In the epigraph that opens this book, Mr. Supreme relates the common experience of hip-hop producers being questioned about whether or not hip-hop is “really” music. Whenever I speak about hip-hop production, this is almost always the second question I’m asked.18 As I take pains to point out, it is actually a question about what the word “music” means, and it contains the hidden predicate that music is more valuable than forms of sonic expression that are not music. If one believes that only live instruments can create music and that music is good, then sample-based hip-hop is not good, by definition. The real question, in other words, is, “Can you prove to me that hip-hop is good?” And the appropriate answer, in my opinion, is “No, because it depends on what you personally consider to be valuable; hip-hop is what it is.” This is essentially what Mr. Supreme is doing by creating an analogous argument about painting: if you believe that musicians should make their own sounds, then hip-hop is not music, but, by the same token, if you believe that artists should make their own paint, then painting is not art. The conclusion, in both cases, is based on a preexisting and arbitrary assumption.
In fact, the question itself is a trick: it loudly directs one’s attention towards hip-hop’s formal characteristics, while quietly installing its own prejudices about what music is supposed to be. The process is similar in both form and intent to the concept of the “noble savage” as explicated by Ter Ellingson (2001). By focusing on the question of whether or not savages were noble, the term’s inventors were able to reinforce the ideas of “nobility” and “savagery”—both of which were deeply flawed—while simultaneously drawing attention away from them. Similarly, to be drawn into an argument about whether hip-hop lives up to the standards of other cultural forms can only weaken hip-hop’s own internal values, and hip-hop producers clearly understand this. For thirty years, in fact, the hip-hop community has steadfastly refused to compromise its aesthetic principles in deference to the majority society.
If hip-hop is revolutionary, then this—even more than its lyrical message—may be where its power truly lies: in the fierce continuity of its artistic vision. And that, ultimately, is what this book is about. Which is why I consider it a statement of both intellectual honesty and political commitment to say that I love hip-hop. I love the crack of a tight snare drum sample, the feel of bass in my chest, and the intensity of a crowded dance floor. “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth (1992) is not only a fine example of the sample-based hip-hop aesthetic. It is also one of the most beautifully poignant songs I have ever heard, and it never fails to send chills down my spine. It is these chills that are often lost in academic discussion. It is these chills that motivate hip-hop producers to devote their time and money to sample-based hip-hop. And it is these chills that have drawn me to produce the following study.
chapter 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