Cultural and Musical Implications of Live-Instrumental Hip-Hop Jonah Ullman
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarWorks @ UVM University of Vermont ScholarWorks @ UVM UVM College of Arts and Sciences College Honors Undergraduate Theses Theses 2016 From The Ground Up: Cultural and Musical Implications of Live-Instrumental Hip-Hop Jonah Ullman Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/castheses Recommended Citation Ullman, Jonah, "From The Ground Up: Cultural and Musical Implications of Live-Instrumental Hip-Hop" (2016). UVM College of Arts and Sciences College Honors Theses. Paper 28. This Undergraduate Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Undergraduate Theses at ScholarWorks @ UVM. It has been accepted for inclusion in UVM College of Arts and Sciences College Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ UVM. For more information, please contact [email protected]. From The Ground Up: Cultural and Musical Implications of LiveInstrumental HipHop A thesis submitted by Jonah Ullman In fulfillment of the requirements for College Honors UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT College of Arts and Sciences May, 2016 ADVISER: Alex Stewart ii ABSTRACT Traditional live instruments have played an important role in hiphop production in various capacities since the earliest stages of the genre’s development. The dominant historical narrative often omits the frequency with which live instruments have been used in hiphop. The authenticity of their use has been a point of contention in the discourse of hiphop producers, consumers, critics and scholars. When used in accordance with hiphop’s aesthetic sensibilities, however, they become a vehicle for innovative and authentic hiphop. Tasteful use of live instruments opens up a range of possibilities in the realms of arrangement techniques and compositional freedom. The opportunities and challenges inherent in liveinstrumental hiphop are relevant in both studio and live settings. Live instruments are an alternative production technology that can coexist with sampling. Through analysis of the work of hiphop artists (including The Roots, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Chance the Rapper) who have used live instruments in various capacities, this paper will present the cultural and musical implications of liveinstrumental hiphop. There is a dearth of scholarship on the topic of liveinstrumental hiphop, and the work that exists tends to deal with this method of production as an afterthought compared to sampling techniques. This paper seeks to fill a gap in scholarship by presenting the merits and challenges of live instruments as a discrete topic worthy of academic attention. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 I. A History of Live Instruments and Hip-Hop 3 II. Live Instruments as Supplementation of Samples 8 III. “The Roots” of Hip-Hop 10 IV. Hip-Hop’s Connections to Past Black Musics and Racial Identity 14 V. Musical Implications of Live Instruments 18 VI. Live Band, Live Performance 21 Conclusion 25 Bibliography 27 Discography 30 1 INTRODUCTION In the fall of 2013 on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Kanye West performed “Bound 2” from his 2013 album Yeezus.1 The performance, which featured vocalist Charlie Wilson and a children’s choir, was backed by the legendary hip-hop band The Roots. With its bouncy groove, rich instrumentation and powerful drums, the live rendition was in stark contrast to the song’s studio version. In keeping with the bleak industrial atmosphere of the album, the original recording of “Bound 2” is barren and minimalist. During the verses, Kanye’s vocals are accompanied only by a classic soul sample that has little low-end or percussion. On Fallon, The Roots rebuilt the beat from the ground up; their re-performance of the sample was lush and full, comfortably sitting atop a strong low end and drummer Questlove’s foundational breakbeat. Although it remained true to established hip-hop aesthetic sensibilities, the instrumentation of Kanye’s performance on Late Night was a far cry from tradition. Hip- hop is a genre defined by the turntables; according to a common narrative, the first hip- hop DJs flipped the script on culturally-imposed dichotomies of producer vs. consumer, of playback device vs. instrument, and transformed the old and tired into the new and fresh.2 Retrospective voices from within the hip-hop and academic communities have repeatedly recounted and analyzed the creation myth of hip-hop, painting the artistic decisions of pioneering DJs as primarily subversive and political; the DJ repurposed records to fight back against an exploitative music industry and reaffirm connections to a Black cultural identity.3 1 See Behrens 2 See Demers 2006, Lessig, McLeod and DiCola 3 See Perchard p. 2 2 In reality such a narrative, however satisfying it may be, does not encapsulate the pragmatic nature of the motivations of hip-hop’s pioneers. Listeners were exposed to the popular music of previous generations through sampling because DJs sampled records they loved, records they heard on their parents’ turntables as children. The idea of the DJ as mindful keeper of a collectivized racial musical identity is appealing, but inaccurate. The hip-hop “creation myth” does not consider one important technology which was present even in hip-hop’s first mainstream hit: live instruments.4 Producers used live instruments in various capacities from the advent of recorded hip-hop.5 To those with purist sensibilities, the choice to leave the turntables behind in favor of other instruments (whether they be digital samplers like the now-ubiquitous Akai MPC, or traditional live instruments) represented an abdication of hip-hop’s ethos; to these hip-hop “heads,” the soul of the music lay in the turntables and to leave them behind was nothing short of blasphemy. This is an understandable viewpoint for those who subscribe to the standard creation myth of hip-hop. However, hip-hop’s early development and embrace of instruments/technologies aside from the turntables is messier than this myth admits. If one acknowledges that traditional instruments have played an important role throughout hip-hop’s development, then what have been the cultural and musical implications of their use? 4 I use the term “live instruments” to describe instruments other than digital samplers and turntables. In informal discourse, the term “real instruments” is often used; this term delegitimizes the validity of sampling as a musical practice, and of samplers and turntables as instruments, and therefore should be avoided. 5 See Marshall p. 874 3 I. A HISTORY OF LIVE INSTRUMENTS AND HIP-HOP It is useful to begin with a brief account of the history of hip-hop which takes into account early uses of live instruments. According to the creation myth of hip-hop, the genre was born at a Bronx rec-room party in the summer of 1973. At this party, eighteen- year-old Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc or simply Herc, established himself as a musical force to be reckoned with, and the pioneer of an exciting new musical form. Herc was born in 1955 in Kingston, Jamaica and spent the first twelve years of his life there before moving to the Bronx in 1967. His father, Keith, was an avid record collector and as a result, Herc was exposed to reggae, jazz, gospel, and country records from a young age.6 Beginning in 1970, Herc deejayed parties using his neighbor’s sound system. Keith purchased a powerful Shure PA system and began to run sound for a local R&B band. Herc had a knack for sound equipment, and his father took notice, allowing Herc to use his system, so long as he also played records during the R&B band’s set breaks. Herc established a reputation as a DJ and in 1974, moved his parties from the rec- room to the block.7 He paid close attention to the reactions of the crowds at his parties. Seeing that the people responded to the instrumental breaks in songs, he developed what he called the “Merry-Go-Round” technique, which entails using two copies of the same record on two turntables to extend the breaks. From this technique, hip-hop was born. The Bronx had been dominated by a number of rival gangs until the mid-70s, when the gangs began to fragment and be replaced in part by smaller crews, which were 6 See Chang pp. 67-72 7 See Chang p. 78 4 often organized around music.8 Herc and clique-members Coke La Rock and Dickie began to rap along with the records he played, hyping the crowd in a rhythmic fashion. By 1977, Herc’s style of deejaying had blown up, and other DJs with accompanying crews emerged, including Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. This was the era of the “four elements” of hip-hop: DJing, emceeing, breakdancing and graffiti-writing. It is these four elements that provide the basis for the purist mindset. In October of 1979, hip-hop hit the mainstream with The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”9 The fifteen-minute-long piece was a major hit, and brought the MC to the foreground of what was typically a DJ-centric medium. Because the technology did not exist to adequately record turntables, the samples in “Rapper’s Delight” were interpolated (a common studio technique which denotes imitative re-performance of a sample source).10 The following year, in light of the success of “Rapper’s Delight,” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five recorded “Superrappin’.”11 The song was originally a live performance routine which featured unison vocal lines alternating with breaks in which Flash demonstrated his prolific drum machine skills. In the studio version, however, the drum fills are replaced with an unremarkable percussion loop.