You Lose Your Balance When the Sound Hits Ya

The other day--okay, several weeks ago-- one of you all asked me to share some information about Hip Hop, specifically the video of Elzhi from Slum Village talking about patterns in rhyming. I gathered a whole bunch of things that I've found on the innertubes that I've found to be useful in thinking about Hip Hop. If you're going to use Hip Hop in your class, it pays to have some knowledge, not to mention that I think a lot of this stuff is fascinating.

If you're a nerdy academic type, like me, you might want to start with this paper by Wayne Marshall, an ethnomusicologist. In it, he uses a message board posting by ?uestlove, the drummer from the Hip Hop band The Roots, to examine the history and musical impact of sampling, notions of musical authenticity in Hip Hop, and some elements of MCing. The paper is in a .pdf linked to that page.

If your interested in MCing, you might want to watch this video by Elzhi of the group Slum Village. It's fairly grainy and fairly cheesy, but you will get a chance to really hear the amount of internal rhymes, half rhymes, and rhymey rhymes employed in Hip Hop.

For more about MCing, you can check out this other paper by Wayne Marshall on Zunguzung, a vocal riff (sample?) that started out in Dancehall and then emigrated throughout Hip Hop. This post comes with musical examples, which might helpful.

Turning to beatmaking, there is a wealth of videos on youtube featuring producers working on beats, sampling, slicing, and so forth. You can find Just Blaze working on a beat. Pete Rock and several others. That first video is quite long and gets dull. The second one is shorter, but Pete Rock is a bit more taciturn that Just Blaze.

This post by Michealangelo Matos at Oliver Wang's Soul Sides blog discusses Apache, one of those records that has been endlessly sampled and forms one of the cornerstones of the sound of Hip Hop. I believe that most of the musical examples on this page still work. This video discusses the Amen break, another one of those endlessly sampled songs. I don't know what's up with the bald guy wandering around the room in that video, though.

Finally, you might want to look at Jonathan Lethem's piece, The Ecstasy of Influence, an essay on sampling, borrowing, and stealing that he wrote (?) for Harper's. The essay on briefly deals with Hip Hop, but it talks about some of larger aesthetic and ethical questions that surround using other people's work in your art.