1. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Be-Bop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 177.
2. Rap began as a “singles” market (see chapter one), became more of an “album-oriented” genre in the late 1980s and 1990s, and in the era of digital downloads has returned in large part to “singles.” Thus, the era of the cohesive album-as-musical-statement appears in retrospect as a blip in the overall history of hip hop music. However, by calling attention to the song as a basic unit of production and consumption, I do not wish to downplay the importance of rap albums in the past or the present moment; I seek only to emphasize that even the most elaborate concept album requires planning at the level of the song. Moreover, marketing for a new album often emphasizes the way that it includes tracks designed for specific target audiences: “for the ladies,” “for the club,” and so on. The Notorious B.I.G.’s 1994 album Ready to Die is a case in point, featuring songs addressing a heterosexual female audience, such as “Big Poppa,” as well as tracks full of violent braggadocio, such as “Gimme the Loot,” that appeal to adolescent male humor.
3. Janice C. Simpson, “Yo! Rap Gets on the Map: Led by Groups like Public Enemy, It Socks a Black Message to the Mainstream,” Time, February 5, 1990, 60.
4. “Fight the Power” contains more than nineteen individual samples, more than some artists use in an entire album.
5. Robert Walser, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy,” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 2 (1995): 193–217.
6. Simpson, “Rap Gets on the Map,” 60.
7. Peter Watrous, “Public Enemy Makes Waves and Compelling Music,” New York Times, April 22, 1990.
8. Asked by Guardian film critic Jason Solomons if he knew that Do The Right Thing was an “incendiary film” when he made it, Spike Lee declined to answer and critiqued the question, explaining, “I really wouldn’t use the word ‘incendiary’ because right away you’d think something was burning. I knew the film would provoke discussion and debate, but in no way shape or form would black people come out of the theaters and start to riot. That was just ridiculous.” Jason Solomons, Andy Gallagher, and Henry Barnes, “Spike Lee: ‘Anyone Who Thinks We Move in a Post-Racial Society Is Someone Who’s Been Smoking Crack,’” Guardian.com, October 6, 2009, www.theguardian.com/film/video/2009/oct/05/spike-lee-do-the-right-thing.
9. Mark Jenkins, “House of Hip-Hop: Boys Gotta Bad Rap,” Washington Post, July 22, 1988, N19.
10. Stephen Holden, “Pop View: Pop’s Angry Voices Sound the Alarm,” New York Times, May 21, 1989, section 2, p. 1.
11. The story of Public Enemy’s internal group dynamics and mainstream media reception, including charges of anti-Semitism, is told in great depth in Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 232–96.
12. Ramsey, Race Music, 175.
13. Solomons, Gallagher, and Barnes, “Spike Lee.”
14. Ramsey, Race Music, 180.
15. From Lee’s journal, January 18, 1988: “The song Radio Raheem plays on his boom box has to be by Public Enemy, my favorite politically conscious rappers. Their new jam ‘Bring the Noise’ is vicious. I gotta get them to do this like Brutus.” Spike Lee with Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing (New York: Fireside, 1989), 59.
16. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
17. Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, 2nd ed. (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 9–10. Schloss’s decision not to emphasize the ethnic and racial identities of his informants is part of a larger statement about the racial politics of hip hop studies. He seeks to shift the critical gaze away from race, not to promote a naive universalism but to shed light on aspects of the music (and the people who produce it) that become invisible when scholars assume that racial politics explains everything about hip hop.
18. Schloss, Making Beats, 10.
19. On the history of how Filipino American DJ communities first formed and thrived, see Oliver Wang, Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For more information on famous Filipino American hip hop DJs, see Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
20. See Planet B-Boy, directed by Benson Lee (New York: Arts Alliance America, 2008), DVD.
21. In his ethnography of the San Francisco Bay Area’s underground hip hop scene, Anthony Kwame Harrison finds that young people have constructed their own standards of belonging and authenticity that render rigid notions of race obsolete. By mastering hip hop’s formal elements and knowledge of its history, young black, Asian, Latino, and white rappers find common ground and create new forms of community. Although Harrison is careful to point out ways that race continues to be salient and problematic in the underground scene, hip hop—like jazz before it—has come to embody for many of its practitioners a meritocratic field where status is awarded by achievement alone. Anthony Kwame Harrison, Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).
22. Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
23. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55.
24. Omi and Winant define racial formation as the “sociohistorical process by which racial meanings are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Racial Formation, 55).
25. Christopher A. Waterman, “Race Music: Bo Chatmon, ‘Corrine Corrina,’ and the Excluded Middle,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 167–205; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
26. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1845]); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994 [1903]).
27. Imamu Amiri Baraka, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It (New York: Morrow Quill, 1963)
28. Imamu Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998 [1968]).
29. Philip Weitzman, Worlds Apart: Housing, Race, Ethnicity, and Income in New York City (New York: Community Service Society of New York, 1989).
30. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).
31. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5.
32. Like film and other mass-mediated constructions of race and class identity, rap music symbolizes social conflict and presents listeners with “indexical markers of enduring crises in the cultural imaginary.” Roopali Mukherjee, The Racial Order of Things (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2.
33. In his study of how blind people experience the “micro-level” politics of race, Osagie Obasogie confirms empirically that physical differences in skin color and body type are not in and of themselves responsible (“constitutive,” in his words) for the reality of race. If race were exclusively, or even primarily, visual in nature we would expect blind people to have a diminished understanding of race. However, even people who have been blind from birth develop remarkably vivid conceptualizations of racial difference, which they use in their daily lives to interpret and guide interactions with others. Osagie K. Obasogie, “Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations,” Law & Society Review 44, no. 3/4 (2010): 585–616.
34. Sighted people, for example, regularly assume the racial identity of callers on the telephone (Obasogie, “Do Blind People See Race?” 610).
35. Obasagie, “Do Blind People See Race?” 598.
36. Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 131.
37. Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 133.
38. Negus, Popular Music in Theory, 133.
39. As a way of calling attention to this mobilization of musical sounds and racial meanings, Radano and Bohlman describe race in music as a “soundtext”: an image constituted within and projected onto the social through sound. Their neologism speaks to the articulation—the joining together—of sounds and the racialized discourse describing them. Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano, “Introduction,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5.
40. Kelefa Sanneh, “Jay-Z’s ‘Decoded’ and the Language of Hip-Hop,” The New Yorker, December 6, 2010.
41. In literary studies, see Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop (New York: Basic Civitas, 2009); in music theory, see Kyle Adams, “Aspects of the Music/Text Relationship in Rap,” Music Theory Online 14, no. 2 (May 2008).
42. “Flow” is a colloquial term that refers to an MC’s distinctive combination of rhyme scheme and rhythmic delivery.
43. Bradley, Book of Rhymes, 3–48.
44. Robert Christgau, “Consumer Guide Reviews: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Public+Enemy.
45. I am particularly grateful for Joseph Schloss’s and Mark Katz’s respective works on sample-based production and hip hop DJing.
46. Schloss cautions academic critics to tread lightly when applying methods of analysis developed in other contexts to the study of hip hop and rap music. He cites the mistakes made by some scholars committed to a postmodern interpretive model (i.e., hearing sampling as primarily about ironic recontextualization), arguing that they have misapplied the concept of “parody” to sample-based hip hop in assuming that producers intend the breaks that they sample to be recognized and interpreted as a commentary upon their original sources (Making Beats, 148).
47. Schloss, Making Beats, 147.
48. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008), 13.
49. Sounding Race is indebted to the late music theorist Adam Krims, author of the first book devoted to analyzing rap music. Calling for a “musical poetics” of rap capable of accounting for its diverse identities, Krims concentrates on three general parameters: topic, musical style, and flow. Building a genre system for rap music circa 1994, Krims explains how these formal qualities help to position a song and its artist relative to others. Identifying and describing a set of generic categories, such as “mack rap,” “party rap,” and “gangsta rap,” Krims (Rap Music) argues that the differences between these various genres are marked not only by the topics that MCs rap about but also by the flow and musical styles that they employ. In other words, a song’s aesthetic features are not neutral or arbitrary; they “transcode” social and musical meanings that mark songs and artists in culturally meaningful ways.
50. Although his work is highly inventive and insightful, Krims’s choice to name his own genre categories and terminology (e.g., the “hip-hop sublime”) to describe musical affect raises concerns about the usefulness of discussing rap’s aesthetics in terms that most fans and producers might fail to recognize. In a similar vein, Krims’s original approach to transcription isolates individual lines and harmonies he hears in the track—such as a looped saxophone melody or guitar riff—ignoring the break-centered musical procedures behind the creation of such sounds.
51. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xii.
1. Grandmaster Flash, as quoted in Nelson George, “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth,” The Source, November, 1993, 44–50.
2. Chuck D, as quoted in Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Civitas Books, 2005), 130.
3. Richard Taninbaum, interview with author.
4. Robert Ford, Jr., “Jive Talking N.Y. DJs Rapping Away in Black Discos,” Billboard, May 5, 1979, 3.
5. Nelson George, “Rapping Records Flooding Stores in N.Y. Market,” Billboard, December 22, 1979, 37, 53.
6. Steve Gordon and the Kosher Five, “Take My Rap . . . Please,” Reflection Records MOM 667, 1979.
7. L’Ectrique, “Struck By Boogie Lightning,” Reflection Records CBL 128, 1979.
8. Steve Gordon, interview with author.
9. According to Steve Gordon (interview with the author), the photograph was staged in the lobby of a hotel in White Plains, New York, but the group sought to evoke the atmosphere of a Jewish resort in the Catskills.
10. Richard Taninbaum, interview with author.
11. Ron Hunt/Ronnie G. and the S.M. Crew, “Spiderap” b/w “A Corona Jam,” Reflection Records PT-7000, 1979; Lady T/M.C. Tee, “Lady D” b/w “Nu Sounds,” Reflection Records PT-7001, 1979.
12. Although it did not garner widespread attention, The Fatback Band can boast the first recording featuring rapped vocals: “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” b/w “Love in Perfect Harmony,” Polydor Records 2095214, 1979.
13. On Saturday, October 6, 1979, Eddie Cheeba took to the stage at the Armory in Jamaica, Queens, with an all-star line-up of New York City’s black dance-club performers. Along with DJ Hollywood and Grandmaster Flash, both of whom also appeared on stage that evening, Cheeba was one of a handful of the city’s best known and most in-demand rapping DJs. A surviving audio recording from that evening’s performance reveals that, in the middle of his set, Cheeba suspended his routine to make an important announcement to his audience: “Now you might have heard on [radio station] WBLS tomorrow night we gonna take the sugar out the hill at Harlem World. Sugar Hill and Eddie Cheeba tomorrow night. But first we have some unfinished business to take care of right here in Jamaica [Queens]. First of all, we’re gonna run down a few of the things that we know we made famous.” Engaging in a bit of not-so-subtle wordplay, Cheeba declares himself one of the true innovators of rap music and announces an upcoming battle with the Sugarhill Gang, who had released “Rapper’s Delight” less than a month earlier. Cheeba’s defiant response at the Armory captured the sentiments of many more established New York artists. Despite having spent the previous years cultivating his reputation as a live performer, he could do little more than watch as Sugar Hill Records reaped the financial benefits of the seeds he and others had sown. Mark Skillz, “Master of Ceremonies: Introducing the Original Crowd Rocker Eddie Cheeba,” Wax Poetics, no. 24 (August 2007), 74.
14. Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 33.
15. Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New York: New American Library, 2010), 37–40.
16. Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 132.
17. Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 132.
18. Breakbeats are often defined as sections on recordings that feature drums or other percussion instruments—for example, moments when all instruments, except for drums and percussion, drop out of the mix. Listening to classic breakbeat recordings, however, it becomes apparent that the breaks often included non-percussion instrumentation. Joseph Schloss offers a more sensitive conception of the break as “the interruption of an integrated groove,” a moment when certain parts of an established polyrhythmic arrangement are dramatically stripped away. See Joseph Schloss, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21.
19. Robert Ford, Jr., “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something with Oldie R&B Disks,” Billboard, July 1, 1978, 65.
20. Kool Herc demonstrates his “merry-go-round” using exactly this sequence of recordings in part 1 of the documentary The Hip-Hop Years: Close to the Edge (1999).
21. Will Hermes, “All Rise for the National Anthem of Hip Hop,” New York Times, October 29, 2006, http://nytimes.com/2006/10/29/arts/music/29herm.html.
22. Schloss, Foundation, 17–39.
23. The story of “Apache,” once described by Kool Herc as “the national anthem of hip hop,” is one of the most fascinating illustrations of this point. “Apache” was recorded by Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band, a group that consisted of anonymous studio musicians passing through MGM Studios in Los Angeles. The Bongo Band never toured or played together at live shows, and their recordings remained virtually unknown and unremarked-upon until Bronx DJs and b-boys began turning to them for their infectious mix of funk drumming and Latin percussion (Hermes, “All Rise.”)
24. Downstairs Records was one of the most famous shops oriented toward the discovery and sale of breakbeat records. Grandmaster Flash describes finding this record store, in the subway arcade at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, as the “Gold Rush of 1975.” Grandmaster Flash with David Ritz, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (New York: Random House, 2008), 67.
25. Flash, My Life, My Beats, 53.
26. Mark Katz, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56.
27. Matthew Honan, “Unlikely Places Where Wired Pioneers Had Their Eureka! Moments,” Wired, March 24, 2008. http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2008/03/ff_eureka?slide=6&slideView=4.
28. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five consisted of Flash, Kid Creole, Cowboy, Rahiem, Melle Mel, and Mr. Ness/Scorpio. Before arriving at this name and solidifying their lineup, the group also performed as Grandmaster Flash and the 3 MCs and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Four.
29. Flash recalls one of his favorite climactic records being the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” (My Beats, My Life, 109).
30. Bob James’s “Take Me To the Mardi Gras” (1975), for example, was and continues to be an essential component in the hip-hop DJ’s arsenal, but only for its opening measures (i.e., less than thirty seconds of music), which feature a syncopated mix of funk drumming and agogo bells.
31. Such formal changes align hip hop music with other black cultural practices, but they do not guarantee specific racial meanings (Schloss, Making Beats, 138).
32. “Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 4 MC’s - Live At Audubon Ballroom,” Hip Hop On Wax, 1979–1999 [weblog], October 14, 2006. http://hiphoponwax.blogspot.com/2006/10/grandmaster-flash-furious-4-mcs-live.html.
33. Joseph Schloss makes an analogous point about musical notation and sample-based beats (Making Beats, 14).
34. The part of Flash’s performance discussed here occurs at approximately six minutes into the recording.
35. Grandmaster Flash, as quoted in George, “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers,” 44–50.
36. Grandmixer D.ST, as quoted in Katz, Groove Music, 21.
37. Flash, My Life, My Beats, 109.
38. David Menconi, “The Riff That Lifted Rap,” NewsObserver.com, March 14, 2010. www.newsobserver.com/2010/03/14/385149/the-riff-that-lifted-rap.html.
39. Oliver Wang, as quoted in Menconi, “The Riff.”
40. Skillz, “Master of,” 74.
41. Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 127.
42. After “Rapper’s Delight,” the spontaneity and creativity hip hop DJs demonstrated by looping and cutting a variety of breaks together became mostly an underground phenomenon. Exceptions to this rule include Grandmaster Flash’s pioneering “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” (1981), as well as the numerous “DJ tracks” on early rap albums in the early and mid-1980s. By the early 1990s, DJ-centered events and competitions, such as the DMC World DJ Championships, helped reinvigorate this aspect of hip hop culture, bringing the art to a younger, wider audience (Katz, Groove Music, 100–152).
43. Grandmaster Flash, My Life, 87–90.
44. Katz, Groove Music, 35.
45. What did differentiate early rap recordings from what DJs were doing at uptown clubs was the narrowness of the latter’s musical selections. As hip hop impresario Michael Holman, who attended both downtown discos and uptown dance clubs explains (interview with the author), junior high kids in the Bronx “didn’t really have the wherewithal to go to these clubs; they were too young. They didn’t have the gear. They didn’t have the money. . . . [Bambaataa, Kool Herc, and Flash] were creating parties for kids that couldn’t go downtown to the discos. So this idea that hip hop was some sort of adversarial reaction to disco is ridiculous. The early hip hop parties were basically bringing disco to the neighborhood, to kids that really couldn’t go to experience it. . . . What was different from the downtown discos was, DJs like [Bambaataa] were determined to play James Brown and other funk and soul tracks as well, that were so big a few years before, which they were not playing in downtown discos. They only played [recently released] disco [records] in discos!”
46. Rickey Vincent, as quoted in Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Hip Hop and Rap Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 80.
47. Charnas, The Big Payback, 65–92.
48. Charnas, The Big Payback, 32–33.
49. Taninbaum, interview with author.
50. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 80–81.
51. The Younger Generation were actually Grandmaster Flash’s rappers, the Furious Five, going under another name in order to work with producer Terry Lewis.
52. Cheryl Keyes, “At the Crossroads: Rap Music and Its African Nexus,” Ethnomusicology 40, no. 2 (1996): 223–48.
53. Katz, Groove Music, 32–35.
54. At the center of the backlash was a young, white radio DJ named Steve Dahl. In 1978, at the height of disco fever, Dahl had been fired from radio station WDAI after it converted from a rock to a disco format. Early in 1979, he was hired by WLUP, one of WDAI’s rivals, and he used the radio platform to heap scorn on his former employer and disco music in general. At twenty-four years of age, the brash Chicago disc jockey became one of the engineers behind the carnivalesque spectacle known as Disco Demolition Night, which lit the fuse, both figuratively and literally, of the anti-disco explosion. On July 12, 1979, fans were offered reduced admission to the White Sox double-header against the Detroit Tigers if they donated a disco record to be destroyed. During the intermission between games, a giant wooden container of vinyl LPs that had been brought by fans was brought out into center field and detonated. After the explosion, hundreds of fans rushed onto the field and chaos ensued. Eventually, riot police were called in to disperse the crowd; the second game of the double-header had to be cancelled.
55. Elements common to so-called disco music—four-on-the-floor bass drum, sixteenth-note hi-hat patterns, and so on—continued to animate popular dance music in the 1980s, long after disco was supposed to have died.
56. Jeffrey Kallberg, “The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor,” 19th-Century Music 11, no. 3 (1988): 238–61.
57. Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
58. Ford, “Jive Talking,” 3.
59. George, “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers,” 44–50.
60. George, “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers,” 44–50.
61. Although it would be naive to reduce the genre’s demise to a single factor, the backlash against disco reveals how musical genres articulate powerfully with socially constructed categories of identity, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. Some of disco’s loudest and harshest critics were white, heterosexual males who identified with rock music, and their barbs aimed at disco (e.g., “disco sucks”) often revealed homophobic, misogynistic, and racist attitudes. Although Dahl himself denies charges of bias in his campaign against disco, his fans and other anti-disco crusaders regularly laced their rants with derogatory terms for racial and sexual minorities. Echols contextualizes the anti-disco movement in the late 1970s, a time when a number of taken-for-granted certainties seemed to be under assault. The recession, oil and hostage crises, and loss in Vietnam were some of the political and economic signs that the United States was no longer living up to its image as a global superpower. For white males, these changes were accompanied by an increasingly visible and militant feminism, gay rights, and civil rights culture. It is little surprise that disco, a gender-bending genre prominently featuring women and minorities, became a punching bag for a generation’s anger and frustrations. As Echols puts it in Hot Stuff, “Discophobes might not be able to ‘bomb bomb bomb Iran,’ as Vince Vance and the Valiants urged in 1979, but they could demolish disco, the music of outsiders—racial minorities and gays.”
62. Charnas, The Big Payback, 59.
63. Echols, Hot Stuff.
64. Paul Green, “New Chic Game Plan: No Disco,” Billboard, December 15, 1979, 23.
65. “Talent in Action,” Billboard, 22 December 1979, 6–50.
66. Green, “New Chic Game Plan,” 23.
67. As scholar Imani Perry puts it in Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, p. 6), “The juke joint has gone public.”
68. George, “Rapping Records,” 37.
69. John Rockwell, “The ‘Rapping’ Style in Pop,” New York Times, October 12, 1980, D30; Robert Palmer, “Pop: The Sugar Hill Gang,” New York Times, March 13, 1981, C23.
70. Rockwell, “The ‘Rapping’ Style in Pop;” Robert Palmer, “Pop: The Sugar Hill Gang.”
71. Robert Palmer, “The Year of the Rolling Stones,” New York Times, December 27, 1981, section 2, p. 23; Leah Y. Latimer, “Recording the Rap: Jive Talk at the Top of the Charts,” Washington Post, August 31, 1980, G1; Rockwell, “The ‘Rapping’ Style.”
72. Palmer, “Rolling Stones”; Rockwell, “The ‘Rapping’ Style.”
73. A telling example of rap’s liminal nature at this time is Spoonin Gee’s 12-inch single “Spoonin Rap” (Sound of New York, USA QC 708, 1979), which was released soon after “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. The recording features one continuous track, but the label lists the different topics Spoonin Gee covers in order—“A Drive Down the Street,” “I Was Spanking and Freaking,” “I Don’t Drink Smoke Or Gamble Neither,” “I’m the Cold Crushing Lover”—as if it were a comedy album!
74. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 47.
75. When The Source magazine asked Grandmaster Flash in 1993 about the transition from live performance to recording songs, he replied, “I’d have to say, I wasn’t ready. I was content with what I was doing. . . . I would have personally liked to stay away from records a little longer.” Citing his love for the different aspects of live performance, from setting up his sound system to mixing dozens of records, Flash explained that one really has to observe a DJ over the course of hours to appreciate the skill it takes to move a crowd (George, “Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers,” 44–50).
76. The next big hit after “Rapper’s Delight” was, in fact, Kurtis Blow’s single “The Breaks” (Mercury Records MDS 410, 1980).
1. Hank Shocklee, as quoted in Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (New York: Basic Civitas, 2005), 260.
2. Jon Pareles, “Public Enemy: Rap with a Fist in the Air,” New York Times, July 24, 1988, H25.
3. Charise Cheney, Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 72–73.
4. Pareles criticizes Chuck D for promising profundity and political analysis but delivering only empty slogans and familiar boasting.
5. Ronald Radano and Phillip Bohlman, “Introduction,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Phillip Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5.
6. Radano and Bohlman, “Introduction,” 5.
7. Bomb Squad members included brothers Hank Shocklee and Keith Shocklee, Chuck D, Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, Gary G-Wiz, and Kerwin “Sleek” Young.
8. Scholars from many disciplines have written about Public Enemy. Here is an incomplete sample. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005); Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New York: New American Library, 2010); Charise Cheney, Brothers Gonna Work It Out: Sexual Politics in the Golden Age of Rap Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Jeffrey L. Decker, “The State of Rap: Time and Place in Hip-Hop Nationalism,” Social Text 34 (1993): 53–84; Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Guthrie Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Be-Bop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Robert Walser, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy,” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 2 (1995): 193–217.
9. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the U.S.: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55.
10. Mark Dery, “Public Enemy: Confrontation,” Keyboard, September 1990, 83.
11. Rose, Black Noise, 53.
12. Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 36–43; see also Mark Katz, “Sampling before Sampling: The Link between DJ and Producer,” Samples 9 (2010): 1–11.
13. Spectrum City, “Lies” b/w “Check Out the Radio,” Vanguard SPV 76, 1984.
14. Hank Shocklee, who served as Spectrum City’s DJ, emphasizes that turntable techniques remained an important touchstone for Public Enemy well into the sample-based era; even when using samplers and drum machines in the studio, the group continued to rely on turntables for scratching and cutting in snippets of sound (Katz, “Sampling before Sampling,” 7–8).
15. Roy Spencer (DJ Moneyshot), “Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” Future Music, no. 269 (August 2013).
16. Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Hip Hop and Rap Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 79–81.
17. Rose, Black Noise, 75.
18. At the time of Rose’s writing, rap music occupied a more precarious and marginal position in American life than it does today, and Black Noise defends and celebrates rap as music, illuminating the logic informing what many refused to recognize as a legitimate form of artistry. In other words, proving rap’s cultural coherence was absolutely central to Rose’s argument that the music was, in fact, music, not the work of unskilled, illiterate thieves.
19. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
20. McLeod and DiCola, Creative License, 19–35.
21. Her observations that rap musicians hate “digital drums” (73) and that samplers are the “quintessential rap production tool” (78), for example, seem to reflect the practices and aesthetic preferences of Public Enemy and other late 1980s and early 1990s artists active in the period leading up to Black Noise’s publication.
22. Walser, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric,” 197.
23. Schloss, Making Beats, 14.
24. The J.B.’s, “Hot Pants Road,” People Records PE 607, 1972.
25. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 79–81.
26. Grandmaster Flash, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats (New York: Random House, 2008), 157.
27. Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski, Fresh: Hip Hop Don’t Stop (New York: Random House, 1985), 18.
28. In her essay exploring rap nationalism, Cheney singles out “The Message” as the beginning of politically engaged rap (Brothers Gonna Work It Out, 8–9). See also Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 177–179.
29. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 91–95
30. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 89.
31. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 87.
32. Songs like David Lampell’s “I Ran Iran” (1979) and Brother D’s “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” (1980) had political themes, but they were set to familiar disco funk beats and did not attract attention as protest songs (see Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 179).
33. Ironically, the huge success of “The Message” marked the beginning of the end for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. By encouraging Melle Mel to record the song without Flash’s consent and without participation from him and the other members, Robinson had driven a wedge into group that would eventually lead to a painful breakup and protracted legal battle (Grandmaster Flash, My Life, 156–65).
34. Kid Creole, as quoted in Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Yes, Yes Y’All: The EMP Oral History of Hip Hop (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 210.
35. Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 179.
36. Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois, eds., The Anthology of Rap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 13.
37. Robert Palmer, “‘The Message’ Is That ‘Rap’ Is Now King in Rock Clubs,” New York Times, September 3, 1982, C4.
38. Geoffrey Himes, “Urban Anthems of Rap Music,” Washington Post, December 30, 1982, D4.
39. Geoffrey Himes, “Urban Anthems.”
40. John Rockwell, “Rap: The Furious Five,” New York Times, September 12, 1982, section 1, part 2, p. 84.
41. Robert Fink, “The Story of ORCH5, or, the Classical Ghost in the Hip-Hop Machine,” Popular Music 24, no. 3 (2005): 339–56.
42. The sounds from these drum machines were so distinctive and ubiquitous, in fact, that to this day people still refer to them by name (e.g. “an 808 kick”), and they have been included—again, by name—in pretty much all modern music production software. In other words, even when working at a digital audio workstation such as a laptop computer, music producers enjoy having access to the sounds of these earlier technologies.
43. Daniel Sofer, DMX Owner’s Manual, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Oberheim Electronics, 1982), 15.
44. Tom Silverman, as quoted in Mark Dery, “Rap: Rock Is Dead,” Keyboard, November 1988.
45. John Leland, “Singles,” Spin 2, no. 7 (October 1986): 43.
46. Charnas, The Big Payback, 96–99.
47. Forman (The ’Hood Comes First, 125) notes that by 1984 rap was beginning to be discussed as “street music” in the trade press, a designation that was not made during the days of disco rap.
48. Gary Jardim, “John Who?” Village Voice, June 21, 1983.
49. Charnas, The Big Payback, 89–94.
50. Run-D.M.C., Raising Hell, Profile Records PRO-1217, 1986.
51. The “Walk This Way” break had been used by hip-hop DJs in live performance for many years. In fact, D.M.C. fondly remembers the moment when the group’s DJ, Jam Master Jay, explained to Aerosmith’s members how he used to use their record: “When Steven Tyler came into the studio, Jay was cutting up [Aerosmith’s original recording of] ‘Walk This Way’ and he said, ‘here’s what we used to do with your record.’ And Steve said, ‘Yo, when are you gonna hear me?’ And Jay looked up and said, ‘We never get to hear you. After this guitar riff, it’s back to the beginning.’ And Steve thought that was so amusing. Those guys were real cool.” Brian Coleman, Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (New York: Villard, 2007), 401.
52. Perhaps seeking to downplay the implication that the crossover success of “Walk This Way” represented a watering-down of hip-hop culture, multiple authors have emphasized the song’s origins in live DJ performance (Rose, Black Noise, 77; Katz, “Sampling,” 1; Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 150).
53. Music critic Robert Palmer noted the aesthetic fusion, explaining that “Walk This Way” takes Aerosmith’s vocals and electric guitar and “grafts” them onto rap’s “typically minimal drum-machine rhythms” (“Rap Music, Despite Adult Fire, Broadens Its Teen-Age Base,” New York Times, September 21, 1986, section 2, p. 23).
54. Will Fulton, interview with author, October 23, 2011.
55. One of the best demonstrations of this technique can be heard in “Peter Piper,” another single from Raising Hell. In it, Jay uses different parts of Bob James’s “Take Me To the Mardi Gras” to augment the DMX track with funky bells and electric piano riffs.
56. The Knack, “My Sharona,” Capitol Records 4731, 1979. On top of that, Run-D.M.C. chant their lyrics to the same rhythm as the chorus of Toni Basil’s song “Mickey” (Radialchoice TIC 4, 1981).
57. Bob James, Two, CTI Records CTI-6057, 1975.
58. Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill, Def Jam/Columbia BFC-40238, 1986.
59. David Chapelle, John Maher, and Questlove, “White People Dancing,” Chapelle Show, Season 2, Episode 3, February 4, 2004.
60. Rick Rubin, as quoted in Mark Dery, “Rap.”
61. Bill Adler, as quoted in Mark Dery, “Rap.”
62. J. D. Considine, “Rap & Hip-Hop: Rising Tide,” Washington Post, August 29, 1986, 29.
63. Robert Palmer, “Rap Music.” Palmer was quick to recognize and accept Run-D.M.C.’s (and their publicists’) messaging. Early in 1985, he made the group’s King of Rock album the center of his argument in favor of rap as more than a passing fad. Quoting Bill Adler, he compared rap’s current state of affairs to R&B just prior to its mass popularization as rock and roll (“Street-Smart Rapping Is Innovative Art Form,” New York Times, February 4, 1985, C13).
64. Jess Cagle and John Callan, “All Hell Breaks Loose at a Run-D.M.C. ‘Raising Hell’ Rap Concert in California,” People 26, no. 9 (September 1, 1986).
65. George Ramos, “‘Rap’ Musicians’ Concert Is Canceled at Palladium after Long Beach Fights,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1986.
66. Rose, Black Noise, 132.
67. Richard Harrington, “Run-DMC and the Rap Flap: For a Hot Trio, Violence and Criticism on the Concert Trail,” Washington Post, August 29, 1986, C1.
68. For a laundry list of such claims by industry insiders, see Mark Dery, “Rap.”
69. “Sound Bite,” SPIN Magazine 8, no. 6 (September 1992): 42.
70. Malcolm X, Grass Roots Speech: Detroit, Michigan, November 1963, Paul Winley Records L.P. 134, 1979.
71. In sample-based hip hop, chopping refers to the process of dividing a digital sample into any number of smaller parts and rearranging them to create a new pattern.
72. Quoted in Rose, Black Noise, 79.
73. Marley Marl dates his innovation to 1981 or 1982, but few, if any, sampling devices capable of this process were available at the time. It is more likely that Marl first experimented with sampled drum breaks in or around 1984 when the first devices with adequate memory and function, such as E-mu Emulator II and the Ensonique Mirage, began hitting the market. See Rose, Black Noise, 79.
74. Oliver Wang, “Beat Making,” in Grove Dictionary of American Music, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
75. Funkadelic, Connections & Disconnections, LAX Records JW-37087, 1981; Bobby Byrd, “I Know You Got Soul,” King Records 45–6378, 1971.
76. “You’ll Like It Too” was adopted immediately by hip-hop DJs upon its release in 1981. A 1981 bootleg tape of the Cold Crush Brothers battling the Fantastic Romantic 5 live at the club Harlem World features them rapping over a DJ quick-mixing this break.
77. Schloss, Making Beats, 137.
78. Schloss, Making Beats, 137.
79. Charnas, The Big Payback, 181.
80. Various online sources, including Wikipedia, misidentify the squealing instrument that opens the “The Grunt” as a trumpet. It is in fact a tenor saxophone, played by Robert McCullough. McCullough was hired to replace Maceo Parker in 1970 after Parker and Brown had a falling out over Brown’s leadership policies. As Eric Leeds, the brother of Brown’s tour manager Allen Leeds, remembers (personal communication), McCullough could not deliver a sax solo in Parker’s virtuosic style, but he did have a knack for squawking on his horn. His squeaking glissandos can also be heard on James Brown’s “Super Bad.”
81. James Brown, “Funky Drummer, Pt. 1,” King Records 45–6290, 1970; The J.B.’s, “The Grunt, Pt. 1,” Mojo 2027–002, 1971; Chubb Rock, “Rock ’n’ Roll Dude,” Select Records FMS 62281, 1987.
82. Mark Dery, “Public Enemy: Confrontation,” Keyboard, September 1990.
83. Katz, “Sampling before Sampling,” 8.
84. For longer samples, like the drum break from “You’ll Like It Too,” producers had a few options: “shorten” the sample by recording it at a higher speed than 33rpm and then slow it back down during playback; or break the sample into smaller units that could be triggered in sequence to reconstruct the entire break, a feature that would become known as “chopping”; or revert back to analogue technologies, such as turntables and tape loops, to cut and paste desired samples into the mix.
85. Red Bull Music Academy Lecture, “Hank Shocklee: A Journey into Noise with Public Enemy’s Chief Producer,” Seattle, 2005. www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/hank-shocklee--art-brut.
86. Schloss, Making Beats, 36.
87. Cheney, Brothers Gonna Work It Out, 67.
88. The Honey Drippers, “Impeach the President,” Alaga Records AL-1017, 1973.
89. Quoted in John Leland, “Armageddon in Effect,” in And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, ed. Raquel Cepeda (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 69.
90. Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 264–70.
91. Stephen Holden, “Pop View: Pop’s Angry Voices Sound the Alarm,” New York Times, May 21, 1989, section 2, p. 1.
92. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 163.
93. K. Fitzpatrick, “More Hip Hop,” Courier-Mail, January 21, 1988.
94. Quoted in DJ Moneyshot, “Solid Steel and the Hour of Chaos,” Solid Steel Radio Show, February 28, 2013. https://soundcloud.com/ninja-tune/solid-steel-radio-show-2-8-1.
95. Although I do not suggest that these were the exact terms in which Public Enemy conceived of their sound, it is likely that the group encountered such theories about African American music through coursework at Adelphi University, where they were enrolled in jazz musician and lecturer Andrei Strobert’s class “Black Music and Musicians” (Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, 239–41).
96. Olly Wilson, “The Significance of the Relationship between Afro-American Music and West African Music,” Black Perspective in Music 2, no. 1 (1974): 20.
97. Wilson, “Afro-American Music,” 15.
98. Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 180–212.
99. Bohemian rap groups, such as Digable Planets and A Tribe Called Quest, self-consciously sampled breaks evoking the instrumental timbres of jazz music, positioning their respective groups as cooler and more sophisticated than their peers. Justin A. Williams, “The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music,” Journal of Musicology 27, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 435–459.
100. For some listeners, 1988 represents hip-hop music’s greatest year, in part thanks to the flowering of artistic diversity enabled by the sample-based approach to beat making; see Loren Kajikawa, “‘Bringin’ ’88 Back’: Historicizing Rap Music’s Greatest Year,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop, ed. Justin A. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
1. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in Gangster Film Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 2007), 13.
2. Opening lyrics of the song “Straight Outta Compton,” on Straight Outta Compton (Ruthless Records CDL-57102, 1988).
3. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 202–03.
4. Kelley, Race Rebels, 187.
5. Kelley, Race Rebels, 228, 185–86.
6. Exhorting scholars to pay greater attention to the differences within rap as a genre, Adam Krims once observed that “the kind of inner city represented, and the relation between that location and the agency of those found there, has changed remarkably since rap was first marketed commercially.” Adam Krims, Music and Urban Geography (New York: Routledge, 2007), 17.
7. Recent research on Los Angeles has explored how Southern California’s urban geography is thoroughly racialized, as well as how everyday experiences of race and racism in the city are spatialized. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); João Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angels (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
8. Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), xvii.
9. Richard Harrington, “1989 Picks: A Six-Pack,” Washington Post, December 29, 1989, N19.
10. I recall a specific example of this disjuncture from my childhood in Los Angeles. Shortly after the release of N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, a friend of mine hosted visiting relatives from Boston, Massachusetts. Having grown up near Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, one of the city’s black ghettos, they insisted on a driving tour of the infamous city of Compton, which they had heard so much about. They were astonished by what they saw: a relatively tranquil, suburban neighborhood completely at odds with the place they had imagined after listening to N.W.A.’s music. In retrospect, I wonder if their surprise stemmed from a particular East Coast image of ghettos as having a high population density (i.e. tenements and fifteen-story housing projects) commensurate with their location in the inner city. In other words, the idea of a more spread-out ghetto composed of single-family homes with lawns was totally outside their experience. It is possible that N.W.A.’s use of Public Enemy’s dense, sample-based production style, associated with East Coast hip hop, added to their confusion.
11. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 191.
12. Lawrence Kramer, Music As Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 12.
13. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 192.
14. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 208–15.
15. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 191.
16. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 193–95.
17. Avila, Popular Culture, 215.
18. Avila, Popular Culture, 219.
19. Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of a Modern City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–21.
20. Avila, Popular Culture, 241.
21. Kelley, Race Rebels, 194–195; Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 41–43.
22. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 51–56.
23. Martin Cizmar, “What Ever Happened to N.W.A.’s Posse? The Eazy-E True Hollywood (or True Compton) Stories behind the Legendary L.A. Hip-Hop Cover,” LA Weekly, May 6, 2010.
24. Jerry Heller, Ruthless: A Memoir (New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2006), 103.
25. Gabriela Jimenéz, “Something 2 Dance 2: Electro Hop in 1980s Los Angeles and Its Afrofuturist Link,” Black Music Research Journal 31, no. 1 (2011): 131–44.
26. Heller, Ruthless, 56.
27. “We [Public Enemy] were in Vegas and they [N.W.A.] were on tour with us, and I had just got the vinyl in. That’s what this is all about. Because Run-DMC and LL Cool J gave me energy. And if our energy happened to be transferred to N.W.A., then that’s what this whole thing is for.” Chuck D, as quoted in Brian Coleman, Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (New York: Villard Books, 2007), 354.
28. In fact, when Ice Cube left N.W.A. in 1989, he hoped that Dre would continue to make beats for his solo project. When this proved impossible because of Dre’s contractual obligations to N.W.A., Ice Cube began collaborating with Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, which served as the production unit for his album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990).
29. Although N.W.A. were less direct about their politics than Public Enemy, critics often described both groups as “militant” and “incendiary,” noting that N.W.A. also offered a powerful critique of the white power structure (Richard Harrington, “The Rap Jive from MTV,” Washington Post, May 24, 1989, D7).
30. The Winstons, “Amen Brother,” Negrum NG 509, 1969. The so-called “Amen break” served as the foundation for dozens of songs in the UK’s “jungle” genre (also known as drum and bass); see Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 252.
31. Chad Kiser, “Stan the Guitar Man,” DUBCNN: West Coast News Network www.dubcnn.com/interviews/stantheguitarman.
32. Even when using live musicians to replay or interpolate samples, producers still have to pay publishing rights (“songwriter’s copyright”).
33. Davy DMX, “One for the Treble,” Tuff City/CBS Associated Records 4Z9 04955, 1984; Ronnie Hudson and the Street People, “West Coast Poplock,” Birdie Records 1002, 1982; Funkadelic, “You’ll Like It Too,” on Connections and Disconnections, LAX 37987, 1981.
34. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 39.
35. David Toop, “Conventional Black; Rock; Records,” The Times [London], August 26, 1989.
36. Rupert Wainwright, dir., “Straight Outta Compton,” The N.W.A. Legacy Videos (Priority Records, 2002).
37. Emboldened by the media hype and public handwringing over the crack cocaine “epidemic,” police chief Daryl Gates announced “Operation Hammer” and the CRASH (Community Response against Street Hoodlums) division, whose names did not attempt to conceal the LAPD’s aggressive and confrontational policing style.
38. Turning our attention to the upper portion of the frame, we notice a strategically placed coffee and donut, invoking the familiar stereotype of the fat, lazy cop. N.W.A. might have confirmed some people’s worst stereotypes about black people through their adoption of gangsta personas, but they also used their position to fire back at their enemies.
39. Vargas, Catching Hell, 42.
40. David Mills, “Rap’s Hostile Fringe: From N.W.A. and Others, ‘Reality’-Based Violence,” Washington Post, September 2, 1990, G1.
41. This time, the group flees from and eventually outsmarts a team of corrupt FBI agents. The decision to lampoon the FBI stemmed from a letter protesting N.W.A.’s single “Fuck the Police,” on Straight Outta Compton, which was sent to Ruthless Records by Milt Ahlerich, then director of the bureau. Ruthless Records owner Jerry Heller was initially alarmed by its intimidating tone, but he soon realized what a great piece of publicity he had been handed. The story of the letter circulated quickly and actually contributed to the group’s album sales and notoriety (Heller, Ruthless, 141–42).
42. This putdown is a reference to the two main characters (played by Ricardo Montalbán and Hervé Villechaize) in Fantasy Island, which ran from 1978 to 1984. Villechaize was a dwarf, so presumably the insult was directed at Eazy-E, who at 5’5” was much shorter than the other members of N.W.A.
43. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), 419–20.
44. N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton,” on Straight Outta Compton (Priority Records 57102, 1988).
45. Dr. Dre, “Let Me Ride,” on The Chronic (Interscope Records P257128, 1992).
46. Vargas, Catching Hell, 57.
47. Dr. Dre’s meticulous approach to sound in his beat making reflects the influence of customized-car audiophile culture; see Justin Williams, Rhymin’ and Stealin’: Music Borrowing in Hip Hop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 73–102.
48. Other tracks on The Chronic differ from this archetypical G-funk aesthetic. In fact, some of the most explicitly violent songs on the album feature loops one measure in length. “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” for example, features a minor-key bass ostinato that lends the tracks a menacing sense of conflict and impending doom, and leads me to wonder if conventional descriptions of G-funk might be based solely on Dr. Dre’s production for a few of the album’s tracks.
49. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 279.
50. Josh Tyrangiel, “All-Time 100 Albums,” Time, January 22, 2010. http://entertainment.time.com/2006/11/02/the-all-time-100-albums/slide/the-chronic/.
51. The footage sampled is from a video of the 1977 Houston concert; see George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, The Mothership Connection, Pioneer Entertainment PA-11664, 1998.
52. Parliament-Funkadelic did not play Los Angeles until the peak of their popularity in 1977. But the group must have been well known from recordings, because the two concerts they performed—complete with Mothership landings—took place at the Forum and the Coliseum, two of the city’s largest venues.
53. Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 256.
54. Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 736.
55. Felicia Miyakawa, Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 114.
56. Even though “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” does not rely on a hook sampled from Parliament, the 1964 Impala pictured in the song’s video continues to serve as the gangsta’s “sweet chariot,” carrying Dre, Snoop, and the D.O.C. from barbeque to house party and home again.
57. Samuel Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 212–25.
58. In George Clinton’s P-Funk lore, these roles are parodied by characters such as Dr. Funkenstein, Sir Nose Devoid of Funk, and Starchild, while humanity finds itself divided into a number of mock ethnic groups including the Thumpasaurus People and Cro-Nasal Sapiens.
59. Michael Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 144–49.
60. Lieb, Children of Ezekiel, 1–2.
61. Lieb, Children of Ezekiel, 147.
62. Robert Farris Thompson, “The Song That Named the Land,” in Black Art/Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art, ed. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia Wardlaw, and Maureen A. McKenna (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989).
63. Thompson, “The Song That Named the Land,” 98.
64. Thompson, “The Song That Named the Land,” 98.
65. Jonah Weiner, “Lil Wayne and the Afronaut Invasion: Why Have So Many Black Musicians Been Obsessed With Outer Space?” Slate.com, June 20, 2008. www.slate.com/id/2193871/.
66. One might also want to point out that Clinton’s Afro-futurism always drew heavily from the earthbound contexts of ghetto life. When Clinton descends from the Mothership as Dr. Funkenstein, his shaky walk and polyester suit signify on the smooth comportment and loud dress of a big-city pimp.
67. Paul Gilory, Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 20.
68. Gilroy, Darker Than Blue, 22.
69. 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Aftermath/Interscope, 2003.
70. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 143.
71. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 143–45.
72. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press 2005), 2.
73. Harvey, Neoliberalism, 3.
74. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 169.
75. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 169.
76. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 172.
77. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, 144.
78. Quinn, Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang, xx.
79. “Rappers or Republicans,” The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, July 28, 2008. http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/68ozaa/rappers-or-republicans.
80. In their song and music video “What They Do” (MCA Records DGC12–22227, 1996), underground hip hop group the Roots parodied gangsta rap’s materialistic individualism.
81. Kelley, Race Rebels, 224.
82. Kelley, Race Rebels, 224.
83. Robert Christgau, “Dr. Dre,” Consumer Guide Reviews. www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Dr.+Dre.
84. TMS, “Record Report: Albums,” The Source, February 1993, 55.
85. The location of Dr. Dre’s home is also a telling indication of his reorientation. Having moved out of the inner city, Dre chose a suburb in the San Fernando Valley that was central to the asymmetrical growth and patterns of white flight that Edward Soja discusses in his writings about Los Angeles (Postmodern Geographies, 233).
86. “Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg: Pool Party,” Yo! MTV Raps, 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNitNLAjn-4.
87. Krims, Music and Urban Geography, 119.
1. Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 22.
2. Shawnee Smith, “Rap Rips Up the Charts,” Billboard, December 5, 1998, 27–28.
3. Smith, “Rap Rips Up the Charts.”
4. Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Hip-Hop and Rap (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
5. Smith, “Rap Rips Up the Charts.”
6. Cameron McCarthy, “Living with Anxiety: Race and the Renarration of Public Life,” in White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America, ed. Joe L. Kincheloe and Shirley R. Steinberg (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 329–30.
7. Woody Doane, “Rethinking Whiteness Studies,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.
8. Eminem, Infinite, bootleg, 1996; Eminem, “My Name Is,” Interscope Records 97470, 1999.
9. Eminem, The Slim Shady LP, Interscope Records 90287, 1999; Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP, Interscope Records 490629, 2000.
10. Anthony Bozza, Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Marshall Mathers (New York: Crown, 2003), 15–16.
11. Mickey Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 115.
12. Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 115.
13. Robert Marriott, “Allah’s on Me,” XXL 1, no. 1 (1997): 64–70.
14. Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 75.
15. Mark Anthony Neal, “. . . A Way Out of No Way: Jazz, Hip Hop, and Black Social Improvisation,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Helble (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 211.
16. The practice of setting a consistent, exact subdivision of the beat is what hip hop producers refer to as “quantizing.” See Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 141.
17. Although in retrospect it seems clear that so many songs from this era share the same rhythmic feel, more research could help to explain how and why this particular convention became established. Did the sampling equipment producers were using suddenly include an option for sixteenth-note triplets? Was there a particular song or producer that inspired the shift? Did producers view this practice as defining a style (e.g., East Coast hip hop), or was it seen less as a limitation and more as an attempt to expand on what previous technologies had offered?
18. Bozza, Whatever You Say I Am, 5.
19. Vanilla Ice, To the Extreme, SBK Records 95325, 1991.
20. 3rd Bass, “Pop Goes the Weasel,” Def Jam Recordings 44–73702, 1991.
21. Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 118–20.
22. Quoted in Brian McCollum, “Best Bet,” Vancouver Sun, May 6, 1999, C31.
23. Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 195–96.
24. Eminem, “Without Me,” on The Eminem Show (Shady/Aftermath 493 290–2, 2002).
25. Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 124–25.
26. Eminem, quoted in Richard Lowe and Dana Heinz Perry, dir., “Part Five: My Name Is . . .” on And You Don’t Stop: Hip-Hop. VH1, 2004.
27. Bozza, Whatever You Say I Am, 25.
28. Eminem’s Detroit associates, Mark and Jeff Bass, were responsible for the majority of the music on The Slip Shady LP. Journalists did their part in aiding Eminem’s publicity, emphasizing time and again Dr. Dre’s role as the white MC’s producer, a stamp of approval that was critical to Eminem’s positive reception.
29. Snoop Doggy Dogg was actually introduced to many rap listeners on the single “Deep Cover,” recorded for the 1992 film of the same name. As the lead single to his solo album (Doggystyle, Death Row 63002, 1993), however, “Who Am I (What’s My Name?)” played an important roll in broadening the rapper’s fan base.
30. Edward G. Armstrong, “Eminem’s Construction of Authenticity,” Popular Music and Society 27, no. 3 (2004): 343. S. Craig Watkins puts it more succinctly, claiming that “the manner in which Eminem makes his race an issue also makes it a non-issue.” S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Popular Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 107.
31. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), xii.
32. De La Soul, Buhloone Mind State, Tommy Boy 81063, 1993; the Roots, Iladelph Halflife, Geffen 24972, 1996.
33. Dr. Dre, The Chronic, Death Row 63000, 1992; N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton,” on N.W.A. Legacy: The Video Collection. DVD. EMI Video 77958, 2002.
34. The Beastie Boys, License to Ill, Def Jam 527351, 1986.
35. Quoted in Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 116.
36. The radio edit of the song opens, “Hi kids! Do you like Primus?”—a reference to yet another “white” rock group.
37. Jon Pareles, “Pop Review: A Rapper More Gauche Than Gangsta,” New York Times, April 17, 1999, B18.
38. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 151.
39. Quoted in “Part Five: My Name Is . . .”
40. It may be more than mere coincidence that Eminem’s music video invokes the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver, whose title character was played by child actor Jerry Mathers (Eminem’s birth name is Marshall Mathers).
41. Dr. Dre and Philip G. Atwell, dir., Eminem: E. DVD. Universal Music and Video Distribution, 2000.
42. Labi Siffre, Remember My Song, Phantom 820427, 2006 [1975].
43. Schloss offers Prince Paul’s sampling of the Daryl Hall and John Oates tune “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” which formed the beat for De La Soul’s 1989 “Say No Go,” as an example. One academic critic wrote that Prince Paul intended to poke fun at the “blue-eyed soul” duo. When Schloss presented Prince Paul with this interpretation, however, Paul was surprised and quick to clarify how much he sincerely enjoyed the original tune.
44. Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity, 43.
45. For more about the generic conventions of funk music, particularly the issue of an implied subdivision of the beat, also referred to as the rhythmic “density gradient,” see Anne Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 44, 74–75.
46. Eminem’s “My Name Is” was not the only track from the 1990s that sampled this same Labi Siffre song. In most cases, the producers of these songs took their samples from the first part of “I’ve Got The . . . ,” which features a funky string-and-guitar riff and an array of off-beat accents resembling more conventional funk grooves. Jay-Z’s “Streets Is Watching” (on In My Lifetime, Vol. 1, Def Jam 536392, 1997) and Def Squad’s “Countdown” (on El Niño, Def Jam 558383, 1998) both take pieces of this syncopated string-and-guitar riff and interpolate them into an eight-count drum track.
47. Jon Pareles, “More Gauche Than Gangsta.”
48. For an exploration of digital sampling’s evolution vis-à-vis hip hop’s aesthetics and cultural politics, see Dale Chapman, “That Ill, Tight Sound: Telepresence and Biopolitics in Post-Timbaland Rap Production,” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 2 (2008): 155–77.
49. Dr. Dre, 2001, Aftermath Records 490486, 1999.
50. Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, xviii.
51. Although I don’t have space to explore Eminem’s voice in detail, I want to point out that the nasality of Eminem’s delivery is contrived, not an essential attribute of his racial identity. At times, he plays up the “whiteness” of his voice, as in “My Name Is” and “The Real Slim Shady.” In other songs, such as “Kill You” and “The Way I Am,” he uses a raspier, throaty voice.
52. Hobey Echlin, “Where Hip Hop Lives: Sure, He’s a Cute White Kid, but Detroit Rapper Eminem is Not the Official Candy of the New Millennium,” Detroit Metro Times, February 17, 1999.
53. Contemporary reviewers picked up on this thread. “The most refreshing thing about ‘The Slim Shady LP’ is Eminem’s (aka Marshall Mathers) self-deprecating humor. Sure, he can be cocky, but he knows how people see him and he doesn’t mind confronting it. He also doesn’t mind using his lack of self-esteem as a setup for a joke” (Christopher Gray, “Eminem Lets Humor Shine Through,” Portland Press Herald, March 28, 1999, 5E).
54. Sway Calloway, “Eminem: The Gift and the Curse,” MTV.com. www.mtv.com/bands/e/eminem/news_feature_052902/.
55. Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
56. McCollum, “Best Bet.”
57. Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead?, 124–25; Armstrong, “Eminem’s Construction of Authenticity,” 343.
58. One of his rhyming couplets threatens to slit his critics’ throats “worse than Ron Goldman” (one of the victims in the O. J. Simpson murder trial).
59. Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP, Interscope Records 490629, 2000.
60. Armstrong, “Eminem’s Construction of Whiteness,” 334–35.
61. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: ‘Gangsta Rap’ and Post-Industrial Los Angeles,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994).
62. Sean S. Cunningham, dir., Friday the 13th, DVD, Paramount Home Entertainment 124902, 2007 [1980]; Alfred Hitchcock, dir., Psycho, DVD, Universal Studios Home Video 61100450, 2008 [1960].
63. Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 416.
64. Ray Pratt, Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990), 36. See also George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1997); Christopher Small, “Why Doesn’t the Whole World Love Chamber Music?” American Music 19, no. 3 (2001): 340–59.
65. Henry A. Giroux, “Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 295.
66. Writing for the Seattle Weekly in 1999 just after The Slim Shady LP’s release, Joseph Schloss zeroed in on the importance of class identity to Eminem’s popularity. “What really distinguishes Eminem from other light-skinned MCs is that he doesn’t think it’s cooler to be black. He just hates being white. . . . In Eminem’s world, whiteness doesn’t represent power or privilege, but working-class anxiety” (“The Joke’s on Us: The Outrageous Humor—and the Sheer Outrage—of Eminem,” Seattle Weekly, April 14, 1999, www.seattleweekly.com/1999–04–14/music/the-joke-s-on-us/).
67. “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting” (Proposition 209: Text of Proposed Law, http://vote96.sos.ca.gov/Vote96/html/BP/209text.htm).
68. “Rebuttal to Argument Against Proposition 209,” Proposition 209 Ballot Pamphlet. http://vote96.sos.ca.gov/BP/209norbt.htm.
69. In a 2014 split decision, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action (Adam Liptak, “Justices Back Ban on Race as Factor in College Entry,” New York Times, April 24, 2014, A1).
70. R. J. Smith, “Crossover Dreams: Class Trumps Race in Eminem’s 8 Mile,” Village Voice, November 5, 2002. www.villagevoice.com/2002–11–05/news/crossover-dream/.
71. Curtis Hanson, dir., 8 Mile, Universal Studios Home Video 61021981, 2002.
72. The website hosting this post has since disappeared from the internet; it was originally cited in a review of 8 Mile that I published in 2002. Loren Kajikawa, “8 Mile: Rap, Rabbit, Rap,” ECHO: A Music-Centered Journal 4, no. 2 (Fall 2002). http://archive.today/fhWe.
73. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 157–58.
74. Richard Goldstein, “Celebrity Bigots: John Rocker, Dr. Laura, Eminem, Don Imus . . . Why Is Hate So Hot?” Village Voice, July 11, 2000. www.villagevoice.com/2000–07–11/news/celebrity-bigots/.
75. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 21.
76. David Denby, “Breaking Through: 8 Mile and Frida,” The New Yorker, November 11, 2002, 196.
77. Joseph Schloss suggested to me that for many journalists and supporters of hip hop music, defending Eminem was not necessarily about respecting him as a person as much as it was about defending a principle: that respect in hip hop should be conferred based on skill and artistry, rather than extramusical factors such as race or biography.
78. Bakari Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America (New York: Civitas Books, 2005), 159–60.
79. Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop, 154–60.
80. Eminem served as executive producer for his crew’s mainstream debut album (D12, Devils Night, Interscope Records 069490897–2, 2001).
81. Carl Hancock Rux, “Eminem: The New White Negro,” in Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 37.
1. Although Sounding Race has focused on successful, commercial rap songs, hip hop music’s vast underground network of artists have produced recordings that also merit close reading. Rejecting “corporate rap” as exploitative and shallow, underground artists often espouse an ideology of artistic meritocracy where authenticity is determined by one’s skills, not one’s conformity to certain standards of black masculinity. Songs by underground artists such as People Under the Stairs, Living Legends, and Jurassic 5 often thematize artistic skill itself, promoting a kind of art-for-art’s-sake ethos that celebrates dope beats and rhymes as ends in and of themselves. Attempting to avoid the gimmicks and clichés that make race audible in Eminem or Jin’s music, such artists often advance a color-blind ideal that strives toward racially neutral authenticity.
2. Jin vs. Sterlin, “106 & Park’s Freestyle Friday,” BET, 2002.
3. Jin vs. Lucky Luciano, “106 & Park’s Freestyle Friday,” BET, 2002.
4. Oliver Wang, “Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity and the Asian American MC,” in Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, ed. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 40–41.
5. Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 416.
6. Jin vs. Lucky Luciano.
7. Jin, The Rest Is History, Ruff Ryders 7243 5 84087 2, 2004.
8. On the history and cultural politics of Asian American exclusion and invisibility, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
9. There are additional levels to Jin’s inversion of the phrase “chinky-eyed,” which in African-American slang is sometimes used to describe the droopy-eyed appearance of a person high on marijuana. For example, see rapper Ludacris’s verse in the song “Holidae In,” in which he confesses, “My eyes chinky, I’m with Chingy at the Holiday Inn” (Chingy, Jackpot, Capitol Records 7243 5 81827 2 9, 2003). In similar fashion, “chinky-eyed” can be used to refer to non-Asians (or people of mixed Asian heritage) with almond-shaped eyes. So what Jin is actually saying in “Learn Chinese” is, “OK, if you like rappers with ‘chinky’ eyes, I am actually Chinese. It doesn’t get any more ‘chinky’ than that.”
10. Wang, “Rapping and Repping Asian,” 56.
11. Wang, “Rapping and Repping Asian,” 57.
12. Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994).
13. Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008).