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Contents |
Abstract
Chapter 0: Introduction
"50 Cent, Soulja Boy, learning, and literacy? Never thought I'd hear those words in the same sentence!"
The quote above came from a colleague after hearing the topic of this paper. He, like many of my peers, self-identifies as a hip-hop fan. As such, he does not question the value of hip-hop culture in general but expresses skepticism of its contemporary manifestations. For many older fans, especially those concerned with the lives of young people, artists like 50 Cent and Soulja Boy represent the decline of hip-hop from a popular culture of nuance, complexity, and progressive politics to a commercial culture concerned primarily with conspicuous consumption, radical individualism, and the reproduction of destructive stereotypes.
Nostalgic selectivity aside, this prevailing sense of the culture's regression is informed largely by commodities transmitted via traditional media channels like cable TV and commercial radio. Evidence presented here suggests that the dominance of these channels is fading as hip-hop discourse moves into participatory online spaces. Unfortunately, prevailing images of young hip-hop practitioners rarely reflect this creative use of media technologies.
Hip-hop dance in the classroom
"This beat is... Automatic, supersonic, hypnotic, funky fresh Work my body, so melodic This beat flows right through my chest Everybody, Ma and Papi came to party Grab somebody, work your body, work your body Let me see you 1, 2 step" - "1, 2 Step", Ciara, 2004
This project begins five years ago when I began teaching math and computer science to middle and high school students from the metro Boston area. Each morning in my homeroom, a group of eighth grade girls gathered around their desks to dance the one-two step while chanting Ciara's lyrics at the top of their lungs. Eighth grade is not an easy time and the relationships among these girls were often strained but hip-hop always provided a common space for them to laugh, sing, and dance together.
In 2004, these students learned Ciara's choreography by waiting for her video to come on BET after school. They would memorize her movements, practice at home, and compare notes the next day. After a few weeks, they not only knew all of Ciara's steps but had created their own variations of the dance. During that year, they performed whenever the opportunity presented itself: in the hallways between classes, at lunch recess, at teen dances, and during the occasional school talent show. Summer vacation eventually came and, like many artifacts of middle-school life, I rarely saw it again.
By 2006, the dancing culture at my school had changed subtly but substantially. Kids still disrupted homeroom activities daily with spontaneous dancing but the proliferation of cameraphones and advent of YouTube connected them to young hip-hop dancers all over the world. After school, I watched over the computer lab as students came in to browse the hundreds of new homemade dance videos posted each week. Whereas my eighth graders had to piece together Ciara's dance from her official music video, the students now learned new dances by watching other teens performing on YouTube.
Digital dance culture features two important characteristics: regional specificity and creative competition. My student dancers could explain with great nuance the distinctive movements of various cities and dance crews. Classic pop-lockin' joined countless new regional hip-hop styles like snap, crump/krump, lite feet, hyphy, juking, jitting, and footwork. The comment sections accompanying these videos provided a rich discursive space for sharing knowledge, critical feedback, boasting, and trash talking. Frequent and friendly competition among cities provided endless demand for innovation.
Engaged in online competition, dancers communicated most effectively by posting their own videos. To have a voice in this community, students had to negotiate several different media systems. First, they had to find a device that could capture video. For some, this might be a cellphone or webcam; for others, a camcorder borrowed from a parent or the video function on a still camera. Second, they transfered the captured video to a personal computer for editing and post-production. Finally, they converted the edited video into an appropriate compressed format and uploaded the resulting file to YouTube.
At the time, my school did not offer classes in video production. We did not have video cameras for the students to borrow. The only editing software available in school was Windows Movie Maker, a simple suite that ships with the operating system. These young dancers, many of whom did not have regular access to an internet-enabled computer in their home, not only found all the tools they needed to produce their video but developed a highly technical understanding of the affordances and constraints of various video formats and web video platforms.
To outside observers, including most of my fellow teachers, the dance culture of my school might have appeared unchanged from 2004 to 2006. The novel technological practices were all but invisible, occurring after school, outside of class, and in emphermeral spaces online. Though they might not have had the historical perspective to ese it, these students were revolutionizing the way that popular dances are shared, learned, and spread. How might their high school experience have been different if adult mentors were able to help them recognize the innovation of their hip-hop practices?
That most of my colleagues did not see the complex technological processes at work in the students' dance culture would not have been a problem were it not also for their persistent misconceptions about the students' hip-hop fandom.
Young black hip-hop fans
In 2006, sociologist Orlando Patterson published a provocative op-ed in the New York Times detailing the "failure of social scientists to adequately explain" patterns of self-destruction among young black men. Dissatisfied with socioeconomic explanations, he turned his attention to young black men's culture. Patterson found anecdotal evidence that young black men who performed hip-hop's "cool-pose" garned such esteem from their peers that they were not motivated to pursue traditional avenues of achievement. Though whites also deeply engage with hip-hop culture, he says, they know when to drop the pose and "get out the SAT prep book." Black men on the other hand, have more difficulty moving past the "immensely fulfilling" experience of pop vanguardism. (Patterson)
While Patterson's critique recognizes the gratification and pleasure of hip-hop culture, vocal hip-hop critic John McWhorter dismisses it out of hand as a "soundtrack [to] antisocial behavior." McWhorter credits the content of rap lyrics with nihilism and anti-intellectualism among young black men. His argument is based on lyrics selected seemingly at random and ignores the context in which rap lyrics are written, performed, recorded, and consumed but his assumption that hip-hop forms a "bedrock of young black identity" is worth our attention. (McWhorter 2003)
In conversations with teachers, parents, and students, many of whom identified as hip-hop fans, I heard many variations on Patterson and McWhorter's argument that hip-hop culture left young black men ill-prepared for adult life and encouraged anti-intellectualism. Tricia Rose offers a powerful alternate reading of the young black man's "feigned disengagement" as a "survival strategy in the face of crushing oppression[,] violence," and limited economic opportunity. (Rose 2008 80) Rose's defense of hip-hop's empowering potential is tempered by concern about the preponderance of gangsterism in the most visible forms of hip-hop culture.
Although the arguments of Patterson and Rose engage thoughtfully with hip-hop culture, I struggle to see representation and recognition of my dancing students in their analyses. As was true of my fellow educators, their critiques focus primarily on lyrics, language, and music videos: the content of hip-hop's pop industrial output. My experience with the high school dancers, on the other hand, foregrounds a critical engagement with media and communications technologies as tools of expression. For these students, hip-hop music, for all its problematic lyrics, was neither nihilistic soundtrack nor survival strategy but rather a cultural catalyst for innovative practice and production.
Nearly every artifact, story, and example in this paper concerns the lives and labor of young black men. Though they come from diverse backgrounds, they are often lumped together, their differences blurred by all-encompassing imaginaries such as "the millenial generation", "the hip-hop generation", or simply "black youth culture." But young people constitute an open-ended, "highly heterogeneous" group and do not represent any unified set of racial, political, aesthetic, nor moral values as is suggested by "generation"-based discourses. (Watkins 2009)
Among their peers in the U.S., young black people are unusually beset by muddying, totalizing social categorization. Hip-hop culture is so widely perceived to be the culture of young black youth that nearly all "young blacks [...] are unjustly profiled [by] rap's stigma." (Asante jr.) Though hip-hop's aesthetic tradition is one of rich complexity, dynamism, influence, and innovation, it is also associated with the worst kinds of violence and ignorance. (Peterson) Young black men thus benefit from their association with hip-hop at the same time as they are unfairly marked by it. (Rose 2008 xii) Forthermore, highly-visible investment in hip-hop among black youth leads outside observers to make conclusions about real young black people based on nothing more than a few trace artifacts of hip-hop culture. As a result, even black youth who do not invest themselves in hip-hop culture are bound by the implications of its circulation. (Watkins 2009)
Santogold, a contemporary recording artist and young black woman, recently confronted this collapse of blackness into hip-hop when she discovered that music retailers were consistently filing her multi-faceted album under their Hip-Hop/R&B category,
"It's racist (laughs). It's totally racist. Everyone is just so shocked that I don't like R&B. Are you shocked that [white rock band] Good Charlotte isn't into R&B? Why does R&B keep coming into my interviews? It's pissing me off. I didn't grow up as a big fan of R&B and, like, what is the big shocker? It's stupid. In the beginning I thought that was funny. I'm an 'MC', I'm a 'soul singer', I'm a 'dance hybrid artist'. And some guy said I looked like Kelly Rowland!" (Nicholson)
As long as outside observers fail to distinguish between them, young black people, especially young black men, will remain bound to stereotypes constructed by hip-hop outsiders. McWhorter's vague familiarity with a smattering of rap lyrics leads him to characterize hip-hop culture as "thuggish," anti-family, and anti-education. Furthermore, by tying investment in hip-hop to joblessness, critics deny that participation requires valuable technical skills; exactly the opposite of what I observed in my students.
Slippage between young black men and peculiar manifestations of hip-hop culture is widespread and will take considerable effort to dismantle. However, the durability of this transit between hip-hop stereotype and black youth provides an opportunity for injecting alternative cultural narratives. By foregrounding the history of technological innovation in hip-hop, we can alter the prevailing hip-hop stereotype and, by virtue of the persistent slippage, effectively provide a new model for the black youth beset by that stereotype. This modest strategy does little to challenge the self-destructive imagery embedded in the dominant hip-hop industry and will not dissuade outsiders from totalizing views of young black people. But alternate narratives about the development and practices of hip-hop culture will challenge the racist assumption that young black men are less technically capable than their non-black peers.
The three chapters to follow present considerable evidence to argue that technological innovation is a fundamental characteristic of participation in hip-hop culture. First, I will examine hip-hop as a culture of practice using theoretical frames provided by John Fiske, Lawrence Lessig, and Henry Jenkins. Next, using the vocabulary developed in the first section, I will trace the history of the hip-hop mixtape with special attention to the recurring role of new media technologies. Finally, I will analyze closely the "Crank Dat" dance craze of 2007, a phenomenon that revealed the wildly creative hip-hop culture flourishing on the web.
Notes on research methodology
Much of the evidence in this project is drawn from digital emphemera found in public spaces on the web. Chapters 2 and 3 rely in particular on mp3 files, fan archives, YouTube videos, blog posts, and the temporary discursive communities that surround them. The nature, volume, context, and circulation of this material demonstrates the intimate links between hip-hop culture and media and communications technologies. Unfortunately, it also presents some thorny issues for the curious scholar.
Although ease of reproduction and low storage costs afford digital media an uncommon staying power among other types of cultural ephemera, its long-term availability remains highly unstable. In December 2008, for example, a failed advertising agreement between YouTube and Warner Music Group lead to the effective loss of thousands of videos from the popular media-sharing site. Called a "fair use massacre" by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this sudden removal of large amounts of video especially affected fan, amateur, and semi-professional practitioners. (Von lohmann) Intimidated by the legal risks, some authors will never return these videos to the web.
The very same complex understanding of authorship, ownership, and permission that brings liveliness to hip-hop culture complicates documentation of its practices. Shifting usernames, email addresses, and the common habit of "re-upping" and mirroring material produced elsewhere occasionally make it difficult to identify a single source for a given artifact. Wherever possible, I have done my best to properly attribute the young people whose creativity forms the foundation upon which this work is built.