First de Bourgoing lays out a lot of tenets of contemporary hip-hop culture, especially in LA.
Some of them:
-artists are using the internet to give themselves a unique identity and spread it around
-artists are involving merchandise with their name
-artists are being more active in perpetuating their attitudes
-collaboration is key (really no better way to say it; not trying to directly rip off her article here...)
-hip-hop artists are good story tellers
-women don't get as much credit as they deserve
-hip-hop has a deep oral culture and history surrounding it, and is very dynamic
-a lot of hip-hop artists are using twitter and social networking to spread themselves and thus a lot of hip-hop culture is reflected online.
She ties in technology with a lot of it, the sample-culture of hip-hop and how they use it to give shout-outs to one another.
Second de Bourgoing is really saying that the internet is helping make rappers well-known, and taking advantage of the internet to better achieve the tenets she outlined. It's the subtext behind her entire essay, and it's what we've been talking about thus far. The whole idea of the internet revolutionizing communications- and various cultures taking advantage of that.
Third Miller says quite a lot of things about rhythm science. What I've taken from his book is that rhythm sciences, dj-ing, and writing have a profound impact on our culture and touches briefly on the idea of copying, sampling, borrowing, stealing, the implications of that in hip-hop and culture in general. For example the copyright mentality we have has been around for a very long time- he gave the example of St. Columba in sixth-century Ireland getting flack for copying a manuscript, which is relevant to today.
Lastly I can see the course material moving in the direction of "rights" and information. Who owns what, what about copies? Who owns them, and who has the right to make copies? And sampling- using another's work in a re-organized context with a different impact. Is that copying, what right do they have to re-iterate someone else's information as their own?
I see from both du Bourgoing and Miller that hiphop and DJing is a genre that really grows when it uses different media, since hiphop is not just about sound but also about performance. Honestly, I had a hard time reading Miller because he never defines what rhythm science is, the most I got out of it was that it a way to make an emotional impression through language or text, how to create that rhythm needed for people to connect to the work. Sampling is interesting in that it is like Photoshop for music and the lines are still blurry on what is legal to use in an image and what isn't. Are copyright laws restricting what we can do with old media and therefore restricting the creative process of people who have ideas of how to make something new out of it? I feel like we will reach a threshold of making brand new, never heard or seen before pieces and reusing the past items will be the only other option.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you are saying about copyright.
ReplyDeleteOur generation is at an interesting point with intellectual property. As we have discussed previously in the course, web 2.0 is all about user created content. With so much content being created and uploaded every day, and the content being served up to us by sites like YouTube, who owns the content? I don't really mean in a legal sense, but more in a functional sense. Is the video I created of a cat on youtube mine, or does it belong to the internet as a whole? Does it belong to our culture?
Nice work w/ deBourging. You could've done a bit more with Miller, but you're definitely on the right track w/ his key points.
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