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

Endnotes

199 Endnotes Chapter 1: Introduction 1. As a result, while there are still many deejays who do not produce, virtually all producers deejay. 2. The extent to which this process has influenced this work is easy to overlook but was brought home to me by the following recent experience: A friend of mine introduced me to the legendary producer Steinski in a club in New York. It seemed like a very local and unremarkable phenomenon until I mentally traced the chain of social interactions that had led me to that moment. The friend who introduced us was Je= Chang, aka DJ Zen (who lives in the San Franciso Bay Area), whom I had met through Lizz Mendez-Berry (who lives in New York), whom I had met through Oliver Wang, aka DJ O-Dub (who also lives in the Bay Area), whom I had met through S. K. Honda (who lives in New York), who was one of the editors in the mid-nineties of Seattle’s Flavor magazine, which I had begun to write for after meeting Strath Shepard , another editor and cofounder of Seattle-based Conception Records, at a Seattle book signing for Chicago-based author William “Upski” Wimsatt’s book, Bomb the Suburbs. 3. The relationship between genre and production technique in hip-hop has often been overlooked. Mainstream journalists, for example, spent several years in the early 1990s trying to define “gangsta rap” by its lyrical content , inevitably settling on a definition that was either too narrow (music that contains references to specific gang activities or sets) or too broad (music that contains violent lyrics of any kind). For its listeners, however, “gangsta rap” —to the extent that it existed at all—was defined by the relationship between the lyrics and two other characteristics: its heavy reliance on synthesizers and the vocal delivery, or “flow,” of its MCs. See Krims 2000 for an excellent analysis of how these factors define genre in hip-hop. 4. In addition, there continue to emerge sample-based genres—such as drum and bass—that are not considered hip-hop, either by their own practitioners or by those who consider themselves to be bearers of a hip-hop aesthetic . These genres will not be addressed here. 5. While the relevance of such definitional issues to the specific act of performing fieldwork in one’s native environment has been apparent since at least the early 1970s, a cohesive body of literature has not developed (or, at least, I have not been able to find it). This is largely due to the simultaneously specific and abstract nature of the issues that arise. While there have been several notable anthologies concerning the nature of fieldwork itself that have touched on such questions (Okely and Callaway 1992, Fowler and Hardesty 1994, Barz and Cooley 1997), most of the work that has been done can be found in the introductions to a wildly diverse group of doctoral dissertations. As a result, those who wish to address these issues have little easily available material to draw on aside from their own intuition and practical experience. Fortunately, both of these sources have much to o=er the researcher who wishes to use them. 6. By my observation, a slight majority of my consultants are African American. The rest are white, Latino, and Asian. 7. Many of the most prominent innovators of contemporary experimental deejaying (or “turntablism”) are Filipino American. GrandWizzard Theodore, who is African American, is credited with the invention of “scratching,” or creating percussive sounds with records. 8. In fact, in some—though not most—cases, producers actually articulated their educational lineage to me. More commonly, it was older producers who cited the younger producers whom they had taught. 9. Although three of my consultants did make brief pejorative references to “suburban kids,” which I took to be a euphemism for “white kids.” 10. Upon reading this section, Kyra Gaunt rather astutely asked me if all of my consultants who used African American English were in fact African American (Gaunt, conversation with author, 20 August 2002). They were not. Clearly this is a phenomenon that is far too complex to address here, but which—I believe—is intimately related to the influence of hip-hop culture on American culture generally. At the very least, it supports the idea that hiphop producers, regardless of race, are committed (in some deep way) to an African American cultural outlook. 11...