Music 15 Week Three

Consolidation/The Suburbs

The End of the Beginning

• By 1982, the scene depicted in Wild Style was reaching the end of its lifespan.

• The crossover into the art world of graffiti and dance petered out largely and the general cultural emphasis shifted back to the music

Moving into the mainstream of the music business

• An increasing number of compromises needed to be made: length of songs, introduction of “hooks” and more “musical” features, shifts in subject matter

• These were also opportunities: there was an opportunity to explore new ideas and new technologies

• The main shift in production was to the primary use of “sampling” as the basis of the beat

• In mc’ing a much wider variety of subject matters became common, as did a much wider variety of narrative styles and positions (I.e. who’s telling the story and how they’re telling it)

Tricia Rose from “Black Noise”

• Rap music is a technologically sophisticated and complex urban sound. No doubt, its forebears stretch far into the orally influenced traditions of African-American culture. But the oral aspects of rap are not to be understood as primary to the logic of rap nor separate from its technological aspects. Rap is fundamentally literate and deeply technological. To interpret rap as a direct or natural outgrowth of oral AfricanAmerican forms is to romanticize and decontextualize rap as a cultural form. It requires erasing rap's significant sonic presence and its role in shaping technological, cultural, and legal issues as they relate to defining and creating music. Retaining black cultural priorities is an active and often resistive process that has involved manipulating established recording policies, mixing techniques, lyrical construction, and the definition of music itself.

Rose cont’d

• We want to learn how to listen to how the production technologies, the subject matter, the enunciation of the words and the musical style combine to create the overall meaning of the songs.

Imani Perry “Stinging Like Tabasco: Structure and Form in Hip Hop

Compositions”• Works through a range of different

narrative strategies and structures that are common in hip hop.

• Explains what they are and what they imply about how the song goes about meaning

Signifying

• Her argument is largely based on the work of Henry Louis Gates

• Gates developed a theory of literary criticism based around the notion of “signifying” which is drawn from the tale of the signifying monkey

Signifying cont’d

• In the broadest sense taking someone else’s words and turning them around in some way

• “Signifyin(g) is a way of saying one thing and meaning another” Samuel Floyd

• “Recontextualizing someone else’s souns was, after all, how hip hop started.” Nelson George

Signifying cont’d

• Indirection, circumlocution• Metaphorical-imagistic• Humorous, ironic• Rhythmic fluence and sound• Teachy but not preachy• Directed at person or persons usually present in

the situational context• Punning, play on words• Introduction of the semantically or logically

unexpected

Perry article cont’d

• She also comes up with some larger categories of rap’s verbal archetypes

• Narrative

• Exhortation/Proclamation

• Allegory

• Realism

UTFO “Roxanne Roxanne”

• Pop/rap crossover hit from 1984

• Has a sung hook which works as the chorus

• The rappers serve as the verses to the hook

• Notable mostly for starting a string of “answer” records

Roxanne Shante “Roxanne’s Revenge”

• “Answer” to UTFO• Single take freestyle by 14 year-old Lolita

Shante Gooden• Produced by Marley Marl, influential Queens

producer• Song became a hit via the Mr Magic radio

show• These shows were the main radio outlet for

hip hop: Mr Magic, Red Alert etc

Slick Rick and Doug E Fresh “La Di Da Di”

• There are only voices on this record• Doug E Fresh beatboxes, mimicing

percussive and other sounds to create the beat, Slick Rick raps, sings etc

• Slick Rick was English by birth, used children’s story style and multiple accents in many of his raps

• This is probably the most sampled/referenced song in hip hop

Run DMC “It’s Like That”

• Grew up in Hollis Queens, basically suburban Long Island

• Run’s brother was Russell Simmons who managed the group

• This is their first single, from 1983• The sound is very stripped down: the only

elements are a drum machine, some keyboard stabs, scratching and the voices

Run DMC “It’s Like That”

• The lyrics follow “The Message” in being descriptive of social problems without being explicitly political

• Run DMC’s image was also stripped down

Run DMC “King of Rock”

• With their increase in popularity, they started to integrate some sounds of rock music, here a guitar riff and metal shredding

• One of the first hip hop videos to get airplay on MTV, in 1985

LL Cool J “Can’t Live Without My Radio”

• Was also from Hollis Queens• First big success for Def Jam records,

the project of manager Russell Simmons and producer Rick Rubin

• Rick Rubin’s production took the Marley Marl sound and both streamlined it and beefed up the sounds to make it more rock radio friendly

LL Cool J “Radio”

• LL Cool J’s rapping style was looser than Run DMC’s, and built largely on boasting more like the first wave of rappers

Eric B and Rakim “Paid in Full”

• Eric B also took the Marley Marl blueprint and refined it, especially the use of looped drum samples

• Rakim’s performances here represent a quantum leap in MC’ing

• Style is very cool and understated, almost in monotone

Eric B and Rakim “Paid in Full”

• Unprecedented rhythmic complexity: lots of run-on lines, unexpected pauses, internal rhymes etc

• Song is also self-reflexive: they are describing what they do while they do it

Eric B and Rakim “Follow the Leader”

• From the second album

• Everything is pushed further in both production and rapping

• Metaphors are now more complex and extended (the gangster theme)

• Also incorporates 5%-er cosmology and phrases

Stetsasonic “Talking All That Jazz”

• “Answer” to Mtume, jazz musician who had called out sampling as lazy and uncreative

• Built on a jazz sample: “Expansions” by Dr Lonnie Liston Smith

• Manifesto for how hip hop’s sampling relates to and revived earlier styles

Sampling

• The use of recordings of other music in making new music

• Three “layers” • The sound• Reference: the new piece is pointing to an

older piece and its context• Intertextuality: the new piece is referring to

other peoples use of the same sample

Beastie Boys “Hey Ladies”

• First significant white rap group

• On Def Jam records originally

• This is from their second album is notable for the number of samples used, and the playful ironic way in which they are used

Native Tongues

• Was a loose collective of artists who embraced a more open-ended notion of what hip hop might be.

• It drew on afrocentric ideas without being explicitly nationalist and

De La Soul “Me, Myself and I”

• Produced by Prince Paul, of Stetsasonic

• A sort of rap psychedelia, encompassing hippy imagery and very wide variety of sample sources (rock, folk, language instruction records etc)

• Critique of hip hop business as usual

Tribe Called Quest “Bonita Applebum”

• Explored an explicitly jazz sensibility (sampling a lot of jazz sources, the general verbal style etc)

Jungle Brothers “Straight Out The Jungle”

• Jungle Brothers explored afrocentric ideas more explicitly than the other Native Tongues groups

• This song both articulates a sort of back to Africa message while at the same time critiqueing it

• Samples a track by Manu DiBango a sax player and singer from Cameroon

Queen Latifah/Monie Love “Ladies First”