Class Diggs
I took my #BreakBeatLit class record shopping last semester. Actually, we didn't go record shopping; we went digging. I told them that digging is a competitive, archival practice through which hip-hop DJs and producers discover source material for making music. They search basements, flea markets, record stores, and other locations for vinyl records they can play or sample to make hip-hop music. This practice extends back to Jamaican soundclash traditions where rarity, scarcity, and secrecy translate to cultural capital. It encapsulates a crucial ethos of hip-hop culture: search and discovery. Lucky for us, there is a record store right across from campus.
By going digging, the class practiced this longstanding hip-hop tradition. We sought to hone the skills that make up this larger practice: listening with the eyes, inferring about sounds from artwork, examining the grooves of the record for possible drum breaks, tuning into the names of musicians on the back covers, and listening not only for what the break is but what the break can be. Of course, many of these skills parallel and even surpass in complexity the archival work of the formal academy. (Maybe no accident there's a record store called Academy Records in NYC.)
Digging can also be deeply personal. You come up on a record your grandmother used to play when you were young, a record your father had, or an image on a cover that reminds you of home. I gave each of my students $5 to spend. One student bought a record because of the futuristic looking image on the label. Another bought a record because it had a song referenced in a book we read. Yet another bought a record because it reminded them of the marching band their mother -- who passed away the previous year -- used to play in.
At the end of the semester, I borrowed the records students got while digging as source material for an experimental sonic composition of sorts I made in Ableton. As such, the piece explores the sensibilities, memories, desires, and aural inclinations that guided us through the archive -- chopped, screwed, sampled, pitched up/down -- what we found and what found us.
Here’s a game from Roland Barthes in "The Grain of Voice": Talk about a piece of music without using a single adjective.
From the sent folder:
Status Board
Reading: Making my way through Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román's Inheriting Possibility. To my surprise, the book is engaging with many of the more-than-human theories/ontologies that I have seen taken up in some literacy/sound work, especially the excellent work of Jon Wargo. It's interesting to see this work put in conversation with quantitative methods and methodologies. Flipping back through the reference pages, it's notable that most of these current works around entanglement and the likes are on Duke University Press. Maybe I'll have to jump into all of this work after all.
Listening: Deep, reverse chronological dive into the Gang Starr catalog. And this great interview with DJ Premier, too, where he goes on at length about the connections between DJing, sampling, and production:
Whenever I produce, I do it with a deejay mentality. When I say a deejay mentality, we pay very close attention to everything that comes out on a record. We dissect it. And in the Hip Hop format, when it comes to sampling, I’m always trying to find a way to be unique with my drum sounds, and the way I chop. Sometimes you just can’t get enough of the parts to make it whole. So that’s when you have to really brainstorm to force it. Sometimes I force things to work, and they just happen to come out. But that’s just me understanding the science of sampling and piecing together breaks.
Writing: Not so much writing but thinking about how to peal off a meaningful layer from an article in revision about sound, youth listening, and the aural imaginary. The longer one will go in a special issue of English Teaching: Practice & Critique. The shorter one will go in Sounding Out, the sound studies blog. Can I do it? Find out by January 15th: the first deadline of 2020!