I’m giving a talk at the Global Conference on Hip Hop Education in November on the role of transcription in the academic study of rap. I’m hoping to post bits and pieces of my work-in-progress here. Please feel free to reach out with any feedback you might have. Enjoy!
When we talk about the origins of hip hop, we often say that it comprises four interdependent elements: writing/graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, and MCing. Hip hop was something you did. Russell Potter writes: “Hip hop was something goin’ down at 23 Park, 63 Park, or the Back Door on 169th Street; you could no more make a hip-hop record in 1979 than you could make a ‘basketball game’ record or a ‘subway ride’ record” (Potter 45-6). As the culture evolved and spread, these elements increasingly separated from one another. In particular, rap music—the combination of DJing and MCing—shifted from a performing art to a recording art. As Dimitriadis, Kajikawa, and others have discussed, the notion of a rap song did not even emerge until about half a dozen years after Kool Herc’s legendary party.[1] With “Rapper’s Delight,” Potter claims that rap moved from a “practice in action” to “a thing to be consumed” (Potter 45).
Rap is part of a long history of Black oral tradition. As such, it is ephemeral and ever-changing, resistant to being fixed in any one form. Writing in 1991, philosopher Richard Shusterman observed that rap’s time- and place-consciousness was one of the characteristics that separated it from white colonial aesthetics that valued timelessness and universality. As the music evolved, the shift from performing art to recording art made it easier to separate the music from the time and place where it was created. [Rose hip hop wars p. 19 middle parageaph; The move away from physical media like records and compact discs and toward a digital streaming model complicates the idea of rap as some kind of object: as songs come and go from streaming services, or their versions are “tweaked” after they’ve been released (as we’ve seen happen to De La Soul’s catalog, for example), music is becoming ephemeral again albeit in a very different way. Liz Pelly, for instance, talks about how Spotify and services like it are contributing to the rise of “disposable” music, music that “streams well” but vanishes quickly from our minds in the attention-driven economy (Pelly 2018).[2]
Rap’s focus on wordplay, rhythm, rhyme, and other poetic techniques makes it resistant to being committed accurately to paper. Rappers play not only with the sounds of language, but the looks of it too, often respelling words in creative ways: consider artists like Joey Bada$$, or ?uestlove (who has since changed the spelling to be more conventional). Erik Nielson (2011) suggests that these creative uses of language offer a kind of “invisibility” to the rapper by coding, refashioning, and multiplying meanings. He writes: “Along these lines, respelling is also related to the uneasiness that rappers have with being recorded in general, either on paper or an album. Nearly all of rap’s antecedents are in the oral tradition, so natural it was originally predicated on live performance. While in one sense live performances exposed rappers to the surveillance discussed earlier, in another they actually provided a built-in mechanism to preserve anonymity” (Nielson 2011, 1261). Writing raps down or recording them in a sense “blows the artist’s cover.” (To digress briefly: it’s significant that many major rap figures like Jay-Z and Biggie are well known for not writing their raps down. Because memory is fallible, this opens the possibility for many “correct” or “authentic” versions of a song). Nielson also reminds us that rap tends to “foreground the technological in favor of the human.” In its use of sampling, its inclusion of record hisses, pops, and scratches, and its use of tools like pitch corrective technology, we are constantly reminded that we are not hearing “live instruments” in a traditional sense. “In rap,” Nielson writes, “technological mediation becomes the sign of the authentic” (1264). In his book Decoded, Jay-Z describes how his recorded voice sounds different to him than the voice in his head: “even though I could recognize myself instantly. I saw it as an opening, a way to re-create myself and reimagine my world” (Jay-Z cited in Christopher 117).
Much of the rap music we study, then, comes to us as heavily mediated works of phonography: it is not an accurate reproduction of a specific live performance by the artists. I don’t intend this as any kind of value judgement; rather, my point in raising this is to acknowledge and affirm the mediated nature of rap. The widespread availability of recordings –and this is especially true of the rise of streaming media—has facilitated our ability to study rap (and, of course, a whole host of other kinds of music). The exact repetition that replaying a recording affords eliminates the variations one might find among different performances of the same composition, arguably resulting in a more objective or correct transcription; however, some have argued that the ubiquity of recordings has all but eliminated the need to transcribe music. So why transcribe?
Most of the tools that music scholars have used to study music have been developed to study notated music; specifically, that which is notated on the five-line staff most associated with “classical” music. To legitimate rap music as a genre worthy of the attention of music scholars, it had to be converted into some kind of notation system. Transcription historically has been used to give readers who can audiate (that is, convert musical notation into sound in their mind) or to play or sing from notated music “a sketchy notion of what [the music] might sound like” (Winkler 193). These are skills that are regularly a part of the musicianship curriculum at most institutions of higher learning—a point to which I will return later. However, the ability to read music at a reasonably high level is not widespread and excludes far more readers than it includes: arguably, this is a feature, not a bug, of the system. There’s much to be said about this in terms of what Phillip Ewell—adapting a concept put forth by Joe Feagin—calls music theory’s “white racial frame.”[3]
In most schools of music, the academic study of music is broken down into four main disciplines: music history, music theory, composition, and ethnomusicology. Music history—sometimes called “musicology”—is pretty much what it sounds like: traditionally, it’s the names, dates, and events that produced the music that we study. Music theory—sometimes called music analysis or musicianship—looks at the materials and techniques of music. Composition involves writing original music. Ethnomusicology is a vast catch-all discipline that includes elements of the other three disciplines that have been adapted to look at music that has historically been excluded the Western canon of classical music—the object of study of the first three disciplines. This “othering” can be seen in the ubiquity of “world music” classes that ethnomusicology professors are often responsible for teaching to large numbers of undergraduates, often to fulfill some kind of diversity requirement in the curriculum.
It is maybe unsurprising, then, that the music-academic study of rap music first appeared in ethnomusicology journals. Like many other Black art forms, it fell outside the realm of Western classical music and thus mostly outside the purview of academic music programs. In Black Noise, Tricia Rose recounts a conversation she had with the chair of the music department at her graduate institution while she was working on her dissertation in 1989. He told her:
“Well, you must be writing on rap’s social impact and political lyrics, because there is nothing to the music.” My surprised expression and verbal hesitation gave him time to explain his position. He explained to me that although the music was quite simple and repetitive, the stories told in the lyrics had social value. He pointed out rap’s role as a social steam valve, a means for the expression of social anger. “But,” he concluded, referring to the music, “they ride down the street at 2:00 a.m. with it blasting from car speakers, and (they) wake up my wife and kids. What’s the point in that?” (Rose 62).
Musicologist Robert Walser states outright that his aim in transcribing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”—an important project to which I will return to in more detail later—is to demonstrate the “coherence and complexity” in the song because these qualities “are precisely what have been denied to hip hop, and those are the qualities that notation is best at illuminating.” He continues, stating: “I see transcription as a way of opening up for discussion the musical details of a style that many people do not think has musical details” (Walser 199-200). In what follows, I’d like to look at some political dimensions of transcription and their implications for the academic study of rap music.
[1] Greg Dimitriadis, “Hip Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative,” [cite] and Loren Kajikawa, Sounding Race in Rap Songs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
[2] https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly
[3] Phillip Ewell, “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame,” [CITE]