0 Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop

MUSICAL BORROWING IN HIP-HOP MUSIC: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND CASE STUDIES Justin A. Williams, BA, MMus Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2009 0 Musical Borrowing in Hip-hop Music: Theoretical Frameworks and Case Studies Justin A. Williams ABSTRACT ‗Musical Borrowing in Hip-hop‘ begins with a crucial premise: the hip-hop world, as an imagined community, regards unconcealed intertextuality as integral to the production and reception of its artistic culture. In other words, borrowing, in its multidimensional forms and manifestations, is central to the aesthetics of hip-hop. This study of borrowing in hip-hop music, which transcends narrow discourses on ‗sampling‘ (digital sampling), illustrates the variety of ways that one can borrow from a source text or trope, and ways that audiences identify and respond to these practices. Another function of this thesis is to initiate a more nuanced discourse in hip-hop studies, to allow for the number of intertextual avenues travelled within hip-hop recordings, and to present academic frameworks with which to study them. The following five chapters provide case studies that prove that musical borrowing, part and parcel of hip-hop aesthetics, occurs on multiple planes and within myriad dimensions. These case studies include borrowing from the internal past of the genre (Ch. 1), the use of jazz and its reception as an ‗art music‘ within hip-hop (Ch. 2), borrowing and mixing intended for listening spaces such as the automobile (Ch. 3), sampling the voice of rap artists posthumously (Ch. 4), and sampling and borrowing as lineage within the gangsta rap subgenre (Ch. 5). By no means are the case studies intended to be exhaustive, but they provide examples which demonstrate that a thorough study of musical borrowing in hip-hop requires attention to the texts (hip-hop recordings), their reception, and wider cultural contexts. 1 –Acknowledgements– This thesis is the result of advice, encouragement and support from many who deserve my thanks and appreciation. The seeds of this project were sown many years ago as a Stanford University undergraduate when my early music teacher, Kerry McCarthy, commented on my borrowing comparisons in the music of Josquin des Prez and Will Smith: ‗Articles need to be written about this!‘ Though the end result looks very different to what we both envisioned initially, it nevertheless is the product of her early encouragement, and of the more general early-stage musicological mentoring and support from Dr. Luke Roberts and Professors Phil Ford, Stephen Hinton, and Tom Grey. I have received generous financial support during the research of this thesis, including the University of Nottingham‘s Overseas Research Scheme, The Graduate School‘s Travel Prize and Universitas 21 Scholarships, as well as a Research Grant from the Royal Musical Association. I also thank the staff and facilities of the British Library and the Harvard (formerly Stanford) Hip-hop Archive, particularly Professor Marcyliena Morgan and Dawn-Elissa Fisher (a.k.a. the D.E.F. Professor) for their help and support. Special thanks go to Professor David Metzer for his advice and careful reading of my work, and for hosting me while at the University of British Columbia as a part of the Universitas 21 programme. I am blessed with the support and encouragement from one of the kindest and intellectually rich music departments in the world. Thanks to Robert Adlington, Mervyn Cooke, Deniz Ertan, Dan Grimley, Sarah Hibberd, Liz Hickling, Paula Higgins, Sherene Osbourne, and Peter Wright. I have also benefited from advice and discussions amongst our postgraduate community, 2 including Jan Butler, Mark Clayden, Fiona Ford, Angela Kang, Ben Moss, James Munk, and Tim Shephard. And thanks to the enthusiastic undergraduates who humoured me and let me test my unconventional ideas on them. My advisor Professor Adam Krims deserves special mention. He was an encouraging and calming presence from the initial stages of the dissertation, and his academic work informs mine at the deepest level. I owe him a tremendous amount of thanks for both his groundbreaking theories on rap music and for his skills as an advisor. I am also grateful to my two examiners, Professor Mervyn Cooke and Dr. Tim Hughes, for their thorough reading of the thesis and for their helpful comments and suggestions. Additional thanks to Dr. Jane Brandon for helpfully reading a draft of the thesis, to Carlo Cenciarelli for his friendship and advice, and to the ―Bucho crew‖ of Sacramento and San Francisco. To the last: without them, I would not have developed an interest for recording studio compositional process, and would not have had such incredible tour experiences with such great musicians. Thanks to Gerald Pease, Derek Taylor, Josh Lippi, Ben Schwier, Roger Cox, Leon Moore, Ryan Robertson, and especially Anthony Coleman II for making it all happen. My family have been extremely supportive of this project, even though it meant their son/brother/grandson would be moving 5000 miles from ‗home‘. Thanks to my sister Whitney, my mother Vicki, and my father Richard. My late grandmother Edith Burton provided an overwhelmingly large amount of love and support throughout our time together. I thank my family for teaching me to love music, and for encouraging me to share that love with others. My wife and soulmate Katherine receives the biggest ‗thank you‘ of all. Her extremely high level of productivity allows her to wear numerous hats in our life together: loving and supportive wife; intellectually challenging academic 3 colleague; bandmate (jazz and ska); proof-reader; music software technician; and best friend. This would not have been possible without her love, encouragement, and intellect. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 6 CHAPTER 1 41 Historicizing the Breakbeat: Hip-hop‘s Origins and Authenticity CHAPTER 2 The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music 91 CHAPTER 3 143 Dr. Dre‘s ‗Jeep Beats‘ and Musical Borrowing for the Automotive Space CHAPTER 4 189 The Martyr Industry: Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G. and Postmortem Borrowing CHAPTER 5 Borrowing and Lineage in Eminem/2Pac‘s Loyal to the Game (2004) 237 and 50 Cent‘s Get Rich or Die Trying (2003) CONCLUSION 270 BIBLIOGRAPHY, DISCOGRAPHY, FILMOGRAPHY 275 CD EXAMPLES 296 5 ‗Because mutiny on the bounty‘s what we‘re all about‘. —The Beastie Boys, ―Rhymin‘ and Stealin‘‖ (1986) –Introduction– This thesis begins with a crucial premise: the hip-hop world, as an imagined community, regards unconcealed intertextuality as integral to the production and reception of its artistic culture. In other words, borrowing, in its multidimensional forms and manifestations, is central to the aesthetics of hip-hop. This study of borrowing in hip-hop music, which transcends narrow discourses on ‗sampling‘ (digital sampling), illustrates the variety of ways that one can borrow from a source text or trope, and ways that audiences identify and respond to these practices. Another function of this thesis is to initiate a more nuanced discourse in hip-hop studies, to allow for the number of intertextual avenues travelled within hip-hop recordings, and to present academic frameworks available with which to study them. The following five chapters provide case studies that prove that musical borrowing, part and parcel of hip-hop aesthetics, occurs on multiple planes and within myriad dimensions. By no means are the case studies intended to be exhaustive, but they provide examples which demonstrate that a thorough study of musical borrowing in hip-hop requires attention to the texts (hip-hop recordings), their reception, and wider cultural contexts. From its onset, hip-hop music was founded on the manipulation of pre- existing material; DJs were borrowing from instrumental excerpts from records (known as ‗breaks‘ or ‗breakbeats‘) to craft their sets, either looping passages with two copies of the same record or stringing passages together from different records. (See Chapter 1 for a longer description of hip-hop music‘s origins.) Joseph Schloss writes that ‗The looping aesthetic … combined a traditional African American approach to composition with new technology to create a radically new way of 6 making music.‘1 As digital sampling technology improved and became more affordable in the mid-to-late 1980s, many of the hip-hop DJ practices (such as ‗crate digging‘, looping and collage techniques) shifted to that of the ‗hip-hop producer‘. As digital sampling emerged in hip-hop culture, it has been said to align itself with the early days of the hip-hop aesthetic: ‗Indeed, the story of sampling is a tale of technology catching up with the DJ, of equipment being created that could do faster, more accurately and more easily what a DJ had long been able to‘.2 Brewster and Broughton argue convincingly that sampling was just a faster, more complex and permanent way of re-creating what the DJs had been doing all along.3 Because of the tightening of copyright legislation for sampling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, collage-style albums like those from Public Enemy and De La Soul would be too expensive to make commercially in the mid-1990s and after.4 Hip-hop music production post-mid-1990s is too varied to define comprehensively, but it often includes a mix of technology such as samplers, sequencers (machines that put the samples together), synthesizers, drum machines, and more traditionally 1 Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 33. 2 Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved my Life: The history of the disc jockey (London: Headline, 2006), 267. 3 For a more detailed history of sampling, see Hugh Davies, ‗A History of Sampling‘, Organised Sound 1, no.

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