Hip Hop and Theory

[Dennis R Redmond]

H. Curtiss Leung writes:
> 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.

Interesting thought. Maybe Bach was indeed a "multimedia" artist compared
to, say, Palestrina, i.e. combined elements of a nascent national
German tradition (most notably, harmonic cadences and melody) with the
sacred heritage of the prevailing Church music (i.e. counterpoint).
The term is, of course, badly overused in current parlance -- what I
meant was that hip hop derived its musical content from a wide variety of
media (films, TV, sound-effects, video-games, you name it) and not
strictly from explicitly musical instruments, as in the jazz tradition.
Jazz improvisation anticipated, of course, many of the achievements of hip
hop (parody, pastiche, etc.) but always kept this within the context of a
handicrafts division of labor (Coltrane's saxophonics, as opposed to
the contemporary sound-engineer -- which doesn't necessarily make the
sound-engineer better than the 'Trane!).

> 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.

It does indeed have ideological content. But that content lies in the
musical text, not primarily in the vocal lyrics. To appreciate the
radicality of the greatest hip hop, think of the degree to which global
capitalism has saturated our living and working environments with sounds:
car horns, traffic, computer chimes, beeping microwaves, car stereos,
beepers, cellphones, ad technologicum. Practically every commodity has its
own characteristic sound-technology nowadays; hip hop's answer to the vile
commodification this implies (an unending, unceasing assault on the
senses) is a kind of "re-appropriation of the appropriation". The musical
commodity is annulled by the hip hop musical ecology. That is, hip hop 
responded by creating a whole new art-form, comprised of lyrical
producers (rappers) on the one hand, and musical samplers (DJs) on
the other (it's similar to the division of labor which you find in
information capitalism, between free-style hackers and library-style 
coders). Example: Cypress Hill's eponymous 1991 album, where there's 
a track called "Real Estate" which is really a send-up of the entire home
mortgage market of Los Angeles. Cypress Hill combines Spanglish lingo with
high-tech samples, all set against a Latin-African-American drumbeat (the
band itself is multiethnic and multilingual) and the patented
1980s-derived heavy bass line: the musical anticipation of the car-mobile
1992 L.A. uprising.  

> 	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?

Ah, but it is indeed only occasional. Global capitalism contains within
itself national monopoly capitalism (the auto industries), regional
capitalism (the New York banks), urban and local capitalism, etc. -- to
say nothing of the 3 billion human beings on this planet who labor under
a kind of raw materials/petty agrarian capitalism. Every mode of
capitalist production reproduces all these other contradictions with it:
in fact, that's how the total system works -- the hegemonic mode, whatever
it is, exploits all the other modes, totally. But this totality is a
totality of antagonisms and conflicts, not of consensus. Das Ganze ist
falsch.
     
There's an important political corollary here. Just think 
of Ross Perot: basically a lumpen-rentier stuffed with T-bills,
trying to buy an American political system already bought off in advance
by the Fortune 500 and Wall Street (of course, he merely had the bad taste
to want to put a "For Sale" sign on what was already sold out). And then
there's Boss Ross's sluglike Congressional parody, Newt 
Gangrene-of-the-Rich, facing off against Clinton, blowdried stooge of the
global bond market and paragon of all the usual Eisenhowerian virtues.
These political actors represent real social forces within American
capitalism, otherwise they wouldn't be where they are, nor would our
corporate mass media take the time to broadcast their conflicts far and
wide. Sure, global capital has the last word, but that doesn't prevent
other class fractions from trying to seize political market share now and
then; and our subjectivities are no less heterogenous admixtures of
present and past class struggles, antagonisms, conflicts etc.

-- Dennis