Week 8 - May 20 No Lecture Next Week (May 23), but Paper #3 Is Due at Noon on Tritoned
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Week 8 - May 20 No lecture next week (may 23), but paper #3 is due at noon on TritonEd. ... Next deadlines: 6/3 for proposal, 6/7 for final paper. Final exam: 6/12 at 7pm * Note: reputable news outlets are acceptable sources. This doesn't include infowars / 8chan / national inquirer. It does include The Source. ... Sections WILL meet next week, EXCEPT MONDAY sections ... CAPE Reviews will be available next week. Please fill these out! These are valuable to me, both professionally and personally. I will offer a small xtrae credit boost if the class achieves 90% participation. ... Check on your TritonEd, make sure everything looks kosher Final Exam Format 1. Listening IDs, drawn from emboldened tracks on the course page. ◦ 30-60 second clip, played three times ◦ Name the artist and the song 2. Timeline fill-in ◦ I provide a timeline, you fill it in with a specified number :of ◦ songs ◦ trends/events ◦ These do not necessarily have to have dates on them, but they have to be approximately in the correct order/location on the timeline This is a blank timeline: To do, May 20: 1. Listening ID prep 2. Review from last week. 3. The South (finish last week) 4. Hip hop as "the most popular popular music" ◦ Theoretical/critical (Tate + Kitwana readings) ◦ musical -- the sound of pop and hip hop in the late 1990s/turn of century Greg Tate, "Hip Hop turns 30" • Written in 2004, by which time Hip Hop has become the most popular musical form (in the world?) • Looking back on 30 years of hip hop history, the period we have covered in this course so far. • Greg Tate is a musician and author, one of the most important thinkers on the subject of Afro- American music and aesthetics. • Editor of Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, 2003 • Quite bitter and cynical take on the intersection of hip hop with global capitalism and corporate media. What are the questions that this article approaches? 1. What does it mean for hip hop that it is now the prevailing sound of mainstream popular music? 2. What conclusions can we draw about American culture generally from the mainstreaming of hip hop music? 3. What are the specifically musical effects for hip hop of this mainstreaming? Greg Tate: Hip- hop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hip- hop had a name it was a folk culture— literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the eighties, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz’s photo graph book Back in the Days. But from the moment “Rapper’s Delight” went platinum, hip- hop the folk culture became hip- hop the American entertainment- industry sideshow. Greg Tate con't: Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we’d translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that the House of Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular’s cool marketing prow- ess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay Z’s John Hancock? Greg Tate con't Twenty years from now we’ll be able to tell our grandchildren and great- grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people’s folkways. We’ll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of hip- hop the year Bush came back with a gang bang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We’ll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public what ever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hip-hop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper’s ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills. ...in other words, hip hop is dead (Nas, 2006) Kitwana, "Why White Kids Love Hip Hop" • Bakari Kitwana is an important cultural critic and former writer for the Source. "White suburban teens are the biggest consumers of hip hop." Thanks largely to The Chronic (1992), this hardens into an accepted fact. Kitwana challenges this common wisdom. • There's no "race" information in Soundscan data. • Counting CD sales is very approximate business. Especially, in the case of mixtapes and bootlegging. • Soundscan tracks location, and deductions about race are made from that information. But people from all races and socio-economic strata shop at malls in affluent neighborhoods. • The approval of black culture is still an acknowledged necessity for successfully marketing any hip hop music. ...but what really matters is not whether the statement above is true, but why it is assumed to be true, given that so little evidence for it exists. • Bill Yousman: White adoption of hip hop is a ritual by which Whites "contain their fears and animosities toward blacks", but do so through adoration. • Is the notion of mostly white consumption, whether or not it's factual, part of this process? • For Kitwana, this is connected to Hip Hop in academia: The number of at universities across the country grows daily (700 at current count). What is being taught? Who is teaching it? What will be the result? ... If white hip hop kids do ignore hip hop's history and do not resist the temptation to reproduce the old racial politics, we will have lost a beautiful democratic momentum set in motion by American youth, one that has the vision and capacity to leave the old racial politics on the pages of history where it belongs. Music of Mass Hip Hop Mase, Harlem World, 1997. • Produced by Bad Boy records (Sean Combs) • Mase marketed as successor to Notorious BIG • Huge success: debuted at #1, nominated for best rap album grammy. • Certified "multi platinum" (i.e. at least 2 million sold) • Mase had appeared on BIG's 1997 Ready to Die, Mo Money Mo Problems Harlem World con't: Mase, Feel So Good (1997) • Definitive of the "pop rap" sound. • Already popular songs with rap over them. • "Take hits from the eighties, make em sound so crazy" • Chris Tucker appears in the video, because the video was on soundtrack to money talks Harlem World, 1997, con't: Lookin' at me, feat. Puffy Daddy • Early example of Neptunes production, which would become SUPER influential in a few years. See below. • But many of the characteristic Neptunes features are here: ◦ sparseness ◦ quirky harpsichord lick ◦ falsetto singing in the hook ◦ Also the "exotic" harmonies. New production techniques: • In the wake of high profile copyright infringement suits (Beastie Boys, Biz Markie), producers who make their own beats (as opposed to building them out of samples) are more in-demand. • Thus late 1990s - early 2000s sound is less dominated by samples. • The most influential are a set of friends and bandmates from Virginia Beach: ◦ Timbaland ◦ The Neptunes (Pharrel Whilliams and Chad Hugo) ◦ Missy Elliot The ubiquitous Neptunes sound: • Noreaga, Supathug (1998) • Jay-Z, I just wanna love you (Give it 2 Me) (2000) • Mystikal, Shake ya ass (2000) • Britney Spears, I'm a Slave 4 you (2001) • Nelly, Hot in Herre (2002) • Justine Timerblake, Senorita (2002) • Clipse, Grindin' (2002) ◦ Super sparse, definitive of the mature Neptunes sound ◦ Pusha T and Malice are both from Virginia Beach • Snoop Dogg, Drop it like it's Hot (2004) Neptunes sound: • Hard-hitting, punchy drum synths • Starkness but not boom-bap starkness (which is more the RZA/Wu Tang style) • Quirky licks that are really exposed in the texture. • Pharrel singing falsetto in the hooks • Synth lines almost like G-funk • Exotica, frequently orientalism. Timbaland • Another incredibly influential producer from Virginia beach • Produces Missy Elliot's 1997 Supa Dupa Fly ◦ The Rain ◦ Which Samples Ann Peebles from 1973 ◦ The classic video is directed by Hype Williams, who has directed many important music videos • After gaining widespread recognition, begins to collaborate with really famous people: Jay-Z, Nas. • Nas, You Owe Me • Jay Z, Dirt off ya shoulder • Missy Elliot, She's a Bitch ..and not just hip hop. In fact it's emblematic of this period that the pop, R/B and Rap worlds converge sonically. • Ginuwine • Justin Timberlake, Cry me a River (2002) • Aaliyah, Are you that somebody Timbaland sound • Diverse, not always predictable • "Tighter" than the Neptunes • really textural and percussion driven • quirky, memorable Timbaland v Neptunes? Spotify challenge: Exoticism continued: Jay-Z, Big Pimpin' • The ultimate in the celebration of turn-of-the-century style mega wealth and consumer culture. • Built around "Khosara," by Abdel Hasim Hafez • Which was covered by Hossam Ramzy and then sampled by Timbaland. • In 1999, Jay-Z and Timbaland paid $100,000 to EMI, who held the rights to the Baligh Hamdi composition "Khosara, Khosara" • 2007, Osama Ahmed Fahmy, nephew to the composer, sues on the grounds of "moral rights", a legal concept common in IP law abroad -- pertains to the mutilation of music, and the right the author has not to see his or her music mutilated, regardless of economic copyright arrangements are made. • Verdict resolved relatively recently (2015) ... what do you think it is? • NY Times article Exoticism con't Aaliyah, We Need a Resolution • Timbaland production Miss Elliot, Get Ur Freak On • Continuing the fad from Big Pimpin for exotic "ethnic" samples.