Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 10, No 1 (2014) When Beats Meet Critique: Documenting Hip-Hop Sampling as Critical Practice Marcel Swiboda Introduction The isolation of rhythm and beat-based elements has been an aesthetic mainstay in the repertoire of hip-hop DJs since the formative development of this culture in the South Bronx in the mid-1970s. In its original form, this practice involved the extraction of short instrumental passages from mainly soul and funk records, using two copies of the same recording on two separate turntables to repeat passages back-to-back to create extended rhythmic sequences. Exponents of this process of isolation and manipulation called these passages breaks, or breakbeats, for dancing, providing beats for emcees to rhyme over and—since the advent of digital sampling—for producers to make beats as a mode of hip-hop practice in its own right. The centrality of the break in hip-hop is described by musicologist Mark Katz: If you hope to understand the art of the hip-hop DJ—and even the origins of hip-hop— you must understand the break[.] (Groove Music, 14) Early breakbeat practices evolved within the disenfranchised communities of South Bronx’s housing projects and were predominantly forged among their African American communities. The range of practices associated with hip-hop culture are fundamentally African American in character, while at the same time drawing on cultural practices and traits from elsewhere in the African diaspora. As ethnomusicologist and hip-hop sampling scholar Joseph Schloss writes, Hip-hop developed in New York City in neighbourhoods that were dominated by people of African descent from the continental United States, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies. As a result, African-derived aesthetics, social norms, standards, and sensibilities are deeply embedded in the form[.] (Schloss 3) Schloss draws our attention here to hip-hop’s formal inscription of material, aesthetic, and social practices associated with African American and African-derived cultural traditions and histories. Regarding the musical content of early hip-hop breakbeats, the musician, curator, and writer David Toop describes as follows the kinds of sonic elements that would often be isolated to comprise the break: A conga or a bongo solo, a timbales break or simply the drummer hammering out the beat — these could be isolated by using two copies of the same record on twin turntables and, playing the one section over and over, flipping the needle back to the start on one while the other played through. (Toop 60) In the case of breakbeats, the idiomatic character of hip-hop attests to the singular ways in which formal traits and sonic elements from African American and African-derived traditions and histories are brought together with the aid of phonographic technologies of reproduction. A number of these traits and elements, as well as their technological synthesis in hip-hop beatmaking, will provide a major focus for what follows. Regarding the technological histories of hip-hop’s beat-based elements, the majority of critical writing to date has tended mostly to focus on the origins of breakbeat culture as rooted in the explicitly live, performative aspects of hip-hop. Among these aspects, the verbal component of rap is usually cited as exemplary, yet the kind of phonographic manipulation techniques just introduced are also often given as examples under the auspice of ‘turntablism’ as a form of performance practice. Given the centrality of turntablism in hip-hop music-making, it stands to reason that these technological and aesthetic aspects combined should provide a main focus on hip-hop’s phonographic histories for academic and critical documentarians. Without in any way seeking to challenge the preeminent centrality of the live performance-based aspects of rap or turntablism, what follows will consist of an investigation into the use of electronic technologies as tools for beatmaking central to hip-hop’s breakbeat ethos. The practices utilizing these techniques will be considered in terms of their aesthetic and material histories and also in terms of their mobilization as vehicles for the establishment of technological, vernacular and idiomatically specific modes of critical knowledge- practice. Furthermore, I will show that digital beatmaking can be meaningfully engaged in relation to improvisatory musical practices, despite the predominantly non-live character of hip-hop sampling. 1 Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation, Vol 10, No 1 (2014) Music Technology and Cultural Agency: The Case of Electro The use of electronic rhythm machines to supplement turntablist approaches to break isolation and sequencing, or looping, became a mainstay of hip-hop DJing from the beginning of the 1980s onward. These incorporations would also mark the beginnings of the expansion of the DJ’s role to include studio production as an element of hip-hop practice. At the same time, “electro” (short-hand for electro-funk and electro- boogie) creatively tapped the lines of aesthetic and technological potential furnished by the major leaps forward in electronic music technology since the late 1970s, particularly in the design and manufacture of synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines. Electronic drum machines (for example the Roland TR-808, Linn LM-1, and Oberheim DMX) first became commercially available at the beginning of the 1980s. As devices in some measure designed to produce backbeats in rock and pop music, drum machines were mainly conceived as electronic workhorses. The design and manufacture of these machines was, in part, driven by economic imperatives, such as the need to mitigate the rising cost of studio-time. Despite such imperatives, many different early users of these machines, across musical styles, would seek to tap their creative potential, as exemplified by post-new wave British-based synth acts, such as The Human League, and exponents of West German electronic music, notably Kraftwerk. In part through the influence of some of these acts, electro musicians made use of these devices to forge a specifically vernacular, cybernetic aesthetic. Consider as a case in point electro pioneer Afrika Bambaataa: he took inspiration from the European “robotic” aesthetic of Kraftwerk and how this band used the sounds of everyday technology. A famous example was Kraftwerk’s integration of the handheld calculator—an early commercially available portable digital computer that was featured in a track entitled “Pocket Calculator” on the 1981 album Computer World. The technological and aesthetic inspiration that Kraftwerk found in the calculator, as well as in older industrial machines—notably trains—carried over into electro, as exemplified by Bambaataa’s landmark 1982 track “Planet Rock,” which incorporated the melody from the title track of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album Trans-Europe Express. At this time, what ultimately made this kind of technological musical bricolage relevant to African American DJs and artists in New York was captured by Baambaata’s qualification that the sounds it generated could be described as “funky” (130). Through a combination of turntablist break manipulation techniques, the oral elements of rap and synthesized (or “vocoded”) voices, and the use of rhythm machines, electro DJs and artists forged an electronically driven funk-based aesthetic. If taken in isolation, the rhythmic interplays of their live and synthetic elements simultaneously affirmed and confounded the metronomic (or motoric) character of the electronic beats of the drum machines. Here and elsewhere in hip-hop’s historical relationship to technology, breakbeat exponents exemplify what techno-theorists call “early adopters.” In light of the contemporary tendency to situate ideas of technological adoption squarely within the discourses of Silicon Valley-inspired cyber-culture, media theorist Anna Everett has made the following observation: Perhaps our ongoing ignorance of African American early adoption of and involvement with prior innovative media technologies such as the printing press, cinema, radio and [. .] video authorizes much of today’s myopic consideration of black technological sophistication. (24) Using electro as a case in point, Everett argues that “part of controlling the technological beast and its elitist scientific applications is black artists’ skill at recoding science and technology” (27). Africana scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose also situates these technological and aesthetic developments within their specific African American socio-economic contexts in order to illustrate the ways in which these methods of technological music-making correspond to specific circumstances affecting African American urban youth: Electro-boogie took place in a historical moment — “Planet Rock” was released [. .] when factory production and solid blue-collar work were coming to a screeching halt in urban America. Urban blacks were increasingly unemployed, and their best options were to become hidden workers for service industries or computer repair people. People said, “Look, technology is here; we can choose to be left behind or we can try to take control of the beast.” (qtd. in Everett 27) Through the work of scholars like Rose and Everett, these issues have been addressed under the auspice of emergent discourses surrounding Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism seeks to disinter critically the disavowed histories and legacies of technology used in African American and