Oh shit, Dj Spooky is on this list now ?
Rob
component
_________________________
www.componentrecords.com
_________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Ryan @ <i__oo__@hotmail.com>
To: <idm@hyperreal.org>
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2001 8:50 PM
Subject: [idm] Hip Hop
quoted 89 lines The genre of hip hop qua cultural locus manifested (and, if I may,
> 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.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org