Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
wired.com
wired.com
Give La concubine de l'hémoglobine a try - talk about smooth.
SkyRock even has rock in its name.
Just being playful :o)
Generation is the more niche station.
:o)
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.
If that's the art form as it was experienced, do archivists need to make a "better" version?
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.
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]
(So is three feet high and rising by De La Soul)
It's pretty findable, but it's unfortunate that there's no canonical source.
https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/publicenemy30/
I have a bunch of their box sets. Pure archival gold - including Jerry Lee Lewis making really crude jokes in between takes of a song.
We need a Bear Family equivalent for hip-hop!
I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?
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.
It’ll be interesting to see if audio ever gets a similar treatment and in what areas it can be applied.
Of course, restoration of older recordings is a separate issue, and that technology is 20-30 years old, at least (and very, very good).
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.
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
Make my request, and wait for it
Holdin my finger on the pause button, like "now go"
I guess that was the original download
-Atmosphere - Don't Forget
I taped a pirate radio Tim Westwood show that was wholly dedicated to the Roxanne saga.
Found this example of his show: https://archive.org/details/TheHipHopShow-19850917
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.
A lot of culture disappeared that day :(
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.
Should be at least 30 days by law.
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.
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.
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.
That's why the law baseline is important. It's how warranties must be 2 years across all EU.
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).
Sadly all seems to be lost to history too.
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.
For example, check the posts in the early 2010's of sites like this, https://hiphop-thegoldenera.blogspot.com/, of course all the links are broken now.
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.
A lot of suckers with colorful names
I’m so-and-so, I’m this, I’m that
Huh, but they all just wick-wick-wack
They can't Move a Crowd, not even slightly.
Even in a rap context MC Hammer got the MC part of his name from being master of ceremonies at various clubs. Aka the guy who controls the mic.
Edit: Never mind, it's gone positive now.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXeJA5plkD8
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.
The line about Liz Claiborne...you can smell it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWlm2E4fb7E
Edit: Video w/ lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3ENkIho8m4
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).
*shakes fist*
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.
For people interested in the history of hip-hop, there's a series of excellent comic books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_Hop_Family_Tree
Hip-hop is for sure not my favorite genre - but this series was fantastic.
[1] : https://www.netflix.com/watch/80141893?trackId=200257859
I can't recommend the show highly enough. My partner and I have watched it through at least twice.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, your finale about how you don’t feel too bad was in unbelievably bad taste. Social skills don’t seem to be your forte.
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 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.
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.
You think it's insulting to assign the Hula to Hawaiians? This makes NO sense.
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.
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.
“Do you remember the days,
When Kool Herc played,
With a following of bands?
If you don’t, well then you won’t
(That’s right!)
Real hip hop, my man”
https://genius.com/Dst-derek-showard-the-home-of-hip-hop-lyr...
'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.'
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.
If you don't like the genre, then you are absolutely in no position to comment usefully or intelligently on whether it is being preserved properly.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/why-country...