essay on baltimore club

Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 19, Issue 4, Pages 311–341

ESSAY

“What Chew Know About Down the Hill?’’: BaltimoreClub Music, Subgenre Crossover, and the New

Subcultural Capital of Race and Space

Andrew DevereauxIndependent Scholar

“Subcultures are just neighborhoods you don’t live in.”

—Scott Seward (Seward 2003)

“Right now there’s a lot of futuristic kid shit that’s happening on the

regional level all across the country. Fools are really dancing, likedancing super hard—there are these new dances all over the place,

and you know that when a fourteen-year-old has invented a brand-

new dance, the music must be incredibly vital and is going to last

another ten or twenty years.”

—Jeff Chang (emphasis added, Chang and Davis 2006)

Neither “Here’’ nor “There’’: A Quick Sketch of Where Baltimore’s AtThe HBO crime drama The Wire, created by former Baltimore Sun

reporter and author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon,

debuted in 2002 to immediate praise for its multifaceted and critical look at

the drug war and the gritty realism of its depiction of Baltimore’s ghettos.

Despite never receiving what would be considered excellent ratings, it has

attracted a major cult following and tremendous critical success through-

out its four seasons, winning numerous Emmy, Edgar, and NAACP Image

awards. Simon and his team of writers have moved beyond the usual topics

of a crime drama to explore the politics, education system, and economics

of contemporary Baltimore. Some of the best writing and analysis of TheWire appears on the blog Heaven and Here, which features several writers

posting commentaries on various aspects of the show.

In November of 2006, frequent Heaven and Here writer Bethlehem

Shoals posted an article entitled “The Language Problem,” which dealt with

312 Andrew Devereaux

the dialect and slang of two of the main Season Four drug dealing characters,

Chris and Snoop.1 One of the many things The Wire is praised for is the great

attention paid to the Baltimore accent by the actors, writers, and speech

coaches on the show. Despite agreeing with this praise of the linguistic

subtleties achieved by The Wire, Shoals wonders whether in Season Four,

specifically with regards to the characters of Snoop and Chris, the slang

has become too obscure and the dialect too heavy, rendering Snoop and

Chris incoherent at numerous times, and if the viewer is in frequent need of

subtitles or closed caption to follow the speech. Shoals uses this as a jumping

off point to speculate about the relationship between the spoken language

on the show and its increasingly gloomy outlook on Baltimore as the series

has progressed:

Maybe that’s because we know how the story goes; maybe things are

really getting worse. Either way, the fact that we’re presented with any

number of characters who are impenetrable, alien, or otherworldly

. . . only heightens the sense that these neighborhoods are drifting

further and further away. Perhaps we’re supposed to reach forth and

understand them, but this is markedly different from learning the

workplace rhythms of life in The Pit, or coming to understand Omar’s

code. This isn’t just a ghetto, where things are different from what

we know; I honestly at times think that we’re supposed to be peering

into the pale of society, where vacants, mutant drug gangs, [and]

child soldiers dominate the landscape and the parallel world is fast

deteriorating. If this is the case, then the linguistic gulf is a necessary

effect, one that should perhaps be making us think there’s a lot else

we barely grasp. No matter how well we knew the Barksdale crew

(Shoals 2006).

There is a remarkable amount of material in this quotation that speaks

not only to the current conditions of Baltimore “ghettos,” but how people

outside Baltimore might come to interpret depictions of these “ghettos” in

popular culture, and most importantly, whether these spaces, both real and

imagined, even fit the loose definition of what a “ghetto” is supposed to be.

Is Shoals correct in speculating that Simon is creating a vision for the viewer

not just of Baltimore ghetto life, but the very “pale of society” or a “parallel

world [that] is fast deteriorating?” If so, and if this is indeed a thematic goal

of the series, then Shoals would be right to wonder if the “linguistic gulf”

that is created between character and viewer renders this Baltimore world

untranslatable.

Baltimore Club Music 313

This idea of the Baltimore ghetto as a “parallel world” beyond the

viewer’s grasp, existing outside of the possibility for translation, is supported

by Shoals’ description of the Season Four drug dealers as “alien” and “other-

worldly.” It is as if the Baltimore ghetto the viewer sees is not on earth at

all, neither here nor there, or in any spatial area the audience could conceive

of. In 2002, the same year as the debut of The Wire, a very real (or surreal)

thing occurred in Baltimore that also signaled to many the “otherworldly”

nature of Baltimore’s drug, crime, and poverty problems. The city was given

a simple solution:

BelieveThe “Believe Baltimore” campaign was launched in 2002 by Mayor

Martin O’Malley in partnership with the Baltimore Community Foundation,

the Office of National Drug Control Policy, various business leaders, health

care organizations and, of course, the Baltimore Police Department. One

cannot fault city leadership for searching for a creative solution to Baltimore’s

mounting problems in the late 1990s/early 2000s. As a report on the campaign

notes, when the “Believe” message was conceived Baltimore was at the top

of all the wrong lists for US cities: first in homicides, first in violent crime,

first in property crime, first in heroin deaths and addicts, and near the top in

instances of sexually transmitted diseases.2 The report also points to the huge

negative demographic and economic shifts that occurred in the 1990s, with

a population drop of 12% (the most of any major US city for that decade)

and a job decline of 17%.

Baltimore is no stranger to interesting slogans. Previous ones whose

remnants are still visible in scratched-up stickers and torn posters through-

out the city include “The City That Reads” and “The Greatest City in

America.” The newest one which is about to be unveiled in a mega ad cam-

paign announced recently is “Baltimore: Get In On It”, aimed at attracting

new residents and tourists from outside the city limits. Although the “Be-

lieve” slogan was aimed directly at residents, it was at times just as vague

to Baltimoreans as it was to out-of-towners. Increasingly seen as a public

relations campaign that was heavy on advertising costs and light on drug

treatment and public works projects, the campaign was mocked by many

(parody stickers and posters that appeared were “Behave”, “beLIEve”, and

“Beehive”), and with the recent Maryland gubernatorial election victory by

O’Malley, the campaign seems to have been dropped completely in early

2007 by interim mayor Sheila Dixon (Fricke 2007).


While reading the article on the language of The Wire, with reference

to the “alien” nature of its characters, I could not help but connect the in-

creasingly distant depiction of the drug culture on the series and the vague

solution offered in the “Believe” campaign. Believe? Believe in what? Are

we past the point of specifics; are we beyond solutions? Is there nothing to

believe in but belief, the kind of pure faith that believers in UFOs and aliens

have? The campaign in its vague optimism ironically endorsed a defeatist

position: we are past the point of no return in Baltimore.

The phrase “this isn’t just a ghetto” in the Heaven and Here article

speaks not only to The Wire’s portrayal of Baltimore, but City Hall’s own view

of the city. Recent popular culture depictions of Baltimore explicitly illustrate

what the “Believe” campaign implied: welcome to another universe. I would

argue that the dilapidated, abandoned, drug-addled depressed neighborhoods

of Baltimore are not depicted in popular culture as “ghettos” (remember, that

is not enough) but as hyperghettos: areas of extreme danger and mayhem that

seem to signify a post-apocalyptic/post-Reaganism. This really does raise a

problem of translation, for as Shoals points out, should we really need the

subtitles to follow along, or are we not supposed to be “getting it”?

This problem of translation emerges when we try to understand the

recent crossover of the subgenre of dance music that dominates Baltimore’s

urban music scene, Baltimore Club music. Now a more white, more middle

class, more hip, and definitely more out-of-town set of DJs, producers, and

club-goers from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York are beginning to

embrace the minimal, proto-break beat, early-House influenced music. I

began to ask myself not only why the music has gained an outside audience,

but what does this say about the look and feel of Baltimore to that audience,

what is its cultural capital among the hip, and how does its imagery of

hyperghettos translate to a packed dance floor in Manhattan?

One should begin the Baltimore Club story with the rise of House

music, where disco had gone to both hide from mainstream backlash and to

expand its sound. The original House audience was black and queer, and the

clubs were mostly underground. House music by the late 1980s had found

its way outside of its birthplace of Chicago and was becoming popular in the

dance clubs of most US cities, along with the House-like sounds of Techno

from Detroit and Garage from New York City. Specifically, the subgenre

of hip-house, which fused house music with rap vocals or rap-like chanted

vocals, became popular in Baltimore. While most US cities had a subculture

of House music in its dance clubs, for Baltimore, House music was theculture for clubgoers in the 1980s.


DJ Frank Ski, who had worked with Miami Bass pioneers 2Live Crew,

began DJing black dance clubs in Baltimore like Paradox and Godfrey’s

(what DJ Technics in his account terms “ghetto clubs.”) Frank Ski would

play just the “break” in popular hip-house tracks, particularly songs that

sampled the hit soul song “Think” by Lyn Collins, a James Brown affiliated

singer. Sampling of the drums from “Think” had been made popular in the

now legendary hip-house song “It Takes Two” by Rob Base and DJ E-Z

Rock (1988) which made the popular music charts and received mainstream

hip-hop radio play. The other drum break that was cropping up in a lot of

tracks was from disco group Gaz’s popular 1978 track “Sing Sing.”

DJs in the “ghetto clubs” began to imitate Frank Ski’s playlist, as he

was becoming popular in clubs and on local hip hop radio stations. These

DJs, such as Scottie B., Shawn Caesar, DJ Booman, and DJ Technics, to

name a few, began producing their own tracks by sampling the breaks used

in the popular hip-house tracks (such as Frank Ski’s “Doo Doo Brown” or

Cajmere’s “Percolator”) and imitating their stripped down, 130 BPM speed,

non-bassline format. These early tracks created a style and a blueprint that

has lasted in the black dance clubs to this day, with not much variation in

production.3 Baltimore Club did not fall from the sky into the club scene. It

is important to note that it was a long established history of DJs in Baltimore

favoring certain sub-styles of House music that made the stylistic evolution

of the Baltimore Club sound possible.

Since these first Baltimore-produced tracks received play in the clubs

in 1990–1991, the Baltimore Club scene existed in relative obscurity from

the rest of the country. It even existed in its own bubble at home; the Bal-

timore Club scene stayed separate from the rise of rave culture made up of

mostly white middle class youth, which hit the United States in the early

1990s and began to become popular among white youth in Baltimore and its

surrounding suburbs. The Baltimore Club scene was not ripped away from

House overnight, and there was still much interplay between the two. Un-

ruly Records owners Scottie B. and Shawn Caesar, in the early 1990s when

Baltimore Club was gaining its own identity, promoted drag-queen Miss

Tony (a.k.a. Anthony Boston) as the first major star of the scene, and Miss

Tony’s popularity in the clubs and on local radio helped bring both House

and Baltimore Club fans together.

While the rave scene declined in popularity with the white middle

class music subculture in Baltimore in the late 1990s, the Baltimore Club

culture remained steady among the black dance culture.4 Then in 2002, the

isolation of the scene ended, not from the efforts of Baltimore DJs, but


because of a white DJ duo from Philadelphia. Hollertronix, comprised of

DJs Diplo (Wes Pentz) and Low Budget (Mike McGuire), began a party by

renting out a Ukrainian social club at night in North Philadelphia (nicknamed

by party attendees the “Ukie Club”).5 The Ukie Club parties started small

with just a few friends, but eventually turned into a major hot spot for both

hipsters and hip-hop fans.

Diplo and Low Budget combined numerous genres in their DJ sets

at the Ukie Club Hollertronix parties. What unified their choices of genres

was their identification with regional urban club styles. In other words,

Hollertronix were playing local styles of music that were largely not popular

outside of the cities they developed in: Grime from East London, Screw

from Houston, Bhangra from Punjab, Baile Funk from Rio de Janeiro, and

Baltimore Club, among others. The popular retail (and trend setting) Web

site for DJs, TurntableLab.com, heard a Hollertronix mix tape and decided to

release it in 2003 through an independent label Turntable Lab was starting,

Money Studios. The mix tape, title “Never Scared,” soon garnered a buzz

with New York DJs, and the popularity surprised both Turntable Lab and

Diplo:

It was way bigger than I imagined–we were just selling it out of the

back of our car with little Kinko’s cut-outs, then Turntable Lab was

really into it. It was something to help them start their label off too.

Then people just got into it, the right people bought it. It seemed like

nobody could find it, but all the press people got a copy so it spread

through New York really quick. People were into it (Drake 2004).

Besides the “Never Scared” mix tape, several other factors in

2003–2004 led to a rise in popularity among the “indie” subculture with

Hollertronix. In general, the “mash-up” style of DJing was gaining media

attention, as Danger Mouse’s infamous “Grey Album” mix of Jay-Z vocals

from “The Black Album” over music from The Beatle’s “White Album”

made contrasting genres within the same mix a talked about new DJ style.

Also, Diplo released another mix tape that got a lot of attention, featuring

Sri Lankan-British vocalist M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam, daughter of Tamil

Tiger rebel leader Arul Pragasam) titled Piracy Funds Terrorism in 2004.

Once again, the tape mixed an enormous breadth of genres. It also used the

Baltimore Club technique of making crude “remixes” of popular songs with-

out proper copyright; Diplo mixed M.I.A.’s vocals over Madonna, Prince and

Jay-Z as well as Baile Funk and Bhangra tracks.


After fifteen years of isolation, new media attention among the in-

die subculture, as well as some more mainstream media outlets, revealed

Baltimore club to the rest of the world. Diplo has brought black Baltimore

Club pioneer DJ Technics to New York to DJ at hip Manhattan clubs, and

other Baltimore DJs for the first time are receiving offers to DJ at hip East

Coast clubs. Hollertronix has moved into the spotlight in the DJ subculture,

and has moved beyond the Ukie Club to DJ at the hippest dance clubs in

Philadelphia and New York, and has also booked around the world on several

tours.

The mash-up multigenre style of Hollertronix has mushroomed and

several other key players since 2003 have embraced Baltimore Club music

in Philadelphia and New York. Baltimore Club has not only crossed the

Mason-Dixon line, but has also crossed racial and class lines. To locate

the possible reasons for this crossover, I will need to explore the spatial

elements of Baltimore Club, the cultural geography of Baltimore and the

relationship it has to the Baltimore Club scene, the issues surrounding its

possible “subcultural capital” and sub-genre spin-offs, and the arguments

within the scene over authenticity.

“Where My Peoples from Up the Hill?’’: Spatial Theory, Hip Hop, andBaltimore Club

Before looking intensely at the crossover phenomenon, one must first

understand the spatial/geographical elements of Baltimore Club that “cross”

borders. What kind of cultural work does this music do with space in the first

place? How does it translate its geography to its own homegrown audience

even before these signs and symbols are translated up Interstate 95?

The spatial dimensions of hip-hop are explored extensively in Murray

Forman’s The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Forman analyzes hip-hop from its earliest roots through its rise in

popularity and its eventual crossover and mainstream success, all with a

close eye on the construction of the “hood” as a spatial signifier in hip-hop

whose meaning has been contested and altered over time. The inroad for

Forman to the spatial dimensions of hip-hop is the use of spatial signifiers

in rap’s lyrics. In the introduction, Forman argues:

Rap’s lyrical constructions commonly display a pronounced empha-

sis on place and locality. Whereas blues, rock and R&B have tra-

ditionally cited regions or cities, contemporary rap is even more

specific, with explicit references to particular streets, boulevards


and neighborhoods, telephone area codes, postal zip codes or other

sociospatial information. Rap artists draw information from their re-

gional affiliations as well as from a keen sense of what I call the

extreme local, upon which they base their constructions of spatial

imagery (Forman 2002: xvii).

The concept of the “extreme local” neatly articulates the shared di-

mensions that all of hip-hop’s lyrical uses of space have. It also differentiates

hip-hop’s use of space from other genres; the local is not just a city or neigh-

borhood, as the “extreme” emphasizes that they mark the spaces with as

much information as possible (area codes, block numbers, etc.). The rela-

tion between space and hip-hop lyrics is not just one way, as in the naming

of spaces; geography can shape the lyrical content as well. In a chapter titled

“Space Matters,” Forman talks about the limitations of discussing space only

as a container for our actions. Forman sees space as not just a background

to experience, but as an active force in shaping our experience. In Forman’s

opinion, hip-hop lyricists articulate this well:

In hip-hop’s physical and localized expressions and in rap’s narra-

tives, the authority of individual experience is generally built upon

what is conceived as the self-evident truth of natural or material

spaces, where events occur and experience is registered. To reduce

the myriad of experiential testimonies . . . to a basic formula, the

statement “this happened to me” is often and increasingly reinforced

by the spatial qualifier “here” (23).

Of course, the “this happened to me here” lyrical equation is just one

of many ways hip-hop has been able to illustrate geographical concerns. Song

titles, album titles, album artwork, MC/DJ/group names, and video settings

all can convey a specific “extreme local” to the audience. Although I will

touch on all of these aspects in Baltimore Club music, for the moment I want

to look specifically at Forman’s lyrical equation, as it represents the biggest

break between hip-hop and Baltimore Club, and how they each illustrate

space in the music.

With a few exceptions, most of these coming from hybrid Baltimore

Club styles, the majority of Baltimore Club tracks do not contain verse or

raps, but are lyrically constructed around one or two chanted refrains. The

refrains are chanted ad infinitum, and many times are the titles of the tracks

(examples: “I Just Wanna Fuck” contains its title as the refrain, as does


“Watch Out for the Big Girl”). Although there are a variety of categories

that would denote what types of phrases become the chanted refrains in

Baltimore Club tracks, there are a few major categories that catch a large

number of tracks under their umbrella. One type of category of refrains

would be sexual phrases (“I Just Wanna Fuck,” “Yo Yo Where the Hos At”),

another includes boastful challenges (“Don’t Make,” “Tote It”), and a third

could be called “‘hood” refrains, which contain multiple spatial signifiers

and shout-outs to various neighborhoods.

The ’hood tracks, best exemplified in “What Chew Know About

Down the Hill,” “Down the Hill Remix,” “Oh My God,” and the crossover

tracks “Murdaland/Bring Walls Down,” simplify Forman’s hip-hop lyrical

equation in a fascinating way. Due to the lack of lyrical narrative, given that

there are no verses, the “this happened to me” identifier is often absent from

Baltimore Club refrains. In a version of a DJ Manny track “What Chew

Know About Down the Hill” by black DJ and Baltimore Club legend Rod

Lee, Lee creates a loop of fourteen-year-old rapper Lil’ Jay reciting the title

over a classic stripped-down Baltimore Club beat.

With the absence of a narrative verse in the track, the spatial equation

of the chanted refrain in “What Chew Know About Down the Hill” is not

hip-hop’s usual “this happened to me here.” Baltimore Club offers instead

a relentless “here/here/here/here,” as persistent as the kick drum. Instead of

the extreme local modifying the described event of the lyricist, the extreme

local is the entire focus of the vocal track in the Baltimore Club “hood”

songs. What makes “What Chew Know About Down the Hill” (and a few

other “hood” tracks I will look at in a moment) even more important to a

spatial analysis of Baltimore Club is that Rod Lee adds a second extreme

local, switching the refrain in the second half of the track to “where my

peoples from up the hill?” before switching back one last time at the end to

the “down the hill” chant.

Where is “down the hill” exactly? This is still up for argument. Al-

though it could generally refer to any hill in Baltimore, or the overall north-

west to southeast slope of the city, one East Baltimore neighborhood is often

times referred to as “down the hill.” In his Baltimore hip-hop/Club blog

Government Names (which will be discussed at length in section four), Bal-timore City Paper writer Al Shipley, while reviewing a remix of “Down the

Hill” by DJ Verb, states: “[there are] various tracks about being from down

the hill or up the hill, and I have to admit, I still have no idea what it really

means. I mean, Baltimore is full of hills and neighborhoods named after

hills (Cherry Hill, Druid Hill, Butchers Hill, Federal Hill), but I don’t know


if “down the hill” refers to a specific part of town” (Shipley, GovernmentNames 2006). In the comments section for this post, two readers post that it

refers to East Baltimore when the phrase is specifically “down the hill.”

This theory of the meaning of “down the hill” seems to fit perfectly

into the “extreme local” concept, with the song representing (or “repping”)

one particular ’hood. The “extreme local” is problematized, however, with

the second refrain. Lil’ Jay switches from “representing” “down the hill”

to calling out “up the hill.” With no exact neighborhood corresponding to

“up the hill,” he seems to be acknowledging the rest of the city. Instead of

the song referencing a few “extreme local” particulars, Lil’ Jay in only two

chanted phrases is able to construct the entire city.

The remix of “What Chew Know About Down the Hill,” called

“Down the Hill Remix,” takes the city construction model even further. Rod

Lee cuts up Lil’ Jay’s voice at the opening so the phrase becomes “down the

hill, down the hill, down the-down the hill,” etc. Then, after another vocalist

(possibly Rod Lee himself) asks Lil’ Jay to “break it down,” Lil’ Jay be-

gins shouting out housing project and ’hood names, followed by the second

vocalist announcing what area of Baltimore they are in (examples: “West-

side!” “Eastside!” or “Essex!”). The effect of the remix is that although the

“extreme locals” become more extreme, i.e., more particular, the listener is

painted an even fuller picture of Baltimore, with Lil’ Jay even venturing into

the extreme southern neighborhood of Cherry Hill and the eastern bordering

Baltimore County area known as Essex.

This effect appears in all of what I have named the “hood” tracks

in Baltimore Club. In “Oh My God,” a club classic that has been remixed

endlessly, the vocalist says a particular neighborhood is “in the house,”

followed by a sampled vocal snippet of someone saying “oh my god.” “Oh

My God” has an even more extensive list of neighborhoods than “Down

the Hill Remix.” Due to the fact that Baltimore Club music (usually) lacks

narratives and therefore the “this happened to me” of hip-hop lyrics, there

is much more room and play for the “here” function. The local represents

Baltimore Club’s ability to map whole sections of Baltimore in a track,

lending the weight of an entire city behind an already heavy driving beat.

Without using grandiose narratives like other musical genres, Baltimore

Club can invoke a place with just a simple phrase. Although this could be

seen as just a clever linguistic device in the music, I would argue that the

spatial meanings of Baltimore Club, with regards to the extreme local, go

beyond simple clever comparisons to hip-hop lyrical tropes. The idea of

piecing together a city in words, and then using that soundtrack to invite that


city’s residents to dance, has a larger significance once we view this idea in

light of Baltimore’s cultural geography in the era of Baltimore Club.

To understand Baltimore’s cultural geography during this era, we can

turn to the work of David Harvey. Harvey helped introduce the concept of

cultural geography, and even more specifically has published a number of

works that could be labeled as Marxist cultural geography. In books such as

The Condition of Postmodernity in 1989, Justice, Nature and the Geographyof Difference in 1996, and Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theoryof Uneven Geographical Development in 2006, Harvey sought to analyze

how neoliberal global economic frameworks were using spaces differently;

over-developing some areas while systematically tearing others down.

Harvey taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for several

decades stretching from the early 1970s until the early twenty-first century

and witnessed firsthand the collapse of Baltimore’s shipping and steel in-

dustries as well as the rise in drug use and the violence and gang culture

that came with it. He references Baltimore frequently in his work, as an

obvious victim of neoliberal global capitalism. In his 2000 book Spaces ofHope, Harvey lays out the devastating facts of Baltimore’s economic decline

since he moved there in 1969, deeming contemporary Baltimore “an awful

mess” (Harvey 2000: 133). Harvey cites the population decline and job loss

due to deindustrialization as the major factors in Baltimore’s extreme rise

in poverty, crime, and neighborhood dilapidation. Although this is the usual

story told about Baltimore’s late twentieth century decline, Harvey’s atten-

tion to the geography of difference allows him to notice the other side to the

story, or what he calls “feeding the downtown monster” (141).

“Feeding the downtown monster” is Harvey’s term for the over de-

velopment of the downtown area in an attempt to jumpstart the economy.

What really occurs is huge corporations exploit the tax breaks of develop-

ing in this area without providing any substantial job markets, and the rest

of Baltimore is subsequently ignored for development projects. Downtown

development projects have left areas of the city completely gutted, fractured,

and abandoned:

In 1970 there were circa 7,000 abandoned houses in Baltimore City.

By 1998 that number had grown to 40,000 out of a total housing

stock of just over 300,000 units. The effect on whole neighbor-

hoods has been catastrophic. City policy is now oriented to large

scale demolition. . .The official hope is that this will drive the poor

and the underclass from the city. The idea of reclaiming older


neighborhoods – particularly those with a high quality of hous-

ing stock – for impoverished populations has been abandoned even

though it could make much economic and environmental sense (135).

Harvey depicts a city that is torn apart, one in which entire neigh-

borhoods lay vacant. He also indicts a government and business community

that makes no attempt to reinvest in these communities.6 If neoliberal eco-

nomics and government dispassion has ripped apart Baltimore’s neighbor-

hoods, creating a disjointed outline of a city, then Baltimore Club is putting it

back together on a symbolic level through musical constructions. Instead of

drawing borders and boundaries by just giving shout-outs to certain ’hoods,

Baltimore Club creates inclusive songs that allow anyone on the dance floor

to feel like a part of a collective scene. It is as if the Baltimore Club dance

clubs—the Paradox, Club Choices, Club Fantasy’s—are loci for the recon-

struction of a ruptured city, and the ’hood refrains are calls to the crowd

letting them know that they belong.

Baltimore Club is an instance of modern black urban music that

would serve as an interesting counter to the concerns of Paul Gilroy from TheBlack Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness about the relationship

between ’hood and nation (or “here” and “there”). According to Forman,

Gilroy doubts the ability of the “hood” in hip-hop to connect across space

to other hoods:

[Gilroy believes]. . .so much territorial antagonism is evident in the

strands of rap that privilege the spatialities of gang culture and turf af-

filiations. Gilroy expresses his perplexity at the closed counters that

the ’hood represents, suggesting that its centripetal spatial perspec-

tives inhibit dialogue across divided social territories and cultural

zones (Forman 2002: 186).

In a city where divided spatial territories are a new reality of a carved-

up geography, Baltimore Club has been able to bridge spatial gaps to con-

nect black communities through a shared musical vocabulary and perfor-

mance experience in the club. I will argue in the next section that regionality

and place are important markers of authenticity in black dance music, and

regionality can be a useful tool to market a new subgenre of black dance

music. The opening of this article quotes hip-hop journalist and scholar Jeff

Chang, in conversation with DJ Shadow (a.k.a. Josh Davis), commenting on

the rebirth of the regional in new hybrid dance and hip-hop styles across the


country. Shadow answers Chang with a description of the subgenre scene in

his area, the San Francisco Bay area’s Hyphy movement:

I also think it’s nice that rap has been around long enough to where

it’s sort of OK to say that New York has its history, Atlanta has its

history, Houston has its history, the Bay Area has its history, and it’s

no longer the case where one region is being looked at as better or

worse than the next. I was just overseas and everybody wanted to

hear me talk about Hyphy and I would say, “Right off the bat, I’m

not the Hyphy spokesperson. I don’t go to shows—I hardly even go

to clubs—I’m a good ten years older than most of the people in the

scene, if not more.” But what I do tell them is, “Look, in the same

way that you can be over here and listen to and understand bounce

music but it really helps to go to New Orleans, and you can have all

your Chopped and Screwed CDs but it really helps to go to Houston

to understand, it’s the same with Hyphy.” From Sly Stone to Digital

Underground to now, Hyphy is a witty, quirky take on things. And

you have to be in the Bay and know the diversity of the Bay and its

weird geographic shape, with its pockets of extreme poverty right

next to pockets of extreme wealth, and all that weird interplay that

creates the Bay as a whole (Chang and Davis 2006).

In this quote, DJ Shadow acknowledges several subgeneric music

scenes that are beginning to crossover into the mainstream hip-hop market,

but also points to the fact that to really understand these scenes you have to

understand the geography of where they come from and the circumstances of

the people who create them. The mutually experienced collective energy of

a city can fuel a whole club scene. However, he also notes that this can lead

to unending arguments over authenticity in the music. The links between a

style of music and where it is from are becoming extremely important, and

those trying to claim a little more authenticity can manipulate the contours

of its origin.

“Ooh I Like That Music, That Get-up Gutter Music’’: The Subcultural Capitalof Baltimore Club ∼or∼ Why Would White Dudes From Philly and NYC RockBaltimore Beats?

In Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Sarah

Thornton discusses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, or


“knowledge that is accumulated through upbringing and education which

confers social status” (Thornton 1996: 10). Building off of his schema of

cultural capital, economic capital and social capital (including the many

subcategories that branch off of these), Thornton adds the concept of sub-

cultural capital. In order to study the culture of underground dance clubs and

raves in Great Britain, Thornton uses the concept of subcultural capital to

study how the youth involved in this subculture use the media, style, genre

formation, and taste hierarchies to create a status system not unlike a “high

culture” status system. Thornton sees a major problem with cultural studies

that strictly define high culture as “vertically ordered” and popular culture or

subculture as “horizontally ordered” (8). In other words, the aesthetic order

of high culture is studied, while popular cultures are studied without regard

to rankings or hierarchies. Thornton wants to study underground dance club

culture taking into account these “vertical” distinctions, the hierarchies that

form within the culture, and the strategies and techniques used to alter the

culture in order to gain more “subcultural capital.” She seeks “an analysis

explicitly concerned with cultural change” (9).

Thornton looks at common differences between white dance music

and black dance music, and what they signify:

Black dance music is said to maintain a rhetoric of body and

soul despite its use of sampling and technology. . .whereas white or

European dance music is about a futuristic celebration and revela-

tion of technology to the extent that it minimizes the human among

its sonic signifiers. . . Although both bear witness to Trans Atlantic

influences, black dance musics are more likely to be rooted in local

urban scenes and neighbor ’hoods. Even gestures to the black dias-

pora point to local subcultures and city places—New York, Chicago,

Detroit, Washington. These specific places anchor and authenticate

music, render it tangible and real. White dance musics, by contrast,

are more likely to be global, nationless, or vaguely pan-European

(72–74).

For Thornton, body and place give black dance music a large cache of

subcultural capital among white consumers. The black body signifies the au-

thentic act of dancing/performing: “the grain of the voice, the thumping and

grinding bass, the perceived honesty of the performance” (73). The trouble

lies in needing to tie this body to a particular place to “anchor” the authentic-

ity, while still trying to play into the “rootlessness” of white European dance


aesthetics. Thornton finds that this tension never completely resolves itself;

thus the infatuation with certain black dance subgenres or performers can

only be short-lived in the rave scene. This means subcultural capital must be

continually exchanged for a newer, hipper style whose contradictions have

not been fully exposed.

The most important purveyor of subcultural capital in music for

young white consumers in America in the past twenty years has undoubtedly

been hip-hop. These consumers have successfully defined the authenticity of

the black body through the increasingly powerful medium of the music video,

and have anchored this authenticity in the various “hoods” of each major city.

Hip-hop in the late 1980s early 1990s was creating a shared culture among

black youth and those white youths who were “in the know.” However, in

the late 1990s, something happened to hip-hop. It became mainstream.

Bakari Kitwana’s new book, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop:Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in Americaanalyzes the crossover of hip-hop into mainstream white America. Others

have studied white people’s involvement in hip-hop, but Kitwana is inter-

ested in the current “climate where hip-hop is mainstream youth culture.”

Kitwana parallels the crossover of hip-hop from a black urban countercul-

ture to the best selling mainstream music with the death of what he calls

“the old racial politics.” An example is provided in Kitwana’s analysis of

Billy Wimsatt’s (a.k.a. Upski) “concentric attitudinal circles” of white kids’

involvement in hip-hop that Wimsatt used in his 1994 revolutionary book

Bomb the Suburbs. In short, these four circles were: 1) at the center, those

involved with the actual art of hip-hop and who do the art with black hip-hop

fans, 2) those with peripheral contact with real hip-hop, 3) free-floating fans

who listen to other forms of music, and 4) pure consumers or “wiggers”

who harbor resentment of black hip-hoppers while consuming their culture

(Kitwana 2005: 54). Kitwana believes that mainstream culture’s embrace of

hip-hop has made the divisions between these circles less rigid. Now it seems

almost all white youth could be grouped in category 2, as it is difficult to

avoid contact with the art of hip-hop in America no matter what race or class

you are. Also, Kitwana points out that the neoliberal politics of the last thirty

years has caused a new underclass of poor whites, both urban and suburban,

who have embraced hip-hop, rather than rock and roll, as the culture with

which to voice their discontent.

Murray Forman echoes Kitwana’s point, arguing that “today, many

top rap acts like their audiences hail from middle-class or more affluent

suburban enclaves, complicating the commonly held impressions about the


music, the artists who produce it, and its origins” (Forman 2002: xix). The

expansion of hip-hop into a mainstream pop market has, in Forman’s view,

“render[ed] its lingering status as “ghetto” music increasingly problematic”

(xix). I argue that the mainstreaming of hip-hop has pushed the subcultural

elite, the tastemakers of youth culture, to find more authentic and “ghetto”

musics to replace the now pop hip-hop.

How do white youths go about discovering new musical movements,

which ones do they pick, and how do they use the music once it is identified

as desirable? Kembrew McLeod has offered an excellent study of how sub-

genre formation can reveal how subcultural communities are built around

certain consumer needs as well as racial appropriation of music. McLeod

identifies five reasons for the proliferation of subgenres in electronic/dance

music. New technologies and growing interest in electronic music has cre-

ated subgenres that sound different from one another. Naming new subgenres

is a good marketing strategy for record labels, whether to boost a slowing

market for an old subgenre or to introduce a new sound that is unfamiliar

to consumers. The larger economic/cultural force of what McLeod refers to

as “accelerated consumer culture” constantly seeks novelty. Just as Thorn-

ton argued, subgenres can lose authenticity quickly, especially if they are

embraced by the mainstream, which accelerates changes in taste. Cultural

appropriation occurs when a white subculture renames a subgenre in order

to make it less black; two examples are hip-hop to “trip-hop”, and “jungle”

to “drum and bass.” Creating names for subgenres is also a useful way to

hoard cultural capital. If subgenre names change at a rapid pace, it is a way

to keep people who are not completely immersed in the culture of a scene

from entering that scene.

McLeod’s theory works not only to help us understand how Baltimore

Club as a subgenre name functions once it crosses over, but it also helps us

to understand why it remained isolated for so long. McLeod describes the

economics of subgenres and the relationship between the industry and the

media (which I will explore in depth in the next section). McLeod makes it

clear that just because it is a subculture, that does not make it economically

“pure”:

The music media are highly dependent on the music industry, for

obvious reasons. In much the same way new artists and genres are

constantly being thrown against the wall by record companies that

hope to make their investment stick, music magazines similarly rely

on hot new artists and sounds to sell their magazines. The same is true


of more underground networks of distribution, where small, indepen-

dent record companies and fanzines dominate the scene. Whether the

music is distributed by multinational corporations or grassroots indie

labels, the importance of selling their products is a concrete reality

(McLeod 2001: 68).

Perhaps one of the reasons Baltimore Club has remained isolated

and out of reach from appropriation by the music industry is its resistance to

normal economic and business models in its production. In the 1990s, many

DJs did not feel the need to look outside of Baltimore for DJ gigs due to the

popularity of the “ghetto clubs” in Baltimore. Also, the music was always

primarily a performance-oriented music, and not many people bought the

music besides DJs. Although many of the track producers could have sold

records in the House market in other cities like Chicago or Detroit, the popu-

lar producers had always been successful selling records to other DJs in local

stores like Sound of Baltimore and Music Liberated that specialized in hip

hop and dance music. Arguably the most successful producer in Baltimore

Club, Rod Lee, gives an account of his business model:

Here’s the thing, when I first did club music, I never got paid for it,

until I met Bernie [Bernie Rabinowitz is the former and deceased

owner of Music Liberated, a legendary local store that sold almost

exclusively vinyl, and was the source for Baltimore club music].

Bernie was like, why put out the tracks, I’ll buy them from you. We

worked out a price: six tracks for $1,500. I was like, shit, I don’t

have to put out no more records. . . . I wanted to see how strong my

name was. Cats would come in and ask, “Rod Lee have new records

out?” Bernie would say, “no,” and they’d leave. Okay. I called Bernie

and said I got three EPs; I’m not making any more; I gave him a

whole hustle. I told Bernie to put up a poster in the back of the store,

and take the rest of the club records off the wall. . . the poster said

“Rod Lee Coming Soon.” I told Bernie not to make any labels for the

records, ’cause a DJ wants to feel important. The record had colored

labels: sky blue, orange, and black. One, two, and three. So when we

put it up on the wall, everything that Rod Lee was playing was up

there. When they come to the store, the DJs would say, “oh shit, how

much are these?” Bernie said “ten,” and the DJS would say, “ten. . .

shit, I’ll take two.” That’s how the whole price thing started” (Janis).


Lee was able to market his music directly to DJs through Music

Liberated, and with Bernie’s ability to sell them at high prices, Lee did not

need to expand into a more traditional CD market for music listeners. Lee’s

account explains an important and not completely obvious point: Baltimore

Club is a music that for the first ten years or so of its existence was seldom

created in CD or cassette form, except in the mix tape format, but never in

true album form. It is a music that was created to listen to in a live setting, in

the club. This is one of the biggest reasons it never crossed over or was rarely

heard outside of Baltimore; without proper albums to market, and without

touring DJs, no one would hear the music unless they came to Baltimore,

and therefore the media had nothing to sell to the public.

McLeod’s analysis also helps to explain why the market for this music

seems to be changing. Although Diplo and Hollertronix brought Baltimore

Club to a larger audience, a New York-based white DJ/hip-hop fashion de-

signer by the name of Aaron LaCrate would market it and split it into further

subgenres, cleverly relying on the image of the Baltimore “hyperghetto.”

Releasing some of the most accessible and widely distributed crossover Bal-

timore Club compilations in the past two years, LaCrate has aimed at making

the subgenre into a marketable scene that could become hip-hop’s “next big

thing.” In the opening to an interview with LaCrate, an interviewer at All-

hiphop.com comes right out and announces this bluntly: “As Hyphy, Crunk,

and Screw have given cities and regions a sonic identity, LaCrate hopes that

Baltimore Club music will be hip-hop’s next embraced sub-genre” (Paine

2006).

LaCrate’s strategy seems to incorporate all the elements of McLeod’s

theory of subgenre creation as he tries to successfully introduce new varia-

tions “Bmore Gutter Music” and “Club Crack” into the musical subcultures

of hip-hop and dance. Bmore Gutter Music sometimes can sound exactly

like Baltimore Club, although with traditional rap verses and more electro-

sounding beats with less House influence. Club Crack is slowed down Bmore

Gutter Music with rap lyrics in what seems to be nothing but the hiphop-

ification of Club music. LaCrate is originally from Baltimore although he

has lived in New York City since he was a teenager and owns the trendy

“street wear” clothing line Milkcrate Athletics, and his in-house producer

for Gutter music is Debonair Samir, a black Baltimore Club DJ and producer.

This lends LaCrate an air of authenticity for some consumers even while he

is altering the music to make it more mainstream accessible.

In an attempt to make Baltimore Club the new breakthrough hip-hop

subgenre, LaCrate is using the authenticity markers Thornton established as


crucial to black dance music: body and place. He always makes sure that

consumers understand how “black” and “ghetto” the music is. The problem

LaCrate faces is that many young hip-hop consumers, both black and white,

did not come of age when there was a strong uptempo black dance club

scene like House or Miami Bass, so many of these hip-hop fans can only

relate to faster Club styles with white rave music like drum and bass and

contemporary techno. In a lengthy interview with The Boston Phoenix in

August 2006, LaCrate was adamant about setting Gutter music apart from

other “white” dance music:

LaCrate: What Samir and I bring to the table is that we were both

coming from a real street hip-hop sentiment, and that’s where club

in its origin came from. As much as it may have been comprised of

rave breaks, there was nothing rave—I always say there was nothing

white-boy about it.

Interviewer: Right. So it wasn’t really a dance music once it got off

and running, it was more of a hip-hop-based crowd.

LaCrate: It was like the next level of hip-hop. You know what I

mean? It was a very black, street, club, urban dance music (McKay

2006).

And in this exchange in the Allhiphop.com interview, he makes the

same point:

LaCrate: There’s clubs that play the uptempo, 120 beats-per-minute,

bass’d out hybrid of Hip-Hop/Crunk/House, but there’s some places

that now play Hip-Hop. We’re doing a slowed-down version of it.

Club music is just faster, and it’s not based around an MC. It’s more

chopped-up lyrics that are about neighborhoods, or p∗∗∗y, or drugs—

the same content.

AllHipHop.com: Bmore Gutter Music combined those worlds. . .

Aaron LaCrate: Definitely. You have a song like DJ Class’ “Stop

Snitchin’” at 120 beats-per-minute, but it’s a f∗∗kin’ hard-assed

record. It’s definitely a different sounding record. . . Some Hip-Hop

fans can’t wrap their heads around it ’cause they think it’s Dance

music or House music, but if you saw the clubs that this was get-

tin’ played in, this is no white boy s∗∗t. People think it’s for raves or


somethin’, it really isn’t. This music did not come from white kids

(Paine 2006).

LaCrate, in order to reach a larger audience, wants to disassociate

his new subgenres from House music, cutting Baltimore Club off from its

origins of hybridity in the House music scene. Particularly dangerous is

LaCrate’s outward disdain for House music, and the obvious homophobia

that accompanies this: “Now basically what Club Crack is, we just decided

to slow down the club beats to hip-hop tempo because there’s only gonna be

so many kids that can get with 120 beats-per-minute dance music. There’s

just always gonna be that hard-headed hip-hop kid that’s like, “This shit is

gay” (emphasis added, McKay 2006). LaCrate aims to cast off House music

traces that could be found in “Gutter”; it is troubling that LaCrate does not

even want to try to bridge the gap between hip-hip and House, even though

fifteen years ago Baltimore Club did it with tremendous success!

The connections between how “black” Gutter music is and how

“ghetto” it is are strong in LaCrate’s marketing strategy. LaCrate has ghet-

toized Baltimore Club through the music, the album artwork and titles of his

mix CDs, and through interviews and press releases. In no way is LaCrate

the only person doing this in the crossover of Baltimore Club, as we will

see in the next section, but the emphasis on the “hyperghetto” elements of

Baltimore Club in LaCrate’s new subgenres is a good place to start. Whereas

McLeod’s cultural appropriation argument for subgenre naming suggests

that a white middle class audience will water down a black dance style and

give it a more universally appealing name, LaCrate goes the other way, trying

to make the subgenre name even more dangerous sounding with the obvious

ghetto signifiers “gutter” and “crack” as the roots of his two subgenre names.

In the actual music LaCrate either produces or compiles in his mix

CDs, he tries to attach Gutter music to the hyperghetto construction of Bal-

timore’s ’hoods. On B-More Gutter Music, his first and most popular mix

CD, in addition to the common sexual and party-themed tracks, LaCrate

(with Hollertronix member and co-producer Low Budget) chose tracks that

signified violence and crime: “Gangsta Shit,” “Stop Snitchin’,” “BodyMore

Murdaland,” “Grit City,” “Dropping Bows” and “Gutter Music.” Also, the

music contains more indexical signifiers of ghetto crime than most classic

Baltimore Club music, several tracks feature gunshots in the background,

or gunshot samples as percussion in the beat. In a strange mix of fantasy-

meets-reality, the opening to the Allhiphop.com interview with LaCrate ref-

erences a character from The Wire (drug kingpin Avon Barksdale) as proof


that LaCrate’s music is not white rave dance music: “If the 120 beats-per-

minute feels like a Moby-minded fad, LaCrate wants to walk you through the

clubs where the music comes from, where possibly Avon Barksdale tucks

his chain” (Paine 2006).

Drugs and crime are not only inevitable for Baltimore’s hyperghettos,

but apparently for the music that comes from there as well:

AllHipHop.com: The “I-95” hustling mentality, along with The Wirehas made Baltimore very big all of a sudden. As a true caretaker of

Hip-Hop, how does that feel?

Aaron Lacrate: Praise God. Halleluiah. Unfortunately. . . the average

Joe says, “Oh no, drugs. . .” but that’s a part of Hip-Hop. The drug

culture is sadly the sixth element of Hip-Hop. [laughs] It’s street

culture and it’s always gonna be there. It’s no different than action

movies. It’s unfortunate that that’s what put Baltimore on, but it’s

true. “Bodymore, Murderland.” It’s a fact (Paine 2006).

Bodymore, Murderland. To people in the crossover scene, it is cap-

ital of the hyperghetto fantasy, home of Gutter and Club Crack. Although

Baltimore is a very real place, Bodymore seems oddly part construction,

part reality. The media reactions to the crossover, and also the complicated

positions DJs and producers (both new and old, black and white) find them-

selves in, hoping to reach an audience yet trying hard to preserve a classic

style, can help illustrate the tensions surrounding the hyperghetto fantasy.

These struggles over racial authenticity in the midst of a crossover should

be familiar to anyone who has studied the rise and fall of genres in modern

American popular music.

The depictions of Baltimore Club in the alternative music media

oftentimes refer to the otherness inherent in both the music and Baltimore

itself, while at the same time championing it as the next big thing in either hip-

hop, dance, or indie music in general. While the press coverage has largely

repeated LaCrate’s construction of Baltimore Club as hyperghetto music,

there has been ample critique of this phenomenon through interviews with

DJs and producers, interactive blogs that allow conversation to occur, and

local Baltimore music media figures responding to the crossover.

One of the most visible and mainstream articles on Baltimore Club

so far was Spin Magazine’s December 2005 feature. Although the actual

title of the article is “Dance My Pain Away” (taken from the name of a Rod


Lee track), the cover advertises the article with the title “Booty & the Beat:

Baltimore’s X-Rated Club Scene” (Fernando 2005: cover, 80). The feature

has a spread of photographs catching club goers in sexualized dance poses,

and the article emphasizes the “wildness” and “aggression” in the music

and the dancing. Spin introduces its article in the table of contents with the

sentence: “When Baltimore wants to forget about homicides and heroin, the

city has its own soundtrack of hard beats and filthy lyrics to turn to” (11).

Although the article gives a good concise history of Baltimore Club,

and interviews Club legends Scottie B., Shawn Caesar, and Rod Lee, it

spends a significant portion on an underground event black female DJ K-

Swift (known as the Club Queen) DJed at a Baltimore warehouse organized

by white promoter Jason Urick, where 350 people, mostly white, came to

dance to Baltimore Club. K-Swift says she was treated like a rock star, and

although hesitant to play the party at first, given the punk-rock look of the

venue and crowd, she described it as “the best crowd I’ve ever DJ’d for in

my life!” (84). Party organizer Urick describes the appeal of the music to

the white Baltimore crowd: “It’s raw, just raw and heavy, and I wouldn’t say

primitive, but it kinda is. When you hear that beat, it’s hard to not dance to

it” (84).

The Urick events (subsequent Baltimore Club parties have been

thrown at the Warehouse) bring up two interesting points. One is that in

order for hip white kids in Baltimore to like Baltimore Club en masse, it first

had to emerge in the white hipster scenes in Philadelphia and New York, and

then be reintroduced to Baltimore. This says a lot about taste making and

geography: it does not matter how close a musical subgenre is to you (or even

if it’s in your backyard); in order for it to have an appeal, it must go through

the proper channels and testing grounds for cool first. The other point con-

cerns the coverage of the Urick parties. Besides the Spin article, it was also

covered in two other major stories on Baltimore Club in XLR8R Magazine

and Urb Magazine, both extremely important periodicals for trend setting

in indie hip-hop and dance music scenes. Although obviously the people

at the Urick party would be the same “type” of music consumer to read

XLR8R and Urb, and therefore these magazines would want to cover it to let

its readership in on the new subgenre (the gate keeping strategy described

by McLeod), it is noteworthy that they did not even try in the articles to

present the majority black Baltimore Club audience or clubs (although the

Spin article did make an effort).

Even when depictions of Baltimore Club in the media equally depict

the original scene and the crossover scene, or even are completely black and


original scene-oriented, the economics of the crossover have to be kept in

mind, with special attention to which DJs have the ability to reach consumers.

In MTV’s 2006 “You Hear It First” feature on Baltimore Club (focusing on

K-Swift) and Baltimore hip-hop (focusing on MC Young Leek), the MTV

audience was given a more balanced representation of the scene in Balti-

more. However, if the viewer then went to a local big-box music store or

logged on to I-Tunes to find Baltimore Club, they have a better chance of

purchasing a LaCrate compilation than they do an original producer’s CD. As

the Baltimore City Paper reported, LaCrate’s forthcoming Club Crack record

will be released by Koch Entertainment, giving it great distribution: “ClubCrack will also be the first release to put a huge cross-section of Baltimore

hip-hop under the national spotlight, with Koch’s long arms reaching into the

nation’s Best Buys” (Shipley, Baltimore City Paper 2006). The cross-section

is not any of the DJs/producers of Club, but the hip-hop MCs LaCrate and

Samir enlist to rhyme over their tracks.

There has been more local media coverage of Baltimore Club world

since 2006. Jess Harvell, the new music editor of Baltimore City Paper, has

started an online blog-like column called “Noise” to document Baltimore

music, and Club has been getting its fair share of entries from him and Al

Shipley. Shipley, who writes for Baltimore City Paper and various music

magazines, maintains a blog entitled Government Names. This blog is a

clearinghouse for not only Club but also Baltimore hip-hop news, reviews,

and show announcements. Shipley’s voice is welcome to the Noise column,

as he is a scene insider and is quite suspicious of the crossover of Club

music, and his reporting will be necessary as new rumblings of bad vibes

are occurring in the scene over the crossover, the hyperghettoization, and

the marketing of Club by Baltimore outsiders. Leading this charge is self-

described gatekeeper Labtekwon.

Labtekwon is a black Baltimore hip-hop MC who at first seems

like an unlikely spokesman for the protection of Baltimore Club from out-

siders. He is best known for indie “backpacker” style hip-hop, releasing

a slew of albums independently and a few on indie hip-hop label Mush

Records. On his new 2006 album, Ghetto Dai Lai Lama, is the Balti-

more Club track “Sex Machine,” produced by Club legend DJ Booman.

In the introduction to the song before the full beat kicks in, Labtekwon

articulates this insult: “all these out of town fake DJs, fake producers

wanna act like they makin’ Baltimore Club tracks, y’all not makin’ Bal-

timore Club, y’all making fake club!” This song has already caused quite

a stir and is brought up in every interview with Labtekwon. In Fader


Magazine, he speaks to his problem with the “fake DJs” he calls out on “Sex

Machine”:

Bmore is just being noticed by outsiders in the last couple of years.

But this style has roots that go way beyond the “Think” loop. The

bigger picture is more important than everybody trying to extrapolate

and graft parts of what they think is dope. I am a gate keeper. It’s

cool, but every cat that claims to be down ain’t down and the real

pioneers are responsible to call out the fakes. Imitation is flattery, but

plagiarism is illegal. If people feel the music, the people who make

it should benefit before someone from the outside profits (FaderMagazine 2006).

While LaCrate is quick to refer to drug culture as the sixth element

of hip-hop, or at least of his Gutter music, Labtekwon emphasizes a different

purpose of Club music in the Baltimore ’hoods; one that echoes Rod Lee’s

huge Club hit “Dance My Pain Away.” In this song, Rod Lee breaks with

Baltimore Club tradition and sings a melody complete with verses. The

storylines of the song follow one male clubgoer as he loses his job and

realizes he cannot pay his bills. The narrator escapes to the club to dance.

Labtekwon describes the cathartic experience of going to clubs:

Club Music is not just “get high, wild out” music. People use the

music to dance and purge all the demons in their normal lives. We

sweat our pain and sorrow out on the dancefloor to the tracks that now

outsiders are just starting to notice. We use this music as a point of

refuge and cleansing. This is the same purpose for music and dance

in Traditional African culture. The culture around Baltimore Club

Music is one that involves the quest for joy in the midst of urban

plight (Fader Magazine 2006).

Although those who are familiar with Labtekwon’s career as a hip-

hop MC might question his authority to speak for Baltimore Club, he actually

was around during the origins of the scene. In fact, his historical take on

Baltimore Club is like the inverse of LaCrate’s; where LaCrate tries to divorce

Baltimore Club from the earlier House music scene, Labtekwon traces the

scene back to the mid-1980s and proto- Baltimore Club tracks that were

more House than Club. Labtekwon was starting to learn hip-hop production


and was at the same time hanging out in the emerging Baltimore Club scene,

which was still part of a larger House movement.

While it is true that many original DJs and producers have bene-

fited from the crossover by getting new out-of-town DJ gigs and better sales

on mix tapes and CDs, and possibly even record deals, Labtekwon seems

to be pointing out the problems when outsiders distort the meanings and

messages of the music, and market it as just “get high wild out” music (in

my word, they “hyperghettoize” it). His criticisms are catching on among

some, and stirring controversy with others. Music critic Tom Breihan, a

former Baltimorean who moved to New York (like LaCrate) writes an on-

line column/blog for the Village Voice called “Status Ain’t Hood.” Breihan

has written about Baltimore Club, and has specifically criticized key mem-

bers of the crossover scene, in articles from July 2006. The comments sec-

tions to these two articles online, as well as the comments section to a

Labtekwon interview and a Diplo interview from October 2006 and April

2007 respectively, contain spirited debate about the crossover scene, con-

testing the authenticity of Baltimore Club among fans as well as key DJs,

producers and promoters.

In his first article on Baltimore Club, “Zidane Headbutt Caused by

Baltimore Club Music,” Breihan goes after the crossover producers right

away:

Pretty soon, a lot of the out-of-town press attention for Baltimore club

music started going to stuff like Low Budget and Aaron LaCrate’s

Bmore Gutter Music mix, a collection of fake club music from out-

of-town DJs and producers who pretty much just imitated a local

phenomenon and changed it enough so they could sell it without get-

ting sued. I haven’t heard Bmore Gutter Music, but its mere existence

is pretty offensive, and it’s the closest thing to Baltimore club that

you can buy at the Tower Records a couple of blocks from the office

where I’m writing this. If national attention on Baltimore was going

to result in more stuff like that, I was pretty happy when the internet

hype-cycle moved on to other stuff (Breihan 2006).

Breihan’s articles have attracted numerous posters in the comments

section of his blog including Labtekwon, and pioneer Scottie B. The readers

of Breihan who posted in the comments sections of his articles on Baltimore

Club debate the geographical origins of numerous artists, lending support

to the claim that the authenticity of the music must be “anchored” by real

places. The poster “a-wood” in the “Zidane Headbutt Caused by Baltimore


Club Music” comments argues for the authenticity of crossover group Spank

Rock. He wonders “how are Spank Rock interlopers? Naeem (Mc Spank

Rock) and XXXchange, the two members of the group, were born and raised

in Baltimore. it’s not their fault that they were ten years old in the early 1990s

when the scene was getting off the ground.”7 When Breihan counters that

it’s more a question of how they present themselves given that they are

more involved in the Philly scene, “a-wood” responds by reiterating their

geographic roots and even their connection to well established producer

Rod Lee.

Labtekwon jumps in at this point to say, “I cant name 3 people from

Baltimore City that actually grew up with the kidz from Spank Rock in

Baltimore City. there is a difference between the city and the county you

know.” Labtekwon is insinuating that many “interlopers” who want to claim

Baltimore roots for the sake of authenticity may bend the truth a little about

the exact area they grew up in, crossing the city/county border in their in-

vented life story. The poster “Eddie Sparks” commiserates with Labtekwon,

and understands his point but ensures him that Spank Rock’s Baltimore roots

are legit: “Lab, the guys in Spankrock are from Baltimore. Maybe not white-

lock or mondawmin..from what I know Naeem is from sandtown or lived

there for a bit. . .the rest of the guys do have CITY zip codes, if you know

what I mean” (Breihan 2006).

Several posters to the comments section also attack Jason Urick’s

warehouse parties, which are mentioned by Breihan in the first article.

Urick’s defense of his parties is very revealing of the complexities of playing

Baltimore Club in Baltimore in a post-crossover era. Although Urick seems

a little naı̈ve as to how his parties would be received from people in the

original scene once the media took off and ran with the story as a banner for

Baltimore Club crossover, he makes the point that even suburban kids in the

county could hear Baltimore Club on the radio. Although LaCrate, Spank

Rock and others are questioned repeatedly as to their Baltimore heritage, it is

sometimes forgotten that 92 Q’s Club radio shows was broadcast to the entire

Baltimore metro area and depending on reception, listeners in Pennsylvania

or Delaware could have possibly heard it.8 The poster “Mr Set” makes a

similar point: “Regardless, do you all forget that club music has been on

the radio every week since all of us can remember? Which means that even

kids in Southern PA and Frederick [MD] with a strong antenna have been

exposed to club music since the start too” (Breihan 2006).

These discussions and exchanges, along with countless others from

Breihan’s articles, point to the various geographical and spatial complexities


of the Baltimore Club crossover. Is the music representing Baltimore or the

Baltimore metro area? What area or zip codes are legit to have if you want

to DJ? Can you move away from Baltimore, and if so for how many years

to still keep your credibility? None of the issues raised in these arguments is

ever completely resolved, but it is a sign of cultural health for these matters

to be discussed, and for there to be explicit criticism of the potential costs of

the crossover.

Conclusion: Gutter vs. Supastarr: New Hybridity Questions the Hyperghetto∼or∼ Baltimore Club vs. the World

While some original pioneers of the Baltimore Club seem ambiva-

lent to the crossover, it is true at least that they recognize the hyperghetto

construction in the crossover scene. Scottie B. was recently seen wearing a

shirt at the Ottobar in Baltimore which read “Support Baltimore Club” and

had an image from LaCrate’s album cover crossed out with the word ‘fake”

superimposed on it. As Al Shipley puts it:

To the extent that people in Baltimore are even aware of Hollertronix

or Bmore Gutter Music, I don’t think people around here are real

thrilled with out-of-towners calling Bmore club “gutter music” and

“club crack” and playing up the whole “Bodymore, Murdaland” thing

or putting drawings of vials of crack on record covers. For one thing,

club music is seen as fun escapism around here, and is dismissed by

a lot of hip hop fans as corny or the province of chickenheads, but

everywhere else people seem to think it’s the grimiest, hardest shit

ever just because there’s some sexual lyrics. Whatever. A lot of those

Lacrate/Low Budget releases have been co-signed by hometown DJs

like Scottie B. and Debonair Samir, but I don’t think that means it’s

above criticism, and I told Samir about my reservations about that

stuff myself recently (Shipley, Village Voice 2006).

Perhaps Shipley would just like the outsiders to have some distance

metaphorically from Baltimore since they have it geographically. Shipley and

others who are critical of the crossover bring to mind the paradox of The Wire.

How much are we supposed to understand? The attempted verisimilitude of

the crossover music will always fall flat given the nature of its signifiers

of the hyperghetto: they are always constructions, never quite real. To ap-

proach the artistic representation of the reality with more perspective and


distance could be a means for paying attention to the social issues that sur-

round the state of Baltimore’s hoods at the same time as simply appreciating

the music created there.

As I mentioned earlier, absent from many of the alternative media’s

depiction of the Baltimore Club scene is the scene itself; the crossover scene

often stands in as a replacement, or simple terms like “raw”, “gritty” and

“dirty” suffice. If the crossover just fizzles and dies, the pioneers of Baltimore

Club still cannot go on forever; there will need to be new young DJs who

take over the scene. The crossover scene was never intended as a farm league

for future Club major leaguers in the first place. With this in my mind I

want to acknowledge the new voices coming from within Baltimore’s black

communities. DJ Blaqstarr, a twenty-two-year-old DJ/producer, is perhaps

the hottest new voice. He has a loyal following not only in Baltimore’s original

scene, but the crossover scene as well. He releases records with both scenes

as well, being backed by Diplo’s label Mad Decent, Rod Lee’s Club Kingz

and Scottie B.’s Unruly Records. Blaqstarr’s sound is at once both familiar

and strange. His percussions choices can be extremely minimal and almost

proto-club, yet he sings hooks on top of these beats in a Prince-like style.

In a recent interview, Diplo points to the fact that Blaqstarr and the

small scene he is creating are something new to the Club world:

He plays for this new kind of crowd in Baltimore. It’s totally a whole

different scene, what he does there . . . The music he makes is really

weird. It’s pretty uncommercial stuff. Those kids all wear All-Stars

and listen to Nirvana and stuff. It’s real grassroots. I really like what’s

happening there. There’s kids like him who work really hard at cre-

ating this image of being rock stars and having this pride in what

they do, being really proud and really arrogant and at the same time

making something really progressive. Like, this dude has the crazi-

est falsetto voice, and I think he’s a real prodigy, but he works hard.

They’re not into promoting how gutter they are and how ghetto and

drug-oriented Baltimore is. They’re really proud of who they are as

musicians, and I think it shows. I think there’s a lot of emotion be-

cause it is kind of weird that this kind of music has become popular

so instantly and no one knows where the credit is due (Breihan 2007).

Blaqstarr is difficult to define on the usual terms of Club, his hit

single “Supastarr” celebrates women more than it sexualizes them, he has

uplifting tracks about the power of Club music, yet at the same time has


several gunshot-driven tracks of hyperviolence like “Tote It” and “Im A

Get My Gun.” Blaqstarr speaks to just one of the many new and exciting

directions Club could take in the future, regardless of the long-term effects

of the crossover scene. It is only because of Blaqstarr’s ability to interact

with the crossover scene that his more measured take on Baltimore might

have the opportunity to rub off on some of the out-of-towners. Recently the

Southern collective BamaBounce, lead by drag queen/producer DJ Taz, have

had several releases through Baltimore Club producers Ayres and Tittsworth.

This crossover could rekindle missing connections Baltimore Club used to

have: to the Southern booty-bass styles of Alabama, Georgia and Florida,

and to the Queer House scene that co-existed with Baltimore Club in the

beginning.

In a short feature on Blaqstarr, the Boston Phoenix wonders whether

Baltimore Club is going to be a viable new subgenre and whether it “might

be ready to leave the city limits. Or maybe not. Remember when reggaeton

was going to change the face of music as we knew it?” (Beck 2007). Maybe

“we” don’t, but I think Puerto Rico does. Subcultures may come and go, but

not as quickly as crossovers move in and recede. As Scott Seward reminds us

in one of his Lester Bangs-esque screeds on Baltimore Club: “Subcultures

are just neighborhoods you don’t live in.” What might we learn from going

to these neighborhoods, from listening to their music? Hopefully music fans

and critics are willing to try to find out.

Notes

1. “Bethlehem Shoals” is an acknowledged pseudonym, but “Shoals” has

never revealed his true name. He also is a frequent contributor to the popular

basketball/culture blog Free Darko.

2. Report can be accessed at: Baltimore Believe: Progress Report Phase

1. Issued by Linder and Associates Inc. http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/believe/

images/BelieveReport.pdf.

3. Although there is no authoritative history of the beginnings of

Baltimore Club, these were helpful sources in my account: Fernando, Janis, and DJ

Technics, “The Influences of Baltimore Club Music”, www.baltimoreclubtracks.

com/history.htm.

4. Of course Baltimore Club was never completely isolated, but I use the

term isolation since the music never had any significant impact on a music scene

outside of Baltimore. Baltimore Club records were occasionally played in clubs


and college radio stations in Washington D.C. and Boston for instance, but this was

extremely rare.

5. Information on the origins of Hollertronix mainly gathered from the fol-

lowing interviews: “DJ Low Budget: Beats straight out the gutter,” http://www.

prefixmag.com/features/D/DJ-Low-Budget/287; “Diplo: the Stylus interview”

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1269; “Interview: Diplo” http://

www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/d/diplo-05/.

6. The Wire has dealt with the abandoned neighborhoods in interesting ways,

even having one function as a legal drug market during an experiment by a disgrun-

tled police commander in Season 3.

7. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/07/

zidane headbutt.php. In the comments section of the Status Ain’t Hood blog,

many of the readers leave comments without proper capitalization or punctuation,

as is common on Internet discussion boards and blogs. I have quoted them in my

article, as they appear online.

8. Author’s note: This is how I first heard Club before I was old enough to

travel into the city to the actual record stores. Growing up about 30 miles outside

of the city, I remember hearing the Friday night Club DJ sets on 92 Q around the

age of 12–13. This would have been around 1992–1993.

Works Cited

Beck, Richard. “Download.” The Boston Phoenix, 23 March, 2007, p. 16.

Breihan, Tom. “Zidane Headbutt Caused by Baltimore Club.” VillageVoice, 10 July, 2006. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/

archives/2006/07/zidane headbutt.php.

——. “Status Ain’t Hood Interviews Diplo.” Village Voice, 3 April, 2007.

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2007/04/status

aint hoo 23.php.

Chang, Jeff, and Davis, Josh. “Jeff Chang Talks with DJ Shadow.” The Believer,

November 2006.

Drake, David. “Diplo: The Stylus Interview” October 2004

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1269.

Fader Magazine Online, no author cited. “Club Science.” Fader Magazine, June

2006. http://thefader.com/blog/articles/2006/06/22/club-science.

Fernando Jr., S.H. “Dance the Pain Away”. Spin Magazine, December 2005.

pp. 80–84.


Forman, Murray. The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap andHip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002.

Fricke, John. “End Could Be Near for ‘Believe’ Drive.” Baltimore Sun, 12 February,

2007.

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

Janis, Stephen. “Labtekwon and Rod Lee Interview” Link, issue 9, pp. 57–

64, http://advanced.jhu.edu/media/files/labtekwon-and-rod-lee-interview

janis.pdf.

Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes,and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

McKay, Mike. “Tear the Club Up: How Baltimore and Aaron LaCrate are

Going to Save Club Music”. The Boston Phoenix, 22 August, 2006.

http://thephoenix.com/Article.aspx?id=20638&page=1.

McLeod, Kembrew. “Genres, Sub-Genres, Sub-Sub-Genres and More: Musical

and Social Differentiation Within Electronic-Dance Music Communities.”

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13: 59–75, 2001.

Paine. “Aaron Lacrate: In Da Club.” 12 June, 2006. http://allhiphop.com/

blogs/features/archive/2006/06/12/18133570.aspx.

Seward, Scott. “Do Dew the Crabtown Clam: Baltimore Breakbeat House Trax

Are the New Everything.” Village Voice, 9 April, 2003. http://www.

villagevoice.com/music/0315,seward,43195,22.html.

Shipley, Al. Government Names, 1 July, 2006. http://governmentnames.blogspot.

com/search/label/Dirty%20Hartz.

——. In comments to: Breihan, Tom. “Friends of Diplo: A Report

Card.” Village Voice, 11 July, 2006. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/

statusainthood/archives/2006/07/the friends of 1.php.

——. “The Best of Both Worlds.” Baltimore City Paper, 19 July, 2006.

http://www.citypaper.com/special/story.asp?id=12048.

Shoals, Bethlehem. “The Language Problem.” Heaven and Here, 8 Novem-

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problem/#comments.

Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover,

NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996.

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