<nettime> hip hop eulogy digest ctd. [greene, miller]

[nettime <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

Rachel Greene <rachel@rhizome.org>
     Re: <nettime> hip hop eulogy digest [myers, eduardo]

"Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>
     <nettime> Re: A Eulogy to Hip Hop


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Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2003 00:29:02 -0500
Subject: Re: <nettime> hip hop eulogy digest [myers, eduardo]
From: Rachel Greene <rachel@rhizome.org>

can I just add to this that though there are aspects of danny butt's reply I
found right -- that there is a greater plurality in hip hop now -- which is
true, as there is greater cultural production in almost all spheres -- it is
also worth noting that paul (miller) has much lived/operational/artistic
experience in these worlds. though paul often travels in the avant garde
circuits that claim distance from bling bling ones, he has toured with hip
hop artists, knows many personally (I assume), has performed all over the
world.... he has a lot of knowledge about the insides of the hip hop world.

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Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2003 22:38:17 -0500
From: "Paul D. Miller" <anansi1@earthlink.net>
Subject: <nettime> Re: A Eulogy to Hip Hop

Hey Ken, hello Danny -- hmmm... let's think of this an an archeaology 
of knowledge kind of game: Trent Lott's statements about the states 
rights elections of 1948 that featured a lunatic like Strom Thurmond, 
versus a contemporary example of American power politics like the 
Bush election of 2000 that disenfranchised thousands upon thousands 
of African American voters.... yes, I understand the basic theme of 
pop culture, and no I'm not some Frankfurt School type like Theodore 
Adorno that thinks of anything having to do with pop as inherently 
"bad." I guess I forwarded Pierre's post as a emblem of a different 
narrative that's going on. No more, no less. I definitely concur with 
Ken's idea of hip-hop as a "discourse machine" (taken informally), 
and yeah, I dj out almost every other nite of the week at clubs 
throughout the industrialized world (yep, including New Zealand every 
once in a while...).  Think of this in terms of "Dredging Operations" 
- The Old and New North/South Divide and the Politics of Location as 
transferred into rhythm structure - and think of a poetry of 
liberation like what Frantz Fanon critiqued in his "Black Skin White 
Mask" period of essays, or even James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" 
period critique of how African Americans have internalized so much of 
"white" American culture as to be "under erasure" - and bounce the 
same concept off of Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" (think uh... 
Eminem etc etc), and most of this kind of makes sense... I guess I'm 
thinking of stuff like Audrey Lourde's "Zami is my Name" or the kind 
of  "Dredging Operations," a term from Gayatri Spivak's "Critique of 
Post-Colonial Reason (1999)," : to juxtapose and assess recent 
theoretical interventions and methodological strategies in relation 
to the complex, asymmetrical and shifting power relations that have 
marked the early 21st century - and just press "play" - yeah, most of 
the time, in contemporary hip-hop it's the sound of silence... to 
make the basic assumption that stuff like Danny says that uh... Mos 
Def dating someone from Destiny's Child (wow... what does this have 
to do with real life?) has anything to do with the reality of 
America's prison industry or the machinery of poetry that the music 
industry supports belies the point - in the U.S. the basic structure 
of African American expression is so heavily filtered through the 
media and the involutions that go with it, as to be a kind of 
American "sub-conscious" or something like that...

"Who speaks through you?" that's a question my mom used to ask when I 
was a kid... these days, the messages are deeply deeply deeply mixed, 
and that's a good thing. Many of the groups mentioned in Pierre's 
e-mail and yours are either friends of mine, or people I've worked 
with, and yeah, I gotta admit, I'd like to see them get more 
attention than, say "Murder, Inc."

Basically there's room for everything. I just wish the discourse on 
hip-hop was a little more dynamic, and thus it's with pleasure that I 
read posts like Pierre's or Kodwo Eshun's "More Brilliant than the 
Sun" or Colson Whiteheads "The Intuitionist" or watch films like Saul 
Williams' "Slam" (set in the jails of Washington D.C. - I did the 
music score for that) or check out stuff like Amish kids dancing to 
Tupac in last years "Devil's Playground" (a documentary about Amish 
drug dealers...), or see Michael Moore discuss why America is such a 
twisted place with the producer of the T.V. show "Cops" in his 
classic "Bowling For Columbine." What this has to do with Mos Def 
dating someone from Destiny's Child is this: private discourse made 
public - rhythm and clues, rhythm and cues - the main thing is to 
think outside the box, and that's what I think Ken Wark was pointing 
out. Sometimes hearing Dr. Dre rhyme "I'll blast yo ass" sounds o.k. 
Sometimes, uh... it's a little bit boring.

thanx for the responses though.


Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid


> Ho-hum. Another self-aggrandising addition to the tired genre of guys (why
> is it always guys?) proclaiming that it's time to call an end to something
> that doesn't give a shit about them. It used to be great, now it's crap
>  [...]
> Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
> So Hip-Hop is goin' where we goin'
> So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin'
> Ask yourself: Where am I goin'? How am I doin'?
> Til you get a clear idea ...
>
>--
>http://www.dannybutt.net
>

============================================================================
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe 
they are free...."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Port:status>OPEN
wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Office Mailing Address:

Subliminal Kid Inc.
101 W. 23rd St. #2463
New York, NY 10011

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