment of music (usually four measures or less) that could be sampled and repeated. For example, the song “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.),” by Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth (1992) is based on a break from a late-sixties jazz artist. The break in this case, however, is not a moment of intense drum activity but a two-measure excerpt from a saxophone solo. Presumably one who was not already familiar with the hip-hop song would not hear those particular measures as being significant in the context of the original music. In contemporary terms, then, a break is any expanse of music that is thought of as a break by a producer. On a conceptual level, this means that the break in the original jazz record was brought into existence retroactively by Pete Rock’s use of it. In other words, for the twenty-four years between its release and the day Pete Rock sampled it, the original song contained no break. From that day on, it contained the break from “They Reminisce over You.” Producers deal with this apparent breaching of the time-space continuum with typically philosophical detachment. Conventionally, they take the position that the break had always been there, it just took a great producer to hear and exploit it.4 Record collecting is approached as if potential breaks have been unlooped and hidden randomly throughout the world’s music. It is the producer’s job to find them. This philosophy is apparent in a contemporary hip-hop magazine’s review of a relatively obscure 1971 album, in which the author describes one of the songs as if it had been pieced together from subsequent hip-hop breaks:
It opens with a solo sax that was re-arranged slightly to become the sax in Artifacts’ “Wrong Side of the Tracks.” Prince Paul’s loop from “Beautiful Night” follows, along with everything but the drums and lyrics of Showbiz and AG’s “Hold Ya Head” (sensing a trend?). This bassline also reappeared on Marley Marl’s remix of The Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka.” The cut closes out with the loop from Smif-n-Wessun’s “Bucktown” is [sic] immediately followed by the Cella Dwella’s classic “Land of the Lost.” (Turner 2000: 64)
DJ Jazzy Jay even goes so far as to suggest that the original musicians may not have understood the significance of their own work: “Maybe those records were ahead of their time. Maybe they were made specifically for the rap era; these people didn’t even know what they were making at that time. They thought, ‘Oh, we want to make a jazz record’” (Leland and Stein 1987: 26).
As digital sampling became the method of choice for hip-hop deejays (who, now that they used sampling, began to call themselves “producers”), their preexisting hunger for rare records became of paramount importance. They developed elaborate distribution systems for records and knowledge about records, yet still went to great lengths to “discover” new breaks before others did. In the mid-1980s, a Bronx-based deejay named Lenny Roberts began to press compilations of rare recordings, each containing a sought-after rhythm break, under the name Ultimate Breaks and Beats (Leland and Stein 1987: 27). This development reinforced the producers’ resolve to find new breaks that were rarer, and in response Roberts would compile those new breaks on new editions of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. As a result of such competition, hip-hop producers soon found themselves with record collections numbering in the tens of thousands as well as a deeply embedded psychological need to find rare records.
At the same time, this process established a canon of records—some of which appeared on Ultimate Breaks and Beats, some of which did not —that a producer had to be familiar with, an expectation that still stands to this day. For example, Bob James’s 1975 jazz fusion recording “Take Me to the Mardi Gras,” though it does not appear on Ultimate Breaks and Beats, was a favorite of early hip-hop deejays and producers (most notably, it forms the basis for Run-DMC’s “Peter Piper” [1986]). It is so well known, in fact, that few contemporary producers would even consider using it for their own productions.5 Nevertheless, producers must have the recording in their collections if they want to be taken seriously by others. As I discuss in later chapters, record collecting occupies a role for hip-hop producers similar to that of practice and performing experience for other musicians. Peers would consider a producer who did not own canonical records to be unprepared, in much the same way that jazz musicians would criticize a colleague who did not know the changes to “Stardust.”
The Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, for its part, eventually grew to twenty-five volumes and spawned hundreds of imitators (see chapters 5 and 6).
That was big, big, big, big influence to me, you know. I had ’em back in the days in like 1983, 1984, before they were even Ultimate Breaks, when they was just Octopus records with the little picture of the Octopus DJ on ’em…. That’s what they were originally. And they didn’t list any of the artists’ names or anything, it was just the titles of the songs, no publishing info or nothing. It was just something somebody pressed up out of their house or something. Yeah, they were a big, big influence, man. I mean, I had all of ’em: doubles and triples of everything.
That was the foundation of hip-hop, man, ’cause you listen to all the rap records when they first started sampling, and it was all that Ultimate Break stuff. That’s the foundation, right there. (Stroman 1999)
Although many producers today see such compilations as a violation of producers’ ethics (see chapter 5), most make an exception for the Ultimate Breaks and Beats collection on the grounds of its historical significance in alerting producers to the value of breaks in the first place: “Those were the ones that started folks looking for breaks and shit, anyway. I don’t know too many people that got the original ‘Substitution’ break, you know? So nine times out of ten, if you hear that shit on a rap record, they got it from Ultimate Breaks and Beats” (Samson S. 1999).6 Of course, not everyone made this exception:
Even [Ultimate Breaks and Beats]—I’ll tell ya, man—there was a lotta mixed feelings about those, too…. You talk to old school cats like Grandmaster Flash, and they’ll tell you that was like the worst thing to ever happen to hip-hop ’cause it took all the mystery out of the whole breakbeat game. But it inspired me, man. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know if I’d even be in it to the level that I am now. (Stroman 1999)
As the 1980s wore on, the potential of digital sampling to go beyond the mere replication of deejaying techniques led to an increasingly sophisticated aesthetic for hip-hop music. In particular, producers made use of samplers’ ability to play numerous samples at the same time (a technique which would have required multiple deejays and turntables), to take very short samples (which would have required very fast deejays) and to assemble these samples in any order, with or without repetition as desired (which could not be done by deejays at all).7 The creative exploitation of these new techniques, along with parallel advances in emceeing, has led to the late 1980s being called the “golden era” of hip-hop.
One of the most significant forces in this development was the Bomb Squad, a production collective that became known for its work with Public Enemy. Their style—a blend of samples from diverse sources that emphasized chaos and noise—revolutionized hip-hop music. Keith Shock lee, one of the Bomb Squad’s masterminds, specifically characterizes their sound as being in contrast to the typical African American fare of the time, supporting my earlier argument that hip-hop was not an organic development:
Public Enemy was never an R&B-based, runnin’-up-the-charts, gettin’-played-all-day-on-the-radio group. It was a street group. It was basically a thrash group, a group that was very much rock ’n’ roll oriented. We very seldom used bass lines because the parallel that we wanted to draw was Public Enemy and Led Zeppelin. Public Enemy and the Grateful Dead. We were not polished and clean like any of the R&B groups or even any of our rap counterparts that were doing a lotta love rap. That just wasn’t our zone—even though when we were DJs we played all those records. We decided that we wanted to communicate something that was gonna be three dimensional—something that you could look at from many different sides and get information from as well as entertainment. (Chairman Mao 1998: 113–114)
But for most producers, the contribution of Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad lay not so much in their particular approach but in the fact that they had a definable approach in the first place. They were self-consciously breaking new ground in their production style, and that was an inspiration to other producers.
Modern producers cite other historical figures from the late 1980s, such as Ced G of the Ultramagnetic MCs, Kurtis Mantronik, Prince Paul of De La Soul, and the Large Professor as artists whose individualistic styles contributed greatly to contemporary approaches. In fact, this collectively held historical consciousness is clearly one of the things that holds the producers’ community together. The veneration of certain lesser-known hip-hop artists, for example, creates a common bond among contemporary producers.8 One example of this tendency is the respect given to Paul C, a New York–based producer of the late 1980s who passed away before his work became widely known but whose style is heard in the music of those he influenced: “He kinda put it down for Ced G and Extra P [also known as the Large Professor] … I think he was one of hip-hop’s biggest losses of all time. I think he was destined to be dope. He was gon’ be the man. He was the best producer that never happened” (DJ Mixx Messiah 1999). Although his name is largely unknown in the broader hip-hop community, Paul C was cited as an influence by virtually every producer I interviewed for this study.
The move by hip-hop deejays into the studio was part of a larger trend throughout the spectrum of popular music toward the increased use of technology in the creation of music. It is no accident that the individuals who create hip-hop music call themselves “producers” rather than composers or musicians. The term “producer” came into vogue in popular music in the 1960s with such individuals as Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and George Martin. While a recording engineer uses recording equipment to capture a sound on tape, a producer, although performing a materially similar task, is considered to have a larger aesthetic responsibility. A producer chooses the methodology of recording and often the musicians and studio in order to evoke a specific sensibility within the music (Theberge 1997: 192–193). This was a role that could not have be born until the technology existed to support it. When recordings were being made monaurally with two or three microphones, there was little room for individuals to put a personal stamp on the recording process. Although there were certainly creative individuals who developed innovative recording strategies during this era, their work was rarely appreciated beyond a small circle of aficionados, and even then it was noted primarily for its fidelity, rather than for its creativity. As a rule, the intent of recorded music until the 1960s was to reproduce the sound of live performance as accurately as possible (see Beadle 1993, Buskin 1999).
As studio technology developed to the point where musicians could create sounds in the studio that they could not possibly create live (such as playing a guitar solo backwards), the roles were reversed, and the studio recording became the ideal to which live music aspired. Albums such as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (produced by Brian Wilson) and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (produced by George Martin) began to experiment with the artistic possibilities of studio recording. It was at this time that the role of the producer became both feasible and significant (Beadle 1993). In the 1970s, developments in electronic music (particularly the advent of synthesizers and drum machines) made the producer even more important because live musicians were no longer an essential part of the recording process. The roles of composer and musician became integrated into that of the producer. Disco producers such as Giorgio Moroder found they needed only drum machines, synthesizers, and a live vocalist to make hits (Buskin 1999:, 201–205). The development of digital sampling technology in the 1980s continued this trend, bringing past recordings of live musicians back into the electronic mix.
For hip-hop producers the process of creating recorded music has become almost completely estranged from the process of capturing the sound of live performance. Live performance (deejaying aside) does not serve as a significant model for the producers’ aesthetic. Conversely, live performances of hip-hop are rarely concerned with reproducing any specific processes from the studio (aside from emceeing); the studio recording is simply played (and sometimes manipulated by a deejay). In fact, one of the major challenges of performing hip-hop on instruments, in the rare cases where this is done, is that many of hip-hop’s most typical musical gestures (such as sixteenth notes played on a bass drum) are virtually impossible to reproduce without electronic editing. Sample-based hip-hop is a studio-oriented music.
One effect of this approach is hip-hop’s celebration, almost unique in African American music, of the solitary genius. Hip-hop producers hold an image of themselves that recalls nothing so much as European art composers: the isolated artist working to develop his or her music. As producer Mr. Supreme says on his Web site, “It’s the shit to be at home at 4:00 in the morning, in your boxers, in front of your sampler, making some shit, you know?” (Mr. Supreme, interviewed on www.conceptionrecords.com, accessed 9 July 1999). In a describing his ideal work setting, Mr. Supreme cites three factors, each of which specifically diminishes the possibility of other individuals being present (“at home,” “at 4:00 in the morning,” and “in your boxers”). This, he suggests, is the best environment in which to create hip-hop music. Hip-hop music confounds many of the generalizations that have historically been made about the communal nature of African American music, especially those that interpret specific musical interactions as reflecting deeper truths about social interactions.
The history of hip-hop sampling, like the history of most musical forms, is a story of dialectical influence. Innovations are accepted only if they conform to a preexisting aesthetic, but once accepted, they subtly change it. Sampling was initially embraced because it allowed deejays to realize their turntable ideas with less work. But the sampler quickly brought hip-hop to places that a turntable could not enter. Nevertheless, a certain consciousness about the significance of the turntable informs sample-based hip-hop even to this day. Moreover, as with any historical narrative, the shape of this story is largely informed by contemporary needs. The narrative that I have recapitulated above is in some sense the origin myth of sample-based hip-hop and serves the needs that such a title implies: it provides a sense of rootedness, group cohesion, and direction for the future. Specifically, this version of hip-hop history foregrounds an evolutionary paradigm that naturally presents current practice as the pinnacle of history. It also notably excludes the influence of disco music on early hip-hop practice (see Fikentscher 2000, Brewster and Broughton 2000).
Individual Histories
The development of individual producers’ technical ability often mirrors the development of the form as a whole. This is due primarily to three factors, the first of which is a socioeconomic concern that runs across the spectrum of human activity: one does not invest a substantial amount of money in a pursuit until one is certain that one is serious about it. For instance, Stradivarius violins are beyond the price range of most violinists; even if one could afford it, one would not buy a Stradivarius for a beginning violin student. Similarly, even if they can afford it, few producers purchase state-of-the-art equipment until they are in a position to exploit it to the fullest. As a result, many producers develop their talents on outdated equipment, which is less expensive to purchase and in many cases simpler to operate.
The second factor is a sense that, on a pedagogical level, the most practical educational approach is to recapitulate the form’s musical evolution to ensure that each important technique is mastered before moving on to the next one. This approach has a compelling internal logic, if only due to the fact that more complex technologies and techniques tend to develop out of simpler ones, rather than vice versa. Finally, there is a broader belief that an individual working through hip-hop history can develop a deeper understanding of the more abstract philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the form.9
For many producers, the educational process began with a single tape deck and the creation of so-called pause tapes: “Basically, it’s an early form of sampling, in the most ghetto form possible. What you do is you play a record, and then you pause [the tape], and you play the break, pause it, bring it back, play the break, pause it … ’til you have like a continuous loop. And then I’d take another tape and rap over that, put like scratchin’ and shit on it. So I started doing it that way” (Samson S. 1999). At some point, many—though not all—acquire a second turn table and a mixer and begin to learn about deejaying. Most producers see learning to deejay and learning to produce as being part of the same process; none of my consultants made a distinction unless I specifically asked them to. Most began by experimenting on their own, and it was only later, after they had achieved some proficiency, that they met other like-minded individuals and began to share information. This pattern has led to certain idiosyncrasies becoming formalized in hip-hop practice:
Mr. Supreme: Just learned on my own, really…. And another funny thing is that nobody taught me and when I brought that $24 mixer and I came home, I plugged up the turntables. I didn’t know, but I plugged ’em in backwards. And to me that was right, ’cause I didn’t know. I just naturally thought number one would be on the right side, two would be on the left side … That’s how I plugged ’em in and that’s how I taught myself. And now a lot of deejays say, “Yeah, you’re weird. You go backwards.”
Joe: Oh, so you still have to do it that way.
Mr. Supreme: Yeah, to this day! That’s how I learned. I can’t go the real way. And that’s called a “hamster.” A lot of deejays are called “hamsters,” that go backwards … I don’t know who came up with that name or why. (Mr. Supreme 1998a).
In fact, many mixers are now outfitted with a “hamster switch” that automatically reverses the controls so that a backwards deejay can use another deejay’s setup without unplugging the turntables to reverse them. So many individual deejays made the same mistake when figuring out how to deejay that their approach, backwards deejaying, is now an accepted practice in the community. This pattern, individual experimentation retroactively legitimized by a professional peer group, can been seen at many points in the development of hip-hop (and, in fact, in most forms of music).
For most, the development of deejaying proficiency was followed by the acquisition of an inexpensive keyboard instrument with a rudimentary sampling function. At this point, the music is powered by youthful enthusiasm, creativity, and a generally high-school-aged peer group that didn’t have very high expectations in the first place. Hieroglyphics producer Domino describes his origins as a producer:
I had a partner named Jason at the time. Basically, I was their MC, and we were producing together…. I bought this little keyboard, and basically you would push the button and whatever you put into it would be what it sampled. Like, I started off by saying, “I’m dope! I’m dope! I—I—I’m dope! I’m dope!” Didn’t have enough insight to do anything with it. Well, he sampled the beat. We used to just like have a continuously drum break and tape it on a tape. And then have another tape player and then record from that tape to another tape player, and add stuff off the sampler—the new things that we had sampled. So by the time you’re done, you got like a fifth generation copy…. That was the initial way that we sampled. That’s how we had the different tracks was by dub, tape to tape. (Domino 1998)
DJ Topspin describes a similar process, which soon evolved into an impossibly byzantine home “studio”:
I got a Casio keyboard, a sampling one … for Christmas…. I thought that was interesting when I first got it. I was like, “Oh, you can sample your voice,” and I’d just do that forever and ever…. You couldn’t really do too much with it, until I looked at the back of it, and there was a input. So you could do something other than your voice. So I went to Radio Shack…. I got the thing hooked up…. It had the input, and I plugged into the Yorx [stereo] … and sampled little bits of stuff. And then I took my Walkman … and would sample pieces from a song.
I mean, it was … like with a little Y-jack, like you have two headphone female jacks, and it would be one going into the sampler, one coming out of the Walkman, and vice versa. This big spider-web concoction. But you could end up playing the Walkman, while hearing you triggering the sampler…. The machine was so limited, you could only do like halfs or thirds [of a loop] sometimes, you couldn’t get a whole. You’d have to overdub all those pieces. So you’ll have like a six-, seven-generation beat. [But] people I was runnin’ around with were like “Yeah, that’s the shit, man!” (DJ Topspin 1999)
Notice that both Domino and DJ Topspin specifically point out how their low expectations facilitated their early development. Both reflect with some amusement that their efforts were acceptable by the standards of their peers.
As they become more emotionally and financially invested in their work, most producers acquire increasingly professional equipment to facilitate it. This raises the issue again of sample-based hip-hop as a non-performative genre. Abstract and aesthetic concerns aside, there is a practical issue here: the hip-hop musician’s instrument, the sampler, is a piece of studio equipment. This simple fact totally obliterates conventional distinctions between performing (or practicing) and recording. Everything that is done with a sampler is, by definition, recorded. Moreover, the output of the sampler is almost always transferred to a conventional medium, such as digital audiotape or CD. At the most basic level, the hip-hop producer’s “instrument” (sampler/sequencer, mixer, and recording device) is a rudimentary home studio.
Virtually all sample-based hip-hop producers do the majority of their work in such home studios. As Theberge notes, this is typical of contemporary electronic music: “In genres of music that rely heavily on electronically generated sounds, a great deal of pre-production sequencing in the home studio (no matter how modest the quality of the synthesizer set-up) became possible. You could then simply carry the work on diskette to a more professional facility where ‘finishing’ work could be performed in a reasonably short amount of time” (Theberge 1997: 232).
For many non–hip-hop electronic musicians, the use of a home studio is a matter of convenience and expense rather than of socialization. They tend to make their studio spaces as distinct from their domestic pursuits as possible:
Often ignored … is the manner in which the domestic space has been transformed into a production environment. Musicians’ magazines often use cliches such as the arrival of the “information age” and Alvin Toffler’s (1980) notion of the “electronic Cottage” to explain the existence of the home studio. It seems to me that there is something else quite striking about this particular manifestation of contemporary music-making that is very different from previous uses of music technology in the home; that is, the degree to which the home studio is an isolated form of activity, separate from family life in almost every way.
The home studio is, above all, a private space. Studios tend to be located in bedrooms, dens, or basement rec rooms, far from the main traffic of everyday life…. The home studio is thus, by design, a private space within a private dwelling. (Theberge 1997: 234)
For hip-hop artists, however, the integration of the production environment with domestic space is one of its primary benefits. During the time of my research, the Lion’s Den, the home studio of the Jasiri Media Group, featured a playpen for the MCs’ infant son, and the Pharmacy, Vitamin D’s home studio, actually had a bed in it. In fact, as Vitamin D reports, the sense of social ease and domesticity that a home studio can provide is one of its major selling points:
There’s really no time-rush thing. You’re at the house…. People come through unexpectedly and it just adds a whole different energy in the room. So when you’re busting [rapping], it’s like you kinda get their energy in the track, too…. It’s how you can keep the spontaneity and stuff going. A lotta times, the best ideas that we’ve come up with … they were spontaneous, they just kinda, “Let’s just do this. Let’s do it!” you know? You can’t do that in a studio….
And you get inspired at different times. You’re not always inspired right then, you know? It’s like, I might be cleaning up the house, listening to some Miles Davis and hear a cold little riff or something, be like, “Man!” you know? “I gotta sample that right now!” Instead of going in the studio, doing all this. If I become inspired by something right there … I’m ’a get to chopping up these pianos, and then lead on from there, I might add these other records and start mixing over it. And it becomes what you hearing on tape. And you can’t get that with just going in the studio. (Vitamin D 1998)
And yet the very fact that these home studio spaces have their own names (e.g., “the Lion’s Den,” “the Pharmacy,” “the Basement” [Pete Rock’s studio]) suggests that producers actually do see them as being distinct from their general domestic environment. In fact, when referring to the home studio environment in the abstract, producers often refer to it as “the lab,” a term which very clearly draws a distinction between work space and living space.10
As with any form of music, an important technique of self-education is to listen to other artists in order to learn new techniques:
Jake One: I try to get into people like that’s heads … just to know. I’m just curious. You try to break down their method … figure it out. (Jake One 1998)
Joe: So you, like, listen to other producers and break down their formula …
Vitamin D: All producers do that, whether they admit it or not. (Vitamin D 1998)
This does not mean that producers want to imitate each other; the things they listen for tend to be very subtle techniques that nonproducers would most likely not notice. When I asked Negus I if he studied other producers, he was explicit on this point:
I do. Yup, I do it all the time. Like Timbaland, I’ll put him up there, because I like the way he makes beats, in that he samples occasionally, but for the most part his compositions are original. He does use some sounds, but for the most part he doesn’t use looped samples. I’m impressed by his music, by his beats. Not that I would necessarily emulate his sound, but … I’m impressed with what he’s done, in terms of his originality, his creativity…. But if I made a beat that sounded too much like him, I would be like “Man, that sounds too much like Timbaland.” I wouldn’t be happy with it, because it sounds too much like someone else’s style. (Negus I 1998)
And such listening is not limited to hip-hop:
Joe: Do you listen to other producers to break down their method?
Domino: I listen to all music like that. Today I was listening to the Beatles. I was just peepin’ how they have things panned [where sounds are placed in the stereo field]. And the ways that they totally change the song, within the song. And how they have a certain type of effect behind the MCs’ vocals, or behind the guitar, or whatever.
Whenever I listen to music, I’m not the type of person who really has it as background music…. I gotta turn it on, and listen to it, and really listen…. That’s just how I am. (Domino 1998)
Domino’s telling slip—referring to the Beatles’ singers as “MCs”—suggests that he is actually listening to the Beatles as hip-hop music. While he may appreciate many diverse aspects of the Beatles’ music, the elements he cites (how instruments are set off from each other spatially, the structure of the song, the use of various effects) are all specifically applicable to hip-hop production. The producers’ aesthetic is such that innovations from other musical forms can be brought in to their own practice.
An important adjunct to the listening process is discussion of hip-hop music with other producers. It is not surprising that this often takes the form of ridiculing absent third parties. As I will discuss in chapter 6, ridicule plays an important role in maintaining the continuity of the hip-hop aesthetic; however, it is also an important pedagogical tool. Hearing another producer berated for something can lead a young producer away from it, before it even becomes an issue in his own music:
King Otto: I really don’t talk with that many producers about making beats, per se. We just talk about other people’s beats…. like make fun of someone else’s beat….
Joe: What types of things would you make fun of somebody for doing?
King Otto: There’s occasions where maybe somebody sounds like somebody else, ’cause everyone has their own distinct style, but sometimes you’ll cross the line and make a [DJ] Premier beat. I know I’ve done it. Or maybe a Pete Rock beat. ’Cause their sound is so distinct. If you get too close to it you can tell. (King Otto 1998)
This process has a secondary function in that by mutually criticizing other hip-hop artists, producers are implicitly complimenting each other on their knowledge and taste:
I think an interesting dynamic to that, too, is that that type of exchange is something that only happens with people that have relationships with each other where they know that [they both have] a degree of knowledge within music, where that’s even the point for bringing the conversation up. It’s like, “I know how you know mu sic,” so it’s like, “What’s up with this?”
But it’s not just something that you casually do, just every day. You don’t sit around and critique, or whatever. But, definitely. That’s almost like out of acknowledgement, you know what I’m saying? You respect the other person’s opinion, so you wanna see where they’re at, with the other music. That’s definitely true. MCs do it with MCs. MCs do it to producers. That’s the element within the culture where it’s like, “Is it fresh, or isn’t it?” (Wordsayer 1998)
The producers’ educational process is not only practical and historical; it is also deeply ideological. Specifically, it promotes the mythological deejay as the cornerstone of the musical form and, by extension, the community itself: “When you learn as a deejay, you learn what the break is about. That’s really like what sampling is about. It’s about the break. And it’s not really about playing music. It’s more of doing what a deejay does” (DJ Kool Akiem 1999).
