Inevitable

The readings this week covered a variety of topics related to the art of the Deejay. However, they all came back to some of our foundational questions around myths of origins, the role of certain influences, politics, and aesthetics. In preparation for the paper, I’ve decided to focus on some ideas concerning aesthetics and the myths of origin.

As a history major, we always discuss the importance of a balanced view of history, focusing ideas of continuity. With my love of jazz and blues I’ve always wanted to consider hip hop as a part of the broader scheme of African American Music. However, after reading Joseph Schloss and the Bartlett selection, some questions have been raised. We have talked about some of the strange origin myths that Dr. Schur has uncovered in his studies, Scotland, Kung-Fu, and others, but Bartlett’s contention’s seem to fall somewhere in between the two extremes. References to Ghanaian drumming circles, or the importance of the oral culture of religion in the slave south seem like some broad connections in my mind (395-397). I think one of the most profound points I have read in this class has been Schloss’s assertion that this type of study makes it seem as if Hip Hop was inevitable (26).

However, I think there can be a point of reconciliation, and it comes from the argument about the aesthetic element of sampling in hip hop. Not that sampling is anything revolutionary, many of the chord progressions in Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album were stolen from the Miles Davis’s album “Kind of Blue.” When Kool Herc DJ talks about loving making people dance to The Monkeys or those music they though they hated, that’s sampling. But, in the broader sense of drawing off other cultures and influences, I think that sampling has to be considered a central element of hip hop. In my mind, you need to have Bambaataa, Kool Herc, and the influence of technology, you need the Bronx, and you need the availability of records to have any trajectory of Hip Hop, so in that sense it was a creation of that snapshot in time. I think the hunt for some sense of “this is where it started” looking at rag time, BAM, jazz could all be justified if the right research was conducted. Those arguments to me sound like someone saying “Isaac Newton is responsible for the first Model T” I mean yeah, he no doubt influenced it, but it took much more than the laws of motion to make a car, and it takes a lot more than Ghanaian drums to make hip hop. Once you accept the argument that sampling is part of the aesthetic foundation, I think this search for origins becomes misguided.

Hip Hop v. Rap Music

Sorry for the slightly late post tonight, I've been making my way back from Memphis today and it took me a bit to get back on track. That being said, it was a really interesting week of readings, and I had one point I wanted to focus on today.

In the selection from Dr. Schur’s book, the point is made, and it’s not a new one in our discussions, that "studies of 'hip-hop' focus almost exclusively on music and musicians (45)." The same point is also made by Murray Forman that "the term hip hop is often incorrectly applied only to the music, the most prominent and lucrative cultural facet (103)." Despite these arguments, when we read Perry's work, it seems that the focus is again nearly exclusively about the music itself.

As we have been working through some the literature and discussing hip hop history, we have touched on a few ideas about these other "elements." Though we have yet to have our units and discussions on graffiti or break that will come later in the course, I still am having trouble fitting these elements in. Is the b-boy anything like his counterpart 30 years ago? After a "war on graffiti," does graffiti still matter, at all as a foundational aspect of hip hop? At this point, and with an admittedly low understanding of these particular elements of hip hop. Dancing and writing on public walls seem remarkably unoriginal in many ways, weren't the Romans dancing and producing graffiti? It seems like we've been trying so hard to get a basic understanding of hip hop and hip hop studies, saying "there are four elements to hip hop, first.." and haven't really asked "why?" are these two elements so important. Is there some sort of path dependency that started with "Wild Style" that has prevented these elements from being downgraded from "elements" to "influences"?