Production in Hip-Hop

Much has been written concerning hip-hop's relationship to the post-modern practice of pastiche. Hip-hop producers recycle musical samples to create new compositions. As they cite their musical past, they also make new alternative meanings around their samples, creating a vibrant, thriving medium with seemingly endless room to expand. There are two related aspects of this dynamic that I think are particularly relevant for hip-hop's relationship to its listener: authorship/collectivity and consumption/production.

Tricia Rose has written extensively on hip-hop as a post-literate black cultural form that embraces both the collective ethos of oral tradition and the individualistic voice of post-modern authorship:

Rap lyrics are a critical part of a rapper's identity, strongly suggesting the importance of authorship and individuality in rap music. Yet, sampling as it is used by rap artists indicates the importance of collective identities and group histories. There are hundreds of shared phrases and slang words in rap lyrics, yet a given rap text is the personal and emotive voice of the rapper (Rose, 1994: 95).

This relationship is key to not only the dynamics between speaker and text, but also between the rapper and his/her listeners and between the listener and the text. The mesh of individualism and community makes for a link between each of these participants which tightens the space of reception so the listener can see him or herself as a part of the music. Successful rappers achieve a stature beyond their community and not every listener is included in this "group history", but the structure still makes for a relatively interactive medium. This process of taking communal history and reproducing it for personal expression is closely related to hip-hop's unique take on production and consumption. The speaker's positioning as one of and above his community and the fact that he/she is sampling music that most know demystifies production and encourages participation. If The Sugarhill Gang is taking Chic's loop to make his own creation, then why can't the listener do the same with The Sugarhill Gang's music?

African-American cultures have mobilized, via a network of localized sites and nomadic incursions, cultures of the found, the revalued, the used- and cultures moreover which have continually transfigured and transformed objects of consumption into sites of production... These modes are not only constructed, but endlessly form and repeat an "open," reconstructable structure-- since the rhythm track, the words, or the mix of Funkadelic may be sampled by Craig G, which in turn will be sampled by.... Hip-hop audiences do not, at any rate, merely listen-- passive reception is no longer possible (Potter, 1995: 108).

Hip-hop blurs the boundaries between consumer and producer and in doing so encourages a kind of conversation between the consumer/ community and the producer/author. Potter and Rose go on to argue that rap's resistance of the strict separation between production and consumption works against the dominant American capitalist hegemony. I believe many consumers produce new meanings from seemingly static texts, but I would agree that the responsive and re-productive structure of hip-hop can facilitate an exceptionally interactive relationship with listeners and can encourage counter-hegemonic participation. It can promote a personal connection and expression which in turn enables listeners to reflect on their specific environment. As Rose points out, although all oppression and domination are related, they are experienced in culturally specific contexts. "Consequently, these hidden transcripts emerge not as overt cross-referential moments of protest but as culturally specific forms and expressions. (Rose, 1994: 123) Hip-hop is able to provide a means to vocalize this specificity and thus resist hegemonic domination.

Because of this seemingly accessible and interactive structure, many have praised hip-hop's ability to be appropriated by oppressed peoples around the world. "It is increasingly clear that hip-hop has become a transnational, global art-form capable of mobilizing diverse, disenfranchised groups" (Potter, 1995: 10) The premise behind statements like this seems to be that since rap is an expression of America's oppressed against social injustice, it will be used in the same way in other countries and contexts. As I will show in discussing Nairobi's youths' relationship to production and consumption, this is not always the case. Although rap can be considered counter-hegemonic in the American context, hip-hop's structure is often differently interpreted when it enters a third world environment as a part of the larger Western hegemony. There has also been considerable literature that dismisses most white hip-hop fans as passive, unproductive consumers of hip-hop's image. White rap fans are repeatedly reified as suburban parodies of black style which I believe not only oversimplifies their complex cultural exchange, but also underestimates the power of hip-hop's conversational context. By examining Internet dynamics, I will show that there are interactive processes of meaning making that show that one does not necessarily have to be within hip-hop's ideological community to participate in the conversation.

Production in Nairobi

It is a wet Sunday afternoon and I am glad to at last reach the Florida 2000 for their weekly "hip-hop competition". After paying my 70 shillings, I enter the dark dance room that at 4:00, is already teeming with kids. Baggy jeans, those black gangsta rap T-shirts and NBA caps surround us as we squeeze our way to the DJ booth. Being a blatantly white female, I catch the now-normal double-takes of the local youth who wonder what the hell a white chick is doing here, and continue over to DJ booth. Settled by the DJ, I watch as today's competitors sign up and write the names of the two records that they want sampled, and wait for the dancing portion of the pre-show to end. Once the dance floor has cleared, the DJ calls out the first competitors-- a pair of males, one adorned in a seemingly prized Raiders cap and the other wearing a pair of jeans factory-patched with American flags. The two men send a few shout-outs to their neighborhood and when the familiar bass of Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" (with the melodic loop of Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise") kicks in, the show begins. At first the performers' African accent makes it hard for me to decipher what he is saying but after getting used to the round R's and hard G's, I realize that he is using Coolio's lyrics. About half way through the performance, the DJ mixes in Dre's "Keep Their Headz Ringin'" and the second guy takes the mic for his part. Occasionally I think I hear a Swahili word worked in over the English slang and the delivery definitely seems altered, but I am not sure if it is an intentional change or due to linguistic differences. Either way, the crowd is responsive. Small tips are stuffed in their pockets and the DJ's friend tells me that they "did nicely" because "they stayed on the beat."

I have taken the reader back to my introduction to Nairobi's hip-hop scene in hopes of provoking in the reader the same questions it raised in me. How exactly are Nairobi youth appropriating hip-hop? Although they have hip-hop competitions, are they actually making their own hip-hop? What is the relationship between their acts of production and consumption? What does this mean for the role of the individual speaker? What are the dynamics between the self and his/her community and why do they seem to be so different than what one hears in US hip-hop?

I begin this exploration by arguing that Nairobi youth are indeed involved in the reproduction processes promoted by the hip-hop medium. They are actively and tangibly taking commodified music, putting it on a turntable and reinserting their changes on its form. They are doing this by not only by repeating the rappers lyrics, but by mixing two songs into a single performance and making translations or changes in intonations. DJ's also repeatedly alter tracks by mixing and looping singles and though scratching is not very popular, DJ's do talk to the crowds over the music. Even it is something as small as him repeating "Smokin', Oakland" over the Luniz' "I got Five on it", he is asserting his presence, and in doing so, giving the music a personal resonance. This is also seen among the larger dance crowds as when all the youth clap their hands after Naughty by Nature's line "so clap your hands and grab your shorties." Nairobi youth are involving themselves in the music and though it often seems to have evolved into more of an informal social code than a deep connection to the lyrical text, the interaction is there nonetheless.

Furthermore, although my initial reaction to the hip-hop competitions was that they merely repeated other lyrics, I came to realize that there were more noticeable alterations being made. Some performers take a variety of different rappers' lyrics and rearrange them to fit a certain hip-hop track. Just as rappers splice, mix and loop musical tracks, Nairobi youth are recycling and reproducing rappers' lyrics. One of the rappers I saw do this the most was a young woman (the only female rapper I saw) named Rita. She explained her methodology in an interview as taking different raps and translating and meshing it into one. She even takes reggae lyrics and "put it into a rap form, but change some of the words with my own. No one knows it is from that song, because I've done it my own, see?... People are like, 'yeah, I've heard this before, but this is cool!'" (Rita, 7/1) I also heard some people introduce some of their own lyrics between other rappers' lyrics and my interviewees told me of other rappers that did the same. This was not common, but its presence does suggest that the extent of Nairobi youth's active alterations of the hip-hop medium is growing.

Now that I have established that Nairobi youth have more than a merely consumptive relationship to hip-hop, I want to recount it a bit. Yes, they are interacting and playing with the hip-hop medium, but they do not seem to ground it in their specific, local environment. Much of hip-hop's counter-hegemonic force comes from its contextual referentiality, and it is precisely this personal expression that is missing in Nairobi rap. In all of the months I was in Nairobi, I only heard one reference to something specific to Kenya, and even that was in reference to Jimi Gathu's video show-- the medium from which they receive rap videos. Freestyles and lyrical rearrangements were usually based on rap's stock phrases on American popular culture. One of the most inventive freestyles I heard was by a four-member group called the Loonatix. They made some introductory mentions to the club they were at and the company they were with, but the majority of their actual freestyle revolved around American icons like Sharon Stone, Jurassic Park, and OJ Simpson. Because of the spread of American movies and media, in themselves, these references do not necessarily mean an irrelevance to their environment. However, the fact that they did not share space with people or places specific to Nairobi suggests a real lack of local cultural specificity.

Before going into the local consequences of this change in hip-hop's reproductive dynamics, I would like to suggest some of the possible reasons behind the difference. Part of the logic behind rap artists using prerecorded musical tracks was not only to lower costs, but to cite one's musical past. Old funk and soul records were taken from parent's LP collections and since the original hip-hop community had a common cultural heritage, there would be a common recognition of both the track and the reasons for sampling it. In Nairobi, the logic behind a lot of these historical, cultural references is less evident. American black music is not a new arrival in Nairobi, but the older funk and soul artists did not have nearly the amount of exposure that today's artists had, and at that, most of my interviewees told me that older generations prefer more traditional music forms. There are also no public places where such music could be heard. Radio stations only play recent American music and music stores do not have any older artists. Thus, the musical loops that rappers are recycling and reciting have no historical context in Kenya.

I believe that this lack of a larger cultural context hinders parallel cultural citation in Kenya. Inaccessible technology would surely make similar sampling of African music difficult, but even so, hip-hop relies on not only the musical component of the loop, but the local and historical logic behind it. Since this is obscured, it is harder for Nairobi youth to see how they can make this some connection with their community's cultural past and their communal present. In this way, it also changes their relationship to hip-hop's individual/communal dynamics. They have definitely appropriated the idea of speaking to and for a group because introductory toasts to one's crew are standard procedure before every performance. They have not, however, changed the medium so that it actually speaks for them or articulates their environment. The individual and communal expression so core to American hip-hop's process of reproduction is simply not appropriated. The potential counter-hegemonic specificity is flattened from much of its contextual depth and is thus seen more as the image on the shirt than the full bodied and culturally contextualized form it is.

I realize that I am bordering some dangerous territory here because similar implications of inauthorship and uncreativity have been incorrectly made throughout rap's history. I also know that there is a kind of individualistic egoism central to American hip-hop that though it is at the heart of a lot of rap's counter-hegemonic specificity, it could invert to reinforce a Western hegemony on the more communally-based Kenyan culture. For, as one Kenyan told me, "I don't like the way rappers only talk about themselves" (Krysten, 6/28). Therefore, I want to clarify that Nairobi youth are actively re-creating (and recreating) hip-hop in a way that makes meaning in their lives, but that as far as hip-hop's historical and cultural context of resistance, hip-hop's counter-hegemonic appropriation is as yet inevident.

Production on the Internet

Now I am on a BART Train-- the Bay Area's subway system. I am looking through the plastic windows at the passing buildings and watching the walls race by in their spray-painted splendor. The train slows as I reach my destination and I walk down and out of the station to where I are meeting Duane and his "cousins". It is a beautiful day and lots of people are taking advantage of it at Lake Merritt. I pass a group of picnickers blasting some old school jams and watch as a pair of girls break out in some nostalgic dance moves. Their legs jog back and forth in the "Running Man" and they wind their shoulder up and around for "The Cabbage Patch". I continue on to Duane's apartment complex and he shows us up to his place. He has converted his living room into a makeshift studio and when I arrive, his friends are flipping through records and suggesting tracks. After going through introductions and getting comfortable, a tall, dark guy named Sean puts on a vinyl single of The Roots' new album on one turntable and Michael Jackson's Off the Wall on the other. He lets The Roots' bass sink in and finds a disco riff on Jackson's which he then proceeds to scratch with amazing precision. Andre, a heavy-set, mean-looking rapper with a surprisingly soft voice jumps in with a freestyle about Oakland and Duane uses one of his pauses to take off on a fast-paced rap on his lyrical skill. They gesture their hands accordingly and we bob our heads in unison with the bass' beat. Duane ends with an obscure rhyme between "Lake Merritt" and "ferrets" and the resulting laughter winds down the freestyle session.

I have taken the reader on this journey back to Oakland in an attempt to point out a very important aspect of the Internet's production: it can't do any of the things above. Hip-hop's four pillars-- graffiti, breakdancing, MCing and rapping-- all depend on the body, sound and/or movement; three things the Internet is not very proficient in expressing. Graffiti's letters play with movement and the changing perspective between buildings and motorists. Breakdancing relies on the transitions of the body that still photos can't capture. And both MCing and rapping are centered in a body and all of the social, cultural and physical qualifiers that give it meaning. Granted, hip-hop has traveled far from these four original expressions, but they remain an ideological force by emphasizing hip-hop's embodied, tangible, street-oriented origins. Another aspect of the hip-hop in Oakland is that it is situated in a space where its reproducers have a common cultural context. Duane and his "cousins" share and constitute a community they then express through the hip-hop medium. Internet newsgroups members, on the other hand, are from different geographical communities that stretch the globe. Thus, they create a community because of hip-hop instead of having hip-hop develop from the community.

These differences beg the question; if the Internet can not tangibly express hip-hop culture, how can one discuss its relationship to production? And if they do not share a common cultural context, how do they relate to hip-hop's traditional mediating role between individual and his/her community? I would like to suggest that the Internet newsgroups engage in productive meaning making and community referentiality. Through understanding their unique position relative to the author/producer and community/consumer dynamics I discussed earlier, I hope to show their relationship to hip-hop's contextual ideology and cultural specificity.

I see a whole lot more potential in new media publishing. When people talk about raising the stakes and taking shit to the next level, I challenge you all to expressions like these (in hip-hop) and taking that extra month or two to get the right people involved and make a cohesive product that includes all the elements. Peace and let's all challenge each other with some friendly competition when it comes to the new age. I really think hip-hop has a chance to experience a rebirth and take things back from the mass media machines and provide people with some content that is relative to their lives (bweeb, 10/28/96).

Hip-hop may emphasize tangible recycling of accessible materials, but much of the meaning behind the actual reproduction lies in the personal re-creation of consumption into expression. Thus, although many struggle with the Internet's relationship to hip-hop's conventional forms, I believe members do participate in hip-hop's larger productive conversations. One of the more obvious productive sites on the Internet are webpages. Many web sites are linked to alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop and though I did not thoroughly study them, I have seen enough to realize that they are important spaces for hip-hop's future. These web sites are becoming an increasingly used structure for personal and local expression, but simply because they are one of the more individualistic mediums on the Internet does not necessarily mean that they are the Internet's only means of production; I think there is just as much, if not more, active expression and production on the Internet newsgroup conversations.

In reviewing any day's messages, one always finds a variety of opinions on lyrical interpretations, artists skills, coastal rivalries, and album reviews. Most posts provoke a weeks worth of responses and reactions by different members, each asserting their own view of the text, issue or image. Granted, much of this responsiveness seems inherent in the Internet's format and could be found on any newsgroup, but hip-hop newsgroup members also situate their comments within the larger framework of hip-hop's production logic.

The purpose of these discussion forums is to discuss,interpolate and air one's opinions and ideas about hip-hop... Everyone should, like Rerunn, have fun with being able to discuss such a diverse music with such a diverse "community"... Like hip-hop, take hold of each other's opinions, debate, rebutt, but never lose sight of the reason that you are all here in the first place, COMMUNICATION (KOOKY, 6/8/95 ).

knucklehead kari orr, why should anyone care if you call them on anything. you want to be negative and put down an individual's choice for best MC. I disagree with that way of thinking. People should be able to put positive posts of what group or artist that they are feeling without being negatively blasted by the next man (brooklyn, 10/16/96).

It ain't safe no more. it's not safe to put up posts without thinking. if you can't defend your own ideas, are your ideas worth defending? i will be negative now because i have my eyes on the greater positive. that goal is to have people think about their music, to do more than just figure out the words of 'Electric Relaxation'; actually decide what they think the main point of the song is, why they chose that title, how the chorus fits the rest of the song. but if asking people to think about this music, instead of just dancing, or bobbing their heads is too much to ask, well i'm going to continue. No peace cause hip-hop was not meant to be peaceful (kari orr, 10/16/96).

This emphasis on communication and making meaning from the music is directly related to hip-hop's participatory structure. The constant competitive process of debating meanings is seen as fundamental to the hip-hop format because, as kari orr says, "hip-hop was not meant to be peaceful." Kari orr's arguments for analyzing and contextualizing the music also points out another aspect of the newsgroup's appropriation: personal involvement. One of the main ways in which members convert their consumer relationship to the hip-hop texts is by posting on its relevance to their own specific context. Concert reviews, song analysis and the many discussions on the politics of race and class all revolve around posters expressing their individual or cultural interpretation of a common text. Just as MC's give new musical contexts to old records and rappers make new word plays from popular symbols, so do the newsgroup members assert their own personal background on hip-hop's musical culture. Though their authorship may lie in an e.mail address instead of a voice or physically reproduced track, the presence of their personal perspective is undeniable. Many members have even developed their own unique typing style so that their authorship can be seen throughout their post. Kari orr for example, will only use a capital to begin a post and uses short single-sentence paragraphs separated by spaces. Others use particular words and short-spellings, and almost every poster has a unique sign at the end of their posts. All of these stylistic choices assert a poster's specific voice and establish their personal production.

Since these newsgroups are constituted by dispersed individuals coming together on the Internet, their appropriation of hip-hop's expressive authorship is relatively straightforward. But what about the "community" that the first poster mentioned? Hip-hop is not only about authorship/production and community/consumption, but about the connection between the two. As I discussed earlier, rappers are seen as representatives that speak to and for his or her area. Though commercial rappers are exposed beyond local boundaries, most other rap artists (the ones which the Internet prefers to discuss) talk first and foremost to their immediate community. Even if we can accept the newsgroup members relationship to the reproduction of commodity meanings, how can the author speak to any local community on the Internet? This is contentious territory on alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop, and though it is rarely discussed directly, their struggle with the meaning of community runs throughout many posts. One of the most prominent areas of this conflict is in the role of history. Since the members do not share a common local past, hip-hop's history has become a foundation for the Internet's community. But because many members have not been raised along with hip-hop's growth, this sense of history has also become a site for struggles over authenticity.

It is such a shame that the majority of alt.rap subscribers are most certainly not "original headz", but affluent college kids that have found a new hobby to pass their time-- and/or a new culture/art form to appropriate. For all those ignorant "cultural outsiders" who insist on lambasting various rappers for what they, or their culture deem to be offensive lyrical content, violent imagery, etc., I say educate yourself on the history and politics of rap music and hip-hop culture. Because I'm assuming most of you read literature occasionally, I will provide all hip-hop junkies in some names of books they should check out as a means of opening up some more constructive dialogue (shawn, 5/10/95).

The wack shit right now is what people wanna listen to probably because of the rap audience structured as so: *) Original heads (True School heads and post 83 Run-DMC listeners a) Post 1987-1988 PE and NWA listeners b) Post 1992 Dr.Dre listeners c) Post 1994 Snoop Listeners This is pretty much what I have seen in my life. Gratefully I fall in the true school category where my listening career began in 1979... (Dolemite, 6/28/95)

Alongside the posts like the above that emphasize the value of knowing the history of hip-hop culture, there are also many posts that discuss samples and lyrical historical references. I believe the primary motivation behind these historical references is to emphasize the original community context of hip-hop, which in doing so, also establishes a common cultural foundation for alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop. Although the members may not all share a similar background, their dedication to these hip-hop newsgroups is in many ways made contingent on their commitment to hip-hop's cultural history. It gives the newsgroups a kind of common ground that their spatial, racial and cultural differences otherwise hinder and makes for a "community" that members can speak both to and for.

However, in asserting this cultural community in history, hip-hop's musical past also tends to propagate an authenticity of origins that disconnects hip-hop from its personal relevancy. Hip-hop's history has the potential to be reduced to a badge of authenticity that endangers the local specificity that its contextual emphasis otherwise encourages.

I agree that there are a lot of bandwagon white wannabees but there are also alot of white people who have been into rap for years. I never listened to any kind of music until one day a friend gave me "It Takes a Nation of Millions" by PE and since then I've been listening to and buying rap. I've never been 'down' with rap since the old school or anything but I'm also trying to learn the history of rap by going to second hand record shops and buying loads of old vinyl (P.J. 4/27/95).

It is unlikely that someone would disapprove of these efforts to educate oneself on hip-hop's older artists, but it also seems that it gives rise to people appropriating history for status rather than for the larger cultural context. The above poster seems to feel like he is inadequate because he has not been "down" as long as others, and though his process of searching for a history he never directly experienced are noble enough, his attempts at converting his economic capital into cultural capital seem ill-fated. Whatever the motivations, the privileging of hip-hop's history is sure to encourage listeners' involvement in hip-hop's larger counter-hegemonic context; I only wonder if it also separates them from hip-hop's ideological force in their own lives. Hip-hop promotes a particular cultural history which should never be divorced from its meaning and form, but it also encourages a specific contextual reproduction for its listeners. For those who have a different cultural background than hip-hop, this may appear a hopeless contradiction. The hip-hop phrases like "don't front" and "stay real" are arguing for people to represent their own unique background-- to speak from what they know-- while hip-hop's presumed authenticity lies in one very specific racial and cultural history.

What are we left with? Because the Internet is a dynamic and diverse meeting ground for people from different places and perspectives, it has become a site of many competing interpretations of hip-hop's ideology. Posters are constantly struggling with asserting their own legitimacy in hip-hop's re-productive conversations. Unlike many Nairobi youth, they do this through expressing hip-hop from their own specific viewpoint. Although this is perhaps only possible because of their exposure and emphasis on hip-hop's larger contextual history, it also makes for an authenticity that values particular perspectives more than others. As much as newsgroup members actively produce new meanings, they are also inescapably connected to hip-hop's specific spatial, cultural and historical form and context. Thus, for as many posts that argue for embracing new technology and making new expressions of hip-hop, there are just as many that pull the newsgroup back to its physical and racial body. The forces and faces behind this latter pull are the subject of the next section: Language, Distance and the Body.

Continue to Language, Distance and the Body in Hip-Hop, Nairobi and the Internet

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