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Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
- cheekibreeki2 3y agoI found a bunch of someone's abandoned belongings which included a number of vhs tapes. Some were hours of hip-hop TV recordings from those dial-your-favorite-song channels. It's crazy how the whole mainstream genre was full of positivity and peace and now it's been reduced to genocide and drugs.
- chayesfss 3y ago[dead]
- dep_b 3y agoThe blog era, that was so cool. The most rare stuff you could find, including some background. Now it's usually on YouTube mostly devoid of context and only single tracks.
- NickC25 3y agoThere is some rare stuff on YouTube - check out this channel - https://www.youtube.com/@OGDonNinja https://www.youtube.com/@OGDonNinja Guy is a collector of old hip hop records and tapes from the 80s until early 2000s. They are all available on his channel in their dusty-sounding glory. Amazing.
- cing 3y agoHeck yes. Music pirates have done a whole lot to help preserve hip-hop history by ripping/archiving countless rare/underground 12" and cassettes that are definitely not available on streaming platforms; we're talking alternative versions of songs like clean edits, remixes, acapellas, instrumentals which supported hip-hop producers and DJs in the early days. For example, check the posts in the early 2010's of sites like this, https://hiphop-thegoldenera.blogspot.com/ https://hiphop-thegoldenera.blogspot.com/, of course all the links are broken now.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoDouble Dee and Steinski mixes - their existence is due to pirates
- WilliamBerglund 3y agoOnly tangentially related, but this documentary is quite good https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2475454/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2475454/
- debo_ 3y agoI also really loved this documentary miniseries by Canadian artist Shad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip-Hop_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip-Hop_Evolution
- yardie 3y agoI'm just going to plug the non-profit whose mission is to archive and teach the history of hip-hop as well as mentor young artists. Until I got involved with them, I didn't realize how much history was being lost to time and neglect. If you grow up in it, you assume it will always be there. http://www.pathtohiphop.org/ http://www.pathtohiphop.org/
- 10729287 3y agoA little off topic but funny enough to mention. Here in France, Skyblog.com is closing its doors in the next days. It was a blog platform ran by the #1 hiphop radio. It's not related to hip hop at all, even the radio only play crappy mainstream rap since 30 years ago, but back in the days, it was an easy way for a lot of teens to have a voice on the Internet. It wasn't deep at all, often really dumb, and it was mocked even in 2000, but 20 years after remains the symbol of an era and there's still some nice joys that came out of it. It was worth archiving for all those reasons and we are glad INA (National Audiovisual Institute) saved all the content.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoFor the record (ha!), French hip hop is my favourite of all the "international" flavours. Some excellent DJs and producers and there's something about the smoothness of the accent that coincides very well with my tastes. Not understanding French and so not having to worry about problematic lyrics may add to the appeal;)
- zhengyi13 3y agoFor anyone following along at home, MC Solaar might be a really good entry point into French Hiphop. Give La concubine de l'hémoglobine a try - talk about smooth.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoSolaar is super smooth. If you're looking for a little edge I'd recommend Les Sages Poètes de la rue. Gènèral P is on high rotation at my place
- vitalurk 3y agoIAM, NTM, Passi, Doc Gyneco
- Hanschri 3y agoArchiveTeam is also currently archiving Skyblog! https://tracker.archiveteam.org/skyblog/ https://tracker.archiveteam.org/skyblog/
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoRap is like a set-up, a lot of games A lot of suckers with colorful names I’m so-and-so, I’m this, I’m that Huh, but they all just wick-wick-wack
- porterbeats 3y agoHip-hop can be bland and shallow (like any other genre) but there's lots of unique and interesting music if one takes the time to get into it. Deltron 3030 (self titled) and MF DOOM's MM...FOOD are fantastic on a lyrical and production level
- harrylove 3y agoThe parent comment is quoting a classic bar from "My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions[0]. [0] - https://genius.com/376131 https://genius.com/376131
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoThanks. Seems like my comment's getting downvoted which I hope is just people not familiar with KRS-One. Edit: Never mind, it's gone positive now.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoWhich in the context of this thread / OP is proof that the history must not only be preserved, but must be promoted, honored, etc. I could of year ago I work at an agency and one of the new dev starter and said something about being into hip hop. I mentioned Rakim and the reply was, "Who?" Don't get me wrong, I respect Nas, Eminem, etc. (i.e., all the lyrical magicians) but they stand on the shoulders of The R.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoNot knowing Rakim would be fighting talk round my way. A friend asked me a while ago to give him a list of the top ten (or fifteen) hip hop tracks that are important to me or the development of hip hop. I wasn't sure whether to include Last Poets as one of the first "rap" groups or whether Gil Scott-Heron should be considered the jazz ancestor. However, I then got stuck around the Tribe Called Quest and Busta Rhymes era. Obviously, "Follow The Leader" was my choice of Rakim track, but I'm having trouble with picking a single Tribe track - should really be the whole of Low End Theory along with a cheat sheet of the significant jazz samples that Q-Tip used.
- lawgimenez 3y agoI don’t know if I am right but Twitter’s growth back in 2010-2012 had a huge boost in the datpiff hiphop era. I remember back then that when Twitter’s fail whale crash logo will appear it means that Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Drake or Kendrick dropped a mixtape.
- rurban 3y agoStill missing Adriano Celentano's Prisencolinensinainciusol
- Lolaccount 3y agohttps://archive.li/DtOVI https://archive.li/DtOVI
- kawsper 3y agoIn Denmark we had MyMusic.dk, which later rebranded to Bandbase.dk, they were active from 1998 to 2013, they stored a lot of free underground music for a lot of up and coming artists. They died when their data host Nirvanix went bankrupt, they lost all of the media files (with no backups), but according to Wikipedia customers were given 14 days to move their data. A lot of culture disappeared that day :(
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>customers were given 14 days to move their data 14 days is not nearly enough for private customers to react. Often vacations can be longer than that, and people don't usually vacation with their laptops and external HDDs to places with fast broadband, just in case they need to make a spontaneous external backup of their cloud data. Imagine by the time you come home all your data is irrecoverably gone. That's fucking nuts. Should be at least 30 days by law.
- ilamont 3y agoI recently got a <24 hour notice of a major price change from a Shopify app developer. On a Sunday. While not a backup-related issue, it forced a scramble on my end. I am sure hundreds of others didn't see it or couldn't react until well after the fact. Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS. Without any kind of legislation saying otherwise, these companies can put whatever the fuck they want in the TOS, which is the cheat code that allowed tech companies to extract obscene profits while completely skipping on customer support costs and legal liability. But this could always come to an end if there's political will to legislate. In my home country a new law was passed that says companies can't keep you on hold for more than 10 minutes before you talk to a real human when you call customer support, and now companies are scrambling to hire enough customer support to deal with the new law because previously they'd leave you in a queue for 45 minutes on hold hoping you'd give up. So it's definitely possible to not fuck over consumers, all it needs is the proper regulations in place since you can't always rely on the good will of for-profit corporations. Yes, that will make it more expensive for tech businesses to operate and reduce their profit margins, but if your business was supposed to be profitable only when skirting the law, not offering customer support, and fucking over your customers on a whim, then I don't need your business to exist in the first place.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoI remember back in the day, listening to Tim Westwood on pirate radio was about the only exposure that hip-hop got in the UK. For people interested in the history of hip-hop, there's a series of excellent comic books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_Hop_Family_Tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_Hop_Family_Tree
- VikingCoder 3y agoHip-Hop Evolution on Netflix is really, really good. [1] Hip-hop is for sure not my favorite genre - but this series was fantastic. [1] : https://www.netflix.com/watch/80141893?trackId=200257859 https://www.netflix.com/watch/80141893?trackId=200257859
- Ductapemaster 3y agoHistorically, I've only casually listened to the genre through friends or events. However, watching this show gave me such a new appreciation for the stories of the performers, the inspiration for their music, where the different styles come from, and the sheer brilliance of the producers and artists. It completely changed my opinion and respect for the genre. I can't recommend the show highly enough. My partner and I have watched it through at least twice.
- stronglikedan 3y agoTangential, but I think the streaming services are preserving the story just fine on their own. No matter how many times I skip or dislike a hip hop song, they all keep shoving them down my throat with their recommendation engines. Very frustrating. /rant
- rolobio 3y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one. Apple's top music is always R&B, Rap, etc. I have never seen a song or radio I actually wanted to listen to. Guess its up to me to find all the new music?
- bazeblackwood 3y agoSo you don't pay a fair price for your music consumption and still complain about the quality of service?
- flangola7 3y agoThey didn't imply anything about piracy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jmopp 3y agoThe article spends a great deal of time explaining why streaming services can't be relied on to preserve the history. Not to mention that a lot of early hip-hop might not have its samples cleared. These songs would not likely be on streaming services due to copyright issues. There is also the issue we've seen with streaming services disappearing huge chunks of the catalogues to avoid paying residuals. If we don't put effort into saving history, it can very easily get lost. On top of this, there's a distinction to be made between Top-100 pop music, and the artists who influenced them in their youth. If a random mixtape from the 80s had a huge influence on you as an artist, those who enjoy your music would love to get a listen of it.
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- darig 3y ago[dead]
- fidotron 3y agoMaybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe when it all became known about what Afrika Bambaataa had been up to the whole foundations of hip hop as a credible art form fell away, and it has been in decline ever since. Maybe the offshoots are more commercially popular than ever but that serious audience seems to have given up on the core product.
- haste410 3y agoWho is the "serious audience" and what is the "core product" they've given up?
- atentaten 3y agoWhat was he up to ? When did it become known?
- fidotron 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrika_Bambaataa#Child_sexual_abuse_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrika_Bambaataa#Child_sexual_...
- atentaten 3y agoOk. That's abhorrent, but I can't make the leap to discredit the entire genre of Hip Hop based on the actions of an early pioneer.
- michaelt 3y agoGiven that a lot of 80s-90s hip hop music the musicians claimed to perpetrate murder, drug crime and sexual exploitation - would you expect the audience to much care?
- qbasic_forever 3y agoAbsolute garbage comment. Go listen to some 60s rock and it's nothing but the same themes. Jim Morrison and the Doors wrote songs about explicitly killing your father, doing drugs, etc.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoAlso its 50 year anniversary according to the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-66471617 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-66471617
- ojbyrne 3y agoThe 50 year anniversary hype is everywhere.I personally agree with the last paragraph of the article: 'He also mentions that he finds the 50th anniversary of hip hop mile-marker a bit disingenuous. The birth of an entire movement can’t be attributed to one act. “I’m definitely not a person to shit on hip hop’s anniversary, or its founders,” he says. “These influential figures are extremely important. They changed the world and they deserve recognition and they deserve compensation. One hundred percent, underlined, big cap, bold letters. Capitalism, industry, commerce require neat stories. But we also have to be like, is this the whole story, or is this a convenient story?” Likely the latter, and it’s incomplete.'
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoThere's certainly precedents in terms of black political poetry in music (The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron) and there was clearly a need for the disenfranchised to have a voice, but there's the other aspects such as graffiti, dancing and DJing that all came together over time.
- Exmoor 3y agoI've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a big fan of the record label Bear Family, a German label that specializes in releasing boxsets from R&B/Rock&Roll/Country artists from the 20's-70's. Want to hear every song The Carter Family ever recorded in their original incarnation? They have a 12 CD boxset for you! They generally do this be acquiring the original master tapes from the labels, which often include a lot of previously unreleased songs or alternate takes, and remastering them. Hip-Hop probably has a higher percentage of this material than almost any other genre, especially once you get to the mixtape/blog era. Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples, so even if clean recordings were available official release would be impossible.
- michaelt 3y ago> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. If that's the art form as it was experienced, do archivists need to make a "better" version?
- Exmoor 3y agoI get your point, but I absolutely do prefer to hear older recordings where they have been able to in some way improve the quality over what was initially released. An extreme case would be some of the old 78rpm records that recent innovations have been able to clean up substantially. While the hip-hop records I'm talking about are not nearly that bad, the releases were often made in 128kbps with whatever encoder was available. Some may even have been transcoded.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoIt is those very versions which need preserving if that is what exists
- tyre 3y agoThis is like asking if a recording of the 1996 Olympics should have to include all of the commercials. For historical purposes, sure, have that as an option, but lil wayne's mixtapes are not better off for the random DJs or website advertisements yelled over them. That's not the music he made.
- aatd86 3y agoA whole lot of stuff on datpiff.com from the mixtape era.
- steve76 3y ago[dead]
- arkaic 3y agoThe same goes for lots of the underground hardcore music. So much of it isn't even on spotify or it is but with the wrong year. Thankfully there are still existing blogspots that still house those rare LP rars
- lawgimenez 3y agoYears ago I asked Lou of Subzero on Instagram why Suffering of Man album is not on streaming yet. I have an mp3 of this, and he mentioned about record labels holding it or something.
- mikrl 3y agoI don’t know the original source, but it is the intro to one of the tracks on The Prodigy’s 1998 mixtape ‘the dirtchamber sessions’ “Do you remember the days, When Kool Herc played, With a following of bands? If you don’t, well then you won’t (That’s right!) Real hip hop, my man”
- ndsipa_pomu 3y agoD.ST. The Home of Hip Hop https://genius.com/Dst-derek-showard-the-home-of-hip-hop-lyrics https://genius.com/Dst-derek-showard-the-home-of-hip-hop-lyr...
- dsir 3y agoI think what's equally as important as the archiving is the aggregating of the information. It's one thing to have a story, or piece of content documented somewhere, but at the end of the day, people still need ways to find it. I think that's where social, discussion based platforms come in. I'm a huge hip-hop fan and have been running a page dedicated to giving people a space to discuss and share all things hip-hop. https://sociables.com/community/TheJive/board/trending https://sociables.com/community/TheJive/board/trending
- jrm4 3y agoA big thing in the background of all of this; America, perhaps the world, myself included, really hasn't come to properly reckon with the extent to which we all subconsciously think of Black American art (including hip-hop) as something to be "taken" or "used" or generally not culturally owned by Black folks, usually Americans. The example that sticks in my head: if I, a black guy, were to get into Irish step-dancing, that's great. I would never, though, suggest that it's "not just Irish, it's universal." I'd respect where it comes from. Yet we have ALL heard the well-meaning, but ultimately a bit harmful, exact same thing said about Hip-hop. I think this ends up having real life consequences; see e.g. the rise of (Rap)Genius.com. They got big on the back of rap lyrics without much respecting the artists AT ALL.
- aesch 3y agoLook at the influence of sampling in hip hop. Sampling is literally taking music from different time periods, genres, cultures and making something new from it. If the mothers and fathers of hip hop had respected cultural ownership hip hop would never have been born in the first place. For any piece of culture to stay culturally relevant it must be "taken" and "used" and evolve. I agree that we should respect and acknowledge the founders of the culture, but once it is set free in the world it has to be shared to grow and thrive.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoAs a white guy I am aware of the minefield I am skipping merrily into here, but here goes: I can see the general point here, but don't think it applies as strongly to hip hop. Maybe it's just the circles I move in, but hip hop fans and artists seem to be quite aware of the origin stories and hold a particular reverence for the old school. Compare that to rock fans who wouldn't look further back than Presley (the king, lol) or green day fans who have never even heard of the stooges. Maybe it's because hip hop is a relatively young genre and ties to the old school fade as generations pass. If we're talking about money then yeah, sure - I'd be surprised if any of the creators made anything out of it compared to what corporate America does, but that's nothing new either. I don't know anything about (Rap)Genius.com, but I guess my question would be: what would you prefer to be happening that would respect the genre's origins but still allow it to grow?
- y-curious 3y agoThis is very relevant to me. There's a great song I heard on The Wire from HBO called "Analyze" by Sharpshooters [1]. Info on this group is almost non-existent; Only a brief synopsis repeated on Reddit and a few other sites. This was a song used on one of the most popular TV shows ever, I cannot imagine the amount of info being lost on lesser groups/songs. Also related, I LOVE MF DOOM. Collecting his discography is a fun little task, considering he appears on various albums using one of many monikers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMlCLw4aCqA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMlCLw4aCqA
- jimt1234 3y agoBack when I first started listening to hip hop music (around 1982; i'm old), it wasn't easy to get your hands on it if you lived in the suburbs. Record stores in the suburbs didn't stock hip hop until the Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill" and Run DMC's "Raising Hell". I had a circle of friends that could get me bootlegs - basically, mixtapes from people with hip hop records. I threw all of them away years ago. And I've been kicking myself ever since. I miss those old mixtapes so much. One of them was Afrika Bambaataa's "Perfect beat", over and over, both sides of the cassette, for 60 minutes. I loved it, listened to it constantly, never got tired of it. Another was entirely "Roxanne" songs - "Roxanne's doctor", "Roxanne's a man", etc.
- analog31 3y agoI remember that time, living in a suburb of Detroit. My first exposure to hip hop was on the radio, driving to my summer job. A lot of it seemed like it was being made on the spot, for instance there were references to recent local events and politics.
- mc32 3y agoI think people often recorded off the radio on to cassettes. Local stations played local artists. Or your friends would drive in to the city and you could come across the music.
- dendrite9 3y agoI was addicted to the radio Make my request, and wait for it Holdin my finger on the pause button, like "now go" I guess that was the original download -Atmosphere - Don't Forget
- jimt1234 3y agoFor me, it was Magic 108 in St. Louis, Missouri. However, I was so far out in the suburbs, Magic didn't always tune-in very well. I had lots of tapes with static. Also, in the early days, they played rap only late at nights, for a few hours before the "quiet storm". There was another AM radio station in St. Louis, a city college station, that used to have a segment called "The Rappin' Hour", where dudes would call-in and rap about their high school or whatever. I used to write rhymes in class, dreaming about calling into "The Rappin' Hour." LOL