Speaker 1: It's warm outside. It's cookout season. Oh yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know I'm ready to gear up the playlists. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: the playlist can make or break the vibes of any cookout. Anyone.
Speaker 1: You put the wrong song in the wrong order, it's
Speaker 1: a rap. Remember when we made a playlist, a cookout playlist. Yes,
Speaker 1: you gave me a little bit of smoke. People gave
Speaker 1: me a little bit of smoke because I was adding
Speaker 1: some contemporary rap to the plays, like TT, You've got
Speaker 1: this all the way messed up. And I was like,
Speaker 1: y'all don't like a little dash of.
Speaker 2: Some As my Auntie there A said, that's where the kickback. Okay,
Speaker 2: the to be okay for all generations.
Speaker 1: Fair, fair, fair. Some people didn't like my playlist. I
Speaker 1: think that that's just fine. I'm open to criticism.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a perfect time to think about the playlist
Speaker 2: and the music you choose, and really the music all
Speaker 2: around us. Because this month is Black Music Month, which
Speaker 2: was formally recognized by the United States in nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: nine with President Jimmy Carter. And I feel like it
Speaker 2: took too long.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yes, I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.
Speaker 3: This is Dope Labs.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science,
Speaker 1: pop culture, and a healthy dost of friendship. It's Black
Speaker 1: Music Month, so this week we're celebrating black music and
Speaker 1: getting into the history, the culture, the politics, all of
Speaker 1: it with some very special guests. We really wanted to
Speaker 1: know more about the roots of hip hop and jazz
Speaker 1: and how black music and artists have been at the
Speaker 1: forefront of popular culture and what's next in music. Let's
Speaker 1: get into the recitation. Okay, so what do we know?
Speaker 2: Sometimes you'll hear people say black pop culture or black
Speaker 2: culture is everywhere, and.
Speaker 1: It's not wrong. But I think we have the level
Speaker 1: set when we talk about black music because terms and
Speaker 1: phrases evolve over time and their meanings do too. Black
Speaker 1: music is not just hip hop, rap and R and B.
Speaker 1: When we say black music, we're referencing the history of
Speaker 1: music created, performed, and celebrated by black artists and audiences.
Speaker 1: We also know that black music is popular absolutely. I
Speaker 1: think we also know that black music influences other genres
Speaker 1: of music heavily. We know that you can draw lines
Speaker 1: from rock and roll back to it being created by
Speaker 1: black people. We also know music can be a tool
Speaker 1: for politics and has been. There's a rich history of that,
Speaker 1: tracing back to instructional messaging or whether it's obvious at
Speaker 1: first glance or at first listen or not, reflections of struggle,
Speaker 1: a way to carry on storytelling, particularly storytelling with political themes. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And I think another thing that we know is that
Speaker 1: the hip hop rap scene used to be kind of
Speaker 1: like a fringe genre where it was just like very
Speaker 1: specific people. But now we see hip hop and rap
Speaker 1: being incorporated into a lot of pop, so it's all
Speaker 1: over the pop charts. Yeah, black culture is everywhere, like
Speaker 1: straight up and down anyway you slice it one hundred.
Speaker 1: So we understand all of that, and I think we
Speaker 1: have accepted a lot of those things, the pervasive influence
Speaker 1: of black culture in both black music and popular music,
Speaker 1: really music all over, and it feels like that's often
Speaker 1: taken for granted in society. But what do we want
Speaker 1: to know specifically tit. I want to know the specific
Speaker 1: influences that the black music of the past has on
Speaker 1: to day's black music. Like I know it's there, we
Speaker 1: know it's there, but I want to know in some
Speaker 1: of the ways that might not be absolutely apparent to
Speaker 1: all people that this is rooted in black culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you want the footnotes, yes, you want to
Speaker 2: give me all the afran wants the citations, Okay. And
Speaker 2: I'm really interested in not just the people, because sometimes
Speaker 2: folks don't get credited, and we know how history can
Speaker 2: be massaged, and so I'm interested in the sonic relationships
Speaker 2: between the music we see today and earlier genres that
Speaker 2: are still booming, like jazz and soul.
Speaker 1: And I'm really curious about how the messaging in hip
Speaker 1: hop has changed in recent decades.
Speaker 2: And if we look back, we got to look forward.
Speaker 2: What's the future of black music looking like. We're seeing
Speaker 2: increasing popularity, which also can invite this other cousin, which
Speaker 2: is appropriation. And we're also seeing academia take a look
Speaker 2: at hip.
Speaker 1: Hop and black music.
Speaker 2: And so I think it's really interesting to to kind
Speaker 2: of project and say what might it look like in
Speaker 2: the next ten to twenty, maybe even fifty years.
Speaker 1: Let's jump into the dissection. Our guests for today are
Speaker 1: doctor Mark Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 4: Mark Anthony Neil, James B. Duke, Distinguished Professor of African
Speaker 4: African American Studies at Duke University. I am born and
Speaker 4: raised from the place that we affectionately call the Bookie
Speaker 4: Down Bronx, aka the home of hip hop.
Speaker 5: Ninth Wonder, producer, college professor, DJ Avid, basketball junkie, and
Speaker 5: father of a French bulldog.
Speaker 1: Doctor Neil and Ninth Wonder are both professors and Duke
Speaker 1: University's African and African American Studies Department. Professor Neil also
Speaker 1: teaches classes in English and gender, sexuality and feminist studies
Speaker 1: and has published several books on Black popular culture and
Speaker 1: Ninth Wonder is also a rapper, record executive and producer
Speaker 1: who worked with Mary J. Blige, Jay Z Drake, Destiny's Child,
Speaker 1: Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Eric Abadu, Mac Miller. The list
Speaker 1: goes on and on and on.
Speaker 2: So when you look across the music genres, and you
Speaker 2: don't even really have to look that deep, it becomes
Speaker 2: really clear that Black musical artistry and its influence spans
Speaker 2: so many different categories of music. So we can trace
Speaker 2: back the spirituals and folk music to blues, to rock
Speaker 2: and roll, the jazz, and then the hip hop.
Speaker 1: The roots of all of these.
Speaker 2: Genres are steeped in black culture. We ask doctor Neil
Speaker 2: to explain just how strong those roots are.
Speaker 4: It is everywhere we talk about classical music, right, and
Speaker 4: we think about European cats with white wigs and Beethoven,
Speaker 4: all those kind of folks, But that's not in the
Speaker 4: music that originated in the US. America's classical music is
Speaker 4: Black music, and most specifically, jazz music is America's classical
Speaker 4: art form. There's very few examples of popular music in
Speaker 4: the US in twenty twenty two that have not been
Speaker 4: touched by the influence of black roots music. In some aspect,
Speaker 4: it's been the soundtrack to not only black struggle, but
Speaker 4: American struggle. It's been the soundtrack to American patriotism, whether
Speaker 4: or not black folks wanted that to be the case
Speaker 4: or not. And of course it is a soundtrack to
Speaker 4: buying and selling in America.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: You can't watch a McDonald's commercial or any other commercial
Speaker 4: without some sort of reference to black musical styles in
Speaker 4: that context.
Speaker 1: Those are some really great points, especially about how classical
Speaker 1: music in the United States is black music, and today's
Speaker 1: popular music is at least influenced by black music and culture.
Speaker 1: If it isn't that explicitly. It really is. Even what
Speaker 1: he's saying about the McDonald's commercial that R and B
Speaker 1: is not random behind them to night, It's really not.
Speaker 2: And what we're doing now is thinking about music as
Speaker 2: this soundtrack to struggle or commerce or just everyday life.
Speaker 2: And so it makes a lot of sense that music
Speaker 2: can serve as a historical signpost for what's going on
Speaker 2: in the culture.
Speaker 4: Music is a signal, a capturing of things that are
Speaker 4: going on in the culture. Right, So if you want
Speaker 4: to know what's happening with black people, all you have
Speaker 4: to do is listening to the music at any given error.
Speaker 4: If you are marching from outer space and you landed
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty four and you heard Curtis Mayfield and
Speaker 4: the Impression singing keep on Pushing, or you heard Sam
Speaker 4: Cook singing the Change is going to come, or without
Speaker 4: knowing what was going on, you would immediately know what
Speaker 4: was going on in that moment.
Speaker 1: Okay, stop. Not so many ways that stories or messages
Speaker 1: get passed down, and music is one of those. And
Speaker 1: when you look at music, there are so many ways
Speaker 1: within music that we pass down stories and messages. And
Speaker 1: we're going to get into that later. In the episod.
Speaker 2: So, but first we wanted to take a closer look
Speaker 2: at some of the foundational elements of black music and
Speaker 2: trace how those ideas have evolved throughout genres over time.
Speaker 2: Before we start tracing these I think we have to
Speaker 2: acknowledge a major part of Black music that we're not
Speaker 2: going to talk about TT right right, and that's the influence.
Speaker 1: Of the Negro spiritual.
Speaker 2: So when we think about musical devices, particularly African musical
Speaker 2: devices that are part of Black American or African American culture,
Speaker 2: So rhythms, melodies, and beats, that's what people who were
Speaker 2: stolen from Africa, that's what they had. They kept what
Speaker 2: they could of their culture, and we see that in
Speaker 2: the music. And we definitely see that in like Negro
Speaker 2: spirituals and that influence work songs, you know, the songs
Speaker 2: people saying while they were working in fields and doing
Speaker 2: this really hard labor. Gospel music and also in blues
Speaker 2: and those things influenced jazz. I'm interested in that concept
Speaker 2: of barring, remixing, sampling, referencing, and reframing that is integral
Speaker 2: and intentional to Black music.
Speaker 1: Yes, that feels like the first brick of building the
Speaker 1: house of hip hop, Doctor Neil breaks it down.
Speaker 4: So whenever you hear black music, you're hearing musicians very
Speaker 4: consciously sampling and drawing from traditions that came before them.
Speaker 4: If you're listening to Bebop in the nineteen forties, it's
Speaker 4: a Childiebird Parker pulling a tune from Tin Pan Alley
Speaker 4: and doing a little improvisation. Most of what we know
Speaker 4: as hip hop is sample based hip hop, drawing specifically
Speaker 4: from existing recorded music, and at least in the early
Speaker 4: days of hip hop, that was specifically these things that
Speaker 4: we call breakbeats, these kind of highly rhythmic parts, James
Speaker 4: Brown probably being the most notable example of that tradition
Speaker 4: and being able to extend them in a loop. At
Speaker 4: the time, it was a DJ right who was doing
Speaker 4: the loop. These days, obviously it's all kind of tech
Speaker 4: machines and samplers.
Speaker 1: Set up, thanks set up. It makes a lot of
Speaker 1: sense that funk and soul has a huge impact on
Speaker 1: hip hop. A lot of the elements from funk and
Speaker 1: soul show up in hip hop. James Brown, aka the
Speaker 1: Godfather of Soul, is the most sample artist of all time.
Speaker 1: And then the drum break improvised by Clyde Stubblefield, who
Speaker 1: often worked with James Brown, and he's on James Brown
Speaker 1: song Funky Drummer is one of the most sampled songs
Speaker 1: in hip hop. The name of those tunes up on Drama,
Speaker 1: imp on your drama. It's such a connected web.
Speaker 2: Once you start looking at how many times somebody has
Speaker 2: been sampled, you know you have to ask her.
Speaker 1: Are you talking about just sampling the beat?
Speaker 2: Are you talking about sampling the lyrics and quoting those right?
Speaker 2: Are you talking about, you know, covering somebody song exactly?
Speaker 2: And when it comes to James Brown, all of the above,
Speaker 2: you know all of the above. And the really big
Speaker 2: thing to note is that if he's a most sampled artist,
Speaker 2: that the second most sampled artist.
Speaker 1: The group is not even close, not even half of
Speaker 1: the amount of times that he's been sampled.
Speaker 4: Basically, what we hear now is often a refabrication of
Speaker 4: sounds and sites and things that we heard before. Everybody
Speaker 4: lost their mind listening to Silk Sonic some new song
Speaker 4: and I'm like, well, you know that's a love train, right.
Speaker 4: I'm like, well, I've been listening to the original love
Speaker 4: Train right for forty years by Confunction, So everything that's
Speaker 4: new is not new.
Speaker 1: Got a listen. Confunction did it first.
Speaker 2: And I love Bruno and Anderson aka djp Wee a lot,
Speaker 2: but it's hard to fight confunction. Confunction ran so that
Speaker 2: they could hobble behind them. So you know, we can
Speaker 2: trace the connection between soul, funk, and R and B
Speaker 2: to hip hop. But there's also this connection between jazz
Speaker 2: and hip hop. Two ninth Wonder, along with a musicians
Speaker 2: Robert Glasper, Ters Martin and Kamasi Washington, released an album
Speaker 2: recently called Dinner Party. And this is an album that
Speaker 2: really shows explicit connection between jazz and hip hop, But
Speaker 2: what about some of those earlier influences where we see
Speaker 2: some of that same borrowing from jazz.
Speaker 5: One of the reasons why myself, Kamasi, Robert Glasper and
Speaker 5: Tares Martin did Dinner Party was to show that kind
Speaker 5: of bridge it's always been there because you got some
Speaker 5: jazz cats that don't really job with hip hop like that,
Speaker 5: but you have some new age hip hoppers that know
Speaker 5: nothing about jazz, and we were trying to show in
Speaker 5: a section of the two.
Speaker 1: So there's the sampling of music, but then there's also
Speaker 1: musical influence on lyrical delivery.
Speaker 5: When the idea of rap flow started to change, like
Speaker 5: in the early eighties, you know, the Curtis Blows and
Speaker 5: the Houdini's and all of them had the same type
Speaker 5: of you know rap flow, Prince Twish and Braks to
Speaker 5: but when Rock Kim came along, he made the distinct
Speaker 5: relation to I get a lot of my flows from
Speaker 5: John Coltrane, how he plays the sax, and also the
Speaker 5: notorious Big said, I listened to Max Roach. There was
Speaker 5: a older gentleman in his neighborhood who played him Max
Speaker 5: Roach records, and he learned different syncopations and different rhythms
Speaker 5: with his voice.
Speaker 1: Max Roach was a drummer and composer, and he's known
Speaker 1: as a pioneer of bebop and one of the most
Speaker 1: important drummers of all time.
Speaker 2: You know, like doctor Neil said, Rock Kim kind of
Speaker 2: changed things. We went from Curtis Blow with these are
Speaker 2: the breaks, You're like, what felt like kind of stiff rapping,
Speaker 2: and then we went to kind of floey rapping with
Speaker 2: Rock Kim and someone who's even more recent, who really
Speaker 2: should be credited if he hasn't been enough for his
Speaker 2: ability to kind of change the course of hip hop
Speaker 2: is q.
Speaker 1: Tip ram truck, what as sea bull point something with
Speaker 1: a gold rode ain't nothing the r I'm the hood
Speaker 1: with it. Ninth highlights q Tip, who is a solo
Speaker 1: artist and also a member of a tricoll Quest.
Speaker 6: I teach you hip Hop production class and one of
Speaker 6: the guests we had on Zoom one day was q Tip.
Speaker 1: From a trib Call quest A trib Call Quest. It
Speaker 1: sound and the musical contributions of the individual members had
Speaker 1: a huge fingerprint on music transitioning in the late eighties
Speaker 1: to nineties.
Speaker 6: I wanted to know.
Speaker 5: Why in the late eighties hip hop shifted from a
Speaker 5: lot of soul sampling a lot of James Brown, James Brown,
Speaker 5: James Brown, to Les McCann and Roy ayres right and
Speaker 5: q Tip is like the genesis of that, q Tip said,
Speaker 5: man I grew up in a neighborhood around Weldon Irvine,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, what, like what is that?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 5: Weldon Irvine and a lot of jazz cast that he
Speaker 5: grew up around influenced the sound that change of generation.
Speaker 2: Weldon Irvine was a musician and artists. He's most known
Speaker 2: for his song Morning Sunrise, which came out in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy nine, and that sampled on Jay Z's track Dear
Speaker 2: Summer and that came out in two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: He was a mentor to many hip hop artists in
Speaker 1: New York as well as Nina Simone's musical director. So
Speaker 1: you know that's big, just that.
Speaker 6: Texture of music.
Speaker 5: We call him top of the family tree because with
Speaker 5: our Q tip, you don't have common most quality, badu jail,
Speaker 5: little brother, slum village, the roots outcast, like I can
Speaker 5: go a whole family tree of people that doesn't exist
Speaker 5: because of Q tip. And it's all because he started
Speaker 5: to dig into roy Airs more than he started digging
Speaker 5: to James Brown.
Speaker 1: And so that gives us this transition from music that
Speaker 1: sounded off funky and chopped up like James Brown with
Speaker 1: the funky drummer, to a much smoother sound with Roy Airs.
Speaker 6: I say everything begins with Benita Applebum.
Speaker 5: Benita apple Bum, like sound wise became the genesis of
Speaker 5: every laid back hip hop song that you know.
Speaker 6: Benita Applebum is the one.
Speaker 5: Banina alta Appaum said to kind of put me on
Speaker 5: Beanina Alpam, And that's a roy Airs produced group called Ramp.
Speaker 5: It's that feel good time for euphorias. So from the
Speaker 5: way we rhyme to the textures that we use like
Speaker 5: jazz is it. And on top of that, jazz and
Speaker 5: hip hop leans on one thing together and that's improvisation.
Speaker 5: It's all about making stuff up. This is the sixties
Speaker 5: and your cold trained the loneliest monk on stage as
Speaker 5: the mother cast, Charlieburry Parker and that having like a
Speaker 5: quintet session. You couldn't get up on that stage unless
Speaker 5: you were ready to be able to hang with that
Speaker 5: particular jam session. It's the same thing with them seeing
Speaker 5: if you you see Black Thought, Royster five nine, Rhapsody Nas,
Speaker 5: some of the greatest worstments of our time on stage
Speaker 5: in a cipher. If you want to call yourself an
Speaker 5: MC and get your chops up, you better be ready
Speaker 5: to get on stage and get in the cipher and
Speaker 5: don't break the cipher.
Speaker 6: But definitely hip.
Speaker 5: Hop bars a lot from jazz with that kind of
Speaker 5: like vetting system of guards. System is like a badger
Speaker 5: honor almost you can't be called one of us unless
Speaker 5: you do this.
Speaker 1: So now we're talking about hip hop borrowing from jazz
Speaker 1: in both musical sampling and in the delivery of rap
Speaker 1: flow lyrical flow. And then also we're talking about hip
Speaker 1: hop borrowing from jazz in the process of kind of
Speaker 1: like this writes a passage about who gets to be
Speaker 1: called it, who gets to be called a jazz musician,
Speaker 1: who gets to be called a hip hop artist. It
Speaker 1: feels really heavily layered. Hip hop is Black music, and
Speaker 1: it's also some of the most popular music in our culture.
Speaker 1: Like we said earlier, black music is American music, just
Speaker 1: like black culture is American culture. I think we're seeing
Speaker 1: that more and more today with the growing influence of
Speaker 1: hip hop on popular culture.
Speaker 5: Hip hop has now become scared for a lot of
Speaker 5: people to say, but if hip hop is not Americana,
Speaker 5: especially because of the consumption of streams and the music business,
Speaker 5: but also by the fashion, by the talk, by the slang.
Speaker 5: More and more each day I see other racists saying
Speaker 5: things that we made up in the street is everywhere,
Speaker 5: will continue to be everywhere. People are already fascinated with
Speaker 5: black bodies anyway, they're definitely fascinated with black rappers still
Speaker 5: to this day that so many older white men they
Speaker 5: are fascinated that if they know a young black rapper
Speaker 5: like it puts them in a different space. The thing
Speaker 5: I see a lot of people say is street crib.
Speaker 5: It's always been a part of America and it's going
Speaker 5: to continue to grow when more enlightened people get older,
Speaker 5: especially young white Americans that like the Jimmy Fallers of
Speaker 5: the world, and who has the roots as there Tonight's
Speaker 5: show bands right, all the casts on Sports Center who
Speaker 5: didn't grow up listening to Johnny Cash or grew up
Speaker 5: listening to nas I mean, what do we.
Speaker 3: Do with that.
Speaker 1: It's not even just older white men's America. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: in general. It's like, hey, I know this thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: we see it all over social media where folks are
Speaker 1: using African American English and not using it correctly a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, and they feel like it's a
Speaker 1: way to give themselves streetcred, like just to make themselves cooler.
Speaker 1: But what they're trying to do is get as close
Speaker 1: to black as as they can without being black.
Speaker 5: I knew things were really changing when it was the
Speaker 5: Oscars I think of last year, and it was Glenn Close.
Speaker 5: They asked her about DC Go Go and she started
Speaker 5: talking about junk yard band and backyard band.
Speaker 6: And rare asses, and I'm like, look at this man.
Speaker 5: This is placed in one of the whitest spaces ever,
Speaker 5: the Oscars, and just that type of thing shows you
Speaker 5: that in order to be cool, in order to be creative,
Speaker 5: in order to be on the cutting edge, you got
Speaker 5: to know what black people are doing.
Speaker 1: And you know, we can't talk about these things without
Speaker 1: talking about people who have been a part of this culture,
Speaker 1: who have listened to this music, being outcasts or excluded
Speaker 1: from things because they identified in this way, you know,
Speaker 1: And that kind of gets us into like the cultural
Speaker 1: appropriation of music and the culture that goes along with
Speaker 1: black music. It's like who gets recognized, who gets credit?
Speaker 5: And the thing about us that we still haven't figured out,
Speaker 5: and we're just so free with our creative property or
Speaker 5: intellectual property that it can be taken in a moment's
Speaker 5: notice and put somewhere else. With so giving is people
Speaker 5: we want to share what everybody not knowing it is
Speaker 5: being taken from us every time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the excitement, a lot of things get shared,
Speaker 1: and that's how we get back to that cycle of
Speaker 1: sharing versus then who's getting credit for these things who's
Speaker 1: creating versus who's leveraging opportunities from the creation. Even recently,
Speaker 1: Bad Bunny he has a hit called sapphi Era, and
Speaker 1: part of the problem was is that he used some
Speaker 1: of the beat from Me Elliott's two thousand and one
Speaker 1: hit get Your Free Gone. We all know, Get Your
Speaker 1: Free Gone, and didn't credit her, and so it was
Speaker 1: never properly cleared with Missy and her team. So it's
Speaker 1: a really long story. We'll put more about that in
Speaker 1: the show notes, But this is something that is still
Speaker 1: pervasive today. Culture is political, and music has definitely been
Speaker 1: used as a political tool to reflect on current struggles,
Speaker 1: to call for revolution, or to even imagine different realities
Speaker 1: like what life could be like. We asked Professor Neil
Speaker 1: and ninth Wonder to walk us through some monumental songs
Speaker 1: throughout history that have been signpost for what's going on
Speaker 1: politically in history. Doctor Neil starts with Billy Holliday Billy.
Speaker 4: Holliday nineteen thirty nine, Strange Fruit, talking about the practice
Speaker 4: of lynching, which folks thought was coming to an end.
Speaker 4: What clearly in twenty twenty two, you know, yesterday's mass
Speaker 4: lynchings have become today's mass shootings.
Speaker 1: Mass strange, true blood only.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Billy Holliday was a jazz singer, and she was known
Speaker 1: for her distinctive vocal style, which was inspired by jazz
Speaker 1: instrumentalists like Louis Armstrong and another well known jazz singer,
Speaker 1: Bessie Smith. Just recently we saw Billy Holliday's life and
Speaker 1: the contributions of her music and what it meant politically
Speaker 1: really kind of thrust into the spotlight with Audre Day
Speaker 1: doing the film The United States Versus Billy Holliday, and
Speaker 1: I was really surprised at just how involved the government
Speaker 1: was in the message that Billy Holliday was delivering through
Speaker 1: her music. I didn't know that absolutely. I thought it
Speaker 1: was really eye opening the entire film, because when we
Speaker 1: talk about Billie Holliday today, you know, we just talk
Speaker 1: about the music, but the politics was such a major,
Speaker 1: major part of it. And so what we saw with
Speaker 1: Billy Holliday, which was basically protest through song, is something
Speaker 1: we see throughout history in black music.
Speaker 4: Nina Simone talking about Mississippi Goddamn, talking about you know,
Speaker 4: anti black violence in the South, a song that she
Speaker 4: wrote immediately after the bombing of the sixteenth Street Baptist
Speaker 4: Church in Birmingham in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: Alabama's gotten me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest,
Speaker 1: and everybody knows about missus damn. The sixteenth Street Baptist
Speaker 1: Church in Birmingham had been a center or hub for
Speaker 1: civil rights organizing, and on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: the KKK members planted dynamite under the steps, and that
Speaker 1: attack killed four girls and injured fourteen to twenty two
Speaker 1: other people. And this happened just two weeks after the
Speaker 1: March on Washington and Martin Luther's King's I have a
Speaker 1: dream speech, So fast forward nineteen sixty four. Nina Simone
Speaker 1: releases Mississippi Goddamn, and she's referencing what's happening in these states.
Speaker 1: And I know I said in nineteen sixty four. You
Speaker 1: may be asking, is it twenty twenty four?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: Alabama has gotten me so upset. Tennessee's made me lose
Speaker 1: my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi. She wrote this
Speaker 1: song immediately after the bombing, and the song is in
Speaker 1: direct response to the attack and other white supremacist violence
Speaker 1: targeting black people across the South, and so that includes
Speaker 1: the assassination of Medgar Evers, who was fighting the end
Speaker 1: segregation in public schools, securing voting rights and other rights
Speaker 1: for black people.
Speaker 2: Doctor Neil also mentioned Sam Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come,
Speaker 2: which was also released in December of the same year
Speaker 2: as Nina Simone's song.
Speaker 4: Sam Cooks The Change Is Gonna Come. Right, this idea
Speaker 4: that in the midst of everything that was going on,
Speaker 4: right the death Somthaga Evers to deaths, you know, shortly
Speaker 4: after that of Malcolm X, you know that folks are
Speaker 4: hoping and wishing for something to change.
Speaker 1: It's been a lot a long time coming.
Speaker 6: Come.
Speaker 2: There's a movie that captures the importance of Sam Cook's
Speaker 2: A Change Is Going To Come, and it talks about
Speaker 2: this meeting of some other black leaders, Sam Cook, Malcolm X,
Speaker 2: Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown.
Speaker 1: All of them met together in February nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: and Regina King recently made a movie about it called
Speaker 1: One Night in Miami. It just shows like the struggle,
Speaker 1: like it shows people are figuring out, like what's going
Speaker 1: to go in my music? Do people just want to
Speaker 1: hear feel good music? I'm torn.
Speaker 2: These things are happening in my community, right, and I
Speaker 2: think a lot of artists are facing that, like what
Speaker 2: goes in my work versus what's for me, you know, right.
Speaker 1: I mean we saw that shift. We talked about Beyonce
Speaker 1: a lot, but we saw that shift with Beyonce and
Speaker 1: her music where at a certain point in her career
Speaker 1: she decided that she did want to become more political
Speaker 1: with the messaging in her music. And that's when we
Speaker 1: had you know, lemonade, Black Is King and things like that.
Speaker 1: And I think all of this is really important, t T.
Speaker 2: Because when we consider the turmoil, the violence against black
Speaker 2: folks and then the protest music that we just talked about,
Speaker 2: you know, this is the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
Speaker 2: So we're talking about these things happening in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2: And the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Speaker 1: In July nineteen sixty four, right, And the Civil Rights Act,
Speaker 1: the purpose of it was it outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex,
Speaker 1: and national origins. It also prohibits unequal application of voter
Speaker 1: registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and
Speaker 1: employment discrimination. And this was a huge landmark for legislation.
Speaker 1: That's July nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2: You move a couple months later, we're at February nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty five and Malcolm X is assassinated in the audobamb
Speaker 2: Ballroom in New York and his death really escalated the
Speaker 2: Black power movement. In this revolutionary movement that was really
Speaker 2: active in the sixties and seventies and very similar to
Speaker 2: the Civil Rights movement. It advocated for, you know, economic, social,
Speaker 2: and cultural empowerment for black folks, but it differed a
Speaker 2: little bit in the support of more militant approaches to
Speaker 2: achieving those goals, and that was really embraced by like
Speaker 2: the Black Panther Party organization US in the Republic of
Speaker 2: New Africa.
Speaker 1: Throughout history, black artists have always found ways to find
Speaker 1: joy and celebrate the milestones along the way amid loss
Speaker 1: and struggle.
Speaker 4: I mean, James Brown, right, I'm black and I'm proud
Speaker 4: right that this moment where folks could be fully in
Speaker 4: public and black and not have to worry about them
Speaker 4: being punished for expressing what they felt.
Speaker 6: At the time.
Speaker 4: Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On Right, the Quintessential Protests
Speaker 4: album Right created as this kind of holistic suite that
Speaker 4: spoke to every aspect of what we're dealing with.
Speaker 2: There's too many of you try, you know, Marvin Gay
Speaker 2: started out as a crooner. You know, I see the
Speaker 2: guys on Instagram trying to wear the little red Marvin
Speaker 2: Gay had. But by nineteen seventy one, well, he released
Speaker 2: What's going On. We're at the height of the Vietnam War,
Speaker 2: and you can hear him grappling with what the country
Speaker 2: is going through and what black people are experiencing during
Speaker 2: this time.
Speaker 4: Talking about the environment, talking about an anti war movement,
Speaker 4: talking about black politics, talking about poverty in the ghetto. Right,
Speaker 4: he managed to get all of that into a thirty
Speaker 4: five minute record.
Speaker 1: Doctor Neil also talked about how this music was so
Speaker 1: personal to him as well as so many black kids
Speaker 1: growing up as these records were being recorded and released.
Speaker 4: The time that I came of age listening to the
Speaker 4: message in nineteen eighty two Grand Master Flash and the
Speaker 4: Furious Five and this detailed analysis of the hood that
Speaker 4: I knew that I was growing up with, right, that
Speaker 4: so many people in the world didn't know of. And
Speaker 4: this was a time when everybody was calling you know,
Speaker 4: when they folks thought about hip hop, all they thought
Speaker 4: about or rap music, all they thought about was partying. Bullshit.
Speaker 4: Grandmaster Flash and Melly Mel made a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: party in Bullshit records that we'd love to this day.
Speaker 4: But then they dropped this sociological jam in the Message.
Speaker 1: Probably glass everywhere, people pissing on the stage, you know
Speaker 1: that just don't care. I can't take the smout, I
Speaker 1: can't take the noise. Got no money to move on?
Speaker 1: I guess I got no charge, you know. I think
Speaker 1: we see this with a lot of artists.
Speaker 2: They might come out with, you know, kind of a
Speaker 2: party song or a fun upbeat, and then they're like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I have a platform, I have a voice.
Speaker 1: There's something I want to say. So similar to what
Speaker 1: we saw with Marvin Gaye. H you see grand Master
Speaker 1: Flash in the Furious five shifting a little bit with
Speaker 1: the message, that's right. In nineteen eighty two, they released
Speaker 1: a song called The Message, and the lyrics describe poverty
Speaker 1: in the inner city struggle, and it was one of
Speaker 1: the first songs in hip hop that addressed those issues
Speaker 1: head on. This political and social commentary was influential to
Speaker 1: the growth of consciousness.
Speaker 4: Even Run DMC, a group did we never think about
Speaker 4: as being political, could drop a song like It's Like That,
Speaker 4: which again talked about the politics of what everyday black
Speaker 4: life was. And then definitely for me my generation, anything
Speaker 4: that Public Dnomy touched between nineteen eighty six right to
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety two has to be on that list.
Speaker 2: Yes, Ren DMC and Public Enemy were both part of
Speaker 2: the new school of hip hop, which you know you
Speaker 2: kind of see really growing around the mid nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: Public Enemy built on the foundation that was laid by
Speaker 2: Grand Master Flash. In a Furious five talking about this
Speaker 2: radical political ideology, doctor Neil lists additional songs and albums
Speaker 2: that fit that same mold.
Speaker 4: Rebel without a Pause, Fight the Powers, and one that
Speaker 4: stands out. But that album, you know, it takes a
Speaker 4: nation of millions to hold us back, and don't believe
Speaker 4: the hyphe I mean, it just changed everything. The politics
Speaker 4: were radical, the images were radical, the sounds were radical,
Speaker 4: the sampling techniques were radical.
Speaker 5: We got to fight the.
Speaker 6: Fight the power.
Speaker 1: It's really fascinating to see that radical political message was
Speaker 1: mirrored in the sounds and musical techniques that these artists used.
Speaker 1: Ninth Wonder also shared his experiences of coming of age
Speaker 1: during this period of music, a time when social and
Speaker 1: political consciousness was at the forefront of hip hop.
Speaker 5: Neil is older than me, and you don't like to
Speaker 5: say that, but he's older than I am. And I
Speaker 5: always like to gloat and revel in the fact that
Speaker 5: I was able to enjoy consciousness in hip hop at
Speaker 5: the age I got a chance to enjoy it, which
Speaker 5: is every kid's formidable years. It takes a nation meetings.
Speaker 5: The Hold Is Back came out when I was thirteen.
Speaker 5: There You Go the year before a show debut on
Speaker 5: TV called A Different World. In nineteen eighty eight, Spike
Speaker 5: Lee released School Days. In nineteen eighty nine, Spike re
Speaker 5: released Do the Right Thing.
Speaker 2: So what Ninth Wonder is highlighting is not just the
Speaker 2: music but also the culture. We're talking about television now
Speaker 2: and movies. A Different World was a classic.
Speaker 1: Honestly, we talked about a Different World in our Black
Speaker 1: History Month episode with X and School Days too. Different
Speaker 1: World and School Days and about how it really showcased
Speaker 1: aside of black culture that wasn't necessarily always showcased on television.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I think one of the things that I loved
Speaker 2: about those shows is they were funny. They were giving
Speaker 2: me this glimpse into like, oh wow, this is what
Speaker 2: college is like. And I'm watching them years later, right
Speaker 2: and still they feel relevant. But they're also talking about
Speaker 2: issues like sexual assault, HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 1: Yes, when Freddy was almost sexual assaulted and Dwyane Wade
Speaker 1: jumped to the roof of the car to beat up
Speaker 1: the guy, these are moments that you will never forget
Speaker 1: and it addresses those issues head on and gives you
Speaker 1: the tools as young people to know how to deal
Speaker 1: with those situations. So that's like mid to late eighties,
Speaker 1: and then we moved right at that cusp of like
Speaker 1: eighty eight to ninety two. I would say hip hop
Speaker 1: is doing a lot of things at that point. So
Speaker 1: before we were talking about the East Coast, but the
Speaker 1: West Coast is also on the map. Straight out account
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
Speaker 5: Quitudes show always say you know NNBA put our straight
Speaker 5: out of Compton, Queen Latifa put out All Hell, The
Speaker 5: Queen Jungle Brothers done by the Fortress of Nature, Daylight, Soul,
Speaker 5: three feet High and Rising a Tribe call Quest People's
Speaker 5: exinctive travels in the past of Rhythm I'm fourteen years old,
Speaker 5: like I am in heaven, Like this is black black
Speaker 5: black black, black, black black black black. Not only it's black,
Speaker 5: but it's also Pan Africanism. Then you got Kara ris
Speaker 5: One and booge Down productions. Then you have Kin saying
Speaker 5: Oslama Lakam. You have Rokkim call himself rock him Ala.
Speaker 5: Like now you have an intersection of Southern black Christian
Speaker 5: board learning about Islam at age thirteen fourteen.
Speaker 6: This was an amazing time for me and my friends.
Speaker 1: That's wild. I mean, imagine being able to be of
Speaker 1: the age where you can understand what's going on, you
Speaker 1: kind of understand what's going on in the world, and
Speaker 1: you can understand what's going on in the music and
Speaker 1: be able to absorb those political and social messages of
Speaker 1: the music as it was being released.
Speaker 2: Man, you know, I can remember folks wearing like my
Speaker 2: older cousins wearing those like big necklaces that had the
Speaker 2: symbol of Africa and it was like red, black and green,
Speaker 2: and it makes me think about brands like cross colors.
Speaker 2: Even the clothes that people were wearing and things that
Speaker 2: had the fist on them. I mean, it was just
Speaker 2: pan Africanism was a global movement and hip hop was.
Speaker 1: In it absolutely.
Speaker 2: And you know, when you think about who's driving culture,
Speaker 2: who's saying this is what's in the musicians were doing that,
Speaker 2: and so it feels fitting that they have a place
Speaker 2: right there is some of the disseminators of political messaging.
Speaker 1: So far, we've seen hip hop evolve from something that
Speaker 1: wasn't explicitly political to a genre that really had consciousness
Speaker 1: at its heart. But this period of consciousness and hip
Speaker 1: hop didn't last forever.
Speaker 5: Sometimes we like to tell the young generation that, oh,
Speaker 5: we were just so political. The only problem is became
Speaker 5: a hard realization for me that the high point and
Speaker 5: consciousness in hip hop on a surface level, which means
Speaker 5: a level that wasn't considered underground, that you can find it,
Speaker 5: you didn't have to dig for it probably only lasted
Speaker 5: like three or four years eighty eight to like I'll say,
Speaker 5: by ninety two, because once Doctor Dre and Snoop, when
Speaker 5: the chronic came, it was over.
Speaker 6: Like it was who you can forget it?
Speaker 1: One, two, three and tough Folk, Snoop, Doggie Dog and
Speaker 1: Doctor Drake is at the dope and it not making
Speaker 1: it trench so Bad Go No.
Speaker 2: This time period that Ninth Wonder is talking about falls
Speaker 2: within what many refer to as the Golden Age of
Speaker 2: hip hop, so from the mid eighties to their early
Speaker 2: to mid nineties. Ninth tells us that things kind of
Speaker 2: changed when Bad Boy Records came on the scene. Bad
Speaker 2: Boy was founded in nineteen ninety three by Sean P.
Speaker 2: Diddy Combs Well Diddy or Puff Daddy Brother Love.
Speaker 1: Brother Love, Sean Love Combs, Puffy. So many names, so
Speaker 1: many names still save Puff.
Speaker 5: When bad Boy came we was in the club, there
Speaker 5: was still a hint of having some type of consciousness,
Speaker 5: which means ten Crack Commandments is a conscious zone, right.
Speaker 5: It teaches you something. It might teach you the wrong thing,
Speaker 5: but it gives you some type of instruction.
Speaker 6: I've been in this game. It may be your animals
Speaker 6: us to rule.
Speaker 1: Ten Crack Commandments is a track from the Notorious Big
Speaker 1: from his album Life After Death. It was released in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven, and it's biggs manual on how to
Speaker 1: succeed at dealing drugs like number one, never let them
Speaker 1: know how much dough you hold or number six that
Speaker 1: goddamn credit debt. It While this might not be a
Speaker 1: deep exploration of societal issues up front, biggest talking about
Speaker 1: the practical ways to make it in this business.
Speaker 5: The hip hop at one point was instructional, whether it
Speaker 5: be about Safe six with Jimmy by Boogie Down Productions
Speaker 5: or the U N I T Y or I always
Speaker 5: say that one of the first versions of Beyonce's Lemonade
Speaker 5: and hip Hop from a Master Respectrum was looking at
Speaker 5: the front door by main source like he was really,
Speaker 5: you know, large professor was really going through it with
Speaker 5: his girl, and he was like, you treat me bad.
Speaker 5: I don't think I could take it anymore. I'm looking
Speaker 5: at the front door. It was political, but it was
Speaker 5: also instructional and informational. A lot of hip hop today
Speaker 5: doesn't give you any type of instruction whatsoever.
Speaker 1: We fight every night now that's not in that swift
Speaker 1: plus up when we was close sung and wake up
Speaker 1: to be rereadd.
Speaker 6: But argument again.
Speaker 1: I think we started to get into the instructions, but
Speaker 1: they're telling you left foot stomp and shuffled. But maybe
Speaker 1: one day we'll get back to it. Watch just watch Next.
Speaker 2: Hip Hop, the Next Man some good instructions. The stallion
Speaker 2: does get instrung and say put your hands on your hips.
Speaker 2: I feel like the only thing we're missing now is
Speaker 2: like hip hop, that's like, this is how you start
Speaker 2: at LLC. Let's take a break and when we come back,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about community and music, the culture of streaming,
Speaker 2: and the future of hip hop and hip hop education.
Speaker 2: We're back and we've been celebrating Black Music Month with
Speaker 2: Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 1: But before we jump back in with the two of them,
Speaker 1: let's talk about next week's lab. And next week's lab,
Speaker 1: we're talking all about linguistics with doctor John Bah the
Speaker 1: history accents, dialect, slang, and code switching that's done in
Speaker 1: the United States. All right, let's get back to the lab.
Speaker 1: Before the break, we were talking about messaging in hip hop.
Speaker 1: So we wanted to know what changed from the nineties
Speaker 1: to the two thousands to the twenty tens and why
Speaker 1: we hear less instructional messaging in hip hop. What's missing today?
Speaker 4: One of the things is missing is intimacy. And I
Speaker 4: don't think we can mistake intimacy for sex, because there's
Speaker 4: lots of sex in the music, but not intimacy. And
Speaker 4: I mean that on a bunch of levels. Ninth is
Speaker 4: talked about this in class. There was a time where
Speaker 4: we had to listen to music in community. There was
Speaker 4: a stereo system in the house. Everybody listened to the
Speaker 4: music at the same time. Your kids are in the car.
Speaker 4: I mean when my daughters were young, they were trapped
Speaker 4: in the car. They had the music taste that they
Speaker 4: have now because I played what I played and they
Speaker 4: had to listen now in the car, and each one
Speaker 4: of them is plugged into their own listening system.
Speaker 1: I remember as a child being just glued to the radio.
Speaker 1: My parents, we begged them for, you know, one of
Speaker 1: the little portable radios that you could have in your bedroom,
Speaker 1: and me and my sisters we would just lay in
Speaker 1: front of it and listen to it all day, especially
Speaker 1: in the summer and on the weekends, just listening to music.
Speaker 1: And then you know, do you remember the box? What's
Speaker 1: the box You could call in and put in a
Speaker 1: code and then it will play the music video. So
Speaker 1: then we went from you know, waiting to hear stuff
Speaker 1: on the radio station to watching the box and seeing
Speaker 1: different music videos. And then MTV and BT really took off,
Speaker 1: so then you could see all these different songs, music videos,
Speaker 1: you have CV behind the scenes making the music video,
Speaker 1: all these things like that. Remember when Napster first came
Speaker 1: on the scene and then you could just get all
Speaker 1: the music you didn't have to buy a CD. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that changed a lot. So there's the intimacy of listening
Speaker 1: to music with other people. But doctor Neil is also
Speaker 1: talking about the intimacy in music itself.
Speaker 4: I used to teach just Michael Jackson class, and if
Speaker 4: we tend when we think about Michael Jackson and Prince,
Speaker 4: we don't talk about the ballads, right, you know, And
Speaker 4: I'm like, I'm a big ballad dude, right. So we're
Speaker 4: listening to Lady in My Life, which I think is
Speaker 4: Michael Jackson's best ballot, maybe Butterflies, you know, on a
Speaker 4: good day. We're listening to the song, and what struck
Speaker 4: me is that they had no relationship to the music.
Speaker 6: Ie.
Speaker 4: They didn't know what to do with it. So I
Speaker 4: asked someone to give a demonstration to do a slow
Speaker 4: jam or grind like what my parents used to call it.
Speaker 4: And they had no idea what I'm talking about because
Speaker 4: they'd never slow danced. Intimacy them and music is like
Speaker 4: twerking or that's actually one of the examples that someone use.
Speaker 4: But the idea of a slow, intimate dance. I'm old
Speaker 4: enough to remember the sixth grade dance. You had to
Speaker 4: have a distance, right, It need to be a foot
Speaker 4: and a half two feet between you and the girl,
Speaker 4: and as you got older, you got to close that gap.
Speaker 4: But we got a bunch of young folks who never
Speaker 4: experienced that, and it plays out in terms of what
Speaker 4: they hear in the music, what they value in the music.
Speaker 1: When Mark Avanil says grind, it's not the grind that
Speaker 1: I think that y'all are talking about. The term grind
Speaker 1: has evolved over time to mean something a little bit different.
Speaker 1: But what he's talking about is just, you know, a
Speaker 1: slow song that couples would dance to. I just think
Speaker 1: it's really interesting how, you know, the way we consume music,
Speaker 1: and this is such a good point, how it affects
Speaker 1: the experience, the culture, you know, around music and music consumption.
Speaker 1: Ninth Wonder talks about how the digital landscape of music
Speaker 1: has affected the way we experience and discover music.
Speaker 5: Now there's no community when it comes to something that
Speaker 5: was created by the community. First of all, is not
Speaker 5: a turn on the factor. There's no let me let
Speaker 5: you hear this because you haven't heard it. It's not
Speaker 5: that because whether you know it or love it or not,
Speaker 5: every album in the world that comes out on streamings
Speaker 5: on your phone. As opposed to being in college and
Speaker 5: me walking by a room and somebody had the money
Speaker 5: that we to buy this new Peak Rocket Seil Smooth
Speaker 5: album that I couldn't get and I'm listening to it like, man,
Speaker 5: I'm broke, but he only wanted to get it. I'm
Speaker 5: gonna have to listen to it in his room until
Speaker 5: I get my refund check and then go to the
Speaker 5: mall and then buy it.
Speaker 1: Sharing music is a lot easier today. I think one
Speaker 1: way during the pandemic that we started sharing music with
Speaker 1: each other, having these communal experiences around music was versus
Speaker 1: versus was such a huge thing that happened during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: So Timbaland and Swiss Beats, they started inviting artists to
Speaker 1: share their music be a celebration of the music that
Speaker 1: they have put out, and everybody was locked in and
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed, you know, texting with friends and saying,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, I completely forgot all about this song
Speaker 1: and reading the comments as the verses was going on,
Speaker 1: and seeing what other people had to say, and seeing
Speaker 1: you know, celebrities being like this is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite songs, and I'm like, this is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite songs.
Speaker 5: That was the beauty about it, because now I went
Speaker 5: to an HBC Houston. When I go back to homecoming,
Speaker 5: every time I see somebody, I look in them by song.
Speaker 5: It's so crazy, like I see them by album. I'm like,
Speaker 5: hey man, we listen to Mob Deeper all the time.
Speaker 5: That's the first thing we say. Or when a party
Speaker 5: and I played the record and then somebody I went
Speaker 5: to school with thirty years ago would come up with
Speaker 5: that was our joint, Like you know what I mean,
Speaker 5: because either I heard it in his room or he
Speaker 5: heard it in my room. Either way, we are tied
Speaker 5: together forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there are some things if I was
Speaker 1: with somebody during a certain phase. You know, one of
Speaker 1: the musicians that I'm a big fan of, and we
Speaker 1: talk about it all the time. TT is the dream
Speaker 1: And I can't remember where I was when I heard
Speaker 1: I Love Your Girl for the first time and I
Speaker 1: was just getting an apartment, Like, oh my goodness, what
Speaker 1: a time, first apartment, what a time. Man. We're lucky, okay.
Speaker 1: And so one of my friends now, even when I
Speaker 1: see her, she's always making a reference to like purple kisses,
Speaker 1: and you know he was talking about lipstick and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. I mean, we were just eating it up, right,
Speaker 1: And so you think about those things, you know, and
Speaker 1: you remember where you were when you heard this music
Speaker 1: and when you heard it with different people.
Speaker 5: The album experience, right. The wonderful thing about this is
Speaker 5: it's tangible. We can hold it. That means we can
Speaker 5: collect it. It would kill us if somebody stole our
Speaker 5: album collection. Most kids with music is not a collection
Speaker 5: for them. It is an experience for us. It was
Speaker 5: a collection right when it comes to this tangible object,
Speaker 5: we had to play it from front to back.
Speaker 6: You can't shuffle this. You have to consume the whole thing.
Speaker 5: That's the thing I think this generation is missing out on,
Speaker 5: which is why they don't believe albums are important.
Speaker 6: Some do, some don't.
Speaker 5: Is because they have a chance to make their own
Speaker 5: playlist in a moment's notice or listen to somebody else's playlist,
Speaker 5: as opposed to me and you guys having to sit
Speaker 5: in front of the radio waiting for your song to
Speaker 5: come on and unpausing the tape, and then you might
Speaker 5: get some of the DJ talking, which you don't went
Speaker 5: on that at all. Is that kind of patience and
Speaker 5: waiting experience to hearing the song on the radio, so
Speaker 5: it's not out yet, you can't have it, and then
Speaker 5: a month later it comes out. But then it comes
Speaker 5: out on a single. Then you got to get the single,
Speaker 5: then you have to get another single, then the album
Speaker 5: comes out. And that was the way that hip hop
Speaker 5: didn't get so watered down. But of course the powers
Speaker 5: of beasts all this thing was a powerful thing and
Speaker 5: they made it for so much a commodity that got
Speaker 5: watered down, and now it doesn't hold the same shelf
Speaker 5: life as it used to.
Speaker 2: I mean, I feel like, yes, there are some people
Speaker 2: who are album purists, you know, and streaming has some drawbacks,
Speaker 2: but I think it also has some benefits. There's something
Speaker 2: magical about playlists, I think, and really, if somebody's able
Speaker 2: to curate and really get the vibes right DJ D
Speaker 2: Nice D Nice starting club Quarantine yup during the pandemic,
Speaker 2: that was special. Yeah, you know, And so I think
Speaker 2: everybody was able to kind of join his ig live
Speaker 2: and listen to him play song after song and really
Speaker 2: get the vibe and the energy going. And one of
Speaker 2: the things I really like doing is making playlists and
Speaker 2: sharing them with people. And I'm like, this is my
Speaker 2: waking up playlist to really get the day started.
Speaker 1: This is my winter playlist, and it's really special because
Speaker 1: you know, it's basically like, if you have access to
Speaker 1: Wi Fi, you have access to music. And like Ninth
Speaker 1: was saying, you know, if he didn't have the money,
Speaker 1: he wouldn't be able to listen to the album. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was part of the process, and you know how
Speaker 1: some of these ritualistic aspects of music consumption make you
Speaker 1: feel good. But some folks will never get that refund
Speaker 1: check and so they will never be able to listen
Speaker 1: to that album unless they're with somebody else. But now
Speaker 1: with streaming, everyone has the opportunity to engage and be
Speaker 1: impacted by music far and wide, and you also have
Speaker 1: the opportunity to discover so you can listen to music
Speaker 1: that's being put out. You know, in Germany you can
Speaker 1: listen to music that's being put out in Brazil you
Speaker 1: can listen to music that's being put out in Nigeria
Speaker 1: and be a part of these cultural explorations and expressions
Speaker 1: of what's going on at the time in different parts
Speaker 1: of the world. Well, one thing that's certain is that
Speaker 1: all of this is happening much much faster, oh, both
Speaker 1: the production and consumption of music, and sometimes it seems
Speaker 1: like this can have an impact on the longevity of
Speaker 1: an artist and their work.
Speaker 5: I asked my students all the time, how long do
Speaker 5: you consume an album? They say, ah, man, I'm done
Speaker 5: with it. I'm done with an artist in about four months.
Speaker 5: I'm moving on to somebody else. And I say, well,
Speaker 5: that's crazy, because I've been listening to The Day Losses
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty nine, you know what I mean. I don't
Speaker 5: think they will never experience that experience longevity with an artist,
Speaker 5: thing with an artist, watching an artist, I say, yoh,
Speaker 5: we waited for an our cast album every two years,
Speaker 5: and we're still waiting on the day they decide they
Speaker 5: want to do one. Dangelta made us wait fifteen years
Speaker 5: for an album. I don't think this generation will ever
Speaker 5: get a chance to experience it because everything moves so
Speaker 5: fast and it's on to the next so much and
Speaker 5: Lloyd's he is not there.
Speaker 1: It's wild because folks give Rihanna a hard time. Rihanna,
Speaker 1: when's the next album? What's the next album? Meanwhile, she's
Speaker 1: given us makeup, a baby, a fashion line, everything, a
Speaker 1: lot of things. And she also gave us like seven
Speaker 1: albums in eight years. That's a lot of albums, okay.
Speaker 1: And what folks don't realize is that Lauren Hill only
Speaker 1: gave us one. And you know that's fine with me. Lauren,
Speaker 1: take your time if she comes out another album, suh,
Speaker 1: it's over okay, But I'm not trying to rush it.
Speaker 1: You have to have patience.
Speaker 2: I think what you're raising is a really good point
Speaker 2: because not only has the loyalty that people feel towards
Speaker 2: artists changed, but their expectations and standards have too. Sometimes
Speaker 2: people have these really high expectations or we see like
Speaker 2: the super fan.
Speaker 1: I think we've always seen a lot of fans. I've
Speaker 1: seen people on Twitter talking about like, oh, I just
Speaker 1: listened to this album. It's top two, and I'm.
Speaker 2: Like, the album came out thirty six hours ago. It
Speaker 2: came out midnight, it's Saturday afternoon. The album came out
Speaker 2: Friday morning. As soon as the clock went from eleven
Speaker 2: to fifty nine on Thursday to midnight, you were able
Speaker 2: to stream it. You know, I'm not sure you can
Speaker 2: see an album that high and it hasn't even had
Speaker 2: two full days, right, it's still raw.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it hasn't even cooked yet. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: might be hot for right now, but you might have
Speaker 1: to cut that album open and it's raw on the
Speaker 1: inside needs to be put back in the oven. You know,
Speaker 1: I think we've been taking a look back. We've been
Speaker 1: looking back so much at history and saying these are
Speaker 1: the roots, these are the people that built the musical
Speaker 1: family tree for black music. But I'm really interested in
Speaker 1: what the future of music looks like, specifically hip hop
Speaker 1: and the recognition of hip hop and academia.
Speaker 5: I would challenge in our hip hop curriculum and what
Speaker 5: we teach is hip hop would beat the life out
Speaker 5: of any university in the country. The guests that we
Speaker 5: get to have my classes did their presentations and one
Speaker 5: of the class group presentations is on Rhymes the Coming
Speaker 5: And I had my phone on IG Live and guess
Speaker 5: who was watching Bust the Rhymes and Buster the Rhymes
Speaker 5: got on Live with me and told the class how
Speaker 5: much he loved the presentation.
Speaker 1: You really, can you imagine having bust to Rhymes sitting
Speaker 1: in on your lecture. We didn't have those guest speakers
Speaker 1: me either. Shoot, but doctor Neil also told us that
Speaker 1: the class can't be taught to the expectations of the students.
Speaker 4: We have to push them beyond that. So when folks
Speaker 4: asked me, it's like, well, what is the class about, Well,
Speaker 4: it is a portal into post World War two black
Speaker 4: life in the United States through hip hop. Right, So
Speaker 4: we're going to start the conversation with the nineteen sixty
Speaker 4: five Immigration Act, because without that there is.
Speaker 6: No hip hop. And so we spend two or three
Speaker 6: weeks on.
Speaker 4: The Cross Bronze Expressway, the Immigration Act, what's happening structurally
Speaker 4: in New York and other kinds of cities before we
Speaker 4: touch even one song, and kids are sitting in the
Speaker 4: class going, well, when we're gonna talk about jay Z,
Speaker 4: when we gonna talk about Drake right, when we're gonna
Speaker 4: talk about Kanye And truth be told, we could do
Speaker 4: a whole fifteen or sixteen weeks and never even get
Speaker 4: to talk about that stuff.
Speaker 1: So for a lot of these students, I guess what
Speaker 1: they're experiencing is that the classes and what they thought
Speaker 1: it was going to be, and learning the full context
Speaker 1: requires going back decades. Without these earlier historical milestones, There's
Speaker 1: no Drake, there is no Kanye, there is no jay Z,
Speaker 1: no Meg, no Eve, There's no Meg Meg, no City Girls, Okay,
Speaker 1: no Little Kim, no Foxy Brown, none of them. And
Speaker 1: it's really important to have scholars like doctor Neil and
Speaker 1: Ninth Wonder who are pushing the culture forward while also
Speaker 1: being historians of the culture. So I like to think of,
Speaker 1: you know, like guardians of the galaxy and the guardians
Speaker 1: of the hip hop galaxy.
Speaker 5: Right, Yes, I just believe that the petitioners of this
Speaker 5: culture need to teach it. The longtime fans turned scholars
Speaker 5: of this culture, Mark Anthony Neil, needs to teach it.
Speaker 5: We are the ones to have hip hop and scholarship
Speaker 5: in the same sentence, and we've done it from HBCUs
Speaker 5: to Ivy Leagues period.
Speaker 1: So hopefully that gave you something to think about when
Speaker 1: you're jamming to your playlist this summer, and maybe you'll
Speaker 1: listen out for references to other lyrics you've heard. Means
Speaker 1: that sound familiar. There's a lot to unpack in there, Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially in pop music.
Speaker 2: Yes, I encourage everybody to do a little bit of
Speaker 2: digging on whosample dot com to find out some of
Speaker 2: the references in some of your favorite songs. Absolutely, we've
Speaker 2: talked about quite a few things here t T and
Speaker 2: it made me ask myself a question. And I want
Speaker 2: to ask our listeners what's your favorite style of like
Speaker 2: integrating old music and new.
Speaker 1: Yes, we are super curious. So if you look into
Speaker 1: the Spotify app right now, you should the pole.
Speaker 2: So, Yes, I want to know what's your favorite style
Speaker 2: of integrating old music with new Is it sampling like
Speaker 2: when somebody takes a beat from an old song and
Speaker 2: puts it in a new one. Is it remixing, like
Speaker 2: when somebody takes the entire song and remixes the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Or is it lyrical callbacks like when somebody uses a
Speaker 2: lyric from an old song and takes that lyric and
Speaker 2: puts it in their song.
Speaker 1: The one thing we're sharing this week is an extensive playlist.
Speaker 1: Be sure to check it out. It'll be linked on
Speaker 1: our show notes page at Dope Labs podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: That's it for Lab sixty seven. I hope you learned
Speaker 1: something in this lab.
Speaker 2: If you have a song that has a hidden hip
Speaker 2: hop or jazz influencer reference, tell us about it. Call
Speaker 2: us at two zero two five six seven seven zero
Speaker 2: two eight and tell us what you thought, or give
Speaker 2: us an idea for a lab we should do this semester.
Speaker 2: We really like from you, So you can call or
Speaker 2: text us at two zero two five six seven seven
Speaker 2: zero two eight.
Speaker 1: And don't forget that there is so much more to
Speaker 1: dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap key
Speaker 1: for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes.
Speaker 1: Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it
Speaker 1: out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's
Speaker 1: guest experts, Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 2: You can find and follow them on Twitter at New
Speaker 2: black Man and at ninth Wonder. And you can find
Speaker 2: us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Lab Podcast.
Speaker 1: TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho,
Speaker 1: and you can find Zakia at z Said So. Dope
Speaker 1: Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Owned Media Group.
Speaker 1: Our producers are Jenny Rattlet Mass Lydia Smith and Izzy
Speaker 1: Ross of Wave Runner Studios. Our associate producer from mega
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