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?
