Abstract
In an album skit, DJ Premier, one half of hip-hop’s underground duo Gangstarr, explicitly warns “break-record cats” against revealing the secreted samples in his production. The most striking aspect about this skit, on Gangstarr’s fifth album, titled Moment of Truth, is the actual voice of DJ Premier.1 We are used to hearing Premo (as he is affectionately called in hip-hop parlance) ventriloquize his artistic voice through a collage of samples and memorable hip-hop voices, producing for hip-hop’s greatest artists, including Biggie Smalls, Jay Z, Nas, M.O.P., Snoop Dogg, and many others. Hearing his voice is revealing in and of itself, but he also anticipates the cottage industry within/out hip-hop that would reveal rare recordings and/or riffs secreted through the production process. He tells them plainly and forcefully to knock it off. This gesture may appear to be economically motivated because Premo has to pay legal sampling fees if his production secrets are revealed. However, since this prophetic response to the exploitation of hip-hop production (the revealing of sampling secrets for money by those viewed by Premo as transgressing the rules of hip-hop culture), many hip-hop artists and producers have been profiled on compilations that reveal the original songs from which many hip-hop producers shamelessly borrow. DJ Premier would not deny this impulse to borrow from the best of the Black, blues, soul music tradition. But those who reveal the code are considered to be operating in violation of a hip-hop policy that protects the creative expression of traditional Black American artistry, represented here as sampling, but tapping into the Black tradition of repetition with a signifying difference.2
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Notes
For more detail on repetition in Black Culture, please see James Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Theories, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Routledge Press, 1990).
Schloss, Joseph. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, p. 138.
Murray Forman, The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), p. 17.
Houston Baker, Black Studies, Rap and the Academy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 33.
Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p 172.
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994). Rose is the first scholar to refer to rap as a transcript in her explanation and analysis of various lyrics (see pp. 100–10).
For a more in-depth discussion and analysis of “wilding” please see Stephen J. Mexal’s “The Roots of ‘Wilding’: Black Literary Naturalism, the Language of Wilderness, and Hip Hop in the Central Park Jogger Rape,” African American Review 46(1), (Spring 2013): 101–15, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life (with an introduction by W. D. Howells) (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896).
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).
Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). Sidran coins this term on page 79 of Chapter Four titled “The Evolution of the Black Underground 1930–1947.”
Leroi Jones, Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), p. 23.
Eric Lott, “Bebop’s Politics of Style,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 246.
Henrietta Buckmaster, Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), p. 59.
Charles Blockson, Hippocrene Guide to The Underground Railroad (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994), pp. 11–12.
Michael P. Jeffries, Thuglife: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 146. The terms “flow” and “layered meaning” or “layering” are applied by Tricia Rose in her discussion of hip-hop aesthetics in Black Noise.
Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 87.
Christopher Holmes Smith, “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity,” Social Identities 3 (3) (1997): 350.
William L. Andrews, ed., The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 84.
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© 2014 James Braxton Peterson
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Peterson, J.B. (2014). Verbal and Spatial Masks of the Underground. In: The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305251_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305251_2
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