ESSAY: Hip-hop and the Anti-Phantasmagoria of Local Style

This essay was originally written in 2017, during my time at NYU, for a course on the history of computer music led by Professor Elizabeth Hoffman.

In the Seventies, before it was ever put to wax or played on the radio, hip hop was a cultural and artistic movement in the South Bronx. While rap, beat boxing, and DJing would go on to be the central elements of hip hop, other trends like graffiti art and breakdancing were as important at the time. These forms of expression did not come about out of nowhere; they were the result of social and economic factors. Instruments were expensive and required equally expensive lessons to learn, but to beat box or rap you only needed a mouth. For DJing, just a turntable and some old records (DJ Kool Herc would go on to revolutionize the practice by employing two turntables). No need for a dance studio, when, to breakdance, you just needed an old piece of cardboard. Oils and watercolors are much more expensive and hard to find than industrial spray paints. But the environment of the projects didn’t just influence the materials. The walls not only provided a canvas for graffiti art, but they created a natural reverb and amplification for the beat boxers and rappers, and so, from those walls, a genre was born.

           Hip hop has never lost its connection to its places of origin, the buildings and communities that birthed it. When hip hop first became a recorded sensation, it was admittedly not its best. The two songs that are credited as being the first hip hop record, “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang and “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” by The Fatback Band, are both more or less disco tracks and utterly corny. But only three years after those songs, in 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released their seminal album and song “The Message.” A soliloquy about life in the inner city and all that comes with that, it was essentially the first socially conscious, political rap song. Moreover, it was entirely about its place of origin. However, for the first five minutes of the six minute track, there’s not one piece of diegetic sound (as opposed to other tracks I will bring up shortly). The track is composed of a few pieces: electric bass, drums (programmed and live), a variety of synths and synth effects, and vocals. Interestingly enough, there aren’t actually any samples in the song; however, its components are looped the same way one would with samples. The track is dripping with reverb, lending itself to the idea of a phantasmagoria. Listening to it, one can feel a sense of place, but it’s unclear what that place is. The reverb provokes in me a sense of anxiety fitting for this elegiac track. While the vocals are considerably drier, you can hear the reverb a bit more at the chorus. Fitting that as Melle Mel and Duke Bootee sing “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under,” you are sonically enveloped in their space. At just about the five minute mark, the beat breaks down, and a short skit plays the track out: the boys from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five are shooting the shit on the corner, talking over a din of trains and car horns, when a cop car pulls up and begins to hassle and arrest them. The beat comes back in and fades out over the sound of sirens.  

           Since its inception in NYC, hip hop has spread across the country, and then the world, but it has remained a located art form, even in our digital, globalized age. From the Eighties, hip hop has had aural markers of origin. This hit an unfortunate peak in the Nineties with the rivalry between East Coast rappers (centering on Notorious B.I.G., his label, Bad Boy Records, and their base in NYC) and West Coast rappers (centering on Tupac Shakur, his label, Death Row Records, and their base in LA) that inspired much violence, eventually leading to the assassinations of Tupac and Biggie. The most notable scenes of the respective coasts in the Nineties were Afrocentric rap in the East and Gangsta rap and G-funk in the West. For Afrocentric, there’s nowhere better to go than A Tribe Called Quest. And while NWA and many others could claim to be the kings of Gangsta, let’s take Snoop Dogg as our example. Compare Tribe’s 1992 song “Scenario” with Snoop’s 1993 song “Gin and Juice.” “Scenario” is a quintessential Tribe song. The sparse instrumental is made up of one short almost endlessly repeating sample and a break beat. The vocals are contributed by an ensemble of rappers alternating lead and providing emphasis en masse on little hits like “boom” and “uh!” The lyrical flow is a technical masterpiece, playful and virtuosic. Similarly, “Gin and Juice” is demonstrative of many of the major trends of Gangsta rap and G-funk. First and foremost there is the classic portamento saw lead. The beat relies on sampling as well, but whereas “Scenario” uses a brief and simple fragment, “Gin and Juice” loops a larger segment, using it as a melodic and harmonic foundation for other instrumentation and the hook. The hook is its own phenomenon. Tribe and their East Coast contemporaries rarely relied on hooks the way much of West Coast did, and the way that is very popular in pop rap. On “Gin,” a guest vocalist provides a melodious, catchy hook. On “Can I Kick It?,” Tribe’s biggest hit, the hook is a simple call and response (“Can I kick it? Yes you can!”) between first Q-Tip, then later Phife Dawg, and a cheering ensemble, all totally unsung.

           The difference extends beyond East and West. There’s Southern: drum machine high-hats in triplets in Trap (“Bad and Boujee” by Migos), the Triggerman beat in New Orleans’ Bounce, the thick and groovy neo-soul sounds from Atlanta artists like Outkast and Childish Gambino. Chicago has had a few different sounds: Kanye West’s “chipmunk soul,” named for its sped up soul samples (“Through the Wire”), the Drill scene, a slower, synthier derivative of Trap, and, lately, a soulful, harmonious, somewhat neo-soul inspired subgenre sometimes referred to as “gospel rap,” best represented by Chance the Rapper’s big live bands and choirs as well as his explicitly religious lyrics, but can also be heard in slightly more minimalistic artists like Noname, whose jazzy Nord chords and groovy syncopated drums fill in the same space Chance uses a whole choir for (I seriously cannot recommend her album Telefone enough). The UK has Grime, a derivative of hip hop, UK House, and Drum n Bass, composed of speedy breakbeats and electronic instrumentals (“Bassline Junkie,” Dizzee Rascal). Chicano rap covers much of Latin-America, but is most often associated with Mexico, and sounds very similar to West Coast styles, but with Spanish/Spanglish lyrics and some infusion of traditional Latin-American styles. The list goes on and on.

In all of this, none of these sounds are exclusive to the location with which they’re associated. Take Kendrick Lamar, who has sampled jazz tracks a la Nas and other East Coasters (“i”) and borrowed the Trap sounds of the South as well (“HUMBLE.”). In the age of Soundcloud and Bandcamp, it’s much easier to be influenced by, or even collaborate with, someone on the other side of the country, or the world. But for the first forty years of hip hop’s existence, sound and place were one and the same. One was a signifier of the other, but it’s never clear which. What will be interesting to see, as our technology and our relationship to it progress, is how ever increasing globalization will affect hip hop. The anti-phantasmagoria of local style may be rendered moot when “local” is a meaningless phrase.