Research Methods B .com
Submitted in consideration for the Master’s degree in Musicology, University of Edinburgh, 2010
For Peter McCaffery, Diane Sibley, and Shelton Walker.
With humble and sincere thanks to Shelton Walker, Komozi Woodard, Seth Boyd a.k.a. Cadence, Brian McCreight, and Sam Harp.
Cover image:
Emily Donnini
Stone Record
2010
Sandstone boulder, embedded record, tone arm
100 x 100 x 100 cm approx.
I. INTRODUCTION
“Thinking of a master plan
Ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand”
- Rakim, “I Know You Got Soul”
To cue it back to the start, I had thought I could count off the beat in numbers. I had wanted to prove something about culture that seemed to me simple enough to measure statistically, and in a fairly straightforward way. Specifically, that hip hop DJs who used sampling in their compositions had revived the popularity and cultural influence of the music they sampled.
James Brown would be one obvious example. Following my hypothesis, the prevalence of samples from James Brown songs in hip hop music from a certain period should have revived Brown’s music’s popularity. Further, the resulting re-popularization should have increased sales of Brown’s back catalogue. This should have happened in part through sales of records that were already available, but also by compelling record companies to recognize this emerging market, and then to reissue Brown’s work. From there, statistics would certainly bear out my theory; the increased frequency of reissue releases could be tracked by release dates, and increased sales to consumers by retail sales figures.
Narrowing my investigation to a specific span of years should have made my hypothesis even easier to prove. I decided to look into hip hop from the years between 1987 and 1994. The sample sources on songs from 1987-94 were released principally in the 1960s and 70s, but hailed from a remarkable range of music styles and genres.
The years 1987 and 1994 were chosen because they are the beginning and end points for the advent of a remarkable stylistic diversity in hip hop. The instigating factors in the rapid and sonically adventurous changes in the range of music used by hip hop producers are beyond the scope of this paper. Its end, however, can be dated with some precision; the slowing of this widespread innovation in production was precipitated by rulings on copyright cases that reached U.S. courts beginning in 1992 with Grand Upright v. Warner Bros., in which Biz Markie was penalized for sampling a few notes and words of the title to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1971 hit “Alone Again (Naturally).” This precedent resulted in sampling being scrutinized much more closely by both artists and record companies, who now rightly assumed they were in a position of strength with regard to copyright claims and fair use guidelines[1].
But even without a firm idea of why hip hop sampling became so adventurous around 1987, I felt the idea was tidy enough, and the numbers reliable and accessible enough, to proceed in confidence.
And I wanted to take it a little further; it seemed to follow from this idea—that sampling increased older artists’ popularity—that hip hop could then be given credit as a culturally beneficial force, and that hip hop DJs were responsible not for eroding the integrity of the older music it used, but in fact for celebrating and rejuvenating it. I wanted to show that hip hop sampling, far from being the semi-legitimate mode of music-making that treated its musical forebears ignorantly at best or contemptuously at worst (as some conservative commentators maintained) was in fact a vital force helping to insure the survival of its sources. With its early years mired in the ignoble, non-musical world of publishing rights, computer manipulation, and lawsuits, it seemed that hip hop sampling had, to rouse a tired pun, gotten a bad rap.
II. HYPOTHESIS
The conditions I stipulated in order to include a sampled song in my survey were, as mentioned above, that it have been used as a sample in a hip hop song which was released between 1987 and ‘94, and that it was what I have decided to call “commercially non-viable.”
By this I mean a song that doesn’t benefit from any circumstance which might bring it increased sales power, outside of being sampled in a hip hop song. Some examples of outside circumstances capable of inflating a song’s sales are inclusion in a film soundtrack (as was the case with Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” which re-entered the Hot 100 (the most widely-referenced pop singles chart) in 1986, 25 years after its initial debut, following its use over the closing credits of the eponymous Rob Reiner hit film[2]); use on a television show (as with Bill Haley and the Comets’ “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” which was used as the opening theme to the US television program Happy Days, and re-entered the charts in 1974 after that show became a hit[3]); the artist associated with that song releasing new material, or a themed catalogue compilation of hits, duets, love songs, music recorded for a specific label or with a certain collaborator, etc; a cover version of the song gaining popularity (as happened with Billy Vera’s song "At This Moment" which entered the Hot 100 in 1981 and again in 1987. Michael Buble covered the song on his album Crazy Love (Reprise, 2009), and performed it on the popular US TV program So You Think You Can Dance. As a result, not only did sales of the Buble version increase, the Vera version did as well[4]); or the artist’s death (as recently witnessed with the late Michael Jackson’s back catalogue[5]). Any of these events can contribute to an older song’s renewed popularity, and therefore had to be ruled out as factors.
More “pure” examples of commercially non-viable music would be a recording which was simply unavailable commercially because it was released on a since-defunct label, or its publishing rights were in dispute, or had lapsed out of print due to lack of consumer interest. Cases, that is, where there was no chance that the music could sell because it wasn’t available to buy.
I’ll address the issue of whether or not sales figures work as an accurate measure of sampling’s influence later in this paper, but for the moment, suffice to say I proceeded in the belief that using older recordings in new musical compositions would soon compel people to buy more of the old stuff.
A. TOOLS
The funds of information I called on to begin investigating sampling’s effects on older music consisted of four unaffiliated websites:
1.
2.
3.
4. and its subscription database site , and subscription site
I also consulted the book Top R&B Singles 1942-1999 by Joel Whitburn (Record Research Inc., Wisconsin, US 2000) and followed up searches conducted on with an interview via email with Nadav Poraz, co-founder of , on March 19th and 24th, 2010. I also interviewed Derek Dressler, VP of Artists and Repetoire for Shout! Factory and Majordomo, a re-issue and re-packaging music and DVD label in California on April 20, 2010 about how companies like his choose what artists to re-issue work by, how re-issue products are marketed to radio and retail, and how their sales are tracked.
I used these websites and books for different reasons, but foremost for their accuracy. In cases where I couldn’t rely on one site to be wholly accurate or provide all the information I wanted, I used others to double-check the information I found first, or to at least narrow the info gleaned from the first site, as I will explain.
What follows is a description of the sources I decided to use and why.
1. Founded by DJ/producer Nadav Poraz and a collaborator in late 2008, is a “crowd-sourced” online database that correlates sample-based hip hop songs with their source songs. Users of the free site create a personal profile entitling them to submit their correlations between sample-based songs and the sampled material. The site’s content is offered and updated voluntarily by all members (they’re the “crowd” in “crowd-sourced”), much like the website . Unlike Wikipedia, ’s content is checked for accuracy by about 50 volunteer site moderators, “carefully selected by [site managers] after they have proven that they can moderate accurately.” These moderators have veto power over submissions. The site also has a staff site manager who oversees content, community discussion boards, and overall site quality. As a further and key element of ’s commitment to the accuracy of the information it presents, the site offers audible evidence in the form of sound clips of both sampled and sampling song, and opportunities for users to make claims of variance; as Poraz wrote to me, his site “present[s] audio streams for every track, and allow[s] for a discussion on every sample - so that users can make their own judgment as to how accurate the information is.”[6]
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Exh. 1
2. Another crowd-sourced site, compiles discographies of artists across rock, R&B, hip hop, classical, reggae, blues and other genres. I used this free site because of one particularly useful feature; the inclusion of a scanned image of the record’s core label which often includes songwriting credits, a personnel list, year of release, and artists’ birth (as opposed to stage) names on the page devoted to a given record. I used this information, coming straight off the record itself, as an authoritative statement on who received writing and publishing credits for a song—i.e., of all the artists who received credit and therefore royalties on that song. I matched the sample correlations on to the songwriting credits on the scans. When the songwriting credits matched the artists affiliated with the song on , I considered it definitive. In cases where I could not find scans with the information I needed on , I looked it up on the websites of two eminent trade organizations devoted to tracking publishing, songwriting, and composing copyrights, ASCAP and BMI, and .
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Exh. 2
3. The Recording Industry Association of America has several functions, but they are best known for the manner in which they reward selling records. The RIAA gives out framed gold- and platinum-plated records to artists who sell a lot of the regular kind, be they singles or albums (and eventually videos as well). The criteria for earning a gold or platinum plaque is having sold 500,000 copies (gold) or 1 million copies (platinum); the multi-platinum award was added in 1984 to recognize sales of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 million, and the diamond award for sales over 10 million was added in 1999. The RIAA’s website, , hosts a free database of all gold, platinum, and diamond award winners[7]. This is where I looked up the hip hop songs which had been given awards for the most sales during the years within the purview of my research[8].
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Exh. 3
4. Joel Whitburn has followed Billboard magazine’s charts with singular zeal for over 40 years. Through his company Record Research he’s published more than 50 books compiling and analyzing Billboard’s statistics on record sales and the frequency with which songs are played over US radio airwaves[9]. His books are published through a division of Billboard magazine, widely considered the pre-eminent source for statistics on how recording industry products perform with US music consumers. Whitburn’s official website is ; I bought a subscription to its database site, , which carries Billboard chart information going back to 1956. I used ’s search engine to track down the chart performance of songs with the highest ranking in sales and radio plays. It is important to emphasize here the difference between the figures tracked by the RIAA and by Joel Whitburn; in giving out gold and platinum plaques the RIAA is acknowledging sales of recordings only, while Billboard’s charts reflect both sales as gathered by SoundScan and radio airplay as tracked by Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems (these charts now reflect internet downloads and streaming, as well as ringtone sales, but these obviously weren’t considerations in the time period I’m dealing with).
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Exh. 4
I also purchased a subscription to , Billboard magazine’s news site, which, in their words, “delivers breaking news, insight and analysis on the music and entertainment industries, all of the articles printed in each week's magazine, a database of all Billboard articles, reviews, features and special reports dating back to 1991, as well as weekly album, singles and video charts dating back to 1984 and year-end charts dating back to 1946.”[10] Their chart search engine allows users to parse and combine information in crucially different ways than , for example by showing not only the first but each subsequent instance in which a song appears on the charts.
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Exh. 5
5. Lastly, I bought a copy of Joel Whitburn’s book Top R&B Singles 1942-1999, which contains a detailed chronology and explanation of Billboard’s changing nomenclature and methods of measuring sales for the music which over the years has been grouped under charts named variously “the Harlem Hit Parade,” “Retail Race Records,” “Rhythm & Blues,” Soul,” and simply “Black.” The book also groups and categorizes songs and artists in helpful ways that and , ironically, were unable to; by artists with longest careers for instance, top hits by decade, or singles which remained on the charts longest.
B. METHODS
First I looked up the best-selling hip hop singles from 1987 to1994. Using the RIAA website, I found singles which went platinum and multi-platinum. Then via and Top R&B Singles 1942-1999, I checked for hip hop songs from the same period which held top positions on the Billboard charts to see if any hip hop songs, besides those the RIAA recognized, merited mention due to increased airplay (apart from sales). I took this group of songs and selected the three that sold and/or charted highest. Those songs are as follows:
1. “Whoomp! There It Is” by Tag Team: 3x platinum, 37 weeks on R&B Singles chart: sample from “I’m Ready” by Kano
2. “Rump Shaker” by Wreckx-N-Effect: 2x platinum, 27 weeks on on R&B Singles chart: most recognizable sample from “Darkest Light” by the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band
3. “Jump” by Kriss Kross: 2x platinum, 19 weeks on R&B Singles chart: most recognizable sample from “Funky Worm” by the Ohio Players
I also looked up three additional songs which charted in the same period, chosen for the notoriety they gained among pop music fans, and hip hop devotees in particular, for their prominent use of recognizable samples[11]. Those songs are as follows:
1. “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer: sample from “Super Freak” by Rick James
2. “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice: sample from “Under Pressure” by Queen with David Bowie
3. “Me Myself & I” by De La Soul: sample from “(Not Just) Knee Deep” by Funkadelic
I then looked up the samples used in those three songs on , checked the accuracy of ’s source/origin correlations via , and looked up the chart performance of those source songs.
Finally, I went back to and Top R&B Singles 1942-1999, I looked for the sampled songs’ return to the charts.
I tracked my results using this table:
Sampled song, artist: Initial peak chart position, date (MM/DD/YY) |Sampling song, artist: Peak chart position, date (MM/DD/YY) |Sampling song's RIAA designation (gold/plat) |Sampled song's chart return date, chart name | |I'm Ready, by Kano: #22 R&B 2/21/1980 |Whoomp! There It Is, Tag Team: #1 R&B 7/17/93, #2 Hot 100 5/29/93 |3x platinum |No | |Darkest Light, Lafayette Afro-Rock Band: Never charted |Rump Shaker, Wreckx n' Effect: #2 Hot 100 12/26/92, #3 R&B 12/5/92 |2x platinum |N/A | |Funky Worm, the Ohio Players: #1 3/10/73 R&B, #15 Hot 100 5/26/73 |Jump, Kriss Kross: #1 Hot 100 4/25/92, #2 R&B 5/23/92 |2x platinum |No | |Super Freak (Part 1), Rick James: Single #3 R&B 9.12.1981, #16 Hot 100 10/24/1981 |U Can't Touch This, MC Hammer: #1 R&B 6/23/1990 #8 Hot 100 6/16/1990 |None |8/28/04, Hot R&B/Hip Hop Recurrent Airplay, Hot R&B/Hip Hop Recurrents, Hot Digital Tracks | |Under Pressure, Queen feat. David Bowie: #7 Rock 12/5/1981, #29 Hot 100 1/9/1982 |Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice: #6 R&B 11/3/1990, #1 Hot 100 11/3/1990 |1x Platinum |No | |(Not Just) Knee Deep, Funkadelic: #1 R&B 8.25.79, #77 Hot 100 10/27/79 |Me Myself and I, De La Soul: #1 R&B 6/10/89, #34 Hot 100 7/22/89 |Gold |No | |Exh. 6
C. OUTCOME
To judge from the records kept on , , and in Top R&B Singles 1942-1999, none of the songs sampled in the most popular (meaning best-selling and/or most-played on radio) hip hop songs of 1987 through 1994 returned to any Billboard chart as a result of being sampled[12].
I should note that my method leaves open the possibility that a record could conceivably go platinum entirely coincidentally, shortly after being sampled. The RIAA site shows not only records’ gold and platinum designations, it also shows the date at which records attained this status, and the date it reached each tier as sales increased; i.e., it is possible to see the date at which a single reached gold status, then the subsequent date at which it reached platinum, then the date it reached multi-platinum, etc. And the RIAA awards are designed to recognize sales in large increments of 500,000 and 1 million copies at a time, Therefore the awards allow a record to accrue sales gradually and achieve platinum status long after its initial release.
Therefore, no causal link necessarily exists between the two events; a platinum record may have sold slowly and steadily over many years, the timing of its millionth sale occurring randomly, but coincident with its use as a sample. Pink Floyd’s 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, to cite one illustrative example, went platinum for the 15th time in 1998, 25 years after its initial release[13].
But common sense suggests this possibility is more remote, particularly if the sample use and subsequent sales awards sequence can be demonstrated in multiple cases. Also, singles, unlike records, are designed to live brief lives. In a market subject to rapid shifts in popular taste, and centered on a physical product strategically released for a limited period, the likelihood of a single enjoying a sustained market life is slim.
In any case, this pattern was not borne out, and therefore immaterial here.
D. IDEAS FOR GOING FORWARD
In researching commercial measures of sampling’s cultural influence, several issues about the premise occurred to me.
The two minor ones were that the sampled songs had to be identifiable; a song like Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” truly lives up to it’s name, using at least 8 samples, and even a big hit such as “Whoomp! There It Is” samples a song so obscure it didn’t break the Top 20 R&B chart, and uses it so minimally that it would be hard for many people to identify it in the mix. The song is also used for its rhythm track more than its melody, making it harder yet to pick out. It would seem to follow that in these cases only the most devoted listeners would bother to try and identify the sources, or indeed could.
The other is a point raised by journalist, DJ, and California State University, Long Beach professor Oliver Wang in an email interview I did with him in January of this year; parsing the influence between the producers who use music to compose with and the record labels which make that music available is tricky[14].
A great deal of romance is afforded the idea of devoted (if not obsessed) DJs “digging in the crates”—searching for vinyl records in used record shops, yard sales, estate sales, junkyards, etc—going to great lengths to gather material, particularly rare records[15]. Tufts University professor Joseph G. Schloss, in his terrific anthropological study of “digging culture” in Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop[16] delves in depth into that scene’s inner workings. But despite the “sampling ethics” which Schloss describes as greatly favoring the use of vinyl over compact discs[17] in sampling, there’s no reason to believe that hip hop DJ/producers would never use compilations, box sets, or other re-issued records, or indeed that they could be alerted to the existence of certain music by a label’s marketing of these re-issues.
As Wang points out, the timing of the release of the Stax/Volt singles box set, The Complete Stax-Volt Singles 1959-1968, and Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album which producer the RZA sampled from heavily, is close; 1991 and 1993. And while it always seemed obvious to me that the inspiration behind Polydor’s issuing the James Brown box set Star Time in 1991 was Eric B and Rakim’s classic late-eighties singles, with their many drum breaks taken from Brown’s early-70s nuggets like “Funky Drummer,” in fact Polydor and Rhino Records had both released good retrospectives in 1984 and 1985.
If box sets are marketed as collector’s items, reference works to be interred in the music library rather than slapped on a platter and used (more suited to the bibliotheque than the discothèque[18]), DJs are still nevertheless, paradoxically, another natural market. For as Schloss discusses at length, the flip side of DJs’ utilitarian approach to records is that no collectors are more obsessively completist than crate-digging hip hop DJs[19]. So who was influencing whom? A chicken-and-egg conundrum begins to form.
Lastly, and perhaps the lesson to be taken from this study, is the question of whether or not sales are the best measure of the kind of impact I’m looking at—an impact which is, after all, more cultural than commercial, and may not lend itself to statistical analysis.
What I wanted to examine was not the kind of influence that can (or cannot) be measured by consumer sales statistics, but the ways in which records, and recording technology, influence how music history and tradition, and therefore ideas about culture, are understood.
Because my focus is on an African-American art form, and further because the emphasis is on that art’s practice and reception in America, issues surrounding race and race relations in the United States must be considered at the fore. I will look at records in the sense that they are objects that “hold” music, but also in that they are documents that preserve cultural memory. In the US, a young nation whose only real “native” traditions—those of the indigenous population which we subjugated—bear a troubling history, cultural memory is a thing we pursue ardently at the same time that we try to evade or deny judgments gazing plainly from our past’s many grim corners.
But fashioning a collective memory requires artifacts, materials which can be considered non-fiction. Those who archive these artifacts have great power in arranging and re-arranging memory. My interest in hip hop DJs and their role as record collectors has to do with this very capacity to reinterpret the past by composing music which draws disparate genres together. To do this, hip hop DJs are required to canvass a vast span of recorded music for usable material. In what they choose to appropriate, hip hop DJs are, I will argue, creating a Black music canon different in significant ways from those compiled in the past.
Music, race, the paths of nostalgia and reinvention which recorded music tangles, obscures, blazes, and then re-aligns again, has profoundly affected my own life. To show how records and music technology played an integral part in making a musical tradition and lineage not my own feel personally intimate to me, I’ll describe some key moments in my own engagement with Black music.
III. PERSONAL HISTORY
“People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm”
- title of A Tribe Called Quest’s debut record (Zomba, 1990)
“Hadn’t I just been a special white boy?”
- William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs[20]
My interest in sample-based hip hop’s use of older music started, as many musical fascinations do, in a bedroom, though not my own.
In 1985 I was 15 years old, well into my sophomore year of high school and entering a friendship with Seth Boyd, a boy in the year before me. We had found common ground in a love for hip hop, and since we lived in neighboring towns—he in Cambridge and I in Somerville—we started hanging out and listening to music together.
Seth and I attended the Cambridge School of Weston, whose ponderous name charted its origins, 100 years ago, in Cambridge to its current location in Weston, an affluent suburb about 45 minutes outside of Boston. CSW sat high on the list of expensive high schools in the United States, and far left on the scale of educational and political philosophies. Our athletic teams were comic, our dance and theatre programs epic, and we cleaned up in the Boston Globe Scholastic Art Awards every year. Teachers and headmasters were known by their first names, and most rules were debated in weekly schoolwide assemblies, presided over by a Student Moderator.
Though Seth and I played on the school basketball team’s starting lineup all four years, this had nothing to do with our heavily subsidized status at CSW. Teachers certainly encouraged our efforts at writing fiction and essays—we were each told we were gifted at points—but I don’t imagine that our funding had to do with outstanding academic brilliance (or mine certainly didn’t). We simply needed help if we wanted to continue at the school. Seth’s mother was a technical writer, mine a graphic designer; his dad was an Harvard researcher and mine was a Boston public high school teacher. Many of our classmates’ parents seemed to have had similar jobs, but many others were high-tech entrepreneurs, architects or bankers, and a few were old rock stars, or psychic healers.
I quickly realized that my familiarity with hip hop was thoroughly pedestrian compared with Seth’s. His explorations in the genre were fearless and omnivorous, and his record collection dwarfed mine. While I was still dismissing artists on the basis of un-serious stage names—the Fat Boys were about as far as I would tolerate in what I considered a sternly cutting-edge musical phenomenon—Seth would bring home records by artists who called themselves things like Ice-T, the Fresh Prince, and Son of Bazerk, or had suspiciously electro-oriented names like Mantronix. Stuff you’d play in a dance club, I reckoned, not the b-boy battlegrounds I fantasized about breakdancing in. I admired his faith in the genre’s resilience, though it appeared to me that in the new rap marketplace, buffoonery was rapidly overtaking quality.
It wasn’t that I had a big problem with dance music. My father kept our house awash in music, and far and away the majority of the vinyl on our stereo was by Black artists. During my upbringing our living room was immersed in the music of Jimmy Reed, King Sunny Ade, J.B. Hutto, Earth Wind & Fire, Joan Armatrading, Dizzy Gillespie, Lonnie Liston Smith, Miles Davis, Ben Webster, Koko Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Archie Shepp, and what seemed like a million others. I awoke most weekend mornings to my parents dancing in the living room to Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall, Marvin Gaye, or Etta James. They took me to house parties (and threw some) where disco played all night long, and the dancing my favorite part. At some point someone, maybe one of my older cousins from Connecticut, referred to me as a dancing fool, and I decided that label was fine by me.
By ten years old I’d become, like a lot of kids in the late 1970s, a devout rollerskater. Recreational, practical, trendy, rollerskates were the perfect extension for almost everything I liked to do; go to friends’ houses, Harvard Square, and the MDC pool in the summer, as well as play tag and, crucially, get out of harm’s way quickly. I learned to dash up and down stairs, play basketball, street hockey, and hide-and-seek in skates—everything but swim. For a while I held a job as a rollerskating courier. I lived on polyurethane wheels for at least half of my second decade of life.
It was rollerskating that brought me that brought me to funk. The burning focus of my weekends for the three years before I turned 13 was a converted warehouse by the wastes off of Route 2 at Somerville’s decaying borderline; the Bal-A-Rou roller rink. Huge and utterly unprepossessing (the building was a warehouse to its very soul), it squatted lopsidedly in a nether zone off the highway, sunk into a strip of asphalt with no sidewalk to distinguish the road from the Chinese restaurants, truck stops, gas stations, and car repair shops tossed out along the pitted, intermittently streetlit road. If that nameless street was unaccommodating of pedestrians, it made some sense—no one who came near the Bal-A-Rou intended to be on their feet for long. Least of all myself, there to skate until they kicked me out of the place.
At home on the other side of town, watching the clock, ironing my Nino Cerrutti shirt, and praying my lone pair of Jordache jeans dried in time (occasionally I’d let my mother put them in the oven very carefully, just to speed the process), I pondered strategies for negotiating the upcoming evening without humiliation, and possibly enjoyment.
As a rank outsider under the thinnest veneer of belonging-ness, without an older sibling, Little League jacket, or a tam-o’-shanter with my youth hockey team’s name on it to announce my tribe, I was an unknown quantity to most other kids. Some potential belonging-ness gambits at the roller rink were obvious (mouthing the words to the song the DJ was playing shows you know cool music), but the angles were still tricky (only if you’re reciting them off-handedly, not actually singing—and not like you’re talking to yourself). I was trying to both read and transmit codes I didn’t quite comprehend (could I mouth the words if the song was sung by a lady?), while bearing up under unbreakable sexual tension, trying to evade a thousand concealed opportunities to fall into searing shame (what if I mouthed the words and got them wrong? And everybody would see?). The roller rink easily (and gleefully) built into a fraught fantasia of dangerous leisure.
But the most baffling aspect of the Bal-A-Rou was that it was segregated. Not strictly segregated—Barry, the DJ, was Black for instance—but the perfectly obvious fact was that Friday nights were white and Saturdays were Black. In reality, every moment the Bal-A-Rou was open was white because Somerville was predominantly Irish-Italian, Catholic, and clannish in that way (that is, in that racist way), but the transformation on Saturdays was breathtaking to me.
In fact the Friday/Saturday division was almost literally breathtaking in that I couldn’t talk about it with other kids. I didn’t know how. Most of the kids I knew from the rink, tough kids who lived in Somerville’s eastern neighborhoods, seemed to feel the switch that occurred between the Saturday afternoon session (grade-school birthday parties and kids with strict parents) and the Saturday night one was a comic inevitability, tolerated with smug bemusement. They didn’t have a choice, but if they did I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have wanted to surrender Saturday nights to a bunch of Blacks.
The lack of love for the weekly change of clientele was palpable; once a night, when Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll” came over the speakers, the opening riff launched fists-aloft sing-alongs which felt more like a tribal declaration than a hit song. My friend Jeff Melvin was the only other kid I knew who got as enthusiastic as I did about Saturdays, and he was such a widely-acknowledged weirdo that no one was surprised he loved the Saturday sessions. I never heard anyone else there mention the total, clockwork shift in the rink’s clientele.
Friday nights were all about speed; feathered hair, black tour T-shirts, REO Speedwagon and Foreigner, Black Sabbath and Kiss pounding out of the massive speakers slung above the vast, slightly warped ring of linoleum. Fridays champed and kicked with brawn and a romantic kind of velocity; the “men’s fast skate” rocketed into a breakneck hockey drill under the disco lights, fuelled by Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love.” Despite that we were all skating in circles, it felt like the goal was epic victory somehow. “Women’s fast skate” was all about icy efficiency, and—for me—standing agog rinkside.
But Saturday nights were all flash; Kool & the Gang, Shalamar, Newcleus, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious 5, Evelyn “Champagne” King. And the skating was all deep style, the synchrony on the floor graceful, swinging, and precise. When the “men’s fast skate” began, ignited to the strains of the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” we hit the floor hard and fast, but with a kind of refined fluidity. When the speeding pack of silk shirts and tinted shades hit the turns in headlong hurtle, we leaned into them as one, and blindly reached out hands to steady ourselves and, inadvertently, one another.
But best of all, there was dancing. There was no dancing on Fridays, or not for us boys anyway. Girls could dance but it was mostly a joking thing among friends, played for laughs—parodying the idea that one might really, actually dance. Otherwise aggression—the bone-breaking speed, the brittle, shuddering hockey stop, the collective chant to Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero”—was the only acceptable expressive outlet.
On Saturdays the session ended a half-hour early when everybody kicked off their skates and took to the rink in their socks, dancing until they turned the houselights on and cut the music. I had never seen anything like that before, and never wanted anything as strange to my experience to last more, or longer, than that moment; so late into Saturday it was almost Sunday, when I could break the rules with everyone else and shuffle onto that electrified gauntlet, that rink my feet had never touched, and dance upon it.
Two years later I was still in search of that thing, but further from it in ways I was barely able to name. I’d left Somerville public schools for the shaded quadrangle and teachers-on-a-first-name-basis arcadia of the Cambridge School. I began to spend less time with my old friends in Somerville, and most of the rules I’d hoarded in order to pass for normal there faded away too.
Increasingly, Seth and I would spend weekend afternoons in his bedroom, listening to his latest finds before heading out to Harvard Square to play video games, eat pizza, and eventually look at more records. The swoony noir of Roxy Music, Prince’s horny funk-rock, and Kate Bush’s art-rock operas held no appeal for my friend, but I realized I was getting the best exposure I could to music I would likely never buy for myself, so I listened hard and didn’t push for reciprocal consideration for New Order.
One afternoon Seth did something that made me realize I was not listening to rap records nearly as hard as he was.
“So check this out.” Seth pulled out a black LP with yellow circles scattered across it, each framing a cut-out of different singers’ heads. Blocky capitals read “James Brown’s Funky People.” The design looked crappy as a supermarket-sale banner (the cover, I told myself yet again—another sure gauge of a record’s quality) and the Godfather of Soul’s involvement appeared to be nominal. I was as ready to believe James Brown liked this record as I was to accept that the British legislative body smoked Parliament cigarettes, or Roy Rogers ate fast food at truck stops. This was the kind of record my Dad made me listen to—just what I’d escaped from before coming over!
“OK. What’s this?” I asked. He took the vinyl disk out and handed me the sleeve. A crackle came over the speakers, then; horns, the hiss-hush-crack of high hat and snare, and a delicious bass lick. “James Brown, right. Cool. Why am I listening to this?” I asked.
Was there supposed to be some kind of revelation here? Metalheads worshipped guitar solos, punks hated acoustic instruments, hippies loved them, and rappers sampled James Brown; these were truisms of the tribes.
“Nope, the J.B.s. You don’t recognize that?”
“The J.B.s? Is that a James Brown cover band? ‘Cause they sound like wanna be one. This song is OK. What else ya got?”
“No—the beat. Here.” Seth was the only person I know who touched records as much as he did. Or record players. The tone arm, the platter, the needle, even the belt drive underneath, which I didn’t know existed before he told me he had dismantled and reconfigured his. Now he lifted the tone arm and placed it back toward the beginning of the record; again, the tight, clean rhythm and bassline. “It’s from Eric B and Rakim. “I Ain’t No Joke.” You know this one. Here.”
Seth pulled Eric B and Rakim’s classic debut from a nearby milk crate (glimpse of ludicrous Gucci tracksuits, “dookie” gold chains, reams of dollar bills, ice grills), whipped it out and dropped it on the platter.
For the tenth or twentieth time, that peculiar shift occurred when the musical vestige overtook its source, and the association between the two pieces of music came clear. There it was, of course; slightly obscured, but clearly legible. A meaty James Brown-style break, perfectly chopped and looped, motivating the rhymes.
It was a fun kind of audio prestidigitation, nothing wildly significant. But what struck me then, for the first time, was that Seth had picked out and identified music neither one of us could’ve been expected to know anything about.
James Brown was then (as now) an acknowledged titan, though by the early 80s he was drifting into ridiculousness; he made a cameo in Rocky IV (itself a dogged revival of a spent franchise) reminding us he was indeed still “Living in America,” and Eddie Murphy played Brown as an addled, incomprehensible loon in Saturday Night Live skits. But you would still hear “I Got You (I Feel Good)” on the radio and so JB remained a presence. Like the portrait of long-dead President Jackson on the 10-dollar bill, he was part of the blur of significant cultural personages, someone you knew of but hardly knew anything about. You felt he was probably important, but that he didn’t really matter.
And though the J.B.s were plausible—their affiliation with Brown was musically obvious, and there was Soul Brother Number 1’s titular co-sign, and they got the initials right—no one really thought about James Brown’s band, they thought about James Brown. And no one had heard this music since what, 1973? The J.B.s were a hidden treasure to us, and if by pursuing their work we were vicariously shuffling through DJ Eric B’s record crates (and perhaps even his earliest inspirations; his parents’ record collection), that felt like a worthy quest—what Eric B knew was clearly worth knowing. Finding music like this was an act of will, creativity, resourcefulness, and, crucially, recovered memory, made more exciting if the memories happened not to be our own.
Discovering James Brown’s Funky People was a small but significant turning point in my relationship with Seth. As I drifted further into more predictable waters of the pop music ocean, on to romantic sad-boys like the Smiths and the Cure and yacht-rockers Steely Dan and Sade, Seth kept blindsiding me with feats of sample-spotting. His subsequent purchases took in jazz, musicals, novelty records, children’s music, film soundtracks, and many arcane tributaries of soul and funk.
In the last few years I’ve started thinking about those afternoons; two white kids, friends from a suburban private school, holed up in a bedroom in Cambridge, Massachusetts— hometown, of course, to Harvard, Radcliffe, and MIT— listening to generation-old Black music that our parents may have heard although it wasn’t marketed to them, or to anyone our parents really knew. Some this music scarcely registered within its intended market. How did we develop an interest in these B-sides, chart also-rans, and nearly-forgotten songs from 15 or 20 years ago? Why did we mythologize the artists, hunt their records down, scrutinize liner notes, album-core text and grill record-store clerks to glean clues for further searching?
When we considered it intellectually, our love for rap music and its stories of sex, violence, and deprivation sounded bizarre, but it felt just right; rap voiced some of our unexpressed fantasies, it was music which no one before us could claim because it hadn’t existed before us. This was our rebel music; and within the microclimate of the Cambridge School of Weston, punk and hippie rock were default options, but hip hop worked better for us not only because it felt more “authentic” but also because we felt it was never intended for us.
Even as hip hop expounded on experiences we couldn’t relate to at first hand, the crack-fuelled fires raging within the inner cities smouldered at the edges of our own neighborhoods and its residual effects were never very far. We felt some of that heat, the swelling power of the new cocaine derivatives poisoning the neighborhoods we skirted. Some of it was reflected in the impossibly glamorous clothing, cars, and jewelry the rappers we loved wore—thrilled but guilty, we knew this. But also, we lived in the city. Few of our classmates did, and as city kids on scholarship we often felt like outsiders around them.
But claiming old soul as one’s own would have been a lame, conservative move in our estimation. Krush Groove and Wild Style were cool movies whose soundtracks announced them as hip hop to the core; The Big Chill, with its cherry-picked roster of Motown hits, was not cool. Not that the music wasn’t good, it was—but nostalgia? No. Plus Motown didn’t really belong to you. Michael Jackson wasn’t even on Motown anymore. Motown belonged to our parents.
At around the same time Seth started hitting me with vinyl obscurities, I started seeing breaks compilations appearing in stores; Ultimate Breaks and Beats, unlicensed collections of songs recently sampled by hip hop producers, were put out on vinyl by New York DJ Lenny Roberts’ Street Beat Records, and marketed, to the degree they were marketed at all (as he was distributing illegal bootlegs, Roberts understandably kept their existence at a fairly low profile[21]), to other hip hop DJs and producers. Then came sampled artists’ responses to their work being used in hip hop; collaborations and/or musical admonishments, as in Jimmy Castor’s “Tellin’ On the Devil,” and James Brown’s “Rapp Payback (Where Iz Moses).”
The genesis comes full circle with hip hop DJs like DJ Shadow forming Cali-Tex Records and Eothen “Egon” Alapatt with his Now-Again imprint on the hip hop label Stone’s Throw, re-releasing sampled artists’ records packaged the same as when initially released, but in deluxe editions which might include extensive liner notes, new interviews with the artists, new photos, outtakes, B-sides and additional rarities. These efforts, though exceptional and which the compilers can’t expect to sell in volume, are clearly carried out by virtue of love for the artistry, and in the spirit of homage.
The instigating force for the bizarre scene in Cambridge, and in hundreds of other bedrooms, basement recreation rooms, and record stores in the US and abroad, was hip hop. It’s not that no other force in our lives would have brought that music to our attention—we were reasonably broad-minded musically, and where I wasn’t I had my Dad to insist I give due diligence to an even broader musical range—but nothing else would have made us as intensely interested in older music in those genres, or challenged us to discover, analyze, and decipher it.
I dropped out of touch with most of my high school friends after my first or second year of college, and Seth was one of them. With leaving home and entering college we were entering a new stage in our lives, but we also happened to choose schools that created, and by virtue of their geographic isolation almost enforced, an intensely insular social environment.
I went to Sarah Lawrence College, which resembled the Cambridge School in most important respects but for being located in New York instead of Massachusetts—small, expensive, artsy, suburban, cool but not tough, too left-wing to know what to do with its elite status—and Seth went to Hampshire, also similar to our high school but situated further out in Massachusetts, and further out in left-field generally, to judge from Seth’s reports.
When I last talked to Seth before we fell out of contact he was still DJing, had started rhyming a bit, and had taken up with some friends at Hampshire and formed a rap group. I thought this was cool and was surprised he had found folks interested in hip hop out there. But I suspected that a rap group formed at a liberal arts college in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts probably wouldn’t thrive, and that similarly, Seth’s devotion to hip hop would surely fade soon after as he immersed himself in college life.
I went away to Sarah Lawrence and did college badly. The collegiality, however, swept me in immediately; the intensity and psychological over-investment engendered by the school’s microcosmic social intrigues escalated to hostage-drama levels. Unstructured time, the shock of living away from home, and campus politics wreaked havoc on my drive to be serious, ascetic, and friendless.
SLC entertained campus politics of only one variety, besides the sexual variety, which was ultimately kind of fun because it was, well, sexual.
The un-fun politics concerned race, and it baffled us all; middle-class white left-leaning kids in an unregulated social hothouse, far from home and sipping from a firehose of new ideas simply had no idea how to deal with race. Looking back, I’m not sure the Black kids—also mostly middle-class—really did either.
The chorus of pop culture we harkened to, from which only Spike Lee’s movies and rap music seemed to be interested in addressing race (surely, we’d graduated from Bill Cosby’s aspirational sitcoms?), offered few answers. Lee’s movies, with their flawed, hyperbolic New York characters and morally tangled stories, left us pissed off and burning with more questions than answers. And hip hop seemed to counsel us to either burn down the nearest representation of the Establishment, keep dancing, or do something as fantastically alien to our experience as drink 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor and gun down our gang rivals from the windows of an Oldmobile 98.
Early in my first semester, I woke up to a bracingly different kind of alienating experience; out of what seemed like the clear blue sky, student protest had shut down the school. The campus was buzzing nervously with the news that the Black student union had taken over SLC’s main administration building, a towering Victorian mansion on a hill in the center of campus. The sit-in, which rumors said would go on indefinitely, was being held to protest the absence of tenured Black professors and African-American history courses in the school’s curriculum.
This was deeply strange to me; where I’d come from, kids got agitated over much less stern stuff than this—more anger was directed toward campus smoking regulations than social issues which affected the world outside.
The student organizers invited speakers to school to speak on white skin privilege and the persistence of racism, its manifestations in American life both institutionally and in its more subtle varieties, and how we white students benefited from them and Black people—including the ones we studied beside, our classmates—suffered under them. Each of these talks was packed, students crowding the doors and windows of the dance studio—the largest assembly space on campus—and they went deep into the night. We debated and argued what we’d heard for hours afterward in dorm rooms, the coffee house, and picnic tables scattered around campus. The discussions careened with what felt like mortal gravity, but we were grateful it was still warm enough to have them outside, sitting on the stone walls lining the lanes around the long, moonlit lawns in this strange, unchaperoned suburb of learning.
It’s hard to describe how incendiary and polarizing these events were within the student body. No one could remain neutral, and the issue seemed to hover over every discussion, even those that didn’t include race.
The ideas aired in that turbulent period cleft the student body down the middle. They either instigated waves of self-interrogation in white students who listened to the rhetoric around them (and to accounts of Black students’ own experiences with racism) and instilled a newly radical vision of the world and their place in it. Alternatively, they spurred furious denial and backlash from other white students, who felt that claims of a pervasive racism which dominated American life and insured that they benefited where others suffered, were extreme, myopic, bullying, too sweeping, too vitriolic, or all of these at once.
Most claimed that the specifics of their personal lives exempted them from guilt. How could they be racists? They were kind, gifted, talented, middle class (everyone felt they were middle class), color-blind people with cool friends of all types, and intolerant of cruelty, phony people, unfairness, and bigotry of any kind.
Some white students seemed to feel the uproar was unfair to them personally. None of what we were here to lose, gain, figure out, and possibly revolutionize for ourselves—our sexuality, famously, but also the Western canon, our cooler and wiser post-high school identities, virginity, newly familiar relationships with teachers, our career paths—included anything on this scale, anything which wagered for such high stakes.
The stakes felt terrifyingly high to me. Facing the idea that I might be racist, that I could only have ever been racist by dint of everything about my identity and history, I felt blindsided by a terrible reckoning. My fundamental legitimacy as a person was to be assessed despite—or because of—everything I had understood as essential to me. Had I fooled myself utterly, willfully blind to my oppression-wrought advantages? Other kids seemed to feel that various particulars in their lives made them impervious to these criticisms that I needed desperately to dodge. Did anything in my own life get me off the hook?
I certainly thought so. Whatever I was, a racially-unaware elite blithely capitalizing on my racial entitlement wasn’t it. Wagging the accusation of privilege at me felt like a crazy misunderstanding.
Well, mostly crazy. I had left one very expensive school full of affluent kids for another. I didn’t really have any Black friends, mostly because there were very few Black students at either place, lolling around on the quad with the hippies and punks, skipping assembly and attending life drawing with an actually nude model. And I had to admit, my friends outside of school weren’t Black either.
But I played basketball, I was the best breakdancer I knew, I paid a lot of attention to sneaker styles, my Dad taught in rough schools in the ghettoes of Boston all through the school integration crisis, and he still did. I was a deeply urban creature who’d never learned to drive and never wanted to.
Just as important to my sense of self was the fact that I was a rap music fan. Only my father’s work meant more to me within the defensive array I was building. And my Dad brought his work home with him—a lot. Over dinners at the kitchen table, on nights he got home early enough to eat with my Mom and I, his stories of soldiers and schoolbuses instilled in me a fretful, agonized sense of racial strife in the city. I wore a lot of Smiths t-shirts sure, but I liked rap from the first, and I mean the very first. Nobody was onto rap, the most contemporary and relevant of all Black music genres, before I was, I knew it.
Plus I listened to rap. Rap you could dance to was cool, but it wasn’t the best stuff out there (another bit of uncommon knowledge, I told myself, which only a real rap fan would know). I mean, the difference between the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5’s “The Message” was disco, hedonism, and funny stories versus reality, poetry, poverty, bad stuff in ghettoes—stuff you could think about. Girls who liked Bananarama and Rick Springfield knew the lyrics to “Rapper’s Delight” (or at least the funny, non-dirty parts). “The Message,” however, was deep—clearly the superior song.
Also, when I danced to hip hop music, I danced hip hop. I wasn’t trying to go out to some disco and just dance to whatever was playing. Not anymore. I wasn’t trying to dance to rock and roll (“dance” to rock? What, like that guy in Footloose?) My father’s students taught me the Smurf! I would breakdance for people and they’d give me money! (granted, mostly me and my friends got free ice cream when we’d set up in the middle of the local ice cream parlor). My idols were Black people—Prince, Michael Jackson, Fab 5 Freddy, graffiti artists, the New York City Breakers, Eddie Murphy. Who were these people calling me a racist?
Fortunately, this was all occurring at college, so people collectively got over it; the sit-in, the self-interrogation, the splintering discomfort. The sit-in ended with the administration promising discussions with student representatives. It seemed dubious to me that this would change anything in reality, but in fact it did.
One thing that changed was the availability of African-American history courses, which I took advantage of, and where I studied under Komozi Woodard, who became a mentor to me. By the end of my senior year I had managed to reconcile my anguish and was deeply immersed in the Five Per Cent Nation-influenced music of groups like Brand Nubian and Poor Righteous Teachers, the apocalyptic scenarios sketched by Ice Cube.
And then fifteen years later I found myself at Vibe, one of the most important hip hop and R&B magazines in the country, talking about, of course, hip hop. My interlocutor was another of my mentors, George Pitts, the magazine’s photo director who now heads Parson School of Design’s photography program.
As I had been on those afternoons listening to music in Seth’s bedroom, I was still frustrated by hip hop. “I’ll always love rap,” I told George. “But I can’t handle the stupidness—all that booty rap, and the guns, jewelry, misogyny, the waste. Like the Watts Prophets said—it’s all just ‘party and bullshit.’”
Then George smiled at me and said, “But that’s rock n’ roll too, Damien. I mean, do you require rock to be principled and upstanding? Are you sure you aren’t asking hip hop to do more than you demand of other music?”
III. COLLECTORS
In looking at record collectors and the influence they wield, I began by analyzing the different types of people who collect recordings.
The table below illustrates the eight types I settled on as encompassing the various types of collectors. I should note that for reasons that will become clear later in this paper, Harry Smith has been assigned his own type for though he did not quite have a peer among the collectors of his day, he was influential enough to merit mention separately from other collectors. I will discuss Smith’s work at length later in this paper.
Collector |Genre(s) |Financial support |Collector / organization type |Collector interest / motivation |Acquisition method |Promulgation Method | |Harry Smith |Folk et al |Amateur, self-supporting |Amateur
• Academic |Anthropological
• Cultural: Nationalist
• Cultural: Racial/Ethnic
• Aesthetic connoisseurship |Buying/trading in-scene
• Buying retail
• Buying 2nd-hand
• Scavenging |Recorded product (as curator / academic) | |James McKune / Blues Mafia |Blues |Amateur, self-supporting |Amateur
• Enthusiast scene |Aesthetic connoisseurship |Buying/trading in-scene
• Buying retail
• Buying 2nd-hand
• Scavenging |Informal pedagogy
• Recorded product (as curator / academic) | |Smithsonian / Folkways |Folk
• Blues
• Jazz
• Classical
• Popular composers |Partly state-supported
• Partly donation-supported |Government
• Academic |Anthropological
• Cultural: Nationalist
• Cultural: Racial/Ethnic |Field recording
• Bequests?
• Solicited donations? |Recorded product (as label)
• Curated performances (festivals, etc)
| |Specialist Libraries |- Classical
- Popular composers
- Musical theatre
- Live perf.s by same?
|Partly state-supported
• Partly donation-supported |Academic |Academic |Academic curators
• Faculty requests?
• Bequests?
|Curated performances (festivals, etc)
• Recorded product (as label)?
| |Northern Soul DJs |60s R&B
• strong emphasis on rarities |Amateur, self-supporting |Enthusiast scene
• Commercial |Status / rarity
• Performability / dance-ability |Buying/trading in-scene
• Buying retail
• Buying 2nd-hand
• Scavenging |Performance (DJing)
| |Hip Hop DJs |Funk
• R&B
• Latin soul
• Jazz
• African, “world”
• strong emphasis on rarities
|Amateur, self-supporting
• To some and wildly varying degree, industry-supported |Enthusiast scene
• Artistic
• Commercial
|Status / rarity
• Performability / dance-ability
• Creative
• Af-Am heritage?? |Buying/trading in-scene
• Buying retail
• Buying 2nd-hand
• Scavenging
• Inheriting? (parents’ / relatives’ record collections, etc) |Performance (DJing)
• Recorded product (as artist) | |Post-Hip Hop “Beat” Music Collectors |Funk
• R&B
• Latin soul
• Jazz
• Prog
• African, “world”
• Etc; strong emphasis on rarities, music of the African diaspora |Amateur, self-supporting |Enthusiast scene
• Commercial |Status/rarity
• Cultural: Racial/Ethnic
• Performability / dance-ability
• Physical preservation of object
• Aesthetic connoisseurship
|Buying/trading in-scene
• Buying retail
• Buying 2nd-hand
• Scavenging |Performance (DJing)
• Recorded product (as label) (in some cases) | |Pop Music Archives (Country Hall of Fame, E.M.P. in Seattle, Rock H.o.F. in Cincinnati) |- Roughly, post-WW2 genres of pop / youth music |Trade-supported |Academic
• Industry-affiliated |- Academic
• Physical preservation of object
• Cultural: Nationalist
|Industry-affiliated acquisition
• Bequests?
• Solicited donations? |Book publishing
• Academic conferences
• Award ceremonies
• Curated performances (festivals, etc) | |Collector |Genre(s) |Financial support |Collector / organization type |Collector interest / motivation |Acquisition method |Promulgation Method | |
Exh. 7
In this paper, I will look at folk collectors, blues collectors, jazz collectors briefly, and hip hop DJs in their capacity as both artists and collectors.
IV. COLLECTORS AND DJs
“You’re looking through all these records and it’s sort of like a big pile of broken dreams in a way… So you have to kind of respect that. If you’re making records and if you’re a DJ and you’re putting out releases... Ten years down the line you’ll be in here. So keep that in mind when you start thinking Oh yeah, I’m invincible or I’m the best or whatever. That’s what all these cats thought.”
- DJ Shadow in the basement of TK record store in TK, on digging, Scratch, 2001
This paper has to do with how individuals affect cultural consensus. Communication between individuals and groups, establishment figures and radicals, the elitist and the populist, is of course crucial to consensus formation. For consensus to be reached, people must know what it is they’re debating about, and the standards by which that thing will be judged by.
Within the humanities, these debates and the resulting consensus (however “pure” or democratic these nominally mutual agreements may be) are how canons are created; musical, literary, philosophical, architectural, and fine art canons (as well as others in disparate fields) result from the kind of critical dialogue through which societies endeavor to determine what of their cultural expressions ought to endure, and be passed on as their legacy. Howard S. Becker discusses the theory of reputation within art worlds[22], encapsulating it thusly:
“Art worlds, in a variety of interwoven activities, routinely make and unmake reputations… By creating the circumstances that favor one or another kind of career and achievement, art world participants—here conceived on the largest scale as including all the members of a society—define the possibilities for making a reputation.”[23]
Becker also goes on to say that consensus is, of course, subject to historical and social contaxt, and is rarely arrived at in ways satisfactory to all interested parties, and it rarely settles serenely for long. In short order, other perspectives offer challenges, and circumstances naturally evolve through time in ways that introduce new problems for dominant canons—and the criteria which assigned them.
The problem of establishing canons is further complicated by the subjective nature of art. To designate one work or group of works as superior, all entrants to the discussion must agree on the terms of assessment.
As in any argument, setting the terms often determines the outcome. Probably the best way to establish those critical standards within art is by being a member of that culture’s dominant social group. The other way, as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu[24], is to gain the degree of cultural capital necessary to attain membership in the cultural elite within that society[25].
One way to advocate for your discriminatory powers, and the way which I am concerned with in this paper, is to display your cultural knowledge to others in ways that make the argument for your superior judgment for you. Thornton’s Club Cultures explores this maneuver in detail, coining the term “subcultural capital” for this display of knowledge particular to specific subcultural groups. David Toop quotes seminal hip hop figure Afrika Bambaata describing how as a prominent Bronx DJ in the late 1970s, he would do this by not only keeping crowds dancing with the records he played, but get them dancing to music they never thought they would dance to, or indeed, one suspects, knowingly tolerate: “I used to like to catch the people who’d say ‘I don’t like rock. I don’t like Latin.’… I’d throw on the Monkees… and they’d start going crazy. I’d say, ‘You just danced to the Monkees.’ They’d say, ‘You liar. I didn’t dance to no Monkees.’ I’d like to catch people who categorize records”[26] With this flourish, Bambaataa demonstrated that he knew what dancers would like better than they themselves did; the breadth of his knowledge afforded him a level of subcultural capital which could make him seem almost clairvoyant, but also, by demonstrating an ability to recognize good music beyond what his audience might expect, grant him racial and cultural ease of transit.
And so it becomes important for interested connoisseurs to find, and excel in, forums in which they may demonstrate their surpassing taste. These demonstrations of superior discernment are crucial to those cultural connoisseurs’ status even though—and specifically because—the field in which they seek to gain authority is subjective. Art yields to as many equally valid judgments as there are observers. Tautologically, every observer (or listener, audience member, reader, etc.) is correct in their judgment—disco sucks, Metallica rules, Clapton is God—simply because they made that judgment. The slippery and non-absolute nature of aesthetic standards in a postmodern world mean that demonstrations of superior discernment—I think of them as “knowledge performances”—occupy such a vital place for connoisseurs.
The group that possesses the authority to render a subjective selection into a canon will depend on the institution. And the institution—whether it is a governing body, or a set of dominant ideological principles—will vary with genre, style, or characteristic variation.
As this paper is concerned with the similarities between disc jockeys and record collectors, I want to look at some of the ways that each group engages in consensus-making dialogues.
V.
But before continuing, I will make two bold claims. First, that the vast majority of record collectors—and again I am focusing here on music recordings—specialize in what they collect in some way. Second, that very few record collectors gather specialized materials in isolation.
The first claim would seem to be reliably true in that the alternative notion is that there is a significant population of people who simply collect recordings of every variety of music, or who collect music in any format or vessel.
The idea that there is a considerable group of collectors who truly value all music which happens to have been recorded—as fierce to snap up Leona Lewis as Peter Sarstedt, G.G. Allin, Sir Harry Lauder, Bobby Rydell, Yoko Ono, karaoke instrumentals, Hawaiian slack-key guitar, death metal demo tapes, whale “songs,” shape-singing, “Happy Birthday” sung into an answering machine, etc, seems scarcely plausible. Such collectors might be more properly called musicophiliacs than collectors.
The existence of significant numbers of collectors who gather recordings of any type seems equally implausible. That there might be a cohort who are equally drawn to wax cylinders, MP3s, reel-to-reel tape, acetates, DAT tape, piano rolls, music boxes, shellac 78s, and magazine giveaway Flexi-Discs, each to the same degree, would, I contend, make such collectors qualify more as aficionados of technology than of music. While we know that musical and technological fetishes are quite compatible, we also know that predilections for certain technologies tend (broadly) to drive music connoisseurs further toward certain genres, as with the “trad” musician’s cautious regard for electricified instruments, or the mutual suspicion between many rock (guitar-orientated) genres and dance (electronic music-orientated) genres.
The second claim, that collectors rarely collect in isolation, would seem to be reliably true because collecting is both a creative act and a social one.
Creativity, for the most part, demands an audience of some kind. Collectors don’t passively accrue stuff, they select, choosing certain materials and not others. In order to do this, collectors will strategize, speculate on market conditions, study history, and devise ways to display, conceal, protect, publicize, bequeath, and increase the value of their hoard—all actions that require creativity. Such devotion tends to instill pride, and if her collection is anything she is proud of, it seems fair to say that that collector will almost always seek to share it.
This tendency to social contact is evident from that the activities described above implicitly recognize the wider world in which the collecting takes place. If the collector is drawing from the social world and not from an entirely idiosyncratic context (as for instance with the pet owner who amasses an archive of portraits of his dog), then he or she must at least be aware of what else within their specialty is available, and what others have and seek. And of course quite often they will absorb masses of detailed information about the world of collecting their favored materials.
One of the significant ways in which both record collectors and DJs state their arguments is by making lists. My own entirely unscientific but first-hand observation indicates that, aside from “want lists” of records sought by a given collector, and artist or label discographies, these lists will tend to be, essentially, best-of rankings.
First and foremost, record collectors listen to music together, indulging in mutual appreciation for what they love, but they also take their engagement with the materials deeper. Collectors swap tales of musicians and the music industry, share technological minutia, collecting lore, and trade and sell records among themselves. But this sharing is possibly a charitable term for what is probably, inevitably, simply comparing. They debate quality among like-minded connoisseurs; quality of recordings, musicians, regional styles, record labels, formats, studios, producers, eras, etc.[27] Advocating for their own perspective on the correct qualitative ranking of what they love is a form of taste-making, done by what could be characterized as broadcasting, but is probably more often narrowcasting; a social activity, it amounts to fostering a canon via peer-group discussion. This is the record collector’s form of cultural consensus-fostering mentioned above.
Collectors will also use mass media to broadcast their expertise, as when they publish books on their genre, create song compilations, organize performances, or with themed radio programs devoted to their specialty. Of the various types of collectors, hip hop DJs are different from the types I will look at in one respect.
Hip hop DJs engage in all the peer-group sharing and mass-media distribution activities mentioned above, but they also broadcast by performing live. Other types of collectors DJ professionally of course, from those who spin at rockabilly or swing nights at clubs, to dancehall selectors in competitive Jamaican soundclashes[28] and dance-music DJs do so as well—indeed for the latter two, performance is integral to those scenes. But the ability to “move the crowd” is central to the origins of hip hop DJing, and is a skill which while it may not be called on often is considered a basic component of the hip hop DJ’s repertoire. This sets them apart from, for instance, folk and blues collectors, whose superior taste and knowledge is not tested in this way.
In the development of hip hop DJing, perhaps the most important factor was the sheerly practical imperatives which bears on the DJ due to the nature of playing records as a performing art. These imperatives have their origins in the competition between DJs as professional live entertainers. For whatever liberties hip hop took early on with records and audience’s sensibilities around musical tradition, certain demands were non-negotiable. Principally, the DJ had to play records that listeners would—or could—dance to.
As artists in a popular music form with origins in dance music (disco and funk originally[29]), hip hop DJs tend to pay most attention to other dance-orientated genres to use in their own compositions. Brewster and Broughton go so far as to assert that dancers, specifically the breakdancers whose virtuosic moves would ignite a party, preceded hip hop DJing, and that the breakdancers’ refusal to get on the dancefloor until the right break was played forced DJs to loop breaks[30].
Funk, disco, soul, R&B, some types of jazz, various Latin styles such as salsa, sabrosa, bugulu, and those genres’ many tributaries feed into the well from which hip hop DJs draw for their own music-making.
In addition to the necessity of playing dance-able music, hip hop DJs drew upon the cultural influences around them. Created in urban American communities in the 1970s, with roots in African-American and Caribbean music and performance traditions[31], hip hop reflected the flavor of social movements and the politics of its era and place.
Certainly the hedonism of the disco era, of which hip hop was partly, and was certainly initially perceived to be, a kind of novelty offshoot, informed hip hop’s positioning itself as a celebratory dance music. Conversely, the stern poetic dramas and warning tales told in Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5’s “The Message,” Divine Sounds’s “What People Do For Money,” and Run-DMC’s “Hard Times” took thematic and political cues from the Black Arts and Black Power movements of the early-to-mid 1970s[32].
Hip hop’s backbone, or backbeat, also came from the music which those DJs grew up surrounded by. As David Serlin has pointed out[33], it appears to be no accident that so many hip hop records from the 87-94 period sampled children’s music, as the music on kids’ shows dating from roughly the mid-to-late 70s, when hip hop DJs would have been kids themselves, was often deeply funky. In this respect, hip hop DJs might be said to be the only type of record collectors whose first acquisitions are inherited.
To summarize, in pursuing musical artifacts, collectors in practically all cases will tend to specialize. They are compelled toward social engagement in their roles as music archivists not only by the creative nature of collecting, but also by their role within wider musical discourse. Collectors share their passion with others not only as a means of expanding and refining their musical knowledge, but to display their knowledgeable reputation within their genre; that is, to accrue cultural capital. As collectors, hip hop DJs differ from many other types of collectors in that their practice incorporates professional and competitive aspects as integral components. Hip hop’s foundations in dance music of the mid- to late 1970s maintains an integral connection to its current practice, and compels hip hop DJs to seek most of its sources within rhythmically-orientated genres.
VI. FOLK COLLECTORS
“Really, is it yours? I had supposed it was something old.”
- Unknown, as quoted from the Anthology of American Folk Music’s liner notes
The next type of collector I want to look at is the folk music collector.
Folk music’s most closely guarded ideology is its insistence on the music’s origin within folk culture. For folk connoisseurs, music that’s “folk-y” is something quite different from folk music. The difference is in the context; the former is a reflection of the latter, and the latter is a category bound by membership and tradition to a far greater extent than other music genres.
So the music’s authenticity is paramount and hinges on that it is being played by integral members of the culture or community who created the form, and that the music being played is integral in some way to their culture. But the environment in which the recording took place trumps the importance of most other concerns such as pristine reproduction, the skill level of the musicians, the particulars of how it was captured, and to some extent even the musician’s identity[34]. In judging the importance of what they were singing, the artist’s persona and individual celebrity generally took a backseat to their ability, another consequence of Popular Front ideologies emphasizing the collective over the individual.
Folk fans also favor live performance in situ as the proper form for folk-music expression; their orientation could be said to be toward ritual as proof of the music’s cultural integrity. This favoring of the of the music as performance, and the correct setting for it, probably has its origins in the scientific study of folklore, with folklorists and anthropologists leaving the groves of academe to witness and record the folkways of different cultures at first hand, all while taking rigorous measures—more and less successfully—to ensure their presence did not interfere with the documentation. I’ll discuss the ways anthropological ideas influenced record collecting later in this paper.
But folk music is of course not dependent on recording, and certain strains of folk connoisseurship distrust recording technology as an impure and intrusive presence—fundamentally non-native, and a potentially polluting element. Indeed for folk collectors involved in field recording, such as ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the recording process is hidden whenever and however possible, in some cases edited or amended to enhance the sense of “real-ness” which on-the-spot recording lends to folk music’s imperative of authenticity.
All this is to say that folk music connoisseurs tend to follow ideologies of authenticity and cultural value that regard technology with suspicion. They view the music as a paradoxically both fundamental and fugitive, to be pursued (reverentially) but not tarnished by the “modern world”—roughly, the world after the Industrial Revolution, or after first contact with the outside (often Western, colonial) world. Recording technology, even though it made the documentation and preservation of the music possible is generally seen as part of an impure modern world.
One prominent example of this concern is John Lomax, who deeply feared that his “discovery,” the great folk musician Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, would be ruined by exposure to the popular tunes which Leadbelly’s peers, and Leadbelly himself, enjoyed, and did everything he could to insulate the artist from modern music made by his artistic contemporaries[35]. This music was, of course, easily available to Leadbelly via commercial records and radio. These technologies brought Leadbelly’s contemporaries rewards in the form of notoriety and recording fees, but more importantly in the ability to book live dates, from which they gained financial profit, and in which—particularly with Black audiences—they held much more freedom as performers. But Lomax felt that Leadbelly’s “purity” as a musician would be compromised through exposure to, for instance, jazz or pop songs of the day, and in his capacity as Leadbelly’s manager determined not only where Leadbelly played but what, and how.
Indeed, in demanding that Leadbelly perform dressed in the penitentiary stripes he wore as a prisoner at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana (where Lomax first encountered him in 1933, serving time for attempted murder)[36], it would seem that Lomax felt he needed to signal to audiences that the artist had been physically insulated from modern culture—that Leadbelly was literally walled off from contemporary influences, and that thus listeners were being presented with an unpolluted font of Black folk culture.
The suspicion folk connoisseurs direct toward technology, and recording technology specifically, puts record collections themselves in an interesting place in folk music ideologies. Folk aficionados—and most fans, I would venture, of what is often called “roots music,” including blues, country, jazz, certain strains of blues-based rock, and any genre preceded by the word “traditional”—hold expectations that recordings reflect only the music and “honestly” reveal the conditions in which that recording was created. But suspicion of recording technology co-exists with a paradoxical belief that recording technology is nevertheless capable of preserving their music accurately and authentically—a desire to “us[e] the phonograph to escape from the phonograph,” as Hamilton puts it[37]. They expect records to be non-fiction without acknowledging that all recording necessarily contains fictions within it.
As physically immutable but ideologically interpretable documents, records both threaten and insure the notion of (or a fetish for) a pure past, a “music of the people” which folk connoisseurs value. For while folk places high value on historical specificity, at the same time it holds to the notion of folk music as an ahistorically “true” expression which emerged from a communal originating forge. Despite its mystic sense of itself as traceable within the essence of all music, folk also seems to harbor an obsessive fear for its own survival, freighted with an imperative to keep itself alive, particularly against the onslaughts of historical change.
Folk collectors come in different varieties, with two types prevailing; song collectors (those who transcribe and/or notate, or create field recordings) and collectors of recordings. For this paper, I will be concentrating on the type that collects folk recordings. Specifically, I want to look at Harry Smith, whose self-financed and -guided exploration of American folk music differed from his contemporaries John and Alan Lomax in one crucial respect. Smith’s singular trait was that he collected folk records created for the consumer market. To that point, folk collectors had usually focused on creating recordings (either via technology such as tin foil and wax cylinders, or by directly transcribing the words and music manually as part of academic, usually anthropological, research. Smith’s focus on records created for consumers marked him as a unique actor in the field to that point.
Smith is probably the best example of a folk record collector because it was his vast record collection which became what is probably the defining single document of the American folk music revival, 1952’s aptly-named Anthology of American Folk Music. Conversely, Smith is also a problematic example of a folk record collector because though his collection was vast and rich, and its distillation, in the form of the Anthology, became canonical, he was a deeply idiosyncratic individual who intentionally flouted the orthodoxies of musical categorization prevalent in his day. His dissident bent, omnivorous musical appetite , and his Romantic, universalist ambitions in divining patterns in art from widely disparate cultures, meant that his collecting strategies varied with that of folk connoisseurs and most academics of the time. For just one example, Smith intentionally refused to classify songs on the Anthology into racial categories. As he told John Cohen “It took years before anybody figured out that Mississippi John Hurt wasn’t a hillbilly.”[38] Smith created an American folk canon by rewriting the rules of what counted as folk.
Smith has said that he wasn’t looking to gather “all the best records…” in one place, but that he was looking for “unusual versions, or ones others might want to improve upon.”[39] He hoped, in the largest sense but certainly with the music gathered on the Anthology, to forge connections between cultures, draw parallels between their themes, patterns, styles, and delineate a way to the universal in human expression. He described his method of categorization as “musicological,” but it seems to me it was more metaphysical—it observed rules of a more profound order, more passionate than scientific, and at once evangelical and rigorous.
The idea that cultures share common tropes and are all connected by a universal patterns, may well have issued from his mother’s Theosophist beliefs and their emphasis on gathering and harmonizing disparate occult theologies[40], but also, and crucially, the work of the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas.
Boas’s then-radical notion held that “all cultures have progressed equally but in unique ways,”[41] countering prevalent ideas that an evolutionary hierarchy applied to cultural development, and that racial characteristics determine the stages of cultural “progress.” Boas’s work also took historical and material circumstances into account in assessments of cultural expression, challenging notions of racial and cultural determinism while defending what he felt were “fundamental truths” which were “common to mankind”[42]. The lineage between what Stocking terms Boas’s “universalistic rationalism”[43] and Smith’s project, undertaken in the conviction that close analysis will reveal the universal patterns which unite all cultures, seems clear.
Indeed, while Smith claimed that in high school he corresponded with Boas[44], it’s certain that before even entering university in Washington state he did some fieldwork with University of Washington anthropology professors Melville Jacobs and Erna Gunther, who had studied under Boas.
Smith may also have encountered Boas through his work with native Americans. In 1911, Boas’s Handbook of American Indian Languages was published by the Bureau of American Ethnography, in which he wrote grammars for several native American languages. One of these was Kwakiutl, the language of the tribe now known as the Kwakwaka’wakw, who live on Vancouver Island near Smith’s Washington childhood home. As a teenager, Smith himself created dictionaries of the language of native American tribes who lived near him.
But Smith’s unorthodox thinking is only a portion of his importance to the establishment of a folk canon. Materially, his contribution was the Anthology.
But a little of Smith’s background and the history of the Anthology is in order here.
Harry Everett Smith is perhaps better-known now as an important avant-garde filmmaker[45], but he spent his entire life as a collector, devoting himself to a dizzying range of interests. In addition to gathering religious totems and artifacts from all over the world[46], he amassed major collections of string figures and painted Ukranian Easter eggs[47]. Though his collection of “large-sized Kwakiutl and Swinomish ceremonial paraphernalia”[48] and recordings of ceremonies collected as a teenager on a Lummi Indian reservation were lost when Smith moved to New York in 1950, his collection of Seminole patchwork textiles is housed in New York’s Museum of Natural History[49], and his collection of paper airplanes resides in the US’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC[50].
While he embodied the intellectual and artistic tropes and lifestyle associated with 1960s counterculture in America and the Beat circle, Smith himself was by no means a refugee from a conformist upbringing by out-of-touch parents in a culturally sterile home. Indeed Smith’s path, unusual as it was, proceeded harmoniously from a profoundly unusual upbringing.
Robert and Mary Louise Smith held what were, for the time, quite radical beliefs and religious faiths within their household. Judging by Smith’s accounts, his family’s circumstances and eccentricities virtually demanded he be exposed to cultures and schools of thought outside the American mainstream during his childhood and adolescence.
Born in Portland in 1923, Smith grew up in the town of Anacortes, Washington, on the island of Fidalgo. As young as 10 years of age, Smith was working out methods of “writing down” dances he watched on the nearby Swinomish Indian reservation. In high school, Smith has said, “as the school bus went out take people back to the Indian reservation, I would usually ride out there after school every day,” and he often made sound recordings of the ceremonies that took place on it.
Mary Louise Smith taught school on the Lummi reservation near Bellingham, and Robert Smith, whom Harry described as a former cowboy, worked as a watchman at a salmon cannery, but they lived separately in nearby houses. Their son was evidently a serious, attentive, and widely curious only child.
Writing in the liner notes to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Ed Sanders of the Fugs, the band whose debut record Smith produced in 1965[51], says “the [Smith] family had a history of being active in Freemasonry and the occult” and “both parents were reputed to be Theosophists.” Mary Louise suggested to her son that his father was actually the English Satanist Aleister Crowley, and that she herself may have been Anastasia, last of the Romanovs, the Russian imperial family. Harry described the basement of his house as being full of “books on whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, alchemy and so forth.” In addition to all this stimulation, intrigue, and speculative grandiosity, the Smiths also ran an art school out of their home for a time.
Harry studied anthropology for five semesters at the University of Washington starting in 1942, while working nights outfitting bombers at a nearby Boeing factory. Following his mother’s death, he left for San Francisco, where he entered bohemian circles and began painting, smoking marijuana, collecting records, and making his first hand-painted films.
A visit to New York in 1950 convinced him to change coasts, and by 1951 he was living in Manhattan, where lived for all but the very last years of his life.
Smith’s aim was not only to illuminate and document the varieties and features of America’s traditional musics, but to illustrate their connections[52]. Ed Sanders tells the story that for his12th birthday, Smith’s father gave him a blacksmith set and instructed him to turn lead into gold[53]. The boy grew up to work a forge, though his medium wasn’t metal but the lattice of cultural memory, alloying the past to the present, and the far-flung transplants in the New World to one another’s artistic heritage.
Smith and Moses Asch, founder and owner of Folkways Records, the label which pressed and distributed the Anthology of American Folk Music, had a contentious but ultimately (and somewhat miraculously) symbiotic relationship. Their sympathies were well-attuned, particularly for two men whose aims were outwardly askew; Asch, a fierce advocate for traditional music his whole life, was also a man trying to run a business; Smith was a true iconoclast, a kind of freestyle bon vivant artist-anthropologist trying to live the life of the (often chemically unfettered[54]) mind. Like the Beat poets[55], Smith was a fearless humanist intellectual about a decade and half too early to enjoy the vogue for such heresies, and this makes it the more remarkable that his sensibilities developed as they did in an era and nation inhospitable to nonconformist thinkers.
At the outset of the Anthology project, Smith simply approached Asch with 78s he wanted to sell[56]. He had arrived in New York after Hilla Rebay, first director of the Guggenheim Museum, had arranged for a Guggenheim grant for his work as a painter[57] but Smith had spent it all on travel, and was looking to raise cash[58]. Asch suggested he distill his horde into the collection that became the Anthology. Smith agreed, telling his new collaborator, “Look, this is what I want to do, I want to lay out the book of notes. I want to do the whole thing. All I want to be sure of is that they are issued.”[59]
Smith wrote the liner notes and designed them using found images and old illustrations; on the cover of the set he used a depiction of the Celestial Monochord. This ancient musical instrument served as a kind of emblem representing Smith’s vision of the essential unity of expressive forms across cultures. As Greil Marcus explains in his chapter on Smith and the Anthology, “The Old, Weird America,”:
Dating back to at least 400 B.C., said to have been invented by Pythagoras, the monochord was a protean instrument, a simple sounding box with a single string… The monochord was used for tuning and as a timer until the late nineteenth century; five hundred years earlier the word had entered the English language as a synonym for harmony, agreement—for the “acorde,” the poet John Lyngate wrote in 1420, between “Reason & Sensualyte.”
On the covers of the Anthology volumes the monochord was shown being tuned by the hand of god. It divided creation into spheres of energy, into fundaments; printed over the filaments of the etching… were record titles and the names of blues singers, hillbilly musicians, and gospel chanters Smith was bringing together for the first time. It was as if they had something to do with each other: as if Pythagoras, [Robert] Fludd, and the likes of the Jilson Setters, Ramblin’ Thomas, the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and Smith himself were calling on the same gods.[60]
As Smith said, referring to his work not only as a painter but as an ethnographer, “my essential interest in music was the patterning that occurred in it… I’m sure that if you could collect sufficient patchwork quilts from the same people who made the records, like Uncle Dave Macon’s or Sara Carter’s houses, you could figure out just about anything you can from the music…. Like certain things sound good to a person in music, certain things look good to the eye. And at some level those two are interconnected.”[61] Ignoring chronology and the categorization orthodoxies of the time which emphasized a song’s racial and cultural origin (in which recordings were marketed as “race records,” “hillbilly records,” etc.), he arranged the songs according to “an epistemological, musicological”[62] analysis, dividing all 84 selections into just three types: “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs.”
In the late 1920s, Greil Marcus explains, “northern record companies suddenly realized that the spread of rail lines and the emergence of radio on a mass scale had opened up self-defining and accessible audiences throughout the South.”[63] And so began the drive to record local musicians and get those recordings, at that time still cast in the 78 r.p.m. shellac disc format, onto radiowaves into area stores for purchase. “As a historical period, they were an economic opportunity to capture ritual,” Marcus notes, “and it was the scent of ritual that Smith pursued.”[64]
This tremendously productive moment witnessed the documentation of most of what is now considered the classic blues, country, Cajun, and other folk musics. But, as Smith himself remarks in the Anthology’s liner notes[65], the rush to record collapsed with the Depression.
Despite the enthusiasm for records in this era, this great trove of material came under threat with the US’s entrance into World War 2. As Moe Asch described it:
We had the shellac shortage during the war—Asia was cut off and they were using boats for other things than shellac. So in order to get shellac, the big [record] companies offered eighteen or twenty cents for all the records that dealers had in stock.[66]
People brought old records out of their attics, setting them out for sale or government collection. Record stores figured they could get a better price selling discounted records individually rather than selling their entire inventory back to the manufacturer at fire-sale prices[67]. Music was everywhere, and cheap. As Smith described it, “there were big piles of 78s—enormous groaning masses of them.”[68] What wasn’t smashed and melted down in the government’s “Record Drives” was very often simply thrown out and lost.[69]
Smith bought everything he could get his hands on. As he put it, he “rapidly amassed many thousands of records… it became like a problem.”[70] According to Asch, Smith’s collection was “vast,”[71] and but the songs he chose for the first three volumes of the Anthology[72] were all recorded and released within just a five-year period; from “1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales.”[73]
While the records he was buying in Seattle held great ethnographic importance—these were compositions, some ancient and some immediate as a tawdry front-page scandal[74], made mostly by working-class people born in the preceding century, long before audio recording was available—their existence came about by a whim of commerce. Their survival, however, was ensured through the kind of foresight and dedication practiced by passionate amateurs like Smith.
The Anthology, edited down to 6 discs, was released in 1952 on Folkways[75]. According to Jeff Place, Folkways’ Archivist, Asch recorded some sales figures in the company’s handwritten ledgers in the years after the Anthology’s release, but what documentation exists is scarce and probably unreliable[76]. Numbers aside, the initial release went on to have several profound impacts on American popular music.
First, the collection of blues, country, sermons, re-fashioned songs of the British Isles, shape-singing, Cajun songs, fiddling tunes, and ballads of disasters both personal and monumental in scale spurred the US folk revival of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The influential American guitarist John Fahey, founder of Takoma and Revenant Records, said “Make no mistake: there was no ‘folk’ canon before Smith’s work.” Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders said “these records changed my life—and the lives of thousands of others—forever… When Bob Dylan was learning to be a songwriter in 1961, he also wrote new words to a number of Smith Anthology songs… This is the Touchstone, the Grail, The Real Deal, The Nitty Gritty, Ground Zero. Long may it wave.” And New York City folk music icon Dave Van Ronk has spoken of “the debt of honor that I, and my whole generation, owe to Harry because of that Anthology, which was the Bible for hundreds of us, or more. Without that, a whole lot of things never would have happened in this country musically. I think of it as the Neo-ethnic revival of the 1950s and 60s… I think it really changed music in this country.”[77]
But beyond and perhaps above that, it inspired the young singers and songwriters of the 1960s and ‘70s, notably Bob Dylan[78], and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia[79] to name just two of the most famous (David Johansen of the influential proto-punk New York Dolls, for instance, named his most recent band the Harry Smiths). Van Ronk, in his autobiography The Mayor of MacDougal Street, said, “they say that in the nineteenth century British Parliament, when a member would begin quoting a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote with him. It was like that. The Anthology provided us with a classical education that we all shared in common, whatever our personal differences.”[80]
Many artists of the 1960s, particularly singer-songwriters such as Dylan, who went on to change popular music in part by upsetting the Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building songwriting establishment and re-introducing a more poetic, folk-derived songwriting style, received the Anthology as a paradoxically exotic and timelessly familiar gospel. It was hailed as a pure thing, the unsweetened musical lineage straight from what Greil Marcus termed “the old, weird America.”[81] They received the music as a manifestation and manifesto of a more-authentic America than the one offered by the US’s Cold War cultural platitudes, what Marcus calls the “scared and satisfied reactionary freeze of the postwar period.”[82]
The careers of several of the musicians on the Anthology were revived after its release, and subsequently folk fans, particularly college students, embraced the artists and developed an interest in folk and older musical forms. Eck Robertson played the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and Clarence Ashley and Mississippi John Hurt toured colleges and universities throughout the country after being rediscovered by folk fans in the 60s. Hoyt “Floyd” Ming played the National Folk Festival and the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in the mid-70s. Furry Lewis opened for Leon Russell later on in his life, and was immortalized in song by Joni Mitchell on her “Furry Sings the Blues.”[83]
Lastly, with characteristic day-late/dollar-short clarity of vision, the Recording Academy, the organization that puts on the annual Grammy awards, acknowledged Smith with a Chairman’s Merit Award in 1991, just months before his death in November of that year. The 1997 re-issue of the Anthology, 45 years after the collection’s initial release, won Grammys in that year’s Best Reissue and Best Liner Notes categories[84], and earned a gold record for sales from the Recording Industry Association of America[85].
Considering its tremendous impact, it might appear trivial that the Anthology was essentially a bootleg. After all, Smith and Asch were re-releasing music recorded and issued by other labels, many of them still going concerns in the marketplace Folkways was competing in.
But Asch never felt he needed to work out licensing for the songs because he believed the Constitution was on his side, and that the public’s “right to know” trumped the strictures of copyright. Or as he put it, “The Constitution… was to me a very basic document… [it] was saying ‘dissemination’—the right to know is a right of the people, and there the record company wasn’t caring whether people have that right or not… I always claimed what they were destroying was the culture, so I started to reissue some of the records which I thought ought to be preserved.”[86]
While the Anthology was released without licensing deals in place, Asch seems to have anticipated claims made against his legal right to distribute materials held under another party’s copyright. In Asch’s section of the collection’s liner notes, he quotes Judge Learned Hand on how notions of copyright and plagiarism veer into absurdity when carried to extremes, and lambasts “the record industry” for trying to “‘freeze’ re-issues by other companies.”[87]
The foundation of Asch’s legal reasoning may be debatable, but the basis is worth considering; that art belongs to and within culture, that no member of that culture has a right to withhold it. Cultural products are the property of all, and once anything—a dance step, a melody, a recipe, a knitting pattern—enters the circle, it can’t be suppressed on one person’s say-so. This was, after all, folk music.
Asch and Smith had taken one record collection and eventually changed the world of music with it. With their tenacity and deep-dyed respect for artists of all varieties, it’s tempting to surmise that, decades later, they may well have been intrigued by and supportive of the use of sampling in hip hop. But they definitely would have understood using the Promethean power of recorded music to open up new worlds to those willing to listen.
VI. BLUES COLLECTORS
“The records were very popular for parties. The people would sit around the phonograph trying to guess the meaning of the confusing imagery, and there would be shrieks of laughter and embarrassment when somebody interpreted a phrase.”
- Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues[88]
“For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces to human affairs.”
- Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is The Message”[89]
The next category of collector I want to look at are blues collectors.
I chose the above quote from Samuel B. Charters’ influential blues history The Country Blues from a discussion of Blind Boy Fuller’s “crudely suggestive” songs (“like listening to dirty stories, but sung with style and imagination”), not for what it says about interpreting meaning in music but for what it leaves out.
While it’s likely that Charters intended the reader to assume that the audience listening to the music he’s describing were white, that their embarrassment was caused by sexual innuendo, and that their interpretations of the lyrics were correct, this isn’t stated outright. With the song lyrics, type of audience, or the accuracy of that audience’s interpretation left unspecified, other possible meanings emerge.
Was this a Black audience feeling embarrassed and amused by the blues? In 1959, when Charters wrote these words, it’s quite possible that younger Black folks would have viewed the blues with embarrassment if not derision—as vulgar in precisely the way a “race man” like Nat “King” Cole and Jackie Robinson were clearly not.[90] If we assume the audience was white and listening in the late 50s, as the Civil Rights Movement gathered steam and social barriers between races slowly began to shift, it’s possible that their sense of the blues’ vulgarity was somewhat similar but felt guiltily, that the music was anachronistic but also invoked an era which carried for them uncomfortable overtones—vulgar in the way raising certain issues in mixed company was impolite. In the 1920s, depending again on the audience, the sexually-charged blues songs might have been received without much embarrassment at all, heard instead as the earthy passions of a primitive race—or simply as a good song. In the 1930s they might have been thought of as vulgar but more importantly an honest American worker’s art form with no pretensions to bourgeois airs. For a form almost always described as being simple, the blues has yielded to a complex range of meanings.
This section will look at how reception of the blues has changed as different interpretative frameworks, particular to time and place, have been applied to it.
The history of efforts to create the definitive story of the blues and a canon of the music has been deeply influenced by social movements, anthropological theories, and political philosophies—particularly ideologies of the Popular Front and the American left in the wake of the Depression—and the changes these fields of thought went through over the years following World War 2.
The story goes back to a kind of national identity crisis which has returned to the forefront of American consciousness repeatedly throughout its history; how does a nation of immigrants decide who truly belongs to it? Deep strains of stubborn racism, class struggle (circling its corellary, the cherished American fantasy that the US is a class-less land of opportunity), differing modes of migration (essentially, the forced and unforced varieties), the claims of indigenous peoples, and a Eurocentric interpretative framework (and its counterpart, the belief that American culture had transcended the intractable biases of the “old country”) all influenced the debate. The issue was deeply complex for a country now involved in its own imperialist adventures (in the Philippines, New Mexico, Haiti, and Puerto Rico) and embroiled in a war of global scale for the first time.
From 1917 onward thousands of Black veterans returned from Europe hoping their wartime service would yield better treatment in the States but found widespread race rioting instead, Jim Crow discrimination as powerful as ever, and few better job opportunities. Labor unions were gaining clout and mobilizing workers under socialist ideals, following sustained violent clashes with industrial power. Immigrant fears ran high, fuelled by pseudo-scientific theories proposing spurious biological types and a “natural” ranked order of human races, cultures, and ethnicities within which virtually all non-Europeans, and even many southern Europeans, were deemed inferior or insufficiently evolved. In 1937 the German Nazi party opened its “Degenerate Art” exhibit in Munich, showcasing modernist work, much of which was influenced by African art and “primitive” cultures, condemning its corrupting “Negro and Jewish” CK qualities[91]; jazz was one of the featured examples of degenerate music played for visitors. Francis Glaton’s eugenics theory was enjoying its poisonous vogue and Henry Ford was inviting Black folk to come north work in his factories even as he espoused the virtues of the anti-Semitic tract The Protocol of the Elders of Zion. As European imperialism began feeling more insistent stirrings from colonial subjects in India, South Africa, and elsewhere, Alain Locke, the Harlem Renaissance writer, edited the influential anthology The New Negro, in which he outlined a vision of African Americans as autonomous, self-determining citizens. Marcus Garvey was counseling Black Americans to give up on their American dreams of eventual equality and to return to Africa, even while King Kong was a hit in movie houses nationwide.
As Jerrold Hirsch discusses in his Portrait of America; A History of the Federal Writer’s Project[92], the years during and following on from World War I saw Americans consciously attempt to delineate a national identity. Many of the WPA’s programs—the oral history project which undertook recording the memories of former slaves, the writing and editing of the state guidebooks, even the creation of the monument at Mount Rushmore—can be seen as phases of this discussion around who exactly was an American.
The notion that America had produced unique customs and cultural expressions was still a radical idea at the time, but socialist ideas had gained currency in American cultural and intellectual circles. The working class was a popular concern among artists and intellectuals. Interest in working class culture surged in those years when capitalism appeared to have proved its malevolence by the rocking the country to its foundations and casting millions of families into desperate poverty.
President Roosevelt’s Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) program sponsored scholars and writers such as Zora Neale Hurston (whose academic mentor at Barnard College was Franz Boas) in her anthropological fieldwork in Florida, resulting in her African American folklore study Mules and Men, and the government’s Works Project Administration also funded John Lomax in his fieldwork through the American south. The Smithsonian established the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage devoted to the study of aspects of American life unique to its people.
American collectors of blues records emerged in the 30s, as the blues was again growing in popularity, and changing in the process. As Amiri Baraka (writing as Leroi Jones) discusses in his 1963 history of African American music, Blues People[93], during the first and second decade of the 20th century, as millions of Black folk left the American south for manufacturing centers in northern cities in search of work, musicians began devising blues-based hybrids that reflected their new circumstances. The features inherent in urban environments and the faster pace of mechanized labor had a profound effect on a Black music and musicians that had been transplanted from agrarian life in rural regions.
As Jones points out, this period marked the advent of rhythm and blues, which sped up traditional blues, added electric instrumentation and a backing band, accelerating its evolution as musicians from different regions found themselves living, working, and socializing in closer proximity than ever before. Large cities also drew more and bigger touring acts, star bandleaders as well as solo artists, introducing transplanted agricultural laborers to music more rapidly than they ever would have in the relatively isolated areas they had come from. And while radio broadcasting had been disseminating musical styles across the country for years, opening up formerly insular communities to new sounds, stations in the large broadcast markets—the cities Blacks were entering like New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Detroit—were broadcasting new artists and innovations earlier and more rapidly than their counterparts in the country. The blues plugged in, filled out, and sped up to keep pace. As Charles Shaar Murray succinctly puts it in his 1994 Blues on CD: The Essential Guide[94], “Chicago blues was simply Delta blues transformed into an electric ensemble music.”
The rapid cultural changes brought about by such vast numbers of Blacks leaving rural areas and entering the industrial labor force after World War 1 became a focus of concern for anthropologists, who feared the blues would languish and disappear from agrarian communities in the countryside where it had thrived. As Black folk left farms for factories, entering industrial occupations, adjusting to the pace of city life and mechanized labor, and altering their music expressions in response, these (usually white) observers surmised that older cultural expressions were at risk of dying out and must be saved.
The attention to blues has its origins in WPA programs like the one headed by the FWP’s folklore director Benjamin Botkin, and in the work of the afore-mentioned folk scholars John and Alan Lomax.
But other figures unaffiliated with the WPA had also found themselves concerned for the vitality of the blues. They had taken the initiative to visit rural Southern areas to document Black music and its innovators in the 1930s and 40s, talking with musicians, recording their songs and recollections, and often making photographic portraits of their subjects, as part of amateur research into the Black music they were fans of. These expeditions too were informed in important ways by politically left-leaning ideologies in their focus on the “the common man” and the notion that recorded recollections might preserve the experience of oral cultures whose expressions weren’t preserved by dominant groups.
But as Marybeth Hamilton discusses in her 2007 book In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions,[95] blues collecting’s origins date back to the New Orleans jazz revival. One influential contingent who sought out jazz recordings and eventually the artists who made those records was composed of Frederic Ramsey, Jr., Charles Edward Smith, and William Russell.
Ramsey took up collecting jazz records at Princeton, as part of a fad for “hot” jazz which developed there and at Yale University in the inter-war years[96], and which counted Yale alumni John Hammond and Marshall Stearns among its devotees. Smith wrote jazz reviews for the Daily Worker and later went to work for the FWP. Russell, a former schoolteacher who abandoned the violin and classical composing upon hearing Jelly Roll Morton’s “Shoeshiners’ Drag,” met Ramsey and Smith at the Hot Record Exchange, the used record store he helped open in Manhattan, and the three formed a close relationship through their love of jazz. Russell eventually tracked down Jelly Roll Morton at a bar called the Jungle Inn in Washington D.C., and brought Smith and Ramsey along to hear him.
After several sessions held spellbound by the elderly, impoverished jazz lion’s stories about his heyday in New Orleans’ legendary Storyville quarter in the 20s, the three referred him to Alan Lomax, who recorded Morton for the Library of Congress. On those recordings, Morton claimed sole credit for inventing jazz and describes hearing the blues while a young boy in New Orleans, as a song form sung by prostitutes to attract customers.
If Ramsey and his two friends didn’t recognize it already, Morton’s description of the blues’ presence in Storyville placed the blues before jazz chronologically. Blues’ position as a precedent and probable source of jazz would greatly affect Ramsey’s thinking and later work, as we shall see.
Swept up in their enthusiasm for New Orleans jazz, Ramsey, Russell, and Smith embarked on record-hunting quests in many ways similar to those undertaken by John and Alan Lomax when searching for Black folk musicians in the rural South, and which would even be familiar to hip hop record collectors; the three men went door-to-door to stores, particularly junk shops, and even private residences in Black neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Missouri, and Michigan, and asked if they had any old records they would consider selling.
One of the differences between the Lomaxes and the three New Orleans enthusiasts of course, was that the jazz collectors’ territory was in cities; and like Harry Smith (but later and with a more confined focus musically) Ramsey, Russell, and Smith were interested in commercial recordings. As they were after material which by and large had passed out of favor with Black folk, and because Blacks as a group were still reeling economically from the Depression, the records could be had for as little as twenty-five cents a box[97].
Ramsey, Russell, and Smith not only collected New Orleans jazz, they were also advocates for the style against factions which favored more recent, and often whiter, styles and players[98] like Bix Biederbecke or “Ellingtonia,” which Yalies were said to be partial to[99]. Ramsey and Smith eventually edited the highly influential collection of essays Jazzmen, released in October 1939[100], “the first history of jazz by American writers and the first anywhere to be based on research.”[101] The book helped catalyze a burst of interest in New Orleans jazz, and included an essay by Stephen Smith titled “Hot Collecting,” less an instructional guide for the beginner, and more of a wised-up survey of the practice.
The book also cast Storyville, New Orleans’ turn-of-the-century red-light district, as “the most glamorous, as well as the most notorious, center of legalized vice in history,” and a kind of rough-hewn proletarian paradise. Eric Hobsbawm describes the allure the city held for hot jazz revivalists as “a multiple myth and symbol: anti-commercial, anti-racist, proletarian populist, New Deal radical, or just anti-respectable and anti-parental, depending on taste.”[102] The power of Storyville for the three men who had created a friendship based on their appreciation for that neighborhood’s music lay to a significant degree in its political significance; glamorous and amazingly rich musically but also an egalitarian playground for the Black working man, separate from the grasping, status-conscious Creole population and whites as well. As Hamilton puts it, “The best that can be said, and it is not inconsiderable, is that they felt no need to pathologize Storyville, that they were bewitched by not the threat but the promise of black urban life.”[103]
The revival which buoyed the fortunes of artists like Morton and William Geary “Bunk” Johnson for a time, but studying the place and history of Storyville and its abrupt abolishment 1917 by the city (following an order by the secretary of the U.S. Navy to close the brothels as the country entered World War 1) seems to have compelled them to
disillusionment with the form.
It also brought Russell and Smith, but especially Ramsey, to see the blues as the real thing, the source of jazz and a truer form of Black music. During the mid-1950s he toured throughout the South taking photographs and recording blues singers in the countryside, expeditions which resulted in the book Been Here and Gone[104], a collection of his own photos of Black musicians for which he wrote the accompanying text.
The emphasis in this later work, as Hamilton describes it, is on the personal, emotional experiences of these people and their “black rural idyll” in the country, and the sizzle of Storyville’s vice dens is replaced by “a personal expression. The music that was everywhere had been welded to a way of life.”[105] Ramsey called it “the plantation blues.”[106]
The withdrawal of Ramsey’s investment in a New Deal reading of New Orleans’ musical culture coincided with the Cold War conservatism which had gained prevalence in the years after World War 2. The narrative that figured Storyville as an earthy playground for the common working man had fallen into disfavor along with most other Popular Front ideologies. Even Alan Lomax, after working for decades documenting America’s native music (often on government-sponsored projects), was branded a subversive in 1950 by a Red-baiting political group, left the U.S. for decade.
The next group of influential blues collectors were the informal New York-based coterie who called themselves the Blues Mafia. Led by James McKune, the Blues Mafia emphasis was on their sense of the music’s aesthetic qualities alone, not in wresting artistic expression to political causes, what they called the “sociological” approach to Black music. The Blues Mafia circle’s approach was probably articulated most succinctly by McKune’s responses to Samuel Charters’ and Frederic Ramsey’s books on jazz and blues.
Charters’ 1959 book The Country Blues missed the point, McKune wrote in a 1961 column for the British record collector magazine VJM Palaver, by writing about blues artists who had sold well in the 1930s:
“This would, or might, be all right if his book were published for those Negroes, fifty years old or older, who could thereafter read all about the singers they listened to thirty years ago… Few of these people have bought Charters’ book… I know twenty men who collect the Negro country blues. All of us have been interested in knowing who the great country blues singers are, not in who sold best.”[107] [emphasis in original]
McKune’s letter to Ramsey, which went unanswered, asked why in neither of his books Jazzmen nor The Jazz Record Book could he find information on the recording or release dates of the records mentioned, or why bandleaders were discussed at length but not the personnel playing on their records. McKune’s queries imply that Ramsey had also missed the point in focusing on the milieu out of which New Orleans jazz developed, and not on the quality of the music itself. A further implication might be drawn that McKune felt Ramsey’s ideology was clouding his aesthetic sensitivity.
Despite their name, under McKune’s guidance the Blues Mafia turned out to be deeply sensitive to the blues. They favored the tormented male singers like Robert Johnson, Skip James and Charley Patton, mythically solitary musicians who went largely unrecognized in their time. As Marshall Stearns put it in the liner notes to Negro Blues and Hollers, a 1962 Library of Congress compilation of field recordings capitalizing on the emerging market for the country blues, their tastes were for music that was “archaic in the best sense… gnarled, rough-hewn, and eminently uncommercial.”
This canon is the one largely recognized as a seminal today, the blues of the Mississippi Delta, the anguished songs of Son House and Robert Johnson, hellhounds and killing floors and the endless road. These blues’ clearest, most pronounced characteristic is the intense suffering and loneliness conveyed in it. This was Black music, but not popular Black music, not in its day and certainly not when the Blues Mafia were championing it as the real stuff.
VIII. HIP HOP COLLECTORS
“I don’t really think of myself as a record collector. I mean, I use my records, you know?”
- Mike D, Beastie Boys
Hip hop DJs are almost unique among record collectors for the narrowly specific nature of what they look for in the music they collect, even while casting a wider net than most other kinds of collectors. As I will show, these idiosyncrasies are due to hip hop DJs being “creative / artistic” collectors who gather materials to serve their art; their collecting strategies are utilitarian.
By categorizing hip hop DJs as “creative / artistic” collectors, I’m minimizing that they can, and by and large ardently endeavor to, re-define themselves as commercial artists. DJs are, like virtually every player in the hip hop world, fiercely devoted to commercial success. And like most all musicians who seek their fortune in the music industry, hip hop DJs also face long odds in their likelihood of realizing commercial success. But a hip hop producer’s stock-in-trade—musical talent—has no reliable value, therefore investing in its salability is an act of faith. Trading gold on regulated markets would be a purely, and plausibly, commercial venture for these same individuals, and one from which they could reasonably expect a financial return simply by following rules and trading shrewdly. But no one would assert that trading on one’s musical talent in the cultural marketplace offers any definite financial rewards whatsoever (indeed quite the opposite) And so for the vast majority of sample-based hip hop DJs making music, their record collecting begins and ends as a de facto non-commercial venture, even if commercial success is the ultimate goal. The illogical presumption which the sample-based hip hop DJ makes as she or he begins collecting records—‘of the myriad hopeful, I will join the elect’—is endemic to artistic acts in that it requires faith and self-belief.
As sample-based hip hop DJs’ record collecting is performed in service to the musical compositions they create using them, their primarily focus is on one specific quality when collecting records, or to use the term of art, “digging in the crates”[108]. This is what I call “compositional utility,” meaning how well a song works in creating a “dance-able” composition, and /or backing track for rappers who will eventually rhyme over it[109].
The specific characteristic a song needs is a pure “break,” the section in which the accompanying instruments drop out of the mix, leaving the drum pattern isolated for a measure or two before picking up again with full instrumentation (or simply concluding). Referred to as the “break” or “breakbeat,” this is usually the part of the song that is “looped” or recorded onto an electronic sampler and repeated in a seamless, continuous cycle.
As a result, hip hop DJs are keenly focused on the primacy of the beat and a hook before all other considerations when seeking songs for compositional use. The “clean-ness” of the recording, the space left around it in the mix of other instruments, and the number of beats per minute, among other concerns, are all ancillary to the break’s potential to facilitate dancing, or to be synchronized to the rapper’s rhyming. And of all the qualities it is crucial for the beatsmith to maintain, synchronize-ability is one of the two[110] aspects that most closely confines a potential sample’s usefulness. A break can be too “dirty” (sonically cluttered with other instruments) but never too clean; it may appear too briefly in a song but never for too long. However, even if it can be manipulated, a beat may simply be paced too fast or too slow to rhyme over—and therefore unusable. Older drum sounds taken from vinyl records, as many producers attest in Schloss’s Making Beats, tend to sound better for sampling than electronic drum sounds. Hank Shocklee describes the sound of other instruments when sampled versus those played by live musicians in the studio thusly: “We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way… Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record.”[111]
Additionally, DJs may sample a “stab” (a brief, incisive figure, often horns, or simply an exclamatory burst of sound to punctuate a line—think of the 3-note riff between James Brown’s lines from his song “Soul Power”), a vocal line (the repeating “Ooh—yeah” under the refrain on Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.”), or a fragment of any other kind (Diana Ross trilling “I’m coming!” on the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems”) to impart a hook to the song. Next to a synchronize-able beat, a hook is probably the next most important element in a hip hop song.
Despite the specific criteria required, hip hop DJs have managed to adapt music ranging from psychedelia to Indonesian gamelan to advertising jingles to “lite jazz”[112] when making music. And as Schloss also points out, adapting exotic and / or unlikely music for effective use in a hip hop song is seen as a virtue among DJs, the gift of having “big ears,” and a visionary understanding of sonic possibility. In one of its periodic negotiations with “respectability,” hip hop’s extensive use of jazz in the early 1990s was perceived for a time as a landmark step, and much hopeful pop-critical debate was devoted to hip hop’s possible new sophistication in appropriating music that was understood to be “serious” and “advanced.” But this attempt to “upgrade” hip hop by linking it with a genre which holds more “high art” cache privileges jazz as a better form of music. Schloss succinctly describes this bad-faith argument tactic thusly: “it loudly directs one’s attention towards hip hop’s formal characteristics, while quietly installing its own prejudices about what music is supposed to be.”[113]
When DJ Mark the 45 King’s produced Jay-Z’s 1998 hit “Hard Knock Life,” a tribute to life as a low-level drug dealer, he sampled children singing the song of the same name in the stage musical Annie. Annie of course is the stage adaptation of the popular Depression-era comic strip parable about the orphaned girl of the title and her dog, who with luck and pluck eventually leave their orphanage, settle in with the wealthy Daddy Warbucks, and live happily ever after. The 45 King has said[114] that initially he wanted to use only the song’s horns, but decided to leave the children’s chorus as is. In a song about thriving during Brooklyn’s crack epidemic during the 1980s, was the 45 King seeking to draw a parallel to the plight of stout-hearted, loveable children like Annie, making the best of economic collapse? Or was his approach essentially sarcastic? It raises a question; is musical corny-ness of the most flagrant variety, if employed in service to irony, fair game in hip hop sampling?
The use of irony and humor, and the attempt to trace ligaments of artistic consciousness from lyrics through to sampled musical sources opens an interesting issue in what Schloss calls “sampling ethics,” but which I think is slightly different and which I will refer to here as a “sampling aesthetics.”
Beyond the beat’s compositional utility lies the issue of the cultural provenance of the source material; the appropriateness of using certain kinds of music, and the perceived inviolability of certain others.
As the artistic free-for-all which reigns in the world of quasi-legal hip hop mixtapes would seem to prove, very little is off-limits for hungry aspiring rap stars; using current hit songs’ backing tracks is the customary mode of practice on the unlicensed, freely-downloaded mixtape circuit. Indeed, using an acknowledged rap star’s beats—the late Notorious B.I.G.’s are a clear favorite, as is anything by Dr. Dre—is a tacit declaration that one deserves recognition on par with, or above, the original artist. Recently an unsigned rap hopeful replicated Lil’ Kim’s pose from the promotional poster for Kim’s1997 album Hard Core for the cover art for her free download mixtape. She also reworked Kim’s ex-lover and labelmate the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning,” adding rhymes to (future labelmate) Drake’s “Best I Ever Had,” and Gucci Mane’s “Freaky Gurl” using their original backing tracks. That artist, Nicki Minaj, was subsequently signed to Lil Wayne’s Young Money records and subsequently released a successful (commercial) album. Unlike Lil’ Kim, who called herself the Queen Bee, Minaj has likened herself to Monica Lewinsky, but the implied lineage is clear.
The apparently unbounded range of hip hop samples raises the question of what—if anything— is off-limits in sampling, and also the issue of intention and result when borrowing musically.
IX. HIP HOP AND THE SOUND OF THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE
Sampling isn’t always done opportunistically; some groups use samples with finely-focused purpose. In the early 1990s, artists such as Public Enemy took their sample sources seriously, using speeches from mainstream Black leaders but also many who were thoroughly unassimilated to the mainstream at the time—the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan, most prominently[115]. Their aesthetic demanded they appropriate sources whose politics and rhetoric were in line with their own beliefs, and the message they sought to deliver. As the apotheosis of politically righteous hip hop in their era, such consistency was crucial to P.E.’s message.
P.E.’s status beyond this sonic/ thematic consistency is even more remarkable when considering that their music never took on any of the cumbersome, and criminally unfunky, weight of political dogmatism. Sonically avant-garde, risky, and thrillingly propulsive, their music was freighted with far more momentum than doctrine.
P.E.—and crucially their production team the Bomb Squad, comprised of Hank Shocklee, Chuck D and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler—may have been notorious for their caustic sound, incorporating jarringly non-musical elements into their songs, but the beat remained pre-eminent throughout. And as Rosie Perez proved so robustly in the opening credit sequence to Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing, P.E.’s “Fight the Power” could be danced to, though based on the evidence, not casually—again, in keeping with the band’s modus operandi. P.E. might not have made dance music in a strict sense, but you could surely dance to it if, their sound seemed to imply, you mustered the correct level of revolutionary commitment.
Other DJs have ventured yet further afield in search of inspiring material. To give one prominent example, producer Prince Paul, on his landmark work with De La Soul in 1989 and 1991, intentionally drew from musical genres and traditions wildly at variance with what listeners thought of as being aligned with, or even sympathetic to, hip hop. His guiding principle seemed to be to use only what sounded good to him or worked with a given song. He sampled with little regard for audience expectations, unguided by any predictable constellation of African American music touchstones, flouting the young genre’s unwritten rules, expanding its vision at the same time. Early Funkadelic, Johnny Cash, cartoon character voices, and perhaps most famously Steely Dan were all thrown into the sonic soup which resulted in the creation of De La Soul’s 1989 debut 3 Feet High and Rising.
The group De La Soul (which Paul was not formally a part of) didn’t disavow Public Enemy’s overt Black Nationalist themes and often militant tone, but neither did they identify themselves explicitly with the cohort of politically strident artists like them, Ice Cube, Poor Righteous Teachers, or Paris.
Like other East Coast groups such as Boogie Down Productions (BDP), Brand Nubian, and Queen Latifah, De La Soul were aligned with the loose fraternity of “Afrocentric” rappers of the late 1980s and early ‘90s but their language and themes were less hard-edged than groups such as P.E. and KMD; the “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” they envisioned and declared in their songs stood for “Da Inner Sound Y’all” which probably signals their creative orientation best; they spoke of their specific experiences, gathering their world view by reflecting through their personal perspective. While Chuck D rapped urgently about his posse breaking him out of jail after he refuses to fight “for their army or whatever,” (“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, 1988), De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove recounted the indignity of hitting on a Burger King cashier who then mistakes him for Tracy Chapman (“Bitties in the BK Lounge” from De La Soul is Dead, 1991).
The two groups I’ve cited, De La Soul and Public Enemy, don’t represent the opposite extremes of political consciousness in hip hop—far from it. Nor do they hold the most wildly disparate artistic sensibilities[116]. In fact, both were politically conscious and artistically visionary musical collectives. But as two of the most prominent groups in the same genre at the same time period, both of whose signature sound relied on sampling, their music bears far fewer similarities than seems reasonable to expect.
One of the central reasons for this, I argue, is the origins of the sample sources used. P.E. wanted to convey a sense of present crisis, of urban social upheaval. In addition to using soul and funk samples, they incorporated sirens, news broadcasts real and fictional, political speeches, distorted vocals, snippets from films, found sounds, and even themselves (Flavor Flav’s trademark “Yeah boyee” peppered throughout “Bring the Noise” to cite just one example)[117].Shocklee has said that he didn’t want to use hip hop’s conventional materials in creating P.E.’s sound: “We didn't want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff—bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature… we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces”[118] or as Chuck D described it in the same interview, “we were taking thousands of sounds… the sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall.” Building in sound elements which require different types of listening, such as news or political speeches, gives the music its disorientating effect, imparting the impression that the music is breaking news, is a traffic-clearing alarm, is dead-serious rhetoric on grave matters, is critical analysis of current events. Those interruptions also deny us the pleasure of losing ourselves in the music’s groove and dance-ability—in the songs’ music-ness. Through these samples the music insists on itself as more than entertainment; as Chuck D famously declared, “Rap music is Black America’s CNN.”
Meanwhile, Prince Paul was creating a sound for De La Soul, a trio that sought to elude the macho threat-posing and dance-craze hedonics, hip hop’s once-and-future prevailing tropes. And while political activism may not have been as important to De La Soul as it was to P.E., deploying the full span of their broad cultural references as viewed from a Black, post-Civil Rights Movement perspective was. Paul reached outside of hip hop’s more predictable toolbox of sources, beyond James Brown and Southern soul (though like P.E., he used those as well), into territory which challenged listeners to re-assess their assumptions about not only what hip hop could conceivably appropriate, but what exotic forms the funky-fresh might assume.
Like P.E. and the Bomb Squad, he broadened the idea of what could work on a hip hop album. Funny as well as funky, Paul interspersed comedic spoken-word “skits” to introduce songs, particularly on 1991’s De La Soul is Dead. With the inclusion of snippets of television and film dialogue, country songs, recording session outtakes, and in-studio goofs, the producer illustrated that nothing was off-limits—anything that could be recorded could be made hip hop. And that conversely, that nothing was not “hip hop enough.” Paul was hardly alone in this—the Beastie Boys were using samples from the Sweet and Cheap Trick, and Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay employed not only Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” but Bob James’ “Take Me To The Mardi Gras”—but his compositions used these wildly disparate sources on the same song.
P.E.’s similar tactic, bringing spoken rhetoric, sound effects, fragmentary exclamations, and the conventions of news broadcasts into their music, created a relentless sonic barrage that sounded like an over-stimulated urban media environment. The results that were intentionally unsettling and jagged.
Paul’s musical citations on the other hand were often humorous, ironic, or if not then whimsically left-field in a way deemed brilliant by mainstream rock critics and many (non-professional) listeners as well. Not only did he use deeply white bands like the Turtles (who later sued him[119]) and Steely Dan, explicitly European sonic documents such as French instruction records, he sampled Philly-soul latecomers Hall & Oates (their song “I Can’t Go For That” on De La Soul’s “Say No Go”).
What does it mean when a Black hip hop producer uses a riff from a white “blue-eyed soul” band which plainly plays Black music[120]? Or when that producer samples a Black funk-rock band’s parody of hillbilly country, as Paul did in using Parliament’s “Little Ole Country Boy” for “Potholes In My Lawn”? What should we gather, if, beyond that, the song he composes is about originality and theft (“potholes in my lawn” being De La Soul’s metaphor for rappers who “bite,” or steal rhymes from other rappers)? And what if, in a further twist, the sampled song sounds as if it could be a goof on the hyperbolic affectations of folk-iness adopted, for instance, by the Rolling Stones’ often-exaggerated pastiche of Black American forms[121]?
Clearly DJs like Prince Paul held a playful view of the music’s potential and where its boundaries lay, and he was not alone; producer Kay Gee used the Jackson 5’s wholesomely funky “ABC” on Naughty By Nature’s breakout single, the wonderfully unwholesome “OPP,” A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Mohammad used Little Feat’s “Fool Yourself” for their 1990 hit “Bonita Applebaum,” Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz used Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” for their “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)”[122], and 2 Live Crew sampled Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman” for their 1989 “Pretty Woman”[123].
Some narratives imply that a cultural thread runs through sample-based hip hop and how hip hop DJs chose sources. But other viewpoints highlight how many hip hop DJs were less determinedly idiosyncratic or broad-ranging in their work. Groups like EPMD cleaved closer to the 1960s soul and funk which hip hop had used from the start and layered samples much less densely to create their signature “trunk funk.” Still others, like the late Jam Master Jay, made a trademark of using heavy rock in their beats. Still others, notably West Coast producers like Dr. Dre and DJ Quik, leaned toward the sinuous synthesizer riffs of Roger Troutman, Leon Haywood, and George Clinton to create eerie backdrops for fast-gaining gangsta rappers from places with names like Compton.
Hip hop could be said to be an artistic practice peculiar to the post-Civil Rights generation and one brought about by Black Power’s response to the Civil Rights Movement’s commitment to nonviolent struggle[124]. If Black Power was a response to how the generation before it struggled to make change from within the American mainstream—by being twice as dedicated as the opposition, twice as dignified, twice as Christian, twice as self-sacrificing, and conspicuously peace-able (indeed civil) in asking for civil rights—then hip hop, inspired by Black folk who lost patience with the integrationism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and reached for autonomy by ballot or bullet and any means necessary, would be different. Still, hip hop was expected to acknowledge with proper esteem the previous two generations of struggle and stand on their shoulders—but this mandate didn’t address how “the hip hop generation,” as Chang calls it[125], was supposed to escape its shadow.
Hip hop responded to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements by refusing to croon, emote, plead, smile, ask for just enough to get by, use proper English, be nice to ladies, or dress for career success. The few exceptions (the Furious 5’s startling vocal harmony lines on their debut record The Message, the Sugarhill Gang’s fun-loving mien, the Fat Boys’ one-note slapstick schtick, LL Cool J’s 1987 “I Need Love”) prove the rule; hip hop was not a music which wished to integrate aesthetically with any mainstream. The listener would be required to reconcile itself to hip hop’s terms.
In keeping with its mode of self-definition and self-declared entitlement, hip hop also asserted the right to claim every single cultural influence it encountered as its own; rappers’ monikers, album titles, and rhymes cited brand names (Run-DMC’s “My Adidas,” Schooly D’s “Gucci Time,” Q-Tip, Redman, Everlast, Smif n’ Wessun, et al), TV shows (Ice Cube’s Amerikka’s Most Wanted, Kurtis Blow’s “8 Million Stories”), films (2 Live Crew’s Luke Skyywalker, the Geto Boys’ Scarface, the RZA’s interstitial snippets from martial arts movies, the Notorious B.I.G.’s claim to be “the Black Frank White,” from the film King of New York in 1990, star athletes (The Jungle Brothers’ “Jim Browski,” Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball”), news media and news stories even sprinkled in melodies from other songs and advertising jingles (De La Soul’s “Buddy,” Ice Cube’s “Check Yourself,” and Doug E. Fresh’s “La Di Da Di” incorporate portions of other songs into their melodies and / or lyrics). DJs of course simply used other artists’ songs and turned them to their own purposes.
In perhaps the defining event to push this generational tension to the social foreground, Rosa Parks sued OutKast in 1998 over the song the group named after her; but that song’s message was essentially, We’re not interested in the front of the bus, we want to sit in the back of the bus, the back of the bus is where the party is happening because we’re going to put it there (and as goes without saying, that party will not conform or aspire to mainstream values or expectations). “Rosa Parks,” the rap song, amounted to the first loudly explicit message to the Civil Rights Movement generation that hip hop is a different music and its listeners and creators have different social aspirations which aren’t concerned with sitting with the white folks[126]. The hip hop generation saw themselves differently and the world around them differently too.
If hip hop consciously endeavored to sound unlike conventional music, it’s worth asking why it used so much music from the two generations immediately preceding it. The obvious answers are that post-war music—soul, funk, and pop jazz—had a beat and people could dance to it, and also that it was the most readily available to most hip hop DJs.
Why hip hop DJs employed the first two qualities is explained by the compositional utility approach—that they were responsible for keeping listeners dancing and rappers rhyming—but the last is worth another look. If aesthetic preferences are formed, either positive or negative, in the home, and the polestars of our musical tastes are fixed by what is played around us when we are children, what can we surmise the average African American kid growing up in an urban area in the late 1960s and early ‘70s was listening to? His or her parents’ records, most likely. And it seems reasonable to assume that this average kids’ parents music collection favored records residing on the soul or R&B charts of the day, with perhaps some mainstream pop, some jazz, and some records from genres or artists yet further afield; Sun Ra, the Last Poets, Cal Tjader, the Watts Prophets, Gil Scott-Heron.
These records from the 1960s and ‘70s were by and large the ones hip hop DJs favored, and collected in order to sample from. If hip hop’s assertive stance was often received as a radical departure from musical history and standards (and as an evidently a contemptuous one—often by musicians who would subscribe to the view that records ought to serve as a form of aural non-fiction), it’s also true that their reliance on the music their parents loved is an homage, a gesture to link themselves and their art to a tradition of Black music and music-making. Clearly, hip hop DJs used these records as a gesture of reverence to their artistic and blood forebears.
But there is an aspect of sampling that resembles, or enacts, conquest (again, very often the music of the previous generation). The conquered is, necessarily, the past (nothing can be sampled until after it’s already been recorded). And it is also culture; not only music but voices, noises, soundtracks, radio transmissions, home recordings, studio outtakes, ambient noise, any and all of these as may be conjured or discovered by chance as found recordings. Sampling clearly allows artists to adapt their sonic environment to their vision; what is less obvious is what their use of Black music from the past may mean to hip hop DJs themselves.
Could sampling be a way of not only claiming one’s parents’ music as one’s own but, in turning it to one’s own ends, freeing it to be re-contextualized? It occurs to me that for any African-American person born after 1965—that is, any member of the hip hop generation—hearing a whole, whole lot about the Civil Rights Movement from your elders was a given. Could the claiming / conquering aspect of sampling have something to do with resisting or re-envisioning somewhat the repeated litany of the sacrifices borne, risks ventured, and victories achieved by one’s forebears? A way of acknowledging a debt while assigning separate cultural spaces; one for the solemn story of grassroots struggle against systematized oppression, another for the freedom to enjoy the result? A way of making some breathing room—and some room for pleasure as well—within a historical legacy which weighed heavy on the “succeeding” generation?
IX. CONCLUSION
It is because of this enterprise, bringing a sense of the sly, of play, and of joy in multivalent meaning into—or back into—the Black music tradition that I feel hip hop DJs, and the particular canon they’ve worked to establish, demand recognition.
Whichever avenue they chose, when hip hop DJs borrowed from far field, they sought out different qualities in the music than those favored by those genre’s connoisseurs. Hence Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat” was heavily sampled for its titular big beat rather than the guitar hero’s big six-string solo.
This is because they used songs for their compositional utility—dance-ability and synchronize-ability with rapping. Hence the perceived heresies of ranking, say, Grant Green higher than Ornette Coleman, Louis Armstrong or (appropriately) Wynton Marsalis on a list of anything musical whatsoever. And yet for hip hop DJs, rating these giants of jazz below a “lite” jazz stalwart is perfectly sound, even obvious. Out of this privileging of rhythm, a “beat music canon” developed; a pantheon of music valued for its hooks, grooves, tempo, and drumming style.
I propose that this canon is a solvent body of music which was gathered using a collecting strategy based on joy and not suffering; not on any ideology favoring an agenda of purity be it racial or cultural, or quality as related to notions of social progress, authenticity, or propriety, complex or simple, high art or low, acoustic or electronic, soulful or slick, traditional or “modern.” Hip hop DJs have, by surveying as widely as any connoisseur has, collected music which favors dancers and rappers, which relies on rhythm, looped musical figures, and can potentially draw from the totality of recorded music. Most importantly, hip hop’s beat canon is beholden only to itself. This is a canon not subject to the ideas of white ethnographers, racial progress groups, blues fans, those nostalgic for the antebellum South, jazz factionalists, or music industry statistics. This is a canon based on beats, hooks, and the inclinations and artistic practices of Black people.
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-----------------------
[1] Grand Upright Music Limited, Plaintiff, v. Warner Brothers Records, Inc., 91 Civ. 7648 accessed via
[2] accessed April 19, 2010
[3] accessed April 19, 2010
[4] accessed April 19 2010 and accessed April 23, 2010; and email interview with Derek Dressler, VP of A&R at Shout! Factory and Majordomo, April 22, 2010
[5] Ed Christman, “Sound of a Crescendo: Retailers See Sustainable Gains On Michael Jackson Catalog As Sales Keep Soaring”July 18, 2009, , at
[6] Email interview with Nadav Poraz, March 19th and 24th, 2010
[7] , accessed April 19, 2010
[8] A note re: using RIAA as a source; though clearly an imprecise tool due to that gold and platinum awards only mark sales leaps of 500,000 and 1,000,000, the RIAA’s sales-tracking figures are the only ones I have found which are accessible to the amateur or academic. The most accurate statistics are compiled by SoundScan, which provides numbers to Billboard, but their information is proprietary, closely guarded, and very expensive to access. I recognize I’m using a blunt instrument, but with the additional Billboard chart figures, I think I’ve reached results which provide data that is as sound and accurate as possible short of funding outlays beyond my means.
[9] Joel Whitburn, Top R&B Singles 1942-1999 (Wisconsin: Record Research Inc., 2000), ix.
[10] , accessed April 19, 2010
[11] My method here was less scientific; it refers to my own work in entertainment journalism (particularly at music magazines such as Vibe, Blender, Rolling Stone, and many others) dating back to 1997, conversations with other journalists and pop culture followers, and observations of the pop music landscape over the last two decades.
[12] The one song in this list that returned to the charts is 1981’s “Super Freak,” which entered the Hot R&B/Hip Hop Recurrents, Hot R&B/Hip Hop Airplay, and Hot Digital Tracks charts in August 2004, shortly after James’ death.
[13] per , accessed May 5th, 2010
[14] Email interview with Wang, January 8 and 14, 2010
[15] Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 79
[16] Schloss, Making Beats, 6
[17] Schloss, Making Beats, 109
[18] I owe a debt here to Brewster and Broughton’s fascinating, if inconclusive, history of the term discothèque; Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, ed.s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (London: Headline 2006) 59
[19] Schloss, Making Beats, 16, 80; this is also a big part of the reason I feel confident in citing particular crowd-sourced sites such as ; if the “crowd” reviewing the content is hip hop DJs, then the scrutiny is going to be deep.
[20] William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs (Chicago: Subway and Elevated 1994) 30
[21] Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 245
[22] Howard S. Becker Art Worlds (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California 1982)
[23] Becker, Art Worlds, 362
[24] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge 2000)
[25] It’s worth pointing out here that, as elucidated in Bordieu’s writings on the differences between cultural capital and economic capital, belonging to the dominant social group and belonging to the cultural elite are not the same. Indeed, as Sarah Thornton points out in her Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), membership in one group may well be opposed to membership in the other due to individuals’ belonging to marginalized subcultures to which certain cultural expertise is afforded. Cultural elites are often simultaneously members of disadvantaged social groups despite—and indeed because of—the subcultural capital they possess. One example to illustrate this irony is inherent in the premise of the American television show Queer Eye For the Straight Guy. On this show, four gay men are assigned to edify the appearance, culinary skills, dancing ability, and domestic habits of a heterosexual man (whose wife or girlfriend has often appealed to the show to improve her mate’s “hopeless” aesthetic sensibilities). Essentially—as, we are led to believe, such capabilities lie within gay mens’ essence—they take over the process of making him a cultured creature. The four gay male stars of Queer Eye are accomplished professionals in the culture or design industries—fashion, interior design, performance, etc.—and these bona fides are cited in order to indicate their authority in these fields. But the show’s premise, evident in its title, proposes that it is the stars’ “gay-ness”—they’re queer to their very eyes!—which grants them powers of discernment superior to the bewildered straight man. In this way the stars’ homosexuality, a characteristic that prevents them from enjoying many of the same civil rights as their makeover subjects, is equated with a native facility with aesthetic and cultural matters. Wielding this cultural skill is presented as a kind of gay performance but, paradoxically, a “natural” one; and one enacted in the service of heterosexuality. In offering their superior enculturating powers to straight couples, the Queer Eye guys became television stars and media darlings through their roles as culture mavens; but to date they cannot serve in the armed forces, have no guaranteed right to receive spousal health insurance benefits, and may marry a male partner in only 4 US states.
[26] David Toop, Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 66
[27] Schloss, Making Beats, Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, Ramsey and Smith, Jazzmen
[28] Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell The People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica, Duke University Press 2000
[29] Toop, Rap Attack 3, 61-62
[30] Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, 229-230
[31] Toop, Rap Attack 3, 29
[32] Marcus Reeves, Somebody Scream! Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. Faber & Faber, 2009.
[33] David Serlin, From Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock: Urban Pedagogy and Soul Iconography on the 1970s, in Soul, edited by Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
[34] Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: University of Cambridge 1984) 3
[35]Lomax also famously employed Leadbelly as his driver while on fieldwork expeditions throughout the Southern US. As Hamilton describes it, on these expeditions Leadbelly played a role akin to interpreter or ambassador for his employer, as Lomax approached Black artists in prisons and work camps, in hopes of recording them.
[36] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 79
[37] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 120
[38] From a 1968 interview with Smith by John Cohen in Sing Out! magazine volume 19 number 1 April/May 1969, 10
[39] ibid., 2
[40]Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than the Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia 1875-1922, 114
[41] Rani Singh and Andrew Perchuk, ed.s, Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute 2010) 18
[42] George W. Stocking Jr., The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1992, 111
[43] Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic, 111
[44] Singh and Perchuk, Harry Smith 18
[45] Smith’s handmade animated films are preserved in the holdings of Anthology Film Archives and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The British Film Institute in London, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
[46] Harry Smith Archives, bio, , accessed December 18, 2009.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Various artists, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records #RVN 211, 2007, Ed Sanders’ essay in the liner notes, 11.
[49] Personal interview with Jeff Place, Archivist at Smithsonian Folkways in Washington DC, via email January 7th 2010.
[50] Harry Smith Archives, bio, , accessed December 18, 2009; confirmed in an email interview with Jeff Place, Archivist, Smithsonian Folkways, January 6, 2010.
[51] The Village Fugs, Broadside Records 304, released by Folkways, 1965: re-released as The Fugs First Album, ESP-Disk, 1966: and again on Fantasy FCD 9668-2, 1994.
[52] Various artists, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records RVN 211 2007, from an interview with Smith by John Cohen in Sing Out! magazine volume 19 number 1, and volume 19 number 2, excerpted in liner notes, page 33.
[53] Various artists, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records RVN 211, 2007, from Ed Sanders’ essay in the liner notes, 5.
[54] Smith spoke of his own use of hallucinogens in the1968 interview with John Cohen excerpted in the Volume 4 liner notes (mentioned above in footnote 10) and his use of amphetamines and marijuana is invoked often by those he knew him; Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records RVN 211, 2007 liner notes, page 20: Harry Smith Archives, bio, , accessed December 18, 2009: Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: Henry Holt and Company 1997, 96: Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, Luc Sante essay in the liner notes page 30, and Allen Ginsberg essay, ibid, page 55.
[55] A group with whom he was quite directly affiliated—Smith was a close friend and for several years in the 1980s a roommate of Allen Ginsberg, who installed him, in 1988, as a “shaman-in-residence” at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado, as discussed in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records RVN 211, 2007, Ed Sanders’ essay in the liner notes 26, 29; and Harry Smith Archives, “bio” section, , accessed December 18, 2009.
[56] Richard Carlin, Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways (New York: Routledge 2003), 4
[57] Rani Singh, ed., Think of the Self Speaking: Harry Smith—Selected Interviews (Seattle: Elbow/Cityful Press, 1998), 183.
[58] Carlin, Worlds of Sound, 61.
[59] Ibid, 62.
[60] Marcus, Invisible Republic, 87.
[61] Various artists, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, from interview with John Cohen from Sing Out! magazine volume 19 number 1, and volume 19 number 2; excerpted in the liner notes, 34-35.
[62] Ibid, 41.
[63] Marcus, Invisible Republic, 103.
[64] Ibid, 103.
[65] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997.
[66] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, interview with Moses Asch from the March 22, 1972 issue of Sing Out! magazine Volume 26 number 1 and volume 26 number 2, excerpted in liner notes, 33.
[67] Carlin, Worlds of Sound, 73.
[68] Various artists, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records RVN 211, 2007, quoted in Ed Sanders’ essay in the liner notes, page 8.
[69] Carlin, Worlds of Sound, 73.
[70] Various artists, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music Volume 4, Revenant Records RVN 211, 2007 quoted by Sanders in the liner notes, page 9.
[71] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, interview with Moses Asch from the March 22, 1972 issue of Sing Out! magazine Volume 26 number 1 and volume 26 number 2, excerpted in liner notes, 33.
[72] The liner notes allude to a volumes 4, 5, and 6, but only volume 4 was compiled and released, by John Fahey’s Revenant Records in 2007, long after Smith moved on to other pursuits and the documentation was lost (as per Asch in the Anthology liner notes, 33; and per Smith in Carlin, Worlds of Sound, 64).
[73] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, from the forward to the original liner notes.
[74] In fact most of Smith’s wry, drum-tight plot summaries of the Anthology of American Folk Music’s 86 songs are written as sensational newspaper headlines; “Young Agriculturist Neglects Seed—Looses [sic] Both Crop and Fiancee” for “A Lazy Farmer Boy”, to give one example.
[75] Folkways was purchased in 1987 by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, an independent public trust which receives some US federal funding.
[76] From an email interview with Jeff Place, Archivist, Smithsonian Folkways, January 6, 2010.
[77] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, Fahey’s essay at 8, Stampfel’s essay at 25, Van Ronk’s essay at 36 in the liner notes.
[78] Dylan has covered many of the songs on the Anthology, such as “Frankie & Albert,” (titled simply “Frankie” on the Anthology and performed by Mississippi John Hurt) from 1992’s Good As I Been to You (Columbia), and “Stack A Lee” on 1993’s World Gone Wrong (Columbia) and as the liner notes to the Anthology mention, his famous song “Maggie’s Farm” clearly takes its inspiration from the Bentley Boys’ “Down on Penny’s Farm,” track 25 on the Anthology.
[79] Garcia told Ralph Rinzler of the Smithsonian Folklife Archives that because he did not own a copy of the Anthology, he used to sneak into a neighbor’s house while she was at work just to listen to her copy. From an email interview with Jeff Place, Archivist, Smithsonian Folkways, January 6, 2010.
[80] Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2005), 47.
[81] Marcus, Invisible Republic, 87.
[82] Ibid, 102.
[83] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, liner notes, 38-63
[84] From the Recording Academy’s Grammy Award Winners search engine website, accessed December 14, 2009;
[85] From the Recording Industry Association of America’s website, Gold & Platinum database search engine, accessed December 14, 2009;
[86] Carlin, Worlds of Sound, 75-76.
[87] Various artists, The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090, 1997, original liner notes, in Moe Asch’s “General Notes on This Series” section.
[88] Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (London: Jazz Book Club 1961), 146
[89] Quoted from A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice (London: Longman, 2003), 226
[90]As Charters himself makes clear, in the years after World War 2, many Blacks considered the country blues a tired anachronism from the wrong side of history. Charters, The Country Blues, 159
[91] Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective, 721 Incidentally, the Degenerate Art exhibit was also the best-attended art exhibit in European history at that time CK
[92] Jerrold Hirsch, Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writer’s Project,
[93] LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: HarperCollins 1963, 1999) 95
[94] Charles Shaar Murray, Blues on CD: The Essential Guide, Kyle Cathie, London, 1994, xii
[95] Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions (London: Jonathan Cape 2007)
[96] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 138
[97] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 126
[98] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 140
[99] Frederic Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith, ed.s, Jazzmen (New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1939) 287
[100] Ramsey and Smith, Jazzmen
[101] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 132
[102] Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1998) 242
[103] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 151
[104] Frederic Ramsey, Jr., Been Here and Gone (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1960)
[105] Ramsey, Been Here and Gone, xi; as excerpted in Hamilton, In Search of the Blues
[106] Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 160
[107] McKune, excerpted in Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 183
[108] Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
[109] This is not universally true of course, but it’s fair to say that the vast majority of hip hop DJs/producers create music (or “make beats”) that’s intended for rappers to rhyme over. However, hip hop producers making beats which are not intended for rappers is no contradiction in terms. Many hip hop producers make beats for music that is emphatically not hip hop (Timbaland’s work with rock band OneRepublic on their 2007 hit “Apologize,” Kanye West’s work with R&B singer Alicia Keys on 2003’s “You Don’t Know My Name,” DJ Premier’s work with Branford Marsalis on 1994’s Buckshot LeFonque), and others, like DJ Shadow, Kid Koala, and Cut Chemist make music intended to stand on its own.
[110] The other being dance-ability.
[111] Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
[112] Indeed, Cadence and Pitch of the Boston group Raw Produce coined the term “garbage production” for the music they composed from the “worst”—i.e. least-likely, embarrassing, and disreputable—sources they could find such as easy listening, children’s records, and undistinguished fusion jazz.
[113] Schloss, Making Beats, 23
[114] Toby Amies, Beat Mining With the Vinyl Hoover, BBC Radio 4
[115] Public Enemy. Bring the Noise. Def Jam Recordings. 651335 6, 1987.
[116] For that we would probably have to look at X-Clan versus the Fat Boys, Poor Righteous Teachers versus 2 Live Crew, or Boogie Down Productions versus Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch
[117] Public Enemy. Bring the Noise. Def Jam Recordings. 651335 6, 1987.
[118] Stay Free! Issue #20, Interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee
[119] After the conclusion of the case in 1991, Turtles singer Mark “Flo” Vollman was quoted saying, “Anybody who can honestly say sampling is a form of creativity has obviously never done anything creative.”
[120] Interestingly, Hall & Oates did not take legal action against Stevie Wonder after he released his 1985 hit “Part-Time Lover,” though that song bears quite striking similarities to Hall & Oates’1982 hit “Maneater.”
[121] Of which their 1969 cover of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” might be the most famous example.
[122] Steely Dan eventually sued Tariq and Gunz for “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby),” receiving writing credit for the song. As a result, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker received the 1999 ASCAP award for most-played rap song.
[123] 2 Live Crew was sued by Orbison’s publishing company for using the song, and became one of the first sampling copyright cases to go to court. The 2 Live Crew version was deemed legal expression on grounds that it was parody.
[124] Marcus Reeves, Somebody Scream! Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. Faber & Faber, 2009
[125] Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: St Martin’s 2005)
[126] This in spite of that OutKast claimed to have had no political intention in titling the song after Ms. Parks, as reported by Ken Paluson in his article “Outkast vs. Rosa Parks: a clash of icons” within Inside the First Amendment, February 1, 2004.
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Exh. 8: Harry Smith in the East Village, New York, 1968 (photo by John Cohen)
Collectors and Selectors: Music Canons and Record Collecting Ideologies from Folk to Hip Hop
by Damien McCaffery
August 31st, 2010
S0960728
MRes Musicology
Advisor: Professor Simon Frith
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