Week 8: Owners, Markets, and the Narrowing of Hip Hop Creativity

First of all, the movie about the "Amen Break" was really interesting. It had a lot of interesting analysis of the position and utilization of the specific 6-second drum break and the appropriate balance of copyright law and cultural production freedom.

Anyway, for this week, I had two ideas I wanted to discuss. Dimitriadis had an interesting thesis on the overall project of hip hop that seems obvious after studying the art form for 8 weeks, but he put it very well. He proposed that "Rapper's Delight" was a fundamental turning point for hip hop. Before RD, hip hop had primarily been a "live" art that was more focused on crowd interaction and engaging the public space, than content. After RD is published, not only did rap music acquire more of a focus on the narrative and content-driven songs, but also this narrowed the terms of hip hop. After the commodification of rap began, it became clear that other elements like break dancing or graffiti would be difficult to commodify in while maintaining their artistic integrity (arguably the graffiti on canvas is a potential avenue for graffiti commodification, but this would not have the same public accessibility and individual ownership as rap). This changed how people were exposed to hip hop. If people knew about hip hop pre-RD, you were locationally situated to have directly interacted with performers and music scenes. In a post-RD world, hip hop gained "exposure by way of an 'institutional context'" (425). One of the most interesting parts for me was the block quote on 427 by Mr. Wiggles from the Rock Steady Crew going to see Run-DMC, expecting to see b-boys break dancing, but only saw the two-man crew "jam". This moment of redefining the culture and creating an "Old-School" is interesting because this article makes it clear that there were two different agendas: the Old School was to rock the crowd and develop a "party community", and the New School was focused on lyrical structure and rap, exclusively. After reading this article and the early skepticism of people like Grandmaster Flash about people's desire to listen to a record re-recording onto another record makes me notice that the earliest aesthetic of hip hop was the connection with people and the ability to keep the groove going (is this still a focus today? At least something that rapper brag about in their lyrics?)

The second part I really enjoyed was theme and brief part from Schumacher's piece, which was a quote from Frith (1986): "Digital technology is 'disrupting the implicit equation of artists' "ownership" of their creative work and companies' ownership of the resulting commodities--the latter is being defended by reference to the former'" (454). I think what Schumacher best examines in his piece is the myth of the "island artist". Schumacher really addresses the idea that recordings of all kinds today, even live ones, involve technology and the studio in some capacity. Also implied in his argument, I believe, is that musical patterns or forms are part of a longer continuum of cultural ideas about musicality and artistic worth, not individual inventions. Therefore, the music industry is relying on this myth of artistic genius in order to "secure the rights of capital" at the expense of cultural creativity (453). This is a powerful idea, especially with Western conceptions of genius and creation, emphasizing individual input and ingenuity. But I believe Schumacher correctly identifies that these arguments are less about ethical issues and more about the politics of appropriation and economic control of capital. I do not think that Schumacher is saying that artists aren't individuals, creative, or talented. What I think is going on here is that Schumacher is questioning to what extent people are creating new music, and what it means to "own" any one part of the musical process.

Whew! Good stuff. Really excited for tomorrow evening!!