On that possible "reproducibility of hip hop" (Brian) by Winston

Yes. Michael Steele is keepin' it real. Well, trying to get real? Ugh...

More here.

Hip Hop is Dead, Long Live Hip Hop (Keith) by Keith

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.