Hip Hop and Theory

[Dennis R Redmond]

One small note in the current discussion: hip hop is primarily a
multimedia musical form, not a prose or poetic form. The words are 
very much secondary to the lyric delivery and African American/urban
speech rhythms, and the lyric polyphony is secondary to the
musical composition itself. This is somewhat similar to film:
im cinema, the images come first, the dialogue comes second and
the sound-track places a distant third. Possibly this is because
consumer capitalism found its easier to retail disposable images rather
than sounds, which until the era of the Walkman and boom box could only be
experienced via concerts, stereo-systems or similarly immobile
technologies; i.e. giant firms tended to invest in cinema and
special-effects where communities of resistance turned to independent 
film or musical forms -- but that's getting a little speculative. 

I'd be interested to hear, though, what folks think of the parallels
between, say, the hip hop track (at its best, a multinational ecology of
recorded and live sounds, movie dialogue, TV shows, sound-bites, 
sound-effects, scratches and samples; at its worst, no worse than
flipping through mainstream American cable TV) and, say, the video-clip.
To wit:

(1) Are there parallels between the two art-forms? 
(2) What are the opportunities for radical praxis here? 
(3) Will the Revolution(s) of the 21st century be Websited?
(4) Finally, if it's true that hip hop and video are truly multinational
genres -- and they certainly seem to be -- might they require a
whole new theoretical apparatus in order to deal with them, if not indeed 
a whole new way of looking and perceiving that world which global
capitalism is, for better and for worse, constructing all around (and
occasionally even within) us? 

Many questions, few answers.

-- Dennis