A little off topic but funny enough to mention. Here in France, Skyblog.com is closing its doors in the next days. It was a blog platform ran by the #1 hiphop radio. It's not related to hip hop at all, even the radio only play crappy mainstream rap since 30 years ago, but back in the days, it was an easy way for a lot of teens to have a voice on the Internet. It wasn't deep at all, often really dumb, and it was mocked even in 2000, but 20 years after remains the symbol of an era and there's still some nice joys that came out of it. It was worth archiving for all those reasons and we are glad INA (National Audiovisual Institute) saved all the content.
For the record (ha!), French hip hop is my favourite of all the "international" flavours. Some excellent DJs and producers and there's something about the smoothness of the accent that coincides very well with my tastes. Not understanding French and so not having to worry about problematic lyrics may add to the appeal;)
Oh no you're the one that was right, I was just being tongue-in-cheek. Skyrock is the better known platform. Mostly broadcasting top40 and music deemed commercial.
That's why when rap started being more popular, they switched to this genre from rock (hence the name).
I've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a big fan of the record label Bear Family, a German label that specializes in releasing boxsets from R&B/Rock&Roll/Country artists from the 20's-70's. Want to hear every song The Carter Family ever recorded in their original incarnation? They have a 12 CD boxset for you! They generally do this be acquiring the original master tapes from the labels, which often include a lot of previously unreleased songs or alternate takes, and remastering them.
Hip-Hop probably has a higher percentage of this material than almost any other genre, especially once you get to the mixtape/blog era. Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples, so even if clean recordings were available official release would be impossible.
> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro.
If that's the art form as it was experienced, do archivists need to make a "better" version?
This is like asking if a recording of the 1996 Olympics should have to include all of the commercials.
For historical purposes, sure, have that as an option, but lil wayne's mixtapes are not better off for the random DJs or website advertisements yelled over them. That's not the music he made.
I get your point, but I absolutely do prefer to hear older recordings where they have been able to in some way improve the quality over what was initially released. An extreme case would be some of the old 78rpm records that recent innovations have been able to clean up substantially. While the hip-hop records I'm talking about are not nearly that bad, the releases were often made in 128kbps with whatever encoder was available. Some may even have been transcoded.
> A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples
That's the killer, right there. For example, the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique probably could not be released today as it samples an incredible number of other artists.[0]
A lot of hip hop still has unlicensed samples in it but the slices just keep getting smaller and less recognizable. And believe it or not a lot of the samples in Paul’s Boutique were licensed. I do agree with you though that (maybe until recently as I think the price of sampling is softening somewhat with sites like tracklib) Paul’s Boutique would be expensive to release today.
Then there are stories like the Mark Ronson song ooh wee that he owns -25% of[0] because the boney m string riff took 100% of the publishing and Dennis Coffey drums took another 25%. So he theoretically lost money each play. Public enemy’s it takes a nation of millions to hold us back is another album that would lose money to make today.
Somewhere I have a dead iPod shuffle with the grey album on it. Listened to that non stop in undergrad. Have not been able to find another bootleg of it :(
The original shows is available on mixcloud for anyone who wants to hear any of the interesting commentary that went with the playlist. It looks like the It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back Breakdown is up too, but I can't see the De La Soul one.
Audio compression literally throws out data. It's audio the human ear isn't likely/able to hear but it's still gone. Different codecs and even different implementations of codecs throw out different audio data.
Any sort of upscaling is going to involve a lot of guesses about what was thrown out. For every codec and implementation there will be a lot of possibilities of what the original data might have looked like. At the end of the process you likely aren't going to get a result that necessarily sounds better than the low quality encoding. There will likely be a lot of artifacts introduced by the upscaling.
It's not impossible but something you'd need a specially trained AI to do I would think.
I work with a system which extrapolates data in the frequency domain to reduce noise in medical images and then doubles the images resolution in the x and y direction (so 4x the pixels). It’s absolutely amazing.
It’ll be interesting to see if audio ever gets a similar treatment and in what areas it can be applied.
If the information has been lost through using a lossy codec like MP3, there’s no getting it back.
But there are “AI upscaling” techniques that use models to fill in the missing pieces. It isn’t really restoring the original, more like painting over a crack in a style that is typically used by similar artists in similar contexts. Such models could produce a result conceptually similar to what a cover band might produce.
I'm just going to plug the non-profit whose mission is to archive and teach the history of hip-hop as well as mentor young artists. Until I got involved with them, I didn't realize how much history was being lost to time and neglect. If you grow up in it, you assume it will always be there.
Back when I first started listening to hip hop music (around 1982; i'm old), it wasn't easy to get your hands on it if you lived in the suburbs. Record stores in the suburbs didn't stock hip hop until the Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill" and Run DMC's "Raising Hell". I had a circle of friends that could get me bootlegs - basically, mixtapes from people with hip hop records. I threw all of them away years ago. And I've been kicking myself ever since. I miss those old mixtapes so much. One of them was Afrika Bambaataa's "Perfect beat", over and over, both sides of the cassette, for 60 minutes. I loved it, listened to it constantly, never got tired of it. Another was entirely "Roxanne" songs - "Roxanne's doctor", "Roxanne's a man", etc.
I think people often recorded off the radio on to cassettes. Local stations played local artists. Or your friends would drive in to the city and you could come across the music.
For me, it was Magic 108 in St. Louis, Missouri. However, I was so far out in the suburbs, Magic didn't always tune-in very well. I had lots of tapes with static. Also, in the early days, they played rap only late at nights, for a few hours before the "quiet storm".
There was another AM radio station in St. Louis, a city college station, that used to have a segment called "The Rappin' Hour", where dudes would call-in and rap about their high school or whatever. I used to write rhymes in class, dreaming about calling into "The Rappin' Hour." LOL
I remember that time, living in a suburb of Detroit. My first exposure to hip hop was on the radio, driving to my summer job. A lot of it seemed like it was being made on the spot, for instance there were references to recent local events and politics.
In Denmark we had MyMusic.dk, which later rebranded to Bandbase.dk, they were active from 1998 to 2013, they stored a lot of free underground music for a lot of up and coming artists.
They died when their data host Nirvanix went bankrupt, they lost all of the media files (with no backups), but according to Wikipedia customers were given 14 days to move their data.
14 days is not nearly enough for private customers to react. Often vacations can be longer than that, and people don't usually vacation with their laptops and external HDDs to places with fast broadband, just in case they need to make a spontaneous external backup of their cloud data. Imagine by the time you come home all your data is irrecoverably gone. That's fucking nuts.
I recently got a <24 hour notice of a major price change from a Shopify app developer. On a Sunday.
While not a backup-related issue, it forced a scramble on my end. I am sure hundreds of others didn't see it or couldn't react until well after the fact.
Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS.
>Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS.
Without any kind of legislation saying otherwise, these companies can put whatever the fuck they want in the TOS, which is the cheat code that allowed tech companies to extract obscene profits while completely skipping on customer support costs and legal liability.
But this could always come to an end if there's political will to legislate. In my home country a new law was passed that says companies can't keep you on hold for more than 10 minutes before you talk to a real human when you call customer support, and now companies are scrambling to hire enough customer support to deal with the new law because previously they'd leave you in a queue for 45 minutes on hold hoping you'd give up.
So it's definitely possible to not fuck over consumers, all it needs is the proper regulations in place since you can't always rely on the good will of for-profit corporations. Yes, that will make it more expensive for tech businesses to operate and reduce their profit margins, but if your business was supposed to be profitable only when skirting the law, not offering customer support, and fucking over your customers on a whim, then I don't need your business to exist in the first place.
Perhaps companies who are effected need to class action this behavior, since there's clear economic damages that can result.
The spectre of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit is probably going to be much more effective at encouraging "fair" behavior on these platforms than any sort of legislation could ever be. If legislation says 30 days, then 30 days it shall be. But if a court rules whatever is reasonable amount of time for a customer to act without suffering economic damages, then we might see some due diligence to ensure smooth migrations.
It was a super active forum between 2001 - 2010. Really the only online meeting place for local hip-hop until social media took over. It was the launching place of many careers (including Action Bronson's albeit indirectly).
This is very relevant to me. There's a great song I heard on The Wire from HBO called "Analyze" by Sharpshooters [1]. Info on this group is almost non-existent; Only a brief synopsis repeated on Reddit and a few other sites. This was a song used on one of the most popular TV shows ever, I cannot imagine the amount of info being lost on lesser groups/songs.
Also related, I LOVE MF DOOM. Collecting his discography is a fun little task, considering he appears on various albums using one of many monikers.
The blog era, that was so cool. The most rare stuff you could find, including some background. Now it's usually on YouTube mostly devoid of context and only single tracks.
Heck yes. Music pirates have done a whole lot to help preserve hip-hop history by ripping/archiving countless rare/underground 12" and cassettes that are definitely not available on streaming platforms; we're talking alternative versions of songs like clean edits, remixes, acapellas, instrumentals which supported hip-hop producers and DJs in the early days.
Guy is a collector of old hip hop records and tapes from the 80s until early 2000s. They are all available on his channel in their dusty-sounding glory. Amazing.
Hip-hop can be bland and shallow (like any other genre) but there's lots of unique and interesting music if one takes the time to get into it. Deltron 3030 (self titled) and MF DOOM's MM...FOOD are fantastic on a lyrical and production level
Which in the context of this thread / OP is proof that the history must not only be preserved, but must be promoted, honored, etc.
I could of year ago I work at an agency and one of the new dev starter and said something about being into hip hop. I mentioned Rakim and the reply was, "Who?" Don't get me wrong, I respect Nas, Eminem, etc. (i.e., all the lyrical magicians) but they stand on the shoulders of The R.
Not knowing Rakim would be fighting talk round my way.
A friend asked me a while ago to give him a list of the top ten (or fifteen) hip hop tracks that are important to me or the development of hip hop. I wasn't sure whether to include Last Poets as one of the first "rap" groups or whether Gil Scott-Heron should be considered the jazz ancestor. However, I then got stuck around the Tribe Called Quest and Busta Rhymes era.
Obviously, "Follow The Leader" was my choice of Rakim track, but I'm having trouble with picking a single Tribe track - should really be the whole of Low End Theory along with a cheat sheet of the significant jazz samples that Q-Tip used.
Because it samples Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm", I would have to go with "Bonita Applebum" (UK Remix). OK, maybe there are better ATCQ efforts but the vibe, sample and length (9+ minutes) make it a gem.
p.s. While there are so many memorable Rakim tracks and lyrics, I always like to point out the overlooked "What's on Your Mind". It's fookin' poetic genius. The images so vivid.
If I had to pick one ATCQ track that satisfies the condition, I'd pick "Jazz (We've Got)" which has a couple of samples from "Green Dolphin Street" plus the drums from "Don't Change Your Love".
I was more thinking of choosing between Check The Rhime (Grover Washington Jr. and a sublime use of Minnie Ripperton) as it's got such a kicking beat or Scenario (Brother Jack McDuff and a bit of Hendrix) due to its influence and being such a stand-out introduction to Busta Rhymes.
Or Award Tour (Charles Earland, Weldon Irvine) or maybe just cheat and go for Excursions and Buggin Out (what a way to start an album).
I think what's equally as important as the archiving is the aggregating of the information. It's one thing to have a story, or piece of content documented somewhere, but at the end of the day, people still need ways to find it.
I think that's where social, discussion based platforms come in. I'm a huge hip-hop fan and have been running a page dedicated to giving people a space to discuss and share all things hip-hop.
Historically, I've only casually listened to the genre through friends or events. However, watching this show gave me such a new appreciation for the stories of the performers, the inspiration for their music, where the different styles come from, and the sheer brilliance of the producers and artists. It completely changed my opinion and respect for the genre.
I can't recommend the show highly enough. My partner and I have watched it through at least twice.
I don’t know if I am right but Twitter’s growth back in 2010-2012 had a huge boost in the datpiff hiphop era. I remember back then that when Twitter’s fail whale crash logo will appear it means that Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Drake or Kendrick dropped a mixtape.
The same goes for lots of the underground hardcore music. So much of it isn't even on spotify or it is but with the wrong year. Thankfully there are still existing blogspots that still house those rare LP rars
Years ago I asked Lou of Subzero on Instagram why Suffering of Man album is not on streaming yet. I have an mp3 of this, and he mentioned about record labels holding it or something.
A big thing in the background of all of this; America, perhaps the world, myself included, really hasn't come to properly reckon with the extent to which we all subconsciously think of Black American art (including hip-hop) as something to be "taken" or "used" or generally not culturally owned by Black folks, usually Americans.
The example that sticks in my head: if I, a black guy, were to get into Irish step-dancing, that's great. I would never, though, suggest that it's "not just Irish, it's universal." I'd respect where it comes from.
Yet we have ALL heard the well-meaning, but ultimately a bit harmful, exact same thing said about Hip-hop.
I think this ends up having real life consequences; see e.g. the rise of (Rap)Genius.com. They got big on the back of rap lyrics without much respecting the artists AT ALL.
Look at the influence of sampling in hip hop. Sampling is literally taking music from different time periods, genres, cultures and making something new from it. If the mothers and fathers of hip hop had respected cultural ownership hip hop would never have been born in the first place.
For any piece of culture to stay culturally relevant it must be "taken" and "used" and evolve.
I agree that we should respect and acknowledge the founders of the culture, but once it is set free in the world it has to be shared to grow and thrive.
> we all subconsciously think of Black American art (including hip-hop) as something to be "taken" or "used" or generally not culturally owned by Black folks, usually Americans
It's a bit silly to try to prescribe or restrict "ownership" of culture. Culture is and always has been a product of sharing and mixing of existing traditions.
EDIT: I think there's also some hidden issues at play here. You basically want people across the world to directly acknowledge "black citizens of USA" as an ethnicity (to protect "your" culture). Some problems with this:
* You don't straight out say this, probably because skin-color-based ethnicity/nationalism is a touchy subject (e.g., white nationalism is basically taboo). But then how can you expect your request to be taken in good faith?
* Your request is somewhat US-centric, as a "Black American" ethnicity would after all be just a US minority, presumably not even independent from the mainstream to the degree that, e.g., many European minorities are in their countries.
I'll admit I'm putting words into your mouth, but clearly there's lots of things being left unsaid every time these discussions come up, so I don't feel too bad.
As a white guy I am aware of the minefield I am skipping merrily into here, but here goes:
I can see the general point here, but don't think it applies as strongly to hip hop. Maybe it's just the circles I move in, but hip hop fans and artists seem to be quite aware of the origin stories and hold a particular reverence for the old school.
Compare that to rock fans who wouldn't look further back than Presley (the king, lol) or green day fans who have never even heard of the stooges.
Maybe it's because hip hop is a relatively young genre and ties to the old school fade as generations pass.
If we're talking about money then yeah, sure - I'd be surprised if any of the creators made anything out of it compared to what corporate America does, but that's nothing new either. I don't know anything about (Rap)Genius.com, but I guess my question would be: what would you prefer to be happening that would respect the genre's origins but still allow it to grow?
It means that you should acknowledge the culture of the people who started it, not too much more than that?
It can get dicey and weird at times, and there's a lot of details that one could get into, and that's good homework to do -- but I definitely find that the vast majority of popular white rappers do a good job of this, e.g. Eminem.
what constitutes the start? DJ Kool Herc? If you asked him, he would list his influences and predecessors... do they not count ? If you try to demarcate some sort of cultural "break" where X becomes Y, how do you do that? And how do you handle subsequent cultural "breaks" that presumably, by the same logic, create something new. How do you handle parallel flows that then converge (such as electro-funk evolving under the influence of kraftwerk, and then becoming the first thing actually named "hip-hop") ?
This is all nonsense. Culture is not "owned".
Almost all the best culture in the world is mongrel culture that arose from someone who grew up in one culture(s) being exposed to other cultures and mixing them together in a way that generally reflects as much upon the individual as or more than the source cultures.
Hip-hop is no different in this respect to any other form of human expression. If there's an art form that seems "pure" to you, the most likely explanation is that you haven't gone far enough into the past to understand how it is also just another mongrel form.
A piece of culture is important in proportion to the reluctance of people to assign an owner to it, whether legal or otherwise. No one would criticize a Frenchman for using Newton's Laws because it belongs to the British. Someone who is really enthusiastic about something will emphasize that it is universally appreciated. E.g., Shakespeare being put on by diverse cultures, Islam trying to spread itself to every corner of the world, Chinese silk being exported to anyone who will buy it, etc.
If I was a hip hop artist, there would be no bigger insult than assigning ownership of my art to a specific culture. If it's really so great, it should speak to everyone. If this isn't true of Irish step dancing, it's because it's a relatively trivial art form. You can trivialize hip hop too if you want, but it's not necessarily doing hip hop artists any favors.
I don't know the significance of hula, but if it doesn't aspire to be something great, then assigning it to Hawaiians wouldn't be an insult, since it doesn't contradict their own view of it.
People will often times contextualize things to downplay it's importance. For example, if I think it's disrespectful to talk about hip hop in a certain way, you can contextualize my view by saying it's an outgrowth of early 21st century American progressive legitimation narratives. I want my views to be universal, but by placing them in the context of a certain country, time, and ideology, they are downplayed.
There are plenty of exported musical genres where the connection to the culture of origin was completely sundered. It only takes a few decades for that. Finnish tango has no connection to Argentina. Irish traditional music plays a lot of mazurkas (a traditional Polish form that came over) with no acknowledgement of or even awareness of Poland. Only natural the same would happen to hip-hop.
Also, because hip-hop requires as a minimum nothing more than a source of a beat and the ability to do intricate wordplay, and is arguably the most accessible of genres, it has found root in impoverished communities worldwide. People in those communities might not have the relatively privileged background that would allow them to explore the history of the genre and the original culture in the USA that it came out of.
The 50 year anniversary hype is everywhere.I personally agree with the last paragraph of the article:
'He also mentions that he finds the 50th anniversary of hip hop mile-marker a bit disingenuous. The birth of an entire movement can’t be attributed to one act. “I’m definitely not a person to shit on hip hop’s anniversary, or its founders,” he says. “These influential figures are extremely important. They changed the world and they deserve recognition and they deserve compensation. One hundred percent, underlined, big cap, bold letters. Capitalism, industry, commerce require neat stories. But we also have to be like, is this the whole story, or is this a convenient story?” Likely the latter, and it’s incomplete.'
There's certainly precedents in terms of black political poetry in music (The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron) and there was clearly a need for the disenfranchised to have a voice, but there's the other aspects such as graffiti, dancing and DJing that all came together over time.
I found a bunch of someone's abandoned belongings which included a number of vhs tapes. Some were hours of hip-hop TV recordings from those dial-your-favorite-song channels. It's crazy how the whole mainstream genre was full of positivity and peace and now it's been reduced to genocide and drugs.
Tangential, but I think the streaming services are preserving the story just fine on their own. No matter how many times I skip or dislike a hip hop song, they all keep shoving them down my throat with their recommendation engines. Very frustrating. /rant
The article spends a great deal of time explaining why streaming services can't be relied on to preserve the history.
Not to mention that a lot of early hip-hop might not have its samples cleared. These songs would not likely be on streaming services due to copyright issues. There is also the issue we've seen with streaming services disappearing huge chunks of the catalogues to avoid paying residuals. If we don't put effort into saving history, it can very easily get lost.
On top of this, there's a distinction to be made between Top-100 pop music, and the artists who influenced them in their youth. If a random mixtape from the 80s had a huge influence on you as an artist, those who enjoy your music would love to get a listen of it.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Apple's top music is always R&B, Rap, etc. I have never seen a song or radio I actually wanted to listen to. Guess its up to me to find all the new music?
I never said I didn't like the genre. In fact, I'm confident that I forgotten more than you've ever known about it. There's no need to be abrasive or try to tell people what to do, but if you're going to do that, then at least have the decency to take a moment and comprehend what you are responding to.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe when it all became known about what Afrika Bambaataa had been up to the whole foundations of hip hop as a credible art form fell away, and it has been in decline ever since. Maybe the offshoots are more commercially popular than ever but that serious audience seems to have given up on the core product.
Afrika Bambaataa undeniably played a significant role in the early days of hip hop, but his sound hasn't influenced the genre for over three decades. If we start discrediting half a century of art based on the actions of a single individual, we'll be left with very little. Should we consider techno and all its offshoots invalid because of Derrick May's sexual assaults? Write off rock as art because Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin? Invalidate punk because Sid Vicious killed his gf? No serious fan of hip hop stopped listening because of this.
Given that a lot of 80s-90s hip hop music the musicians claimed to perpetrate murder, drug crime and sexual exploitation - would you expect the audience to much care?
Absolute garbage comment. Go listen to some 60s rock and it's nothing but the same themes. Jim Morrison and the Doors wrote songs about explicitly killing your father, doing drugs, etc.
