is certainly possible that the apparent color-blindness of the producers’ community is an artifact of my own racial point of view (as a Jew, I would be considered white by most Americans). But given the nature of my personality and those of my consultants, it is difficult for me to imagine that they would downplay racial issues simply to avoid making me uncomfortable.9 In fact, I have discussed various racial questions with almost all of them in other contexts. Ultimately, though, this issue—whether I am underrepresenting the influence of race on individuals’ approach to hip-hop production—can only be answered satisfactorily by a nonwhite researcher. From a purely logical standpoint, I cannot assess my own blind spots—if I could, they wouldn’t be blind spots.
Another factor that particularly stands out in interview-based research is the disjuncture between the oral language of those who were interviewed and the written language of the author and secondary sources. In other words, my consultants’ comments were initially presented orally, improvisationally, and in response to questions that they had not seen beforehand, while scholars’ comments (both my own and quotations from other writers) were presented in written form, with (presumably) much forethought and revision. Moreover, many of my consultants speak African American English, even if they write Standard (i.e., European) American English. If one is not familiar with it, a written approximation of African American English—nonstandard by definition—may make the speaker appear to lack full linguistic competence. While such judgments are entirely the result of social prejudice, they may be reinforced by the textual juxtaposition of a quotation from a speaker of African American English and the broader text written in Standard American English. Generally speaking, I have followed Monson (1996) with regard to transcribing the speech of my consultants:
I have chosen to use nonstandard spellings very sparingly…. I include such spellings when they seem to be used purposefully to signal ethnicity and when failure to include them would detract from intelligibility. Since African Americans frequently switch from African American idioms to standard English and back in the same conversation … orthographic changes can represent linguistic changes that carry much cultural nuance. For the most part I have preserved lexicon, grammar, and emphasis in the transcription of aural speech.10 (Monson 1996: 23)
Beyond transcriptional choices, I have used three strategies to try to account for the occasionally jarring nature 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,
