Sound, Objecthood, and Place in the Mixtapes of DJ Screw
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 9-2020 All Day in the Trey-Fold: Sound, Objecthood, and Place in the Mixtapes of DJ Screw Matthew K. Carter The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3982 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] All Day in the Trey-Fold: Sound, Objecthood, and Place in the Mixtapes of DJ Screw by Matthew K. Carter A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2020 © 2020 MATTHEW K. CARTER All Rights Reserved ii All Day in the Trey-Fold: Sound, Objecthood, and Place in the Mixtapes of DJ Screw by Matthew K. Carter This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Music in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Shaugn O’Donnell Date Chair of Examining Committee Norman Carey Date Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Chadwick Jenkins, Advisor Jeffrey Taylor, First Reader Shaugn O’Donnell, Second Reader Graham Harman, External Reader THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract All Day in the Treyfold: Sound, Objecthood, and Place in the Mixtapes of DJ Screw by Matthew K. Carter Advisor: Chadwick Jenkins This dissertation traces the impact of the mixtapes of DJ Screw on the emergence of Houston hip hop culture in the 1990s. The relationship between these “screwtapes” and local culture resists demonstration through conventional modes of representational analyses, due in part to the screwtape’s preponderant use of hip hop tracks that originally represent other places. I suggest that representation itself is the result of the structuring tension emerging from a threefold field of representation of sound, objecthood, and place, and that when a hip hop artist or critic or fan claims to "represent" Houston (or any other constituted and constituting place) the mechanisms that make such representation possible are not a mere matter of indexicality (pointing in some relatively direct manner to the place one professes to represent) but rather the result of competing exigencies among materialities, localities, and sounding presences. This dissertation divides into three chapters, each of which highlights a different sonic- cultural tension. In the first chapter I argue that the sonic techniques Screw uses to deform mostly non-Houston tracks are the force behind the screwtape’s representation of Houston, which problematizes conventional analyses of hip hop representation. Through close musical analysis and an expansion of the philosophical concept of the sublime, I advance a theory of the screw sublime, which foregrounds an enduring strife between local cultural autonomy and wider mainstream heteronomy. iv The second chapter considers the relationship between authenticity and objects. In the first half I present a cartography of authenticity in 1990s hip hop culture, revealing a pervasive paradox in which authenticity gains value among fans while increasingly being commodified by corporations. In the second half I examine the abiding tensions in the screwtape through the lens of an aesthetic process called allure. Allure, as theorized by philosopher Graham Harman, pits inaccessible objects against their accessible qualities while simultaneously creating new objects. When applied to Screw’s sonic techniques, allure demonstrates how Houston hip hop culture was shaped through the screwtape’s revelation of the inscrutable but ineluctable nature of authenticity. In the third and final chapter, I interpret Houston as a place experienced through the screwtape. The chapter opens with an exposition of the most prevalent theories that attend to the issue of place, many of which—especially in popular music studies—use the term either as a stand-in for some physical location in space, or interchangeably with the term space. I suggest that place is best understood as experiential rather than locational, and that the experience of place is undergirded by a deeper background web of constraining forces that frames social and cultural. Through analyses of freestyles, pre-recorded tracks, and Screw’s four techniques, I reveal various ways in which the experience of Houston obtains through the screwtape’s power of what Edward Casey calls gathering, and how lyrics and sound together instantiate a phenomenological experience of place that cannot be explained through surface-level content analysis. v Acknowledgements I do not imagine there are many advisees as indebted to their advisor as I am to Chadwick Jenkins. After all, it was during a lecture on Scriabin in his twentieth-century music history class that I, an undergraduate jazz guitar major with little interest in graduate school, became exhilarated by a deeper dive into music history and analysis (I wasn’t yet familiar with the term “musicology”). Since then, I have been fortunate enough to have Professor Jenkins as an MA thesis advisor, a professor in doctoral seminars, a trusted colleague, a bandmate, and a barbecue eating partner. Throughout the dissertation process, he has made me a better writer and a better thinker, suggested revisions that led me to reconceptualize my research, and has been unbelievably selfless with his time and energy. I have grown as a scholar and a person thanks to his encouragement and guidance. I am grateful to the members of my supervisory committee for their participation. Jeffrey Taylor has given me thoughtful suggestions and countenance (even on sabbatical!). Shaugn O’Donnell took time out of an extremely demanding schedule as Chair of the Music Department at the City College of New York (during a pandemic) to lend his astute analytical eyes and ears. Graham Harman—whose philosophy is central to this dissertation, and has inflected my approach to scholarship in general— has been open and engaged since his addition to the committee. I have relied on people and organizations whose engagement with the history of Houston hip hop predates my work by many years. Lance Scott Walker’s input, through both personal correspondence and his collection of interviews, was essential to my initial framing of this topic. Julie Grob, archivist at the University of Houston Library’s Special Collections, has compiled the most expansive repository of Houston hip hop artifacts, sound recordings, and ephemera. I vi was able to spend a number of days doing research at this collection—as well as at Project Rowhouses in Houston’s Third Ward, and at Houston Library’s Houston Metropolitan Research Center—thanks to the Graduate Center’s Early Research Initiative Archival Research Grant. I am indebted to a number of people at the Graduate Center: my colleague Eric Taxier for our enlivening discussions and for his erudite explanations of all things object-oriented ontology; Anne Stone for one of the most illuminating doctoral seminars and for organizing paper preview sessions that helped me sharpen my presentation of various concepts; Stephen Blum for pointing out a methodological flaw in a term paper that changed my approach to research; and Jonathan Pieslak and John Szwed for encouraging me early in my coursework to research what I think is important. I also received invaluable feedback early in the writing process thanks to my participation in the Junior Faculty Symposium sponsored by the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society, at which I was lucky enough to work with Mike Alleyne, Andy Flory, Brian Wright, and Albin Zak. Thank you to Keith Robichau, Jerry Rios, and all of my Houston friends for making those formative years so meaningful. Thank you to Ed McDonald, Matthew Rankin, and all of my New York friends whose company and comradery over the years have made this enterprise manageable. And a special thanks to my fellow Houstonian transplant Jason Abbruzzese for a conversation at the Hog Pit during a Houston Rockets Conference Championship loss that was the catalyst to my dissertation topic. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude for my family. Thank you Mom, Dad, Robert, and Travis for your love and support throughout this long process. Thank you Orbit for all of those walks that had a way of crystalizing concepts I was having trouble articulating at home. Thank you to my son Louie, who, although the newcomer on the scene, has motivated me vii more than anything else. And thank you to my wife Liz. Nobody understands the grind of this process better than you. Not only did you endure towering mounds of books and papers on the dinner table, the emotional swings from the joy of having drafted a chapter to the despair of having to revise it, baseball on the television in the background all summer because “it helps me write,” and unknowable amounts of apartment neglect, but did so with genuine love, care, pride, and excitement for my work. This doesn’t happen without your support. viii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ iv Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................