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

3 “It Just Doesn’t Sound Authentic”: Live Instrumentation versus Hip-Hop Purism

63 c h a p t e r 3 “It Just Doesn’t Sound Authentic” Live Instrumentation versus Hip-Hop Purism Much has been written about the concept of authenticity within the hip-hop world. But due to both the prominence of the MC in hip-hop music and the dominance of lyric-oriented hip-hop scholarship, virtually all discussions of authenticity, explicit or implicit, concern the relationships between lyrics and reality and how the complexities of this relationship might be fruitfully theorized (Allen 1996, Costello & Wallace 1990, Del Barco 1996, Flores 1996, Forman 2002a, Gilroy 1991, Jones 1990, Kelley 1996, Perkins 1996, Potter 1995, Rose 1994, Samuels 1991, Shomari 1995, Wheeler 1991). Other definitions of authenticity and the social structures which may support those definitions have been less fully explored. But the contribution of hip-hop producers (by definition) includes no lyrics and therefore no explicit claims about their social position , so other approaches must be pressed into service. Adam Krims (2000) has used lyrics and music together to develop a musical “poetics of place,” which is then presumed to provide a social context for the artist’s lyrical message. Still, though, his remains a primarily analytical, taxonomic approach—its concern, like that of earlier analyses, is more with what is represented than with how and why. Even when scholars focus on sampling specifically, there is still a tendency to focus on the various ways in which the individual samples may reflect the artist’s personal background. Tricia Rose, for example, sees sampling as a form of musical pedagogy: “These samples are highlighted, function- ing as a challenge to know these sounds, to make connections between the lyrical and musical texts. It a;rms black musical history and locates these ‘past’ sounds in the ‘present.’ . . . More often than not, rap artists and their DJ’s openly revere their soul forebearers” (Rose 1994: 89). But for many producers, sampling a;rms a more diverse musical history. Many of the most popular breakbeats in hip-hop, from its earliest days, have been drawn from white rock artists such as Mountain, Grand Funk Railroad, and Jack Bruce. As Kodwo Eshun poetically notes, “The Breakbeat is a motion-capture device, a detachable Rhythmengine, a movable rhythmotor that generates cultural velocity. The break is any short captured sound whatsoever. Indi=erent to tradition, this functionalism ignores history, allows HipHop to datamine unknown veins of funk, to groove-rob not ancestorworship ” (Eshun 1999: 14). Rock breaks were chosen because, in spite of their origins in the putatively white rock world, they conformed to the black aesthetic of hip-hop. But what are black producers trying to say about themselves when they sample white musicians? I argue that the authenticity they seek has less to do with ethnic and political identity than with professional and artistic pride. In this chapter, I suggest that producers have developed an approach to authenticity that is characterized by a sort of aesthetic purism; certain musical gestures are valued for aesthetic reasons, and one’s adherence to this aesthetic confers authenticity . In the pages that follow, I will use the hip-hop producers’ discourse surrounding the use of live instrumentation as an example of how this process operates.1 It is also worth reiterating at this point that the approaches and attitudes I will be delineating here are specific to producers of sample-based hip-hop, and may not be held by other members of the hip-hop community. My use of purism as an organizing principle for this chapter derives directly from the fact that many of the producers I spoke with speci- fically use that term to characterize their own position. The qualifier “aesthetic,” however, is my own addition, and I have included it for two reasons. First, I want to distinguish the purism of hip-hop producers from other essentialist tendencies that have been attributed to hip-hop culture, particularly those of ethnicity and class. I do not deny that such factors have been important to the development of hip-hop music; I am merely arguing that such concerns are of secondary interest to produc64 Making Beats ers in constructing their idea of authenticity, and therefore they will not be directly addressed in this chapter. Second, I use the term “aesthetic” to emphasize the decisive role that abstract ideas of beauty play in the hip-hop discourse, a role...