Humor can be a excellent source of critical power. The Saturday Night Live/ T-Pain sketch "I'm on a Boat" reveals a number of developments. A certain form of hip hop has been completely exhausted so that it is now just an easily reproduced shell that can carry any content... that is why the SNL video is so funny, it takes what was once a very advanced and difficult to reproduce cultural form and uses it to deliver absurd content. The video also reveals new developments in US racial constructs-- the video intensely mocks standard mainstream hip hop tropes without being racist.
The shell of the hip hop form exploited in the snl/t-pain sketch also reveals something about how the capitalist production process develops in general and around the arts and culture in particular. Marx explains that the capitalist production process has two major phases of development. The first he calls the "formal subsumption of labor to capital" and the second he calls "the real subsumption of labor to capital."
Take the example of shoe making. Shoe making begins as an artisan craft. Individuals make shoes-- there is no division of labor: a shoe maker produces the whole shoe by themselves. Under the formal subsumption the capitalist gathers all the shoe makers together and puts them under one roof. The shoe makers continue working as before, each worker makes the shoe from beginning to end, only now the capitalist takes the completed shoes and sells them. Sometimes this is called "commodification." Commosification is not really the problem in terms of art. The real problem is the real subsumption of labor to capital.
The real subsumption of labor comes next, in this phase the capitalist takes control of the production process itself. The capitalist watches how the shoes are made and then institutes a division of labor. The division of labor de-skills the workers, so that each one is only responsible for a limited aspect of the overall process. The division of labor is the first step in mechanization and this allows the capitalist to start to replace workers with machines.
The same thing happens with cultural production. Most cultural production begins with individual artists creating their work. Capital may then commodify the product and sell it. Take an extreme example. Bob Dylan developed his craft for years playing coffee houses and practicing. Capital only sells his music but they do not control the way it is produced. Sometime this is called "artistic control." But take someone like Tiffany or Britney Spears, they are not individually talented they are not even artists they are just a cog in the machine. They labor under the real subsumption of labor to capital and the capitalist controls the production process. Their music is not artistic production it is capitalist production.
You can usually tell when an artist has been really subsumed because their music sucks and odd things happen like orchestras appearing on country records. Duke Elington famously commmented that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. The difference is often in how that music is created and produced.
The SNL sketch shows that mainstream hip hop has been subsumed by capital. The song "I'm on a boat" just takes a song template for the capitalist production process and exposes it by inserting absurd lyrics. SNL has done serious artists a favor by striking a blow against the legitimacy of that template and they have opened a door for serious hip-hop artists to enter.
Are you sure this was SNL? I think these dudes have their own TV show. Or, at least, there was a pilot episode for one that I watched on the Internet. Awesometown, I think.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo39df-9588
http://www.thelonelyisland.com
KRS-One once sang "Rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live..." Waaay back in the day, nobody referred to the art form itself as "hip-hop." Everybody in the hood called it rap. I remember Baraka pointed that out in that speech he gave where he mentioned many old schools of black music and how capitalism permutated them into easily reproduceable templates for white consumers e.g. spirituals-barber shop quartets, jazz-fusion, Bob Marley reggae-Shabba Ranks!
ReplyDeletePersonally, I mark the end of rap (as I'm sure many in my generation and background do)with the deaths of Biggie and Tupac. I'm not really sure why, but as if it was to happen on cue, a Pandora's Box of awfulness unleashed itself soon after, i.e. the rise of Puffy and Jay-Z, Eminem's corny frat-hop, the talentless caricature that was 50-Cent, Kanye West and his PG-13 furry hop, and the resulting vacuum that would eventually get filled by all those terrible "Dirty South" acts. This video's a spot-on indictment of Crunk!
Rap is Dead, Long Live Crunk. -_-;
I watched the sketch on Saturday Night Live last week.
ReplyDeleteThe deaths of 2pac and Biggie were definitely losses but the underground scene still thrives no? dead prez, talib, Aesop rock, asian dub, fuse! etc. Anything that is static and unchanging is dead so hip hop has to develop.
Baraka does make the point that when the corporations take hold of the music they turn into shit, from Kenny G, Vanilla Ice, etc. but I think that when the style is so easily reproduced (by comedians) the lack of originality becomes painfully apparent, but that allows for new artist to emerge...
I agree that the underground scene is still jumping, but it's not what it used to be! IMO, underground rap was at it highest point during the 90's up until the unofficial markers of the 2Pac/Biggie murders. Back then you had folks like DITC, Fat Joe and Big Pun (before Joe sold out and started producing shitty club music), Leaders of the New School, Kurious Jorge, Jeru the Damaga, Keith Murray before he went commercial, Lord Finesse (better DJ than MC), and the unofficial king of 90's underground, Big L (he was on 2Pac's and Big's level imo).
ReplyDeleteIMO this whole decade's has some cultural malaise with rampant unoriginality as a result. Movie "remake" culture, hipster resurgence, Reaganomics, vampire/goth chic, the manga revolution, etc. It's very hard to point out worthy cultural markers apart from Chocolate Rain and Shepard Fairey's Obama image.
But I hold out some hope. I'm of the opinion with the rise of Obama, we'll begin going in new directions. It's starting to look that way, methinks. :)
Great post - I though tof this in terms of a discussion we had at study circle once about "black music" as we were tossing around the "Obama coalition" analyses...we kinda said that one reason black music has been so revolutionary (i.e. reinventive) is that 1. as blacks in certain areas/eras moved from simply oppressed to exploited (i.e. capital-ized), a new wave of music develops (the working-class is only revolutionary in that it is exploited - it is only exploited in that it can make profit/is in some way engaged in current and profitable production...otherwise, it is just a group of marginalized, oppressed people) and that this new wave and this capitalization coincides with/directly follows 2. "whitey catching up" with the music...This "crunk" was, as I've been told, once "alternative" to rap that was commercialized and is now commercialized itself...either way, this video is reflective of the larger cultural reality of the 2-step (or 2-part) process I describe above...I mean, many things are reflective of that, and mass culture such as SNL is "behind" - so none of us are surprised by a video like this, but nonetheless this type of analysis is now easier to discuss because we have all been experiencing/observing the capital-ization for a while....SO, where is the "new wave" gonna come from? Is it that as-of-yet-barely-commercialized-underground that has remained so for surprisingly long? ANyway - great stuff...good topic!!
ReplyDelete@winston: Well, "crunk" is a more modern subgenre of southern rap. Southern Rap's been around almost as long as East and West Coast Rap, e.g. 2LiveCrew based in Miami, but no one ever took it seriously or even bothered to designate a separate regional term for it (which led to some legendary beef between Dr. Dre and Uncle Luke after the release of The Chronic. youtube search "Cowards in Compton")
ReplyDeleteAgain, using the double murders as a marker, contemporary "Dirty South" started building commercial clout around that time, with acts like Master P and Lil Jon. "Alternative" is not necessarily an apt analogy for crunk since, from my limited understanding of white boy music ;), alternative was at least recognized as part of the mix to the point where the distinguishing term is debatable. Crunk is a hard subgenre, like Heavy Metal. And both are easily reproduced styles too. XD
Man, I'm yearning for some change...
DS makes an interesting point about the "easily reproducible" nature of both crunk and heavy metal. I was trying to argue that the reproducibility is not inherent in either genre but emerges over time and is a symptom of the staleness of the genre.
ReplyDeleteIn both cases --crunk and metal-- their weer early attempts by capital to reproduce the sounds that failed, and comedic attempts that also failed because the comedians had not mastered the genre (because it was not easy to do).
As I teenager I was a die-hard metal head (I got into hip hop because Anthrax promoted Public Enemy and eventually they did a version of "Bring the Noise" w/ Chuck D and Flavor Flav) but I saw many attempt to mock thrash metal ("kill your mother" was the favorite lyric of every would be mocker) fall flat, in some way that form (the speed and heaviness of the music) and the content were hard to separate and if you didn't get the content (which was never simply "kill your mother" even if classic lyrics included themes of fraticide, matricide, infanticide, the content was fundamentally rage at Reaganism) you couldn't master the form.
When those forms are exhausted (because something new needs to be said or the corporations have bled the genre or subsumed its innovators) they become easily reproduced.
====
In terms of the Afro-American tradition, I think those constant revolutions in the music which are not only within a genre or sub-genre but create whole new traditions of music (blues, Jazz, rhythm and blues/soul/rock, hip-hop) are born of necessity. Each new genre emerges as the freedom struggle enters a new stage and the forms of white supremacy/oppression change.
Hip Hop-emerges with the onset of neoliberalism in NYC. In 1975 NYC went bankrupt (because the banks refused to roll NYC's debt, the banks then established a dictatorship over the city (they created oversight boards so that any budget decided by the democratically elected mayor and city council had to be vetted by them first). The end result was that all social services were withdrawn and part of the city like the Bronx basically had no government services. Hip -Hop is the creation of the people to fill that void --
Something new must come, we must overthrow the power of the banks... that is the next stage of struggle.
You are not your Credit Score!