nettime on Tue, 7 Jan 2003 13:15:17 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> hip hop digest vol. 4 [sonar radar, eyescratch, mcgee] |
Sonar Radar <intothegloaming@yahoo.com> Re: <nettime> hop hip digest [fusco, williams, porculus, butt] eyescratch <eyescratch@terminal.cz> Re: hip hop is dead Art McGee <amcgee@freeshell.org> Re: A Eulogy to Hip Hop ------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 21:57:42 -0800 (PST) From: Sonar Radar <intothegloaming@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: <nettime> hop hip digest [fusco, williams, porculus, butt] unfortunately to me this whole conversation is missing one salient point... the current hip-pop ushered in by everyone ranging from p. diddy to jay-z to nelly to mystikal and all of the other robin hoods is an extension of gangsta rap which is not in the strictest terms hip hop... it's its own thing evolving from NWA and public enemy, among others. When you consider, the the legacy of grandmaster flash, run dmc, etc it is more aptly represented by the likes of tribe called quest, de la soul and today mos def, jurassic 5, kool keith, blackalicious and some others i'm too bored to think of. why anyone in our current state of global thinking should defend the rights of these most subversive of exploiters, i.e., the neo-ghetto troubadours selling "coolture" is beyond me. hip hop music was a call to "the powers that be" to change things like police brutality and public policy and sometimes a call to arms, not a defense of belligerent and fiscally irresponsible behavior. there were no bitches in sight. i blame media babies like ice-t and young black teenagers and 2 live crew who were interested in the vehicle of urban unrest as a means to get on TV. why hip-hop and its orphans should be held to a higher standard than rock, i really don't know. and we all cry freedom... okay, fine. but, inherent in american thinking is freedom. and inherent in american freedom is capitalism. period. hip-hop, gangsta rap and hip-pop sells. they are not representative of universal black thought anymore than rock speaks for white people. anyway, the necessary meditation that keeps escaping everyone is: what will we do with our said freedom, capitalistic or otherwise? i see know point in giving any energy to what is insignificant, salacious and uneviable esp. with the global issues that face us in the coming months. that said, hip hop is NOT dead... the money-driven, sex-obsessed pop engine which has accepted it's offshoots is dead. the upside is we have finally reached a point where art can be seperated from spectacle. so, defend hip hop if you must - it bores me to death to defend anyone's right to anything - but know that when you defend it, you may sleep soundly... you are supporting the right of socially conscious musicians and NOT the salacious LCD trash that parades across MTV. and soon enough, as the market continues to splinter, the monolith will impale itself. -------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 01:25:42 -0500 From: eyescratch <eyescratch@terminal.cz> Subject: Re: hip hop is dead buuuuhuuuuu.... hipitihop. the engine that could could could sold from the cities to the SUV laden suburbs recycled cultural musical artifacts. I notice that for musicians into the historical dimension of hip-hop everything occurring now musically already found a voice in hip-hop years ago. Yet those musicians listening to the newer genres of dance music proclaim that everything came after hip hop. So what happens if the bottom falls out? Here in New York the funnel that spurned new music as the active ingredient to movement was shut down by the dance police. Maybe that is why so much posturing is going on? The rumor was going around that m&m's rip on Moby was part of a Dr. Dre conspiracy to decimate electronica. I though it was a us/brit clash, and now it turns out that he's just "The White Negro". Either way, Moby got jumped up in Boston last week. Three guys wrestled him out of the car and beat on his bald head. Times are not getting better. The irony of "you only get one shot to fame" and its continual airtime, blanketing out the other verse. Some Warhol in that? Not if you look at the 8th mile on VCD, filmed in the theater of Detroit. So much of hip hop is staking ground. It has a whole spacial dimension where shout out and reference provide dialog and linkage. Was Mosaic compiled with Roxanne in mind? So as time becomes fluid, relativity being relative, Nestle. Boredom holds possibility. A time to reflect while riding out a recession. Ideas sweep in from overseas. Not like being preached to, but inspired by, I guess that's why I liked the eulogy. America numb. People are up to trying different things. This would have been greatly accelerated had the FCC rules for low-power transmitters gone into effect. Did see a piece on Public Access here during the Emmies, where the talking head announcer turned around and mooned the camera while "Call 212.679.2805 now if you want eminem to suck your dick!" was blended in. People find ways to respond to the garbage that is shoveled at them. Usually with more garbage, but hey, that's what "culture wars" means, right? The ethnography of Trinidad internet doesn't gloss over the stance of Trinidad banter in chat rooms which sets them apart from their more vulgar brethren up north, by the way! Dynamics at play, if we take language as the active ingredient, not everyone wants to be euphemized by the clan. The formula has set to a certain extent, wallowing in its own taboo, but that is not how hip hop spread. It spread precisely because it refused to fit into traditional media channels and simply made its own! It is at these crossroad for reading media use and abuse that I beg to differ with the Trinidad expose. Sure people using internet communication have no lofty sense of the virtual, but in order to come up with these tools abstractions need to be sought, dreamed up or worked out, much like the frenetic pulse of early bomb squad productions made the leap to post-punk for many european headz. You know, what really irks me though is the touting of Wagner perfection in the arts is finally paying off - the diamonds are out of the rough and on the glossy swimsuit issue cover - the US competitive edge agenda in this world is finally finding rhyme. That's all it really is. Maybe nihilism is the word, but consumption is the key. The eulogy, having been there all along, causes kernel panic. Found the pointer yet? ----------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 07:09:16 +0000 (UTC) From: Art McGee <amcgee@freeshell.org> Subject: Re: A Eulogy to Hip Hop So far, only Paul Miller and Coco Fusco have talked about the elephant in the room, the racial dimension, which is what the article was *really* about. Although it is unstated, the author was speaking and venting rage to a Black audience, a Black American audience, and not a general hip-hop audience. Implicit in the critique is the reality that hip-hop sprang from the Black and Latino working-class in America, and that irrespective of the now tired droning on by privileged whites about Hip-Hop's now global and multi-cultural composition, WE created it, and WE feel a sense of ownership of it, however tenuous or delusional that is or may have always been. Black people rarely feel that they have any real control of anything in American society, and so there is a tendency to try and lay claim to certain cultural elements as a substitute for what's really needed, Reparations and Socialist Revolution, not necessarily in that specific order. I was actually upset that Paul even bothered to post it on nettime, because I knew that this being a predominately white middle-class libertarian academic male space, you would end up with the typical forms of intellectual masturbation which ignore the reality of the effect that Capitalism and White Supremacy have on cultural production. What the author was railing against is self-evident to me, and needed no explantion. Even if I didn't feel his critique was wholly accurate, I immediately recognized and identified with the anger and alienation he was expressing at the ways that Black people continue to be reminded that we are not really free and that true liberation is still a long way off. Corporate Hip-Hop is just a small dagger that keeps jabbing us in the side reminding of us of that, but it's nowhere near being the big picture. > Those interested in pushing the art-form should do so, or > if unhappy with it, move on to something else. After all, > was it not by moving on that Hip Hop was born? WE will: "Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand -- or sleight-of-hand -- by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary -- without the faintest notion of what it really means -- the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience." --James Baldwin "Sermons and Blues" New York Times Book Review March 29, 1959 --- Art McGee Communications & Technology Consultant amcgee@freeshell.org (510) 967-9381 Circuit Riders International <http://npogroups.org/lists/info/riders> NPO/NGO Media & Technology Calendar <http://amcgee.freeshell.org/mtcalendar.html> APC ActionApps Content Management System <http://www.apc.org/actionapps> -------------------------------------------------- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net