The genre of hip hop qua cultural locus manifested (and, if I may,
legitimated) the inertia of the Postmodern ethos of mediumistic
deconstruction in the 1970s, which in itself was in many respects a
culmination of the 1960s hermeneutic of the post-dada studio production and
re/de-simulation foci of the rising production mnemonic in live music. Seen
from this perspective, can hip hop be "live"? First, one must recall that
hip hop, vernacular usage aside, was originally delineated in its cultural
dimension. The term was allegedly codified, if not fabricated, or at least
lexicalized, by Afrika Bambaataa, who in the mid-1970s identified not four
but five "pillars" of the nascent designation: MCing, DJing, breaking,
graffiti, and Zulu nation, the last of which being a pan-Africanist
association of black skinned persons in urban centres, particularly the
Bronx. It may be useful at this point to note that Bambaataa's namesake
itself is most likely a tipping of the hat to the Bambata insurgence in 1906
against the British colonial rule of South Africa, easily attributed, by a
gloss, to the society, albeit segmented political system, of the extant
Zulu. The internal structure of Bambaataa's reinscription of nomenclature
thus highlights a fiction of agency that parallels the appropriation of
factual knowledge, an unconscious, or at best quasi-conscious,
de-semanticization of Afrocentric loan terms aimed at fostering a discourse
of racial empowerment and a subsequent deconstruction or reformulation of
the Eurocentric grammar.
In perhaps simpler terms, the experience of hip hop (re)embodies the very
semantic drift that is tellingly symptomatic of syntactical uncertainty
grafted on to the language of popular culture (seen from the post-Hegelian
viewpoint, at least). While the tacit epistemological justification of
early hip hop remains a rich source of analysis, let us turn to, first, the
reduction-or progression, if you prefer-of hip hop from a socio-cultural
locus to a genre of art, and, second, to its co-optation and re-codification
in contemporary circles of electronic music production. The conceptual
re-casting thematized by hip hop over the last three decades parallels the
renunciation of praxis in other musical cultures, such as rock, blues, and
funk. Here it is useful to invoke DeMan's aesthetic ideology, which is
closely allied to the politics of the Other. Hip hop's heyday in the 1970s
was largely an underground sociocentric endeavor, unconcerned with the
transformation on to physical medium (cf., DeMan's coverage of cultural
aesthetics in a non-art setting) outside of a smattering of cassette
bootlegging. While the Sugarhill Gang were not the very first to codify rap
on the vinyl medium (they were narrowly beat to the punch by a Fatback
b-side and one other obscure recording by an outside impresario, both in the
summer of 1979), in September 1979 their enormously popular 12" "Rapper's
Delight" heralded a new ideological era of hip hop which eventually
marginalized the wholistic culture of hip hop promulgated by its founders.
The (re)formation of history as such is comparable with the delegitimization
of the enigmatic, the very raison-d'etre of the underground, as the
subculture's zeitgeist demonstrated its susceptibility to capitalistic
king-of-the-hillisms with a facility emblematic of the Heraclitean flux of
market forces.
Here we see that hip hop is not so much a genre in the traditional Platonic
essentialistic sense, but rather a Wittgensteinian "family of resemblences"
amenable to co-optation by new progressivistic artists utilizing physical
media. Although hip hop's chief organizers of the 1970s, such as Kool Herc
(perhaps the original founder of the culture but by no stretch a theorist),
Grandmaster Flash ("the scientist of the mix," the forebear of hip hop's
modern penchant for instrumentals and turntablistic noodling), and their
confrere Bambaataa himself, originally denounced the vinylization of the
genre, all but Herc had jumped on the commercialistic bandwagon within the
first couple years of 1980s. The rhetoric of radical alterity, it followed,
submitted to an almost protean adaptation to the ephemeral marketplace
panopticism. The growing acculturation of white-skinned persons and
electronic producers working within the so-called "IDM" rubric represents
yet another fundamental rehashing of the conceptual nuclei of hip hop (in
the family-resemblance schema), refuting its Platonic essence in favor of a
more accomodationist schematization, reminiscent of the shift from
discophilia to discophobia among recorded rappers in the early 1980s, or of
the violent turnover from an underground orientation to a highly vocal
"moneymaking" esprit (although boast rap, often seen as a concomitant to
moneymaking, was elemental in the formative 1970s sphere). The viability of
such a transfer is predicated upon the notion of a shifting epistemological
bearing within a closed (albeit nebulous) genre delimitation. What's more,
the divisibility of exoticism opens a space for the invention of the
unspoken. The inception of narrative qua rap (that is, the culturally
motivated anecdotal utterances and illicit aphorizing of MCs) invested
itself in the representational validity of the marginal, but now accepted,
transmutability to the disc medium. The speaking of this societal image,
finally, instantiates the historicization of the autonomous selfhood of
cultural organization congruent with the incipient textuality of the musical
lyric.
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