My dissertation research includes a methodology of my own invention, which I’m calling analytical remixing. I’m writing about three hip-hop educators, in order to illuminate hip-hop as an education philosophy, not just a subject area. That includes centering the remix as an important and underexplored music education practice. Beyond just writing about remixing, I am making some remixes as part of my research product. Specifically, I’m taking audio data (interviews, music, and various cultural artifacts) and remixing them to create a dissertation mixtape.
The value of the remix method is so self-evident to me that I made little effort to justify or explain it in the first draft of my dissertation proposal. However, my advisor, Alex Ruthmann, rightly pointed out that it is not self-evident to people who aren’t me. He suggestied that I pick a specific example and walk through it. So in this post, that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a remix I made of Ben Shapiro explaining why rap isn’t music.
I’m grateful to Ben Shapiro for his willingness to say the quiet part loud, giving voice to culturally reactionary opinions in print and on video that others tiptoe around or voice more euphemistically. The belief that rap isn’t music, or isn’t “real” music, or isn’t substantive enough to merit thoughtful attention, is a depressingly widely held one. In my teenage years, I succumbed to peer pressure from my fellow white rockists and became convinced of it myself. Which was ridiculous, because I loved rap as a kid in NYC, and that love persisted straight through the years when I tried to convince myself that it didn’t exist. Anyway, while rockists, jazz snobs and classical folks are united in a belief that rap is musically deficient, it’s less common to find someone in this day and age who will go ahead and say it isn’t music at all.
Naturally, Shapiro’s opinion calls for a rebuttal. He even invites us to give one, concluding his speech with one of his catchphrases, “Tell me why I’m wrong.” But there’s no point in going online and arguing with him or telling him off, because he and his fans are probably hoping for a dead-end online shouting match. Instead, I thought it would be a better idea to turn Shapiro’s speech about how rap isn’t music into a piece of rap music. It wasn’t difficult! Just about anyone’s speech sounds good over the right breakbeat. I chose “It’s A New Day” by Skull Snaps. I used iZotope Nectar for an Auto-Tune effect on Shapiro, along with some tasteful tempo-synced delay. I didn’t quantize the speech rhythmically, but I did duplicate key phrases, both for musical effect and as a kind of audio highlighter. For example, I repeated the phrase about how Ben’s dad is a music theorist who went to music school, music school, music school.
I added some jazz samples, too: the baritone sax from “Moanin'” by Charles Mingus and a piece of the trumpet solo from “Concerto for Cootie” by the Duke Ellington Orchestra. They’re part of a folder full of pre-sliced jazz samples that I collected for exactly this purpose. My original motivation for putting those samples in was expediency. But after some reflection and repeated listening back, I realized why I intuitively chose those samples in particular. There’s a connection between present-day “highbrow” dismissal of rap and the dismissal of jazz during its first decades of cultural prominence. It’s wild to think of it now, but there was once a widespread belief among educators and critics that jazz wasn’t music either. Some music educators thought, okay, it’s technically music, but obviously it’s terrible, and its only value is as bait on the hook to get young people interested in the study of real music. See, for example, Sargent, 1943 and Maita, 2014.
At this point everyone agrees that jazz is music, but it still has this strange second-class citizen status in the music academy. I keep hearing people group jazz in with “popular” music, a categorization that last made sense sixty years ago. I wasn’t thinking about any of that intentionally when I dropped the Mingus and Ellington samples into my Ben Shapiro remix. I only became conscious of the connection weeks later. But in retrospect, it was in my head the entire time. This is the point of making musicological and cultural arguments through remixing: it enables me to access thoughts and ideas that are not as easily accessible through traditional scholarly activity. I did my reflective listening to the track as background music while doing other things: giving my kids their bath, grading assignments, washing dishes. This is time that’s not normally available to me for dissertation purposes.
The remix also enables me to speak back to Ben Shapiro using his own voice, and in the exact medium that he’s disparaging. The humor value of that appealed to me immediately, and it has appealed to everyone I’ve played the track for. When I played the track to my class at the New School, one student immediately responded, “This slaps.” That’s exactly the reaction I wanted, partially because I want to make music that people enjoy, but also because the aesthetic pleasure is an incentive for listeners to engage the ideas. I’m imagining an audience for my research that wouldn’t normally want to read a 300 page dissertation, but who will happily listen closely to a mixtape. And I’m imagining some scholarly readers who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in listening to this kind of music.
I consider the analytical remix to be a form of methodological triangulation (Fusch, Fusch & Ness, 2018), an intuitive and aesthetic complement to the more analytical approach of my interview and observational data. My data research data will consist of my own notes, audio recordings of interviews, and musical examples. For examination and presentation of the audio data, I plan to use the analytical remixing method, for example by combining interview recordings with the music under discussion. The blending of speech fragments and music into a seamless collage format aligns well with the formal content of hip-hop. I will present these remixes alongside the written dissertation document as a mixtape. In hip-hop, the mixtape is a less formal version of an album, a compilation of tracks that might include original music, remixes of other people’s tracks, freestyles, and fragments.
Mixtapes were originally sold on the street or “under the counter,” and are still typically distributed via unofficial, grey-market online channels. They often include unsanctioned copyrighted material. The freedom to use unlicensed samples and make unsanctioned remixes gives artists the chance to express themselves more freely than is possible within the constraints of “official” commercial releases. For this reason, Ball (2011) describes the mixtape as “hip-hop’s original mass medium” (p. 121). Toni Blackman, when asked what mixtapes mean to her, answered, the “next shit. Newness. Authentic freestyles… sharing of love. Biggin’ up the people who don’t get bigged up in the mainstream” (quoted in Ball, 2011, p. 127). My dissertation mixtape will aspire to this spirit of newness and authenticity.
The mixtape approach was inspired in part by Marshall’s (2010) concept of technomusicology, the process of examining digital media using those same media. For example, one might study remixes and mashups by creating remixes and mashups. Marshall draws a parallel between using digital audio technologies to study digitally produced musics and using music notation to study notated musics. The process of remixing a track requires close attention to its existing sound and structure, while also imagining possible ways to alter it and combine it with other sounds. By juxtaposing and layering tracks, the remix directs the listener’s attention to aspects of those tracks that might have gone unnoticed. Barone and Eisner (2012) argue that “the clear specification of a referent by a symbol is not a necessary condition for meaning. In the arts, symbols adumbrate; they do not denote” (p. 2). This adumbration is the goal of my remixes.
There is some overlap between recording and writing—the word phonography literally means “sound writing.” I could simply collect audio recordings and let them speak for themselves, but they would not adequately convey the full experience of their original context. Weidenbaum (2017) observes that recording never sounds like what he heard—listening is a process of focusing and filtering, of selective attention and interpretation, not direct transcription. While Kapchan (2017) wants her sound writing to have the full sensual richness of sound itself, Weidenbaum prefers writing exactly because it does not have the rich texture of recorded sound. Recording playback is a new sensory experience unto itself, one that might be far removed from the one the recordist meant to capture or convey. I see the remix as a way to fold sound writing back into the sound itself, using the conspicuously mediated aesthetics of hip-hop to deliberately frame and focus the listener’s experience.
The idea of blending recorded interviews with the music under discussion has long been a practice of electronic music producers. For example, “Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb (1991) includes samples of a radio interview with the artists themselves discussing their creative process, one of “layering different sounds.” Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” (2017) includes a sample of Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera criticizing Lamar’s earlier music. Some DJs perform real-time musical ethnography as well, for example by mixing together a rap song and the soul song that it samples—Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of The Roots is a master of this technique. These artists use music to speak for itself.
Because there is such a smooth continuum because speech and singing in rap, the spoken words of hip-hop practitioners can inform their music particularly closely. It is important to me to include my participants’ voices as audio in addition to written text. “The ability to represent and otherwise co-construct participants in/as/through sound simultaneously removes a layer of translation while adding important affective and sensual information… representing sounds sonically allows participants give voice for/to themselves while retaining information lost when translated to text” (Gershon, 2013, p. 259). It is true that my listeners are only hearing participants’ voices through my “cut”, my selection (Goldman-Segall, 1995, p. 170). However, all presentation of audio evidence requires editing. The hip-hop aesthetic offers the audio ethnographer an advantage: choppy, conspicuous and fragmented edits are desirable aesthetic traits. This creates the opportunity for me to foreground the technological medium of my work, and to proudly show its seams, rather than trying to present an illusion of a unitary whole.
References
Ball, J. A. (2011). I mix what I like!: A mixtape manifesto. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2012). Arts-based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Fusch, P., Fusch, G. E., & Ness, L. R. (2018). Denzin’s paradigm shift: Revisiting triangulation. Journal of Social Change, 10(1), 19–32.
Gershon, W. S. (2013). Vibrational Affect. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 257–262.
Goldman-Segall, R. (1995). Configurational validity: A proposal for analyzing ethnographic multimedia narratives. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 4(2), 163–182.
Kapchan, D. (2017). Theorizing sound writing. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Maita, J. (2014). Revisiting “The Jazz Problem.” Retrieved October 12, 2017, from http://jerryjazzmusician.com/2014/02/revisiting-jazz-problem/
Marshall, W. (2010). Mashup poetics as pedagogical practice. In N. Biamonte (Ed.), Pop-culture pedagogy in the music classroom (pp. 307–315). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Sargent, W. (1943, October). Is jazz music? The American Mercury.
Weidenbaum, M. (2017). Audio or it didn’t happen. Retrieved June 14, 2017, from http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/audio-or-it-didnt-happen/