Making Beats. Joseph G. Schloss
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of these oppositions (oral versus written, African American English versus Standard English, improvised versus prepared), the first of which is simply to call attention to them. A second strategy has been, as often as possible, to include my own side of the conversation when I quote from interviews. In this way, I am able to present a record of my own oral expressions as an implicit point of comparison to those of my consultants.
Finally, I have shown drafts of this work to all of my consultants, in order to see that they are comfortable with the way their words are being presented as well as to make sure that my interpretations of their statements are consistent with what they actually meant. I believe that this is important, not only for ethical reasons, but also for simple accuracy. It is precisely the things researchers take for granted—our own assumptions about the way the world works—where we are most vulnerable and where our consultants can exert a decisively positive role.
The reader will also note that—unlike previous academics who have discussed hip-hop production—I tend to shy away from transcribing musical examples. Transcriptions (that is, descriptive graphic representations of sound) objectify the results of musical processes in order to illuminate significant aspects of their nature that could not be presented as clearly through other means. The core of this book is concerned with the aesthetic, moral, and social standards that sample-based hip-hop producers have articulated with regard to the music that they produce. I believe that transcription—or any other close reading of a single completed work of sample-based hip-hop—is more problematic than valuable for my purposes. There are four general areas of difficulty that bear on this question: the necessary level of specificity of a transcription, the ethical implications within the hip-hop community of transcribing a beat, the general values implicit in a close reading of a beat, and the specific deficiencies of transcription as a mode of representation with regard to hip-hop.
With regard to the level of specificity, most of the significant aesthetic elements I discuss are too general, too specific, or too subjective to be usefully analyzed through the close reading of any one beat. An example of an element that is too general is the myriad conceptual changes that a linear melody undergoes when it is “looped” or repeated indefinitely. An example of an element that is too specific is the microrhythmic distinctions that result in a beat either sounding mechanical or having what producers often refer to as “bounce.” Finally, there are a number of psychoacoustic criteria that must be fulfilled for a sample to have “the right sound.” All of these issues, I believe, are more usefully addressed through the producers’ own discourse than through the objective analysis of a given musical example.
Transcribing a beat also has ethical implications. In the community of sample-based hip-hop producers, the discourse of aesthetic quality is primarily based on the relationship between the original context of a given sample and its use in a hip-hop song; that discourse consists of assessments of how creatively a producer has altered the original sample. For various reasons that I will discuss, however, the community’s ethics forbid publicly revealing the sources of particular samples. Thus, while various techniques may be discussed, it is ethically problematic to discuss their realization in any specific case. This also means that when any two people present a producer’s analysis to each other they are each implicitly confirming their insider status. This valence is one of the most significant aspects of the analysis (it is manifested in record knowledge and technical knowledge as well as aesthetic knowledge). In other words, the prohibition and what it represents are as significant as the information being protected.
Finally, previous transcribers of hip-hop music, who were acting (implicitly or explicitly) as defenders of hip-hop’s musical value, have naturally tended to foreground the concerns of the audiences before whom they were arguing, which consisted primarily of academics trained in western musicology (see Walser 1995, Gaunt 1995, Keyes 1996, Krims 2000). This approach requires that one operate, to some degree, within the conceptual framework of European art music: pitches and rhythms should be transcribed, individual instruments are to be separated in score form, and linear development is implicit, even when explicitly rejected. While Adam Krims (2000) has moved the analysis away from specific notes and toward larger gestures, he has retained the rest of these conventions. I am not saying that these transcriptions are inaccurate, or even that the elements that they foreground are insignificant, only that they represent a particular perspective, which is, as I said, that of their intended audience: musicologists. My work, by contrast, is more ethnographic than musicological. As a result, I wish to convey the analytical perspective of those who create sample-based hip-hop music as well as those who make up its primary intended audience: hip-hop producers. Their analysis, I would argue, is not best served through transcription.
Most significantly, to distinguish between individual instruments, as in a musical score, obscures the fact that the sounds one hears have usually been sampled from different recordings together. Take, for example, a hip-hop recording that features trap drums, congas, upright bass, electric bass, piano, electric piano, trumpet, and saxophone. These instruments, in all likelihood, were not sampled individually. The overwhelmingly more plausible scenario is that the piece was created from a number of samples, one of which may feature upright bass and piano; another of which might feature drums, electric bass, electric piano, and trumpet; another of which may use only the saxophone; and another of which may feature only congas and trap drums. To present each instrument as playing an individual “part” is to misrepresent the conceptual moves that were made by the song’s composer. But it is not possible to understand these conceptual moves through listening alone, even if one is trained in the musical form. One can only know which instruments were sampled together by knowing the original recording they were sampled from, which brings us back to the ethical and social issues raised by revealing sample sources.
Similarly, pitches, as elements at play within a framework of tonal harmony, are rarely conceived of as such and even then are rarely worked with individually; rather, entire phrases are sampled and arranged. Choosing a melody to sample (after considering its rhythm, pitch, timbre, contour, and potential relationship to other samples) is very different from composing a melody to be performed later.
The use of ethnography also raises questions about the subjectivity of the researcher. For white people writing about African American music, of course, this is an age-old question. Unfortunately it is often answered with guilty soul-searching, a confident recitation of one’s credentials, or somewhat perfunctory admissions of outsiderness, all of which tend to be so particular to the individual in question as to be of little value to readers. One begins to move beyond the constraints of these strategies when one senses the underlying issues implicit in William “Upski” Wimsatt’s rhetorical question (which arose when he reflected on his own experiences in hip-hop culture), “Hadn’t I just been a special white boy?” (Wimsatt 1994: 30). In other words, when a white person does manage to forge a relationship with African American culture, there is a temptation to attribute this to some exemplary aspect of our own personality. While there may be some truth to this, it would be foolhardy—as Wimsatt convincingly argues—to ignore the larger forces at play. The difficulty lies in the fact that these forces manifest themselves primarily through our daily activities and interactions; it is often quite difficult to distinguish between one’s own impulses and the imperatives of the larger society.
I believe that the most productive approach to this issue is for scholars to create a framework in which their particular paths may be interpreted as case studies of individuals from similar backgrounds pursuing similar goals. In other words, reflexivity is not enough: one must generalize from one’s own experience, a pursuit which requires researchers not only to examine their relationships to the phenomena being studied, but also to speculate on the larger social forces to which they themselves are subject, a process that I would term “self-ethnography.” I have found the work of Charles Keil (particularly his new afterword to Urban Blues [1991]) and William Upski Wimsatt (1994) to be particularly valuable as models for such endeavors.11 To that end, I wish to discuss several aspects of my own life that may contribute to a broader understanding not only of my own project, but also of other such works created by researchers from similar backgrounds. In making this choice, I am intentionally avoiding the impulse to give a comprehensive explanation of my approach in favor of focusing of a few specific factors that I believe have been less exhaustively discussed elsewhere. These aspects include my ethnic