Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop

4 Materials and Inspiration: Digging in the Crates

79 c h a p t e r 4 Materials and Inspiration Digging in the Crates I’m not the hottest crate digger around. I can’t remember the names of breaks I used. I’m not like one of them break kids. But I have so many records in my house I don’t even like to move, you know? (DJ Kool Akiem 1999) Sampling—the digital recording and manipulation of sound that forms the foundation of hip-hop production—requires source material. In order to sample, there must be something to sample from. For sample-based hip-hop producers, the source is usually vinyl records. In this chapter, I will describe the process of “digging in the crates”—searching for rare records—and discuss its significance to the hip-hop production community . I argue that in addition to its practical value in providing the raw material for sample-based hip-hop, digging serves a number of other purposes for the production community. These may include such functions as manifesting ties to hip-hop deejaying tradition, “paying dues,” educating producers about various forms of music, and serving as a form of socialization between producers. The process of acquiring rare, usually out-of-print, vinyl records for sampling purposes has become a highly developed skill and is referred to by the term “digging in the crates” (“digging” for short). Evoking images of a devoted collector spending hours sorting through milk crates full of records in used record stores, garages, and thrift shops, the term carries with it a sense of valor and symbolizes an unending quest for the next record. Individuals who give themselves to this quest are held in high esteem, and one of the highest compliments that can be given to a hiphop producer is the phrase “You can tell he digs.” The digging mind-set is one of the things that sets producers apart from other participants in the hip-hop arts. As deejay Karen Dere explains, it can easily approach the level of an obsession: My friend Roman, he’s from Switzerland. And he took a road trip through the South and pretty much just knocked on people’s doors and asked them if they had old records that they wanted to sell. And . . . he came back with just ace records. And that’s pretty psychotic , if you think about that in terms of “What would normal people do on vacation?” They went on a quest for records, and that was the whole reason for the trip. If people were having a garage sale, they’d be like, “Do you have records? Does your neighbor have records?” It’s a whole ’nother mind set that people have. (Dere 1998) Jake One, an inveterate digger, describes how he and Mr. Supreme once arrived at a record sale well before dawn, only to find they were not the first ones there: “Me and [Mr. Supreme] in L.A., in February, we went to see Common and the X-Men and there was a swap meet at five in the morning in Pasadena. We went from the club straight there. And there were people [already] out there with flashlights” (Jake One 1998). It is interesting to note that many of the best-known diggers seem to be predisposed to collecting things in general; many also have extensive collections of toys, kung fu videos, action figures, or even, in the case of one of my consultants, Beanie Babies. As Will Straw points out, male record collectors must work to maintain a balance between the competing tendencies toward hipness and nerdishness which are inherent in the activity: Hipness and nerdishness both begin with the mastery of a symbolic field; what the latter lacks is a controlled economy of revelation , a sense of when and how things are to be spoken of. Hipness maintains boundaries to entry by requiring that the possession of knowledge be made to seem less significant than the tactical 80 Making Beats sense of how and when it is made public. Cultivation of a corpus (of works, of facts) assumes the air of instinctuality only when it is transformed into a set of gestures enacted across time. The stances of hip require that knowledge and judgment be incorporated into bodily self-presentation, where they settle into the postures of an elusive and enigmatic instinctuality and may therefore be suggested even when they are not...