Hip Hop and Theory

[H. Curtiss Leung]

Dennis Redmond writes:

> 
> 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.

	I don't understand what you mean by "musical composition itself"
here.  That the words are subordinate to their delivery I can understand,
but if, when you write "the lyric polphony is secondary to the musical 
compostion itself," you just mean the vocals are subordinate to the overall 
sound, then this hardly makes hip-hop "multimedia" -- unless,
of course, you're going to toss all vocal music from Bach's Matthew
Passion to Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick" into the multimedia category,
too.

	Nit-picking?  Maybe, but maybe not.  I won't disagree hip-hop
is a musical rather than literary form, but does this mean it can't
have ideological content as well as function?  That's the direction
you seem to be headed.

> 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? 

	Dunno.

> (2) What are the opportunities for radical praxis here? 

	Well, what social relations do these art-forms reveal?  What
do they hide?  Wouldn't that reveal the opportunities and hazards?
Given the popular music and broadcasting industries, I'm not enthusiastic.

> (3) Will the Revolution(s) of the 21st century be Websited?

	Oh, come on now.

> (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? 
> 
	
	That you'd write global capitalism's world is only "occasionally"
built within us means the problem is that we've forgotten too much of
the old model.  Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry, anyone?

-- 
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Curtiss Leung                           Voice:     (212)267-7722 x3033
hleung@prolifics.com                    Facsimile: (212)608-6753 
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"Futility is ... hard to deal with" -- Patrick Bateman
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