Making Beats. Joseph G. Schloss
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incorporate into his performances. And if he hadn’t, there is little realistic reason to assume that someone else would have. While his sociocultural environment nurtured and embraced his innovation, it did not create it.
In addition to cultural determinism, there is also a great deal of class determinism evident in the scholarly discourse of hip-hop. Although certain elements of hip-hop culture, such as b-boying or b-girling, graffiti writing, and emceeing may well be the products of economic adversity, other aspects, particularly deejaying and producing, are not: they require substantial capital investment. This, in and of itself, is not particularly significant, except to the degree that it contradicts the narratives of those who would characterize hip-hop as the voice of a dispossessed lumpenproletariat, a musical hodge-podge cobbled together from the discarded scraps of the majority culture. David Toop, for example, writes:
Competition was at the heart of hip hop. Not only did it help displace violence and the refuge of destructive drugs like heroin, but it also fostered an attitude of creating from limited materials. Sneakers became high fashion; original music was created from turntables, a mixer and obscure (highly secret) records; entertainment was provided with the kind of showoff street rap that almost any kid was capable of turning on a rival. (Toop 1991: 15).
Although Toop’s examples are certainly accurate historically, one must be careful of letting the very real influence of material circumstance on individuals become inflated into either a motive or an aesthetic for an entire movement. To do so demeans the creativity of the artists involved, suggesting that they had no choice but to create what they did because no other path was open to them. It virtually precludes the possibility that people chose hip-hop’s constituent elements from a variety of options and thus ignores the cultural values, personal opinions, and artistic preferences that led them to make those choices. Toop marvels that “original music” could be created from the “limited materials” of “turntables, a mixer and … records.” But exactly how are these limited? The idea that an individual could have access to a deejay system and thousands of obscure records, but not to a more conventional musical instrument (such as a guitar or a keyboard), is difficult to accept.
New York–based producer Prince Paul, for one, disputes the assertion that hip-hop’s innovators did not have access to other musical instruments:
You know, everybody went to a school that had a band. You could take an instrument if you wanted to. Courtesy of your public school system, if you wanted to.
But, man, you playing the clarinet isn’t gonna be like, BAM! KAH! Ba-BOOM-BOOM KAH! Everybody in the party [saying] “Oooohhhhh!” It wasn’t that “Yes, yes y’all—y’all—y’all—y’all,” with echo chambers. You wasn’t gonna get that [with a clarinet]. I mean, yeah, it evolved from whatever the culture is. But it’s just an adaptation of whatever else was going on at the time….
It wasn’t cats sittin’ around like, “Man. Times are hard, man…. a can of beans up in the refrigerator. Man, I gotta—I gotta—I gotta —do some hip-hop! I gotta get me a turntable!” It wasn’t like that, man.
Ask Kool Herc! He was the first guy out there. I know him, too. We talked plenty of times. A good guy. He’s not gonna sit there and be like, “Man. It was just so hard for me, man. I just felt like I needed to just play beats back to back. I had to get a rhymer to get on there to make people feel good, ’cause times was just so hard.”
Yeah, cats kill me with that. (Prince Paul 2002)
DJ Kool Akiem of the Micranots also questions the notion of poverty as the decisive factor in the development of early hip-hop:
DJ Kool Akiem: “They were too poor to get instruments.” Yeah, right. They were too poor for classes. Somebody came along with a hundred-dollar sampler.
Man, those samplers were [expensive] back then! I mean, you gotta have money, some way, to put your studio together…. Producing takes more money than playin’ a instrument. You play an instrument, you buy the instrument and then you go to class, you know what I mean?
Joe: Even deejaying costs more money than playing an instrument….
DJ Kool Akiem: I mean deejaying, if you’re serious, you’re gonna have to spend a thousand dollars on your equipment. But then every record’s ten bucks. Then you got speakers and blah, blah, blah.
Even saying that is kinda weird. Obviously, [the academics] just probably didn’t think about it. The most important thing to them is, “Oh, the kids are poor,” you know what I mean? Not even thinkin’ about it. Just like, “Well, that must be it: they’re poor!” (DJ Kool Akiem 1999)
As Prince Paul continues, in addition to broad social and economic trends, there were also significant aesthetic, personal, and even romantic factors that came into play when hip-hop was being developed:
Deejay stuff was more expensive back then than it is now. I mean, like, way more expensive. So for them to even say that is crazy. [Hip-hop] was cool! It’s like: we liked the music. Deejaying was cool….
Yeah, there’s some socioeconomical issues and everything else that goes on, but that wasn’t everybody’s, like, blatant reason for making the music. There’s some other stuff that people don’t talk about. Like showing off, you know what I’m saying? There’s stuff like girls. Loving the music in general. It’s just the feeling that you get when you deejay. Especially back in the days. You can’t even describe the whole feeling of how it was, because everything was so new and so fresh…. It was all about fun. And it was a lot of fun. (Prince Paul 2002)
In 1986, when sampling achieved its initial popularity, the least expensive version of the E-mu SP-121 carried a list price of $2,745—well beyond the budget of most inner-city teens (Oppenheimer 1986: 84). And while the current popularity of hip-hop music has led to an increased demand for inexpensive equipment, the Akai MPC 2000 (the most popular digital sampler used by hip-hop producers at the time of this writing) lists for $1,649 (Musician’s Friend Catalog 2002). The enormousness of the initial investment required of hip-hop producers raises another question as well: how does one develop the capital and infrastructure necessary to make beats? Most of the producers I spoke with worked long hours at mundane jobs, received the equipment as gifts from their parents, or were given used equipment by older siblings or peers who had lost interest in using it. In other words, the reality in most cases is precisely what hip-hop’s critics would presumably like to hear: a story of hard-working, close-knit families with a certain amount of disposable income and a willingness to invest that income in their children’s artistic pursuits.2
Collective History
The rap DJ evolved from the party DJ, whose ostensible role was merely to play pre-recorded music for dance parties; like their audiences, these DJs were consumers of pop music. Yet by taking these musical sounds, packaged for consumption, and remaking them into new sounds through scratching, cutting, and sampling, what had been consumption was transformed into production. (Potter 1995: 36)
The basic deejay system consists of two turntables and a mixer that controls the relative and absolute volume of each. Using this equipment, a new record could be prepared on one turntable while another was still playing, thus allowing for an uninterrupted flow of music. As has been extensively documented elsewhere, the central innovation of early hip-hop was the use of this system with two copies of the same record for various effects, particularly the isolation of the “break.”
As Toop relates,
Initially, [Kool DJ] Herc was trying out his reggae records but since they failed to cut ice he switched to Latin-tinged funk, just playing the fragments that were popular with the dancers and ignoring the rest of the track….
A conga or bongo solo, a timbales break or simply the drummer hammering out the beat—these could be isolated by using two copies of the record on twin turntables and, playing the one section over and over, flipping the needle back to the start on one while the other played through (Toop 1991, 60)
Tricia Rose notes that these breaks soon became the core of a new