Andrew
04-06-2005, 01:15
Extract from Freedom of Expression (http://kembrew.com/books/) by Kembrew McLeod, issued under a Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/).
Killing the author softly with two turntables
Musical revolutions are often the result of the most mundane circumstances.
Sometime in the mid-1970s at a housing project in the
Bronx, a teenager was in his room blasting records. As parents are
likely to do, his mom banged on his door, telling him to turn his
music down. When she walked in, he stopped the record with his
fingers, listening partially to what she was telling him while unconsciously
moving the record back and forth over the same drumbeat.
That teenaged boy morphed into Grand Wizard Theodore. “I
wanted to get that same groove I was on,” the veteran DJ explained
in the documentary Battle Sounds. “So I was, like, back and forth
and I said to myself, ‘Hey, this sounds pretty good!’ Ya know?”
Whether this story is a fanciful bit of mythmaking or straight-up
fact, it illustrates hip-hop’s haphazard evolution—a series of events
built around mistakes that sounded good, and which were further
developed.
The DJs who inspired Grand Wizard Theodore—Kool DJ Herc,
Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash—often plugged their
massive sound systems into street-lamp outlets in local parks. They
dug deep into their crates full of records and kept the party rocking
till the cops quite literally came a-knocking. The earliest of these
DJs to gain popularity was Kool DJ Herc, who had a habit of creating
infectiously danceable collages with his two turntables. Herc
was from Jamaica, and the music of his birthplace was extremely
influential for him, especially the dub reggae records made by
producer/engineers King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. These men
turned the recording studio’s mixing desk into a musical instrument.
They altered the speed, equalization, and other elements of
the recording—also dropping instruments in and out of the mix—
to make multiple “versions” of one song.
The existence of these dub versions, British cultural studies
scholar Dick Hebdige comments, demonstrates that “no one has
the final say. Everybody has a chance to make a contribution. And
no one’s version is treated as Holy Writ.”2 In Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes, the French philosopher says something similar
about his writing and his life: “What I write about myself is never
the last word.”3 He means that there’s no way to permanently imprint
his intentions in the words he types. Someone can always misinterpret
his writing, or they can take a small fragment and put it in
a new context—as I have just done with his words. Kool Herc
brought from Jamaica the idea that the musicians no longer had the
last word in their music, and when he arrived in the early 1970s,
disco DJs had independently come to the same sonic conclusions.
With their two turntables and a mixer, early disco DJs stretched
tunes from three minutes to twenty, crafting entirely new versions
of songs—all without involving the original songwriters and musicians.
Disco was primarily a downtown happening, while up in the
Bronx hip-hop DJs such as Kool Herc were doing much the same
thing in a different style. “I quickly realized that those breakbeats
were making the crowd go crazy,” Herc told me, speaking of the
catchy and percussive breakdowns that make songs go BOOM. “As
long as I kept the beat going with the best parts of those records,
everybody would keep dancing, and the culture just evolved from
that.” Herc fused together the chunks of songs that were the most
popular with dancers, segueing the instrumental and percussion
breaks into one long musical collage.
Some of the better known hip-hop breakbeats came from the Incredible
Bongo Band’s “Apache,” James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,”
and even the opening bars of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk
Women” or Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” Afrika Bambaataa took a
cue from Kool Herc’s eclecticism, going a bit further by mixing in
television commercials and the theme to The Andy Griffith Show.
But in terms of sonic skills and agility, Grandmaster Flash left Kool
Herc and other DJs in the proverbial dust. “Most great records had
amazing parts,” Flash told me. “You know, the percussive part that
you wait for—before they called it ‘the break’ it was ‘the get-down
part.’ What pissed me off was that part was so short, so I just extended
it with two copies to five minutes.”
The one thing Flash couldn’t do was spit rhymes, which wasn’t a
big deal because in 1970s hip-hop culture the DJ was the star, not
the MC. “I was like totally wack on the mic,” said Flash, “so I had to
find someone able to put a vocal entertainment on top of this rearrangement
of music.”4 From there, Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Five—best known for “The Message” and “White Lines”—
were born.Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa inspired numerous up-andcoming
Bronx DJs during the late 1970s, including Grand Wizard
Theodore, Grandmaster D.S.T., and DJ Afrika Islam, among others.
Offering a window into that time is a rare taped performance by
the Cold Crush Brothers that fell into my hands while writing this
book. It was recorded over a quarter century ago, but something
about it sounds fresh—funky fresh—because the music was created
live with turntables, mixed by a deft (and def ) DJ who might screw
up and drop a beat at any moment. It’s that sense of danger, the
feeling that comes from live performances, that makes it so compelling.
The same year of the Cold Crush Brothers recording, 1977,
the French intellectual Jacques Attali published an important book,
Noise, in which he unknowingly described (in the abstract) the
turntable practices South Bronx hip-hop DJs had already perfected.
In his book, Attali breaks up the history of music-making into four
stages, with the fourth stage, composition, existing only in his imagination
at the time, or so he thought.
“The listener is the operator,” said Attali about this music-
making method, where anyone could compose music, regardless of
whether they fit the traditional category of “musicians” or not.5 In
the composition stage, the distinction between the worker and consumer,
the musician and listener, was blurred—quite an advanced
concept for the 1970s. Afrika Bambaataa’s sonic collages echoed Attali’s
technique, in which the cultural consumer—the record buyer,
the DJ—morphed into the cultural producer. The turntable is an
object of consumption that was reimagined by DJs as a technology
of production, and today’s software programs now allow anyone
with a computer to collage and compose.
This expansion of creative possibility has resulted in the MP3
“mash-ups” of today, where thousands of bedroom composers are
creating new songs by smashing together two different songs and
putting them on the Internet for free. One hilariously compelling
mash-up I’ve downloaded crosses Eminem’s “Without Me” with
“Come On Eileen” by Dexy Midnight Runners, which—dare I say
it?—aurally emasculates the posturing white rapper by placing him
atop a goofy one-hit wonder of the 1980s. Another great one is Eminem’s
“The Real Slim Shady” set to a ragtime instrumental. At their
best, mash-ups sound equally right and wrong; the fusion can be
both seamless, but weird and jarring. Yet again, the original authors
no longer have the last word.
This sensibility echoes philosopher Jacques Derrida’s writings, in
which he encouraged readers to play with the text—mocking, deconstructing,
and reconstructing it. Derrida was publishing his
writings on deconstruction roughly at the same time hip-hop DJs,
disco DJs, and dub reggae producers developed their deconstructive
music methods in the early 1970s. And his ideas were as revolutionary
in the academy as hip-hop was in the South Bronx. There
was a common impulse shared at the time by all sorts of people—
whether they were working with typewriters or turntables, in the
ivory tower or in the streets—to “break it down,” so to speak. The
deconstructive tactics these DJs used would have likely been approved
of by Roland Barthes. He attempted a literary drive-by in
his widely cited essay, “The Death of the Author,” where he more or
less blew away established assumptions about what authorship is.
For instance, in Leviathan, that influential Enlightenment artifact,
Thomas Hobbes defined the author, first, as someone who is
responsible for his writing and, second, one who determines the
text’s meaning after it circulates. For Barthes, the first definition
doesn’t stand up to scrutiny because it is the critical reader who determines
the meaning of a text. Just ask that Catcher in the Rye fan
and John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, or all the fans
who misinterpreted Bruce Springsteen’s anti-Vietnam anthem
“Born in the U.S.A.” as a jingoist ditty.6 Barthes wanted to give more
power to the people—the readers, in this case. This desire wasn’t
merely a theoretical exercise, because it was rooted in the very real
fact that all readers have their own interpretations and can make
their own meanings.
The attempt to eliminate the godlike power and influence of the
author was only a reaction to the critical tenor of the times, when
the author’s intentions had previously eclipsed most everything in
the field of literary criticism. One of Roland Barthes’s motivations—
which was shared by Michel Foucault in his essay “What Is
an Author?”—was to undermine the overpowering influence of the
author. The things that DJ Derrida, Funkmaster Foucault, and
Roland 808 Barthes wrote about in the late 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed,
in part, the way today’s young adults have been brought
up reading and playing with fragmented, hyperlinked texts and images.
The manner in which my college students use the Internet and
editing software has severely damaged the myth of the individual
genius author, for it gives them the tools to freely collage image,
music, and text.
PS Woohoo! 200! Who da man?!? :cool:
Killing the author softly with two turntables
Musical revolutions are often the result of the most mundane circumstances.
Sometime in the mid-1970s at a housing project in the
Bronx, a teenager was in his room blasting records. As parents are
likely to do, his mom banged on his door, telling him to turn his
music down. When she walked in, he stopped the record with his
fingers, listening partially to what she was telling him while unconsciously
moving the record back and forth over the same drumbeat.
That teenaged boy morphed into Grand Wizard Theodore. “I
wanted to get that same groove I was on,” the veteran DJ explained
in the documentary Battle Sounds. “So I was, like, back and forth
and I said to myself, ‘Hey, this sounds pretty good!’ Ya know?”
Whether this story is a fanciful bit of mythmaking or straight-up
fact, it illustrates hip-hop’s haphazard evolution—a series of events
built around mistakes that sounded good, and which were further
developed.
The DJs who inspired Grand Wizard Theodore—Kool DJ Herc,
Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash—often plugged their
massive sound systems into street-lamp outlets in local parks. They
dug deep into their crates full of records and kept the party rocking
till the cops quite literally came a-knocking. The earliest of these
DJs to gain popularity was Kool DJ Herc, who had a habit of creating
infectiously danceable collages with his two turntables. Herc
was from Jamaica, and the music of his birthplace was extremely
influential for him, especially the dub reggae records made by
producer/engineers King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. These men
turned the recording studio’s mixing desk into a musical instrument.
They altered the speed, equalization, and other elements of
the recording—also dropping instruments in and out of the mix—
to make multiple “versions” of one song.
The existence of these dub versions, British cultural studies
scholar Dick Hebdige comments, demonstrates that “no one has
the final say. Everybody has a chance to make a contribution. And
no one’s version is treated as Holy Writ.”2 In Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes, the French philosopher says something similar
about his writing and his life: “What I write about myself is never
the last word.”3 He means that there’s no way to permanently imprint
his intentions in the words he types. Someone can always misinterpret
his writing, or they can take a small fragment and put it in
a new context—as I have just done with his words. Kool Herc
brought from Jamaica the idea that the musicians no longer had the
last word in their music, and when he arrived in the early 1970s,
disco DJs had independently come to the same sonic conclusions.
With their two turntables and a mixer, early disco DJs stretched
tunes from three minutes to twenty, crafting entirely new versions
of songs—all without involving the original songwriters and musicians.
Disco was primarily a downtown happening, while up in the
Bronx hip-hop DJs such as Kool Herc were doing much the same
thing in a different style. “I quickly realized that those breakbeats
were making the crowd go crazy,” Herc told me, speaking of the
catchy and percussive breakdowns that make songs go BOOM. “As
long as I kept the beat going with the best parts of those records,
everybody would keep dancing, and the culture just evolved from
that.” Herc fused together the chunks of songs that were the most
popular with dancers, segueing the instrumental and percussion
breaks into one long musical collage.
Some of the better known hip-hop breakbeats came from the Incredible
Bongo Band’s “Apache,” James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,”
and even the opening bars of the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk
Women” or Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” Afrika Bambaataa took a
cue from Kool Herc’s eclecticism, going a bit further by mixing in
television commercials and the theme to The Andy Griffith Show.
But in terms of sonic skills and agility, Grandmaster Flash left Kool
Herc and other DJs in the proverbial dust. “Most great records had
amazing parts,” Flash told me. “You know, the percussive part that
you wait for—before they called it ‘the break’ it was ‘the get-down
part.’ What pissed me off was that part was so short, so I just extended
it with two copies to five minutes.”
The one thing Flash couldn’t do was spit rhymes, which wasn’t a
big deal because in 1970s hip-hop culture the DJ was the star, not
the MC. “I was like totally wack on the mic,” said Flash, “so I had to
find someone able to put a vocal entertainment on top of this rearrangement
of music.”4 From there, Grandmaster Flash and the
Furious Five—best known for “The Message” and “White Lines”—
were born.Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa inspired numerous up-andcoming
Bronx DJs during the late 1970s, including Grand Wizard
Theodore, Grandmaster D.S.T., and DJ Afrika Islam, among others.
Offering a window into that time is a rare taped performance by
the Cold Crush Brothers that fell into my hands while writing this
book. It was recorded over a quarter century ago, but something
about it sounds fresh—funky fresh—because the music was created
live with turntables, mixed by a deft (and def ) DJ who might screw
up and drop a beat at any moment. It’s that sense of danger, the
feeling that comes from live performances, that makes it so compelling.
The same year of the Cold Crush Brothers recording, 1977,
the French intellectual Jacques Attali published an important book,
Noise, in which he unknowingly described (in the abstract) the
turntable practices South Bronx hip-hop DJs had already perfected.
In his book, Attali breaks up the history of music-making into four
stages, with the fourth stage, composition, existing only in his imagination
at the time, or so he thought.
“The listener is the operator,” said Attali about this music-
making method, where anyone could compose music, regardless of
whether they fit the traditional category of “musicians” or not.5 In
the composition stage, the distinction between the worker and consumer,
the musician and listener, was blurred—quite an advanced
concept for the 1970s. Afrika Bambaataa’s sonic collages echoed Attali’s
technique, in which the cultural consumer—the record buyer,
the DJ—morphed into the cultural producer. The turntable is an
object of consumption that was reimagined by DJs as a technology
of production, and today’s software programs now allow anyone
with a computer to collage and compose.
This expansion of creative possibility has resulted in the MP3
“mash-ups” of today, where thousands of bedroom composers are
creating new songs by smashing together two different songs and
putting them on the Internet for free. One hilariously compelling
mash-up I’ve downloaded crosses Eminem’s “Without Me” with
“Come On Eileen” by Dexy Midnight Runners, which—dare I say
it?—aurally emasculates the posturing white rapper by placing him
atop a goofy one-hit wonder of the 1980s. Another great one is Eminem’s
“The Real Slim Shady” set to a ragtime instrumental. At their
best, mash-ups sound equally right and wrong; the fusion can be
both seamless, but weird and jarring. Yet again, the original authors
no longer have the last word.
This sensibility echoes philosopher Jacques Derrida’s writings, in
which he encouraged readers to play with the text—mocking, deconstructing,
and reconstructing it. Derrida was publishing his
writings on deconstruction roughly at the same time hip-hop DJs,
disco DJs, and dub reggae producers developed their deconstructive
music methods in the early 1970s. And his ideas were as revolutionary
in the academy as hip-hop was in the South Bronx. There
was a common impulse shared at the time by all sorts of people—
whether they were working with typewriters or turntables, in the
ivory tower or in the streets—to “break it down,” so to speak. The
deconstructive tactics these DJs used would have likely been approved
of by Roland Barthes. He attempted a literary drive-by in
his widely cited essay, “The Death of the Author,” where he more or
less blew away established assumptions about what authorship is.
For instance, in Leviathan, that influential Enlightenment artifact,
Thomas Hobbes defined the author, first, as someone who is
responsible for his writing and, second, one who determines the
text’s meaning after it circulates. For Barthes, the first definition
doesn’t stand up to scrutiny because it is the critical reader who determines
the meaning of a text. Just ask that Catcher in the Rye fan
and John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, or all the fans
who misinterpreted Bruce Springsteen’s anti-Vietnam anthem
“Born in the U.S.A.” as a jingoist ditty.6 Barthes wanted to give more
power to the people—the readers, in this case. This desire wasn’t
merely a theoretical exercise, because it was rooted in the very real
fact that all readers have their own interpretations and can make
their own meanings.
The attempt to eliminate the godlike power and influence of the
author was only a reaction to the critical tenor of the times, when
the author’s intentions had previously eclipsed most everything in
the field of literary criticism. One of Roland Barthes’s motivations—
which was shared by Michel Foucault in his essay “What Is
an Author?”—was to undermine the overpowering influence of the
author. The things that DJ Derrida, Funkmaster Foucault, and
Roland 808 Barthes wrote about in the late 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed,
in part, the way today’s young adults have been brought
up reading and playing with fragmented, hyperlinked texts and images.
The manner in which my college students use the Internet and
editing software has severely damaged the myth of the individual
genius author, for it gives them the tools to freely collage image,
music, and text.
PS Woohoo! 200! Who da man?!? :cool: