June 23, 2022 • 57 mins
It’s Black Music Month! This week, Titi and Zakiya are celebrating Black music and getting into its history, culture, and politics. We’re diving into the roots of hip hop and jazz and tracing how Black music and artists have been at the forefront of music and popular culture. Guests: Professors Mark Anthony Neal & 9th Wonder. You can find more Dope Labs, show notes, and cheat sheets at dopelabspodcast.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's warm outside. It's cookout season. Oh yeah, and you
know I'm ready to gear up the playlists. Oh yes,
the playlist can make or break the vibes of any cookout. Anyone.
You put the wrong song in the wrong order, it's
a rap. Remember when we made a playlist, a cookout playlist. Yes,
you gave me a little bit of smoke. People gave
me a little bit of smoke because I was adding
(00:22):
some contemporary rap to the plays, like TT, You've got
this all the way messed up. And I was like,
y'all don't like a little dash of.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Some As my Auntie there A said, that's where the kickback. Okay,
the to be okay for all generations.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Fair, fair, fair. Some people didn't like my playlist. I
think that that's just fine. I'm open to criticism.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Well, it's a perfect time to think about the playlist
and the music you choose, and really the music all
around us. Because this month is Black Music Month, which
was formally recognized by the United States in nineteen seventy
nine with President Jimmy Carter. And I feel like it
took too long.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Okay, Yes, I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
This is Dope Labs.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science,
pop culture, and a healthy dost of friendship. It's Black
Music Month, so this week we're celebrating black music and
getting into the history, the culture, the politics, all of
it with some very special guests. We really wanted to
know more about the roots of hip hop and jazz
and how black music and artists have been at the
(01:52):
forefront of popular culture and what's next in music. Let's
get into the recitation. Okay, so what do we know?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Sometimes you'll hear people say black pop culture or black
culture is everywhere, and.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
It's not wrong. But I think we have the level
set when we talk about black music because terms and
phrases evolve over time and their meanings do too. Black
music is not just hip hop, rap and R and B.
When we say black music, we're referencing the history of
music created, performed, and celebrated by black artists and audiences.
(02:33):
We also know that black music is popular absolutely. I
think we also know that black music influences other genres
of music heavily. We know that you can draw lines
from rock and roll back to it being created by
black people. We also know music can be a tool
for politics and has been. There's a rich history of that,
(02:55):
tracing back to instructional messaging or whether it's obvious at
first glance or at first listen or not, reflections of struggle,
a way to carry on storytelling, particularly storytelling with political themes. Absolutely,
And I think another thing that we know is that
the hip hop rap scene used to be kind of
(03:17):
like a fringe genre where it was just like very
specific people. But now we see hip hop and rap
being incorporated into a lot of pop, so it's all
over the pop charts. Yeah, black culture is everywhere, like
straight up and down anyway you slice it one hundred.
So we understand all of that, and I think we
have accepted a lot of those things, the pervasive influence
(03:37):
of black culture in both black music and popular music,
really music all over, and it feels like that's often
taken for granted in society. But what do we want
to know specifically tit. I want to know the specific
influences that the black music of the past has on
to day's black music. Like I know it's there, we
(03:59):
know it's there, but I want to know in some
of the ways that might not be absolutely apparent to
all people that this is rooted in black culture.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, like you want the footnotes, yes, you want to
give me all the afran wants the citations, Okay. And
I'm really interested in not just the people, because sometimes
folks don't get credited, and we know how history can
be massaged, and so I'm interested in the sonic relationships
between the music we see today and earlier genres that
(04:31):
are still booming, like jazz and soul.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
And I'm really curious about how the messaging in hip
hop has changed in recent decades.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And if we look back, we got to look forward.
What's the future of black music looking like. We're seeing
increasing popularity, which also can invite this other cousin, which
is appropriation. And we're also seeing academia take a look
at hip.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Hop and black music.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
And so I think it's really interesting to to kind
of project and say what might it look like in
the next ten to twenty, maybe even fifty years.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Let's jump into the dissection. Our guests for today are
doctor Mark Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Mark Anthony Neil, James B. Duke, Distinguished Professor of African
African American Studies at Duke University. I am born and
raised from the place that we affectionately call the Bookie
Down Bronx, aka the home of hip hop.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
Ninth Wonder, producer, college professor, DJ Avid, basketball junkie, and
father of a French bulldog.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Doctor Neil and Ninth Wonder are both professors and Duke
University's African and African American Studies Department. Professor Neil also
teaches classes in English and gender, sexuality and feminist studies
and has published several books on Black popular culture and
Ninth Wonder is also a rapper, record executive and producer
who worked with Mary J. Blige, Jay Z Drake, Destiny's Child,
(06:12):
Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Eric Abadu, Mac Miller. The list
goes on and on and on.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
So when you look across the music genres, and you
don't even really have to look that deep, it becomes
really clear that Black musical artistry and its influence spans
so many different categories of music. So we can trace
back the spirituals and folk music to blues, to rock
and roll, the jazz, and then the hip hop.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
The roots of all of these.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Genres are steeped in black culture. We ask doctor Neil
to explain just how strong those roots are.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
It is everywhere we talk about classical music, right, and
we think about European cats with white wigs and Beethoven,
all those kind of folks, But that's not in the
music that originated in the US. America's classical music is
Black music, and most specifically, jazz music is America's classical
art form. There's very few examples of popular music in
(07:05):
the US in twenty twenty two that have not been
touched by the influence of black roots music. In some aspect,
it's been the soundtrack to not only black struggle, but
American struggle. It's been the soundtrack to American patriotism, whether
or not black folks wanted that to be the case
or not. And of course it is a soundtrack to
(07:26):
buying and selling in America.
Speaker 6 (07:28):
Right.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
You can't watch a McDonald's commercial or any other commercial
without some sort of reference to black musical styles in
that context.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Those are some really great points, especially about how classical
music in the United States is black music, and today's
popular music is at least influenced by black music and culture.
If it isn't that explicitly. It really is. Even what
he's saying about the McDonald's commercial that R and B
(07:56):
is not random behind them to night, It's really not.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
And what we're doing now is thinking about music as
this soundtrack to struggle or commerce or just everyday life.
And so it makes a lot of sense that music
can serve as a historical signpost for what's going on
in the culture.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Music is a signal, a capturing of things that are
going on in the culture. Right, So if you want
to know what's happening with black people, all you have
to do is listening to the music at any given error.
If you are marching from outer space and you landed
in nineteen sixty four and you heard Curtis Mayfield and
the Impression singing keep on Pushing, or you heard Sam
(08:36):
Cook singing the Change is going to come, or without
knowing what was going on, you would immediately know what
was going on in that moment.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Okay, stop. Not so many ways that stories or messages
get passed down, and music is one of those. And
when you look at music, there are so many ways
within music that we pass down stories and messages. And
we're going to get into that later. In the episod.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So, but first we wanted to take a closer look
at some of the foundational elements of black music and
trace how those ideas have evolved throughout genres over time.
Before we start tracing these I think we have to
acknowledge a major part of Black music that we're not
going to talk about TT right right, and that's the influence.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Of the Negro spiritual.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So when we think about musical devices, particularly African musical
devices that are part of Black American or African American culture,
So rhythms, melodies, and beats, that's what people who were
stolen from Africa, that's what they had. They kept what
they could of their culture, and we see that in
the music. And we definitely see that in like Negro
spirituals and that influence work songs, you know, the songs
(09:39):
people saying while they were working in fields and doing
this really hard labor. Gospel music and also in blues
and those things influenced jazz. I'm interested in that concept
of barring, remixing, sampling, referencing, and reframing that is integral
and intentional to Black music.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yes, that feels like the first brick of building the
house of hip hop, Doctor Neil breaks it down.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
So whenever you hear black music, you're hearing musicians very
consciously sampling and drawing from traditions that came before them.
If you're listening to Bebop in the nineteen forties, it's
a Childiebird Parker pulling a tune from Tin Pan Alley
and doing a little improvisation. Most of what we know
as hip hop is sample based hip hop, drawing specifically
(10:30):
from existing recorded music, and at least in the early
days of hip hop, that was specifically these things that
we call breakbeats, these kind of highly rhythmic parts, James
Brown probably being the most notable example of that tradition
and being able to extend them in a loop. At
the time, it was a DJ right who was doing
the loop. These days, obviously it's all kind of tech
(10:52):
machines and samplers.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Set up, thanks set up. It makes a lot of
sense that funk and soul has a huge impact on
hip hop. A lot of the elements from funk and
soul show up in hip hop. James Brown, aka the
Godfather of Soul, is the most sample artist of all time.
(11:15):
And then the drum break improvised by Clyde Stubblefield, who
often worked with James Brown, and he's on James Brown
song Funky Drummer is one of the most sampled songs
in hip hop. The name of those tunes up on Drama,
imp on your drama. It's such a connected web.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Once you start looking at how many times somebody has
been sampled, you know you have to ask her.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Are you talking about just sampling the beat?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Are you talking about sampling the lyrics and quoting those right?
Are you talking about, you know, covering somebody song exactly?
And when it comes to James Brown, all of the above,
you know all of the above. And the really big
thing to note is that if he's a most sampled artist,
that the second most sampled artist.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
The group is not even close, not even half of
the amount of times that he's been sampled.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Basically, what we hear now is often a refabrication of
sounds and sites and things that we heard before. Everybody
lost their mind listening to Silk Sonic some new song
and I'm like, well, you know that's a love train, right.
I'm like, well, I've been listening to the original love
Train right for forty years by Confunction, So everything that's
new is not new.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Got a listen. Confunction did it first.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And I love Bruno and Anderson aka djp Wee a lot,
but it's hard to fight confunction. Confunction ran so that
they could hobble behind them. So you know, we can
trace the connection between soul, funk, and R and B
to hip hop. But there's also this connection between jazz
(12:57):
and hip hop. Two ninth Wonder, along with a musicians
Robert Glasper, Ters Martin and Kamasi Washington, released an album
recently called Dinner Party. And this is an album that
really shows explicit connection between jazz and hip hop, But
(13:20):
what about some of those earlier influences where we see
some of that same borrowing from jazz.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
One of the reasons why myself, Kamasi, Robert Glasper and
Tares Martin did Dinner Party was to show that kind
of bridge it's always been there because you got some
jazz cats that don't really job with hip hop like that,
but you have some new age hip hoppers that know
nothing about jazz, and we were trying to show in
a section of the two.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
So there's the sampling of music, but then there's also
musical influence on lyrical delivery.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
When the idea of rap flow started to change, like
in the early eighties, you know, the Curtis Blows and
the Houdini's and all of them had the same type
of you know rap flow, Prince Twish and Braks to
but when Rock Kim came along, he made the distinct
(14:10):
relation to I get a lot of my flows from
John Coltrane, how he plays the sax, and also the
notorious Big said, I listened to Max Roach. There was
a older gentleman in his neighborhood who played him Max
Roach records, and he learned different syncopations and different rhythms
with his voice.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Max Roach was a drummer and composer, and he's known
as a pioneer of bebop and one of the most
important drummers of all time.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
You know, like doctor Neil said, Rock Kim kind of
changed things. We went from Curtis Blow with these are
the breaks, You're like, what felt like kind of stiff rapping,
and then we went to kind of floey rapping with
Rock Kim and someone who's even more recent, who really
should be credited if he hasn't been enough for his
(15:01):
ability to kind of change the course of hip hop
is q.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Tip ram truck, what as sea bull point something with
a gold rode ain't nothing the r I'm the hood
with it. Ninth highlights q Tip, who is a solo
artist and also a member of a tricoll Quest.
Speaker 6 (15:18):
I teach you hip Hop production class and one of
the guests we had on Zoom one day was q Tip.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
From a trib Call quest A trib Call Quest. It
sound and the musical contributions of the individual members had
a huge fingerprint on music transitioning in the late eighties
to nineties.
Speaker 6 (15:33):
I wanted to know.
Speaker 5 (15:34):
Why in the late eighties hip hop shifted from a
lot of soul sampling a lot of James Brown, James Brown,
James Brown, to Les McCann and Roy ayres right and
q Tip is like the genesis of that, q Tip said,
man I grew up in a neighborhood around Weldon Irvine,
and I'm like, what, like what is that?
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Like?
Speaker 5 (15:53):
Weldon Irvine and a lot of jazz cast that he
grew up around influenced the sound that change of generation.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Weldon Irvine was a musician and artists. He's most known
for his song Morning Sunrise, which came out in nineteen
seventy nine, and that sampled on Jay Z's track Dear
Summer and that came out in two thousand and five.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
He was a mentor to many hip hop artists in
New York as well as Nina Simone's musical director. So
you know that's big, just that.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
Texture of music.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
We call him top of the family tree because with
our Q tip, you don't have common most quality, badu jail,
little brother, slum village, the roots outcast, like I can
go a whole family tree of people that doesn't exist
because of Q tip. And it's all because he started
to dig into roy Airs more than he started digging
to James Brown.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And so that gives us this transition from music that
sounded off funky and chopped up like James Brown with
the funky drummer, to a much smoother sound with Roy Airs.
Speaker 6 (17:05):
I say everything begins with Benita Applebum.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Benita apple Bum, like sound wise became the genesis of
every laid back hip hop song that you know.
Speaker 6 (17:15):
Benita Applebum is the one.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
Banina alta Appaum said to kind of put me on
Beanina Alpam, And that's a roy Airs produced group called Ramp.
It's that feel good time for euphorias. So from the
way we rhyme to the textures that we use like
jazz is it. And on top of that, jazz and
hip hop leans on one thing together and that's improvisation.
(17:41):
It's all about making stuff up. This is the sixties
and your cold trained the loneliest monk on stage as
the mother cast, Charlieburry Parker and that having like a
quintet session. You couldn't get up on that stage unless
you were ready to be able to hang with that
particular jam session. It's the same thing with them seeing
if you you see Black Thought, Royster five nine, Rhapsody Nas,
(18:05):
some of the greatest worstments of our time on stage
in a cipher. If you want to call yourself an
MC and get your chops up, you better be ready
to get on stage and get in the cipher and
don't break the cipher.
Speaker 6 (18:16):
But definitely hip.
Speaker 5 (18:17):
Hop bars a lot from jazz with that kind of
like vetting system of guards. System is like a badger
honor almost you can't be called one of us unless
you do this.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
So now we're talking about hip hop borrowing from jazz
in both musical sampling and in the delivery of rap
flow lyrical flow. And then also we're talking about hip
hop borrowing from jazz in the process of kind of
like this writes a passage about who gets to be
called it, who gets to be called a jazz musician,
who gets to be called a hip hop artist. It
(18:48):
feels really heavily layered. Hip hop is Black music, and
it's also some of the most popular music in our culture.
Like we said earlier, black music is American music, just
like black culture is American culture. I think we're seeing
that more and more today with the growing influence of
hip hop on popular culture.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Hip hop has now become scared for a lot of
people to say, but if hip hop is not Americana,
especially because of the consumption of streams and the music business,
but also by the fashion, by the talk, by the slang.
More and more each day I see other racists saying
things that we made up in the street is everywhere,
(19:26):
will continue to be everywhere. People are already fascinated with
black bodies anyway, they're definitely fascinated with black rappers still
to this day that so many older white men they
are fascinated that if they know a young black rapper
like it puts them in a different space. The thing
I see a lot of people say is street crib.
It's always been a part of America and it's going
(19:49):
to continue to grow when more enlightened people get older,
especially young white Americans that like the Jimmy Fallers of
the world, and who has the roots as there Tonight's
show bands right, all the casts on Sports Center who
didn't grow up listening to Johnny Cash or grew up
listening to nas I mean, what do we.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Do with that.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
It's not even just older white men's America. Yeah, it's
in general. It's like, hey, I know this thing. I mean,
we see it all over social media where folks are
using African American English and not using it correctly a
lot of the time, and they feel like it's a
way to give themselves streetcred, like just to make themselves cooler.
(20:29):
But what they're trying to do is get as close
to black as as they can without being black.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
I knew things were really changing when it was the
Oscars I think of last year, and it was Glenn Close.
They asked her about DC Go Go and she started
talking about junk yard band and backyard band.
Speaker 6 (20:44):
And rare asses, and I'm like, look at this man.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
This is placed in one of the whitest spaces ever,
the Oscars, and just that type of thing shows you
that in order to be cool, in order to be creative,
in order to be on the cutting edge, you got
to know what black people are doing.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
And you know, we can't talk about these things without
talking about people who have been a part of this culture,
who have listened to this music, being outcasts or excluded
from things because they identified in this way, you know,
And that kind of gets us into like the cultural
appropriation of music and the culture that goes along with
black music. It's like who gets recognized, who gets credit?
Speaker 5 (21:20):
And the thing about us that we still haven't figured out,
and we're just so free with our creative property or
intellectual property that it can be taken in a moment's
notice and put somewhere else. With so giving is people
we want to share what everybody not knowing it is
being taken from us every time.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Yeah, in the excitement, a lot of things get shared,
and that's how we get back to that cycle of
sharing versus then who's getting credit for these things who's
creating versus who's leveraging opportunities from the creation. Even recently,
Bad Bunny he has a hit called sapphi Era, and
part of the problem was is that he used some
(21:58):
of the beat from Me Elliott's two thousand and one
hit get Your Free Gone. We all know, Get Your
Free Gone, and didn't credit her, and so it was
never properly cleared with Missy and her team. So it's
a really long story. We'll put more about that in
the show notes, But this is something that is still
pervasive today. Culture is political, and music has definitely been
(22:21):
used as a political tool to reflect on current struggles,
to call for revolution, or to even imagine different realities
like what life could be like. We asked Professor Neil
and ninth Wonder to walk us through some monumental songs
throughout history that have been signpost for what's going on
politically in history. Doctor Neil starts with Billy Holliday Billy.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Holliday nineteen thirty nine, Strange Fruit, talking about the practice
of lynching, which folks thought was coming to an end.
What clearly in twenty twenty two, you know, yesterday's mass
lynchings have become today's mass shootings.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Mass strange, true blood only.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
So.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Billy Holliday was a jazz singer, and she was known
for her distinctive vocal style, which was inspired by jazz
instrumentalists like Louis Armstrong and another well known jazz singer,
Bessie Smith. Just recently we saw Billy Holliday's life and
the contributions of her music and what it meant politically
really kind of thrust into the spotlight with Audre Day
(23:27):
doing the film The United States Versus Billy Holliday, and
I was really surprised at just how involved the government
was in the message that Billy Holliday was delivering through
her music. I didn't know that absolutely. I thought it
was really eye opening the entire film, because when we
talk about Billie Holliday today, you know, we just talk
(23:49):
about the music, but the politics was such a major,
major part of it. And so what we saw with
Billy Holliday, which was basically protest through song, is something
we see throughout history in black music.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Nina Simone talking about Mississippi Goddamn, talking about you know,
anti black violence in the South, a song that she
wrote immediately after the bombing of the sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Alabama's gotten me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest,
and everybody knows about missus damn. The sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham had been a center or hub for
civil rights organizing, and on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three,
the KKK members planted dynamite under the steps, and that
(24:36):
attack killed four girls and injured fourteen to twenty two
other people. And this happened just two weeks after the
March on Washington and Martin Luther's King's I have a
dream speech, So fast forward nineteen sixty four. Nina Simone
releases Mississippi Goddamn, and she's referencing what's happening in these states.
And I know I said in nineteen sixty four. You
(24:56):
may be asking, is it twenty twenty four?
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Right?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Alabama has gotten me so upset. Tennessee's made me lose
my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi. She wrote this
song immediately after the bombing, and the song is in
direct response to the attack and other white supremacist violence
targeting black people across the South, and so that includes
the assassination of Medgar Evers, who was fighting the end
segregation in public schools, securing voting rights and other rights
(25:22):
for black people.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Doctor Neil also mentioned Sam Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come,
which was also released in December of the same year
as Nina Simone's song.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Sam Cooks The Change Is Gonna Come. Right, this idea
that in the midst of everything that was going on,
right the death Somthaga Evers to deaths, you know, shortly
after that of Malcolm X, you know that folks are
hoping and wishing for something to change.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
It's been a lot a long time coming.
Speaker 6 (25:55):
Come.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
There's a movie that captures the importance of Sam Cook's
A Change Is Going To Come, and it talks about
this meeting of some other black leaders, Sam Cook, Malcolm X,
Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
All of them met together in February nineteen sixty four,
and Regina King recently made a movie about it called
One Night in Miami. It just shows like the struggle,
like it shows people are figuring out, like what's going
to go in my music? Do people just want to
hear feel good music? I'm torn.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
These things are happening in my community, right, and I
think a lot of artists are facing that, like what
goes in my work versus what's for me, you know, right.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
I mean we saw that shift. We talked about Beyonce
a lot, but we saw that shift with Beyonce and
her music where at a certain point in her career
she decided that she did want to become more political
with the messaging in her music. And that's when we
had you know, lemonade, Black Is King and things like that.
And I think all of this is really important, t T.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Because when we consider the turmoil, the violence against black
folks and then the protest music that we just talked about,
you know, this is the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
So we're talking about these things happening in nineteen sixty four.
And the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
In July nineteen sixty four, right, And the Civil Rights Act,
the purpose of it was it outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex,
and national origins. It also prohibits unequal application of voter
registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and
employment discrimination. And this was a huge landmark for legislation.
(27:27):
That's July nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
You move a couple months later, we're at February nineteen
sixty five and Malcolm X is assassinated in the audobamb
Ballroom in New York and his death really escalated the
Black power movement. In this revolutionary movement that was really
active in the sixties and seventies and very similar to
the Civil Rights movement. It advocated for, you know, economic, social,
(27:51):
and cultural empowerment for black folks, but it differed a
little bit in the support of more militant approaches to
achieving those goals, and that was really embraced by like
the Black Panther Party organization US in the Republic of
New Africa.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Throughout history, black artists have always found ways to find
joy and celebrate the milestones along the way amid loss
and struggle.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
I mean, James Brown, right, I'm black and I'm proud
right that this moment where folks could be fully in
public and black and not have to worry about them
being punished for expressing what they felt.
Speaker 6 (28:31):
At the time.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On Right, the Quintessential Protests
album Right created as this kind of holistic suite that
spoke to every aspect of what we're dealing with.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
There's too many of you try, you know, Marvin Gay
started out as a crooner. You know, I see the
guys on Instagram trying to wear the little red Marvin
Gay had. But by nineteen seventy one, well, he released
What's going On. We're at the height of the Vietnam War,
and you can hear him grappling with what the country
is going through and what black people are experiencing during
(29:10):
this time.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Talking about the environment, talking about an anti war movement,
talking about black politics, talking about poverty in the ghetto. Right,
he managed to get all of that into a thirty
five minute record.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Doctor Neil also talked about how this music was so
personal to him as well as so many black kids
growing up as these records were being recorded and released.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
The time that I came of age listening to the
message in nineteen eighty two Grand Master Flash and the
Furious Five and this detailed analysis of the hood that
I knew that I was growing up with, right, that
so many people in the world didn't know of. And
this was a time when everybody was calling you know,
when they folks thought about hip hop, all they thought
about or rap music, all they thought about was partying. Bullshit.
(29:51):
Grandmaster Flash and Melly Mel made a whole bunch of
party in Bullshit records that we'd love to this day.
But then they dropped this sociological jam in the Message.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Probably glass everywhere, people pissing on the stage, you know
that just don't care. I can't take the smout, I
can't take the noise. Got no money to move on?
I guess I got no charge, you know. I think
we see this with a lot of artists.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
They might come out with, you know, kind of a
party song or a fun upbeat, and then they're like, Okay,
I have a platform, I have a voice.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
There's something I want to say. So similar to what
we saw with Marvin Gaye. H you see grand Master
Flash in the Furious five shifting a little bit with
the message, that's right. In nineteen eighty two, they released
a song called The Message, and the lyrics describe poverty
in the inner city struggle, and it was one of
the first songs in hip hop that addressed those issues
head on. This political and social commentary was influential to
(30:41):
the growth of consciousness.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
Even Run DMC, a group did we never think about
as being political, could drop a song like It's Like That,
which again talked about the politics of what everyday black
life was. And then definitely for me my generation, anything
that Public Dnomy touched between nineteen eighty six right to
nineteen ninety two has to be on that list.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yes, Ren DMC and Public Enemy were both part of
the new school of hip hop, which you know you
kind of see really growing around the mid nineteen eighties.
Public Enemy built on the foundation that was laid by
Grand Master Flash. In a Furious five talking about this
radical political ideology, doctor Neil lists additional songs and albums
that fit that same mold.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Rebel without a Pause, Fight the Powers, and one that
stands out. But that album, you know, it takes a
nation of millions to hold us back, and don't believe
the hyphe I mean, it just changed everything. The politics
were radical, the images were radical, the sounds were radical,
the sampling techniques were radical.
Speaker 5 (31:39):
We got to fight the.
Speaker 6 (31:42):
Fight the power.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
It's really fascinating to see that radical political message was
mirrored in the sounds and musical techniques that these artists used.
Ninth Wonder also shared his experiences of coming of age
during this period of music, a time when social and
political consciousness was at the forefront of hip hop.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
Neil is older than me, and you don't like to
say that, but he's older than I am. And I
always like to gloat and revel in the fact that
I was able to enjoy consciousness in hip hop at
the age I got a chance to enjoy it, which
is every kid's formidable years. It takes a nation meetings.
(32:25):
The Hold Is Back came out when I was thirteen.
There You Go the year before a show debut on
TV called A Different World. In nineteen eighty eight, Spike
Lee released School Days. In nineteen eighty nine, Spike re
released Do the Right Thing.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
So what Ninth Wonder is highlighting is not just the
music but also the culture. We're talking about television now
and movies. A Different World was a classic.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Honestly, we talked about a Different World in our Black
History Month episode with X and School Days too. Different
World and School Days and about how it really showcased
aside of black culture that wasn't necessarily always showcased on television.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Absolutely, I think one of the things that I loved
about those shows is they were funny. They were giving
me this glimpse into like, oh wow, this is what
college is like. And I'm watching them years later, right
and still they feel relevant. But they're also talking about
issues like sexual assault, HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yes, when Freddy was almost sexual assaulted and Dwyane Wade
jumped to the roof of the car to beat up
the guy, these are moments that you will never forget
and it addresses those issues head on and gives you
the tools as young people to know how to deal
with those situations. So that's like mid to late eighties,
and then we moved right at that cusp of like
(33:43):
eighty eight to ninety two. I would say hip hop
is doing a lot of things at that point. So
before we were talking about the East Coast, but the
West Coast is also on the map. Straight out account
It's crazy.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
Quitudes show always say you know NNBA put our straight
out of Compton, Queen Latifa put out All Hell, The
Queen Jungle Brothers done by the Fortress of Nature, Daylight, Soul,
three feet High and Rising a Tribe call Quest People's
exinctive travels in the past of Rhythm I'm fourteen years old,
like I am in heaven, Like this is black black
(34:18):
black black, black, black black black black. Not only it's black,
but it's also Pan Africanism. Then you got Kara ris
One and booge Down productions. Then you have Kin saying
Oslama Lakam. You have Rokkim call himself rock him Ala.
Like now you have an intersection of Southern black Christian
board learning about Islam at age thirteen fourteen.
Speaker 6 (34:39):
This was an amazing time for me and my friends.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
That's wild. I mean, imagine being able to be of
the age where you can understand what's going on, you
kind of understand what's going on in the world, and
you can understand what's going on in the music and
be able to absorb those political and social messages of
the music as it was being released.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Man, you know, I can remember folks wearing like my
older cousins wearing those like big necklaces that had the
symbol of Africa and it was like red, black and green,
and it makes me think about brands like cross colors.
Even the clothes that people were wearing and things that
had the fist on them. I mean, it was just
pan Africanism was a global movement and hip hop was.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
In it absolutely.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
And you know, when you think about who's driving culture,
who's saying this is what's in the musicians were doing that,
and so it feels fitting that they have a place
right there is some of the disseminators of political messaging.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
So far, we've seen hip hop evolve from something that
wasn't explicitly political to a genre that really had consciousness
at its heart. But this period of consciousness and hip
hop didn't last forever.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
Sometimes we like to tell the young generation that, oh,
we were just so political. The only problem is became
a hard realization for me that the high point and
consciousness in hip hop on a surface level, which means
a level that wasn't considered underground, that you can find it,
you didn't have to dig for it probably only lasted
like three or four years eighty eight to like I'll say,
(36:13):
by ninety two, because once Doctor Dre and Snoop, when
the chronic came, it was over.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
Like it was who you can forget it?
Speaker 1 (36:19):
One, two, three and tough Folk, Snoop, Doggie Dog and
Doctor Drake is at the dope and it not making
it trench so Bad Go No.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
This time period that Ninth Wonder is talking about falls
within what many refer to as the Golden Age of
hip hop, so from the mid eighties to their early
to mid nineties. Ninth tells us that things kind of
changed when Bad Boy Records came on the scene. Bad
Boy was founded in nineteen ninety three by Sean P.
Diddy Combs Well Diddy or Puff Daddy Brother Love.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Brother Love, Sean Love Combs, Puffy. So many names, so
many names still save Puff.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
When bad Boy came we was in the club, there
was still a hint of having some type of consciousness,
which means ten Crack Commandments is a conscious zone, right.
It teaches you something. It might teach you the wrong thing,
but it gives you some type of instruction.
Speaker 6 (37:15):
I've been in this game. It may be your animals
us to rule.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Ten Crack Commandments is a track from the Notorious Big
from his album Life After Death. It was released in
nineteen ninety seven, and it's biggs manual on how to
succeed at dealing drugs like number one, never let them
know how much dough you hold or number six that
goddamn credit debt. It While this might not be a
deep exploration of societal issues up front, biggest talking about
(37:43):
the practical ways to make it in this business.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
The hip hop at one point was instructional, whether it
be about Safe six with Jimmy by Boogie Down Productions
or the U N I T Y or I always
say that one of the first versions of Beyonce's Lemonade
and hip Hop from a Master Respectrum was looking at
the front door by main source like he was really,
you know, large professor was really going through it with
his girl, and he was like, you treat me bad.
(38:08):
I don't think I could take it anymore. I'm looking
at the front door. It was political, but it was
also instructional and informational. A lot of hip hop today
doesn't give you any type of instruction whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
We fight every night now that's not in that swift
plus up when we was close sung and wake up
to be rereadd.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
But argument again.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
I think we started to get into the instructions, but
they're telling you left foot stomp and shuffled. But maybe
one day we'll get back to it. Watch just watch Next.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Hip Hop, the Next Man some good instructions. The stallion
does get instrung and say put your hands on your hips.
I feel like the only thing we're missing now is
like hip hop, that's like, this is how you start
at LLC. Let's take a break and when we come back,
we'll talk about community and music, the culture of streaming,
(39:03):
and the future of hip hop and hip hop education.
(39:25):
We're back and we've been celebrating Black Music Month with
Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
But before we jump back in with the two of them,
let's talk about next week's lab. And next week's lab,
we're talking all about linguistics with doctor John Bah the
history accents, dialect, slang, and code switching that's done in
the United States. All right, let's get back to the lab.
Before the break, we were talking about messaging in hip hop.
(39:52):
So we wanted to know what changed from the nineties
to the two thousands to the twenty tens and why
we hear less instructional messaging in hip hop. What's missing today?
Speaker 4 (40:01):
One of the things is missing is intimacy. And I
don't think we can mistake intimacy for sex, because there's
lots of sex in the music, but not intimacy. And
I mean that on a bunch of levels. Ninth is
talked about this in class. There was a time where
we had to listen to music in community. There was
a stereo system in the house. Everybody listened to the
(40:22):
music at the same time. Your kids are in the car.
I mean when my daughters were young, they were trapped
in the car. They had the music taste that they
have now because I played what I played and they
had to listen now in the car, and each one
of them is plugged into their own listening system.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
I remember as a child being just glued to the radio.
My parents, we begged them for, you know, one of
the little portable radios that you could have in your bedroom,
and me and my sisters we would just lay in
front of it and listen to it all day, especially
in the summer and on the weekends, just listening to music.
And then you know, do you remember the box? What's
(40:59):
the box You could call in and put in a
code and then it will play the music video. So
then we went from you know, waiting to hear stuff
on the radio station to watching the box and seeing
different music videos. And then MTV and BT really took off,
so then you could see all these different songs, music videos,
you have CV behind the scenes making the music video,
(41:20):
all these things like that. Remember when Napster first came
on the scene and then you could just get all
the music you didn't have to buy a CD. Yeah,
that changed a lot. So there's the intimacy of listening
to music with other people. But doctor Neil is also
talking about the intimacy in music itself.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
I used to teach just Michael Jackson class, and if
we tend when we think about Michael Jackson and Prince,
we don't talk about the ballads, right, you know, And
I'm like, I'm a big ballad dude, right. So we're
listening to Lady in My Life, which I think is
Michael Jackson's best ballot, maybe Butterflies, you know, on a
good day. We're listening to the song, and what struck
(42:07):
me is that they had no relationship to the music.
Speaker 6 (42:10):
Ie.
Speaker 4 (42:11):
They didn't know what to do with it. So I
asked someone to give a demonstration to do a slow
jam or grind like what my parents used to call it.
And they had no idea what I'm talking about because
they'd never slow danced. Intimacy them and music is like
twerking or that's actually one of the examples that someone use.
But the idea of a slow, intimate dance. I'm old
(42:32):
enough to remember the sixth grade dance. You had to
have a distance, right, It need to be a foot
and a half two feet between you and the girl,
and as you got older, you got to close that gap.
But we got a bunch of young folks who never
experienced that, and it plays out in terms of what
they hear in the music, what they value in the music.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
When Mark Avanil says grind, it's not the grind that
I think that y'all are talking about. The term grind
has evolved over time to mean something a little bit different.
But what he's talking about is just, you know, a
slow song that couples would dance to. I just think
it's really interesting how, you know, the way we consume music,
and this is such a good point, how it affects
(43:12):
the experience, the culture, you know, around music and music consumption.
Ninth Wonder talks about how the digital landscape of music
has affected the way we experience and discover music.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
Now there's no community when it comes to something that
was created by the community. First of all, is not
a turn on the factor. There's no let me let
you hear this because you haven't heard it. It's not
that because whether you know it or love it or not,
every album in the world that comes out on streamings
(43:43):
on your phone. As opposed to being in college and
me walking by a room and somebody had the money
that we to buy this new Peak Rocket Seil Smooth
album that I couldn't get and I'm listening to it like, man,
I'm broke, but he only wanted to get it. I'm
gonna have to listen to it in his room until
I get my refund check and then go to the
(44:05):
mall and then buy it.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Sharing music is a lot easier today. I think one
way during the pandemic that we started sharing music with
each other, having these communal experiences around music was versus
versus was such a huge thing that happened during the pandemic.
So Timbaland and Swiss Beats, they started inviting artists to
(44:27):
share their music be a celebration of the music that
they have put out, and everybody was locked in and
I really enjoyed, you know, texting with friends and saying,
oh my gosh, I completely forgot all about this song
and reading the comments as the verses was going on,
and seeing what other people had to say, and seeing
you know, celebrities being like this is one of my
(44:49):
favorite songs, and I'm like, this is one of my
favorite songs.
Speaker 5 (44:52):
That was the beauty about it, because now I went
to an HBC Houston. When I go back to homecoming,
every time I see somebody, I look in them by song.
It's so crazy, like I see them by album. I'm like,
hey man, we listen to Mob Deeper all the time.
That's the first thing we say. Or when a party
and I played the record and then somebody I went
to school with thirty years ago would come up with
(45:13):
that was our joint, Like you know what I mean,
because either I heard it in his room or he
heard it in my room. Either way, we are tied
together forever.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yeah, I think there are some things if I was
with somebody during a certain phase. You know, one of
the musicians that I'm a big fan of, and we
talk about it all the time. TT is the dream
And I can't remember where I was when I heard
I Love Your Girl for the first time and I
was just getting an apartment, Like, oh my goodness, what
a time, first apartment, what a time. Man. We're lucky, okay.
(45:47):
And so one of my friends now, even when I
see her, she's always making a reference to like purple kisses,
and you know he was talking about lipstick and stuff
like that. I mean, we were just eating it up, right,
And so you think about those things, you know, and
you remember where you were when you heard this music
and when you heard it with different people.
Speaker 5 (46:05):
The album experience, right. The wonderful thing about this is
it's tangible. We can hold it. That means we can
collect it. It would kill us if somebody stole our
album collection. Most kids with music is not a collection
for them. It is an experience for us. It was
a collection right when it comes to this tangible object,
we had to play it from front to back.
Speaker 6 (46:26):
You can't shuffle this. You have to consume the whole thing.
Speaker 5 (46:30):
That's the thing I think this generation is missing out on,
which is why they don't believe albums are important.
Speaker 6 (46:36):
Some do, some don't.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
Is because they have a chance to make their own
playlist in a moment's notice or listen to somebody else's playlist,
as opposed to me and you guys having to sit
in front of the radio waiting for your song to
come on and unpausing the tape, and then you might
get some of the DJ talking, which you don't went
on that at all. Is that kind of patience and
waiting experience to hearing the song on the radio, so
(47:00):
it's not out yet, you can't have it, and then
a month later it comes out. But then it comes
out on a single. Then you got to get the single,
then you have to get another single, then the album
comes out. And that was the way that hip hop
didn't get so watered down. But of course the powers
of beasts all this thing was a powerful thing and
they made it for so much a commodity that got
watered down, and now it doesn't hold the same shelf
(47:21):
life as it used to.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
I mean, I feel like, yes, there are some people
who are album purists, you know, and streaming has some drawbacks,
but I think it also has some benefits. There's something
magical about playlists, I think, and really, if somebody's able
to curate and really get the vibes right DJ D
Nice D Nice starting club Quarantine yup during the pandemic,
that was special. Yeah, you know, And so I think
(47:43):
everybody was able to kind of join his ig live
and listen to him play song after song and really
get the vibe and the energy going. And one of
the things I really like doing is making playlists and
sharing them with people. And I'm like, this is my
waking up playlist to really get the day started.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
This is my winter playlist, and it's really special because
you know, it's basically like, if you have access to
Wi Fi, you have access to music. And like Ninth
was saying, you know, if he didn't have the money,
he wouldn't be able to listen to the album. Yes,
that was part of the process, and you know how
some of these ritualistic aspects of music consumption make you
(48:22):
feel good. But some folks will never get that refund
check and so they will never be able to listen
to that album unless they're with somebody else. But now
with streaming, everyone has the opportunity to engage and be
impacted by music far and wide, and you also have
the opportunity to discover so you can listen to music
(48:42):
that's being put out. You know, in Germany you can
listen to music that's being put out in Brazil you
can listen to music that's being put out in Nigeria
and be a part of these cultural explorations and expressions
of what's going on at the time in different parts
of the world. Well, one thing that's certain is that
all of this is happening much much faster, oh, both
(49:05):
the production and consumption of music, and sometimes it seems
like this can have an impact on the longevity of
an artist and their work.
Speaker 5 (49:15):
I asked my students all the time, how long do
you consume an album? They say, ah, man, I'm done
with it. I'm done with an artist in about four months.
I'm moving on to somebody else. And I say, well,
that's crazy, because I've been listening to The Day Losses
nineteen eighty nine, you know what I mean. I don't
think they will never experience that experience longevity with an artist,
thing with an artist, watching an artist, I say, yoh,
(49:36):
we waited for an our cast album every two years,
and we're still waiting on the day they decide they
want to do one. Dangelta made us wait fifteen years
for an album. I don't think this generation will ever
get a chance to experience it because everything moves so
fast and it's on to the next so much and
Lloyd's he is not there.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
It's wild because folks give Rihanna a hard time. Rihanna,
when's the next album? What's the next album? Meanwhile, she's
given us makeup, a baby, a fashion line, everything, a
lot of things. And she also gave us like seven
albums in eight years. That's a lot of albums, okay.
And what folks don't realize is that Lauren Hill only
(50:13):
gave us one. And you know that's fine with me. Lauren,
take your time if she comes out another album, suh,
it's over okay, But I'm not trying to rush it.
You have to have patience.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
I think what you're raising is a really good point
because not only has the loyalty that people feel towards
artists changed, but their expectations and standards have too. Sometimes
people have these really high expectations or we see like
the super fan.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
I think we've always seen a lot of fans. I've
seen people on Twitter talking about like, oh, I just
listened to this album. It's top two, and I'm.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
Like, the album came out thirty six hours ago. It
came out midnight, it's Saturday afternoon. The album came out
Friday morning. As soon as the clock went from eleven
to fifty nine on Thursday to midnight, you were able
to stream it. You know, I'm not sure you can
see an album that high and it hasn't even had
two full days, right, it's still raw.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Yeah, you know, it hasn't even cooked yet. Yeah, it
might be hot for right now, but you might have
to cut that album open and it's raw on the
inside needs to be put back in the oven. You know,
I think we've been taking a look back. We've been
looking back so much at history and saying these are
the roots, these are the people that built the musical
(51:37):
family tree for black music. But I'm really interested in
what the future of music looks like, specifically hip hop
and the recognition of hip hop and academia.
Speaker 5 (51:47):
I would challenge in our hip hop curriculum and what
we teach is hip hop would beat the life out
of any university in the country. The guests that we
get to have my classes did their presentations and one
of the class group presentations is on Rhymes the Coming
And I had my phone on IG Live and guess
who was watching Bust the Rhymes and Buster the Rhymes
got on Live with me and told the class how
(52:09):
much he loved the presentation.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
You really, can you imagine having bust to Rhymes sitting
in on your lecture. We didn't have those guest speakers
me either. Shoot, but doctor Neil also told us that
the class can't be taught to the expectations of the students.
Speaker 4 (52:31):
We have to push them beyond that. So when folks
asked me, it's like, well, what is the class about, Well,
it is a portal into post World War two black
life in the United States through hip hop. Right, So
we're going to start the conversation with the nineteen sixty
five Immigration Act, because without that there is.
Speaker 6 (52:50):
No hip hop. And so we spend two or three
weeks on.
Speaker 4 (52:53):
The Cross Bronze Expressway, the Immigration Act, what's happening structurally
in New York and other kinds of cities before we
touch even one song, and kids are sitting in the
class going, well, when we're gonna talk about jay Z,
when we gonna talk about Drake right, when we're gonna
talk about Kanye And truth be told, we could do
a whole fifteen or sixteen weeks and never even get
(53:15):
to talk about that stuff.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
So for a lot of these students, I guess what
they're experiencing is that the classes and what they thought
it was going to be, and learning the full context
requires going back decades. Without these earlier historical milestones, There's
no Drake, there is no Kanye, there is no jay Z,
no Meg, no Eve, There's no Meg Meg, no City Girls, Okay,
(53:38):
no Little Kim, no Foxy Brown, none of them. And
it's really important to have scholars like doctor Neil and
Ninth Wonder who are pushing the culture forward while also
being historians of the culture. So I like to think of,
you know, like guardians of the galaxy and the guardians
of the hip hop galaxy.
Speaker 5 (53:57):
Right, Yes, I just believe that the petitioners of this
culture need to teach it. The longtime fans turned scholars
of this culture, Mark Anthony Neil, needs to teach it.
We are the ones to have hip hop and scholarship
in the same sentence, and we've done it from HBCUs
to Ivy Leagues period.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
So hopefully that gave you something to think about when
you're jamming to your playlist this summer, and maybe you'll
listen out for references to other lyrics you've heard. Means
that sound familiar. There's a lot to unpack in there, Yeah,
especially in pop music.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
Yes, I encourage everybody to do a little bit of
digging on whosample dot com to find out some of
the references in some of your favorite songs. Absolutely, we've
talked about quite a few things here t T and
it made me ask myself a question. And I want
to ask our listeners what's your favorite style of like
integrating old music and new.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Yes, we are super curious. So if you look into
the Spotify app right now, you should the pole.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
So, Yes, I want to know what's your favorite style
of integrating old music with new Is it sampling like
when somebody takes a beat from an old song and
puts it in a new one. Is it remixing, like
when somebody takes the entire song and remixes the whole thing.
Or is it lyrical callbacks like when somebody uses a
lyric from an old song and takes that lyric and
puts it in their song.
Speaker 1 (55:25):
The one thing we're sharing this week is an extensive playlist.
Be sure to check it out. It'll be linked on
our show notes page at Dope Labs podcast dot com.
That's it for Lab sixty seven. I hope you learned
something in this lab.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
If you have a song that has a hidden hip
hop or jazz influencer reference, tell us about it. Call
us at two zero two five six seven seven zero
two eight and tell us what you thought, or give
us an idea for a lab we should do this semester.
We really like from you, So you can call or
text us at two zero two five six seven seven
zero two eight.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
And don't forget that there is so much more to
dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap key
for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes.
Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it
out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's
guest experts, Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 2 (56:23):
You can find and follow them on Twitter at New
black Man and at ninth Wonder. And you can find
us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Lab Podcast.
Speaker 1 (56:33):
TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho,
and you can find Zakia at z Said So. Dope
Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Owned Media Group.
Our producers are Jenny Rattlet Mass Lydia Smith and Izzy
Ross of Wave Runner Studios. Our associate producer from mega
Owmedia is Brianna Garrett. Editing and sound design by Rob Smerciak,
(56:56):
Mixing by Hannes Brown. Original music composed and produced by
Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Executive producer Corin
Gilliard and creative producer Miguel Contreras. Special thanks to Shirley Ramos,
Jess Borrison, Jasmine Afifi, Kamu Elolia, Till krat Key, and
Brian Marquis. Executive producers from Mega Own Media Group are
(57:19):
us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattley. I was
trying to tie Beyonce to Lyndon B. Johnson another b
Lyndon B. Johnson
It's warm outside. It's cookout season. Oh yeah, and you
know I'm ready to gear up the playlists. Oh yes,
the playlist can make or break the vibes of any cookout. Anyone.
You put the wrong song in the wrong order, it's
a rap. Remember when we made a playlist, a cookout playlist. Yes,
you gave me a little bit of smoke. People gave
me a little bit of smoke because I was adding
(00:22):
some contemporary rap to the plays, like TT, You've got
this all the way messed up. And I was like,
y'all don't like a little dash of.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Some As my Auntie there A said, that's where the kickback. Okay,
the to be okay for all generations.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Fair, fair, fair. Some people didn't like my playlist. I
think that that's just fine. I'm open to criticism.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Well, it's a perfect time to think about the playlist
and the music you choose, and really the music all
around us. Because this month is Black Music Month, which
was formally recognized by the United States in nineteen seventy
nine with President Jimmy Carter. And I feel like it
took too long.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Okay, Yes, I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
This is Dope Labs.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science,
pop culture, and a healthy dost of friendship. It's Black
Music Month, so this week we're celebrating black music and
getting into the history, the culture, the politics, all of
it with some very special guests. We really wanted to
know more about the roots of hip hop and jazz
and how black music and artists have been at the
(01:52):
forefront of popular culture and what's next in music. Let's
get into the recitation. Okay, so what do we know?
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Sometimes you'll hear people say black pop culture or black
culture is everywhere, and.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
It's not wrong. But I think we have the level
set when we talk about black music because terms and
phrases evolve over time and their meanings do too. Black
music is not just hip hop, rap and R and B.
When we say black music, we're referencing the history of
music created, performed, and celebrated by black artists and audiences.
(02:33):
We also know that black music is popular absolutely. I
think we also know that black music influences other genres
of music heavily. We know that you can draw lines
from rock and roll back to it being created by
black people. We also know music can be a tool
for politics and has been. There's a rich history of that,
(02:55):
tracing back to instructional messaging or whether it's obvious at
first glance or at first listen or not, reflections of struggle,
a way to carry on storytelling, particularly storytelling with political themes. Absolutely,
And I think another thing that we know is that
the hip hop rap scene used to be kind of
(03:17):
like a fringe genre where it was just like very
specific people. But now we see hip hop and rap
being incorporated into a lot of pop, so it's all
over the pop charts. Yeah, black culture is everywhere, like
straight up and down anyway you slice it one hundred.
So we understand all of that, and I think we
have accepted a lot of those things, the pervasive influence
(03:37):
of black culture in both black music and popular music,
really music all over, and it feels like that's often
taken for granted in society. But what do we want
to know specifically tit. I want to know the specific
influences that the black music of the past has on
to day's black music. Like I know it's there, we
(03:59):
know it's there, but I want to know in some
of the ways that might not be absolutely apparent to
all people that this is rooted in black culture.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yeah, like you want the footnotes, yes, you want to
give me all the afran wants the citations, Okay. And
I'm really interested in not just the people, because sometimes
folks don't get credited, and we know how history can
be massaged, and so I'm interested in the sonic relationships
between the music we see today and earlier genres that
(04:31):
are still booming, like jazz and soul.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
And I'm really curious about how the messaging in hip
hop has changed in recent decades.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And if we look back, we got to look forward.
What's the future of black music looking like. We're seeing
increasing popularity, which also can invite this other cousin, which
is appropriation. And we're also seeing academia take a look
at hip.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Hop and black music.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
And so I think it's really interesting to to kind
of project and say what might it look like in
the next ten to twenty, maybe even fifty years.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Let's jump into the dissection. Our guests for today are
doctor Mark Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
Mark Anthony Neil, James B. Duke, Distinguished Professor of African
African American Studies at Duke University. I am born and
raised from the place that we affectionately call the Bookie
Down Bronx, aka the home of hip hop.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
Ninth Wonder, producer, college professor, DJ Avid, basketball junkie, and
father of a French bulldog.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Doctor Neil and Ninth Wonder are both professors and Duke
University's African and African American Studies Department. Professor Neil also
teaches classes in English and gender, sexuality and feminist studies
and has published several books on Black popular culture and
Ninth Wonder is also a rapper, record executive and producer
who worked with Mary J. Blige, Jay Z Drake, Destiny's Child,
(06:12):
Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Eric Abadu, Mac Miller. The list
goes on and on and on.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
So when you look across the music genres, and you
don't even really have to look that deep, it becomes
really clear that Black musical artistry and its influence spans
so many different categories of music. So we can trace
back the spirituals and folk music to blues, to rock
and roll, the jazz, and then the hip hop.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
The roots of all of these.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Genres are steeped in black culture. We ask doctor Neil
to explain just how strong those roots are.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
It is everywhere we talk about classical music, right, and
we think about European cats with white wigs and Beethoven,
all those kind of folks, But that's not in the
music that originated in the US. America's classical music is
Black music, and most specifically, jazz music is America's classical
art form. There's very few examples of popular music in
(07:05):
the US in twenty twenty two that have not been
touched by the influence of black roots music. In some aspect,
it's been the soundtrack to not only black struggle, but
American struggle. It's been the soundtrack to American patriotism, whether
or not black folks wanted that to be the case
or not. And of course it is a soundtrack to
(07:26):
buying and selling in America.
Speaker 6 (07:28):
Right.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
You can't watch a McDonald's commercial or any other commercial
without some sort of reference to black musical styles in
that context.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Those are some really great points, especially about how classical
music in the United States is black music, and today's
popular music is at least influenced by black music and culture.
If it isn't that explicitly. It really is. Even what
he's saying about the McDonald's commercial that R and B
(07:56):
is not random behind them to night, It's really not.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
And what we're doing now is thinking about music as
this soundtrack to struggle or commerce or just everyday life.
And so it makes a lot of sense that music
can serve as a historical signpost for what's going on
in the culture.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Music is a signal, a capturing of things that are
going on in the culture. Right, So if you want
to know what's happening with black people, all you have
to do is listening to the music at any given error.
If you are marching from outer space and you landed
in nineteen sixty four and you heard Curtis Mayfield and
the Impression singing keep on Pushing, or you heard Sam
(08:36):
Cook singing the Change is going to come, or without
knowing what was going on, you would immediately know what
was going on in that moment.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Okay, stop. Not so many ways that stories or messages
get passed down, and music is one of those. And
when you look at music, there are so many ways
within music that we pass down stories and messages. And
we're going to get into that later. In the episod.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
So, but first we wanted to take a closer look
at some of the foundational elements of black music and
trace how those ideas have evolved throughout genres over time.
Before we start tracing these I think we have to
acknowledge a major part of Black music that we're not
going to talk about TT right right, and that's the influence.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Of the Negro spiritual.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
So when we think about musical devices, particularly African musical
devices that are part of Black American or African American culture,
So rhythms, melodies, and beats, that's what people who were
stolen from Africa, that's what they had. They kept what
they could of their culture, and we see that in
the music. And we definitely see that in like Negro
spirituals and that influence work songs, you know, the songs
(09:39):
people saying while they were working in fields and doing
this really hard labor. Gospel music and also in blues
and those things influenced jazz. I'm interested in that concept
of barring, remixing, sampling, referencing, and reframing that is integral
and intentional to Black music.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yes, that feels like the first brick of building the
house of hip hop, Doctor Neil breaks it down.
Speaker 4 (10:07):
So whenever you hear black music, you're hearing musicians very
consciously sampling and drawing from traditions that came before them.
If you're listening to Bebop in the nineteen forties, it's
a Childiebird Parker pulling a tune from Tin Pan Alley
and doing a little improvisation. Most of what we know
as hip hop is sample based hip hop, drawing specifically
(10:30):
from existing recorded music, and at least in the early
days of hip hop, that was specifically these things that
we call breakbeats, these kind of highly rhythmic parts, James
Brown probably being the most notable example of that tradition
and being able to extend them in a loop. At
the time, it was a DJ right who was doing
the loop. These days, obviously it's all kind of tech
(10:52):
machines and samplers.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Set up, thanks set up. It makes a lot of
sense that funk and soul has a huge impact on
hip hop. A lot of the elements from funk and
soul show up in hip hop. James Brown, aka the
Godfather of Soul, is the most sample artist of all time.
(11:15):
And then the drum break improvised by Clyde Stubblefield, who
often worked with James Brown, and he's on James Brown
song Funky Drummer is one of the most sampled songs
in hip hop. The name of those tunes up on Drama,
imp on your drama. It's such a connected web.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Once you start looking at how many times somebody has
been sampled, you know you have to ask her.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Are you talking about just sampling the beat?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Are you talking about sampling the lyrics and quoting those right?
Are you talking about, you know, covering somebody song exactly?
And when it comes to James Brown, all of the above,
you know all of the above. And the really big
thing to note is that if he's a most sampled artist,
that the second most sampled artist.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
The group is not even close, not even half of
the amount of times that he's been sampled.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Basically, what we hear now is often a refabrication of
sounds and sites and things that we heard before. Everybody
lost their mind listening to Silk Sonic some new song
and I'm like, well, you know that's a love train, right.
I'm like, well, I've been listening to the original love
Train right for forty years by Confunction, So everything that's
new is not new.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Got a listen. Confunction did it first.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And I love Bruno and Anderson aka djp Wee a lot,
but it's hard to fight confunction. Confunction ran so that
they could hobble behind them. So you know, we can
trace the connection between soul, funk, and R and B
to hip hop. But there's also this connection between jazz
(12:57):
and hip hop. Two ninth Wonder, along with a musicians
Robert Glasper, Ters Martin and Kamasi Washington, released an album
recently called Dinner Party. And this is an album that
really shows explicit connection between jazz and hip hop, But
(13:20):
what about some of those earlier influences where we see
some of that same borrowing from jazz.
Speaker 5 (13:26):
One of the reasons why myself, Kamasi, Robert Glasper and
Tares Martin did Dinner Party was to show that kind
of bridge it's always been there because you got some
jazz cats that don't really job with hip hop like that,
but you have some new age hip hoppers that know
nothing about jazz, and we were trying to show in
a section of the two.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
So there's the sampling of music, but then there's also
musical influence on lyrical delivery.
Speaker 5 (13:49):
When the idea of rap flow started to change, like
in the early eighties, you know, the Curtis Blows and
the Houdini's and all of them had the same type
of you know rap flow, Prince Twish and Braks to
but when Rock Kim came along, he made the distinct
(14:10):
relation to I get a lot of my flows from
John Coltrane, how he plays the sax, and also the
notorious Big said, I listened to Max Roach. There was
a older gentleman in his neighborhood who played him Max
Roach records, and he learned different syncopations and different rhythms
with his voice.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Max Roach was a drummer and composer, and he's known
as a pioneer of bebop and one of the most
important drummers of all time.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
You know, like doctor Neil said, Rock Kim kind of
changed things. We went from Curtis Blow with these are
the breaks, You're like, what felt like kind of stiff rapping,
and then we went to kind of floey rapping with
Rock Kim and someone who's even more recent, who really
should be credited if he hasn't been enough for his
(15:01):
ability to kind of change the course of hip hop
is q.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Tip ram truck, what as sea bull point something with
a gold rode ain't nothing the r I'm the hood
with it. Ninth highlights q Tip, who is a solo
artist and also a member of a tricoll Quest.
Speaker 6 (15:18):
I teach you hip Hop production class and one of
the guests we had on Zoom one day was q Tip.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
From a trib Call quest A trib Call Quest. It
sound and the musical contributions of the individual members had
a huge fingerprint on music transitioning in the late eighties
to nineties.
Speaker 6 (15:33):
I wanted to know.
Speaker 5 (15:34):
Why in the late eighties hip hop shifted from a
lot of soul sampling a lot of James Brown, James Brown,
James Brown, to Les McCann and Roy ayres right and
q Tip is like the genesis of that, q Tip said,
man I grew up in a neighborhood around Weldon Irvine,
and I'm like, what, like what is that?
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Like?
Speaker 5 (15:53):
Weldon Irvine and a lot of jazz cast that he
grew up around influenced the sound that change of generation.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Weldon Irvine was a musician and artists. He's most known
for his song Morning Sunrise, which came out in nineteen
seventy nine, and that sampled on Jay Z's track Dear
Summer and that came out in two thousand and five.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
He was a mentor to many hip hop artists in
New York as well as Nina Simone's musical director. So
you know that's big, just that.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
Texture of music.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
We call him top of the family tree because with
our Q tip, you don't have common most quality, badu jail,
little brother, slum village, the roots outcast, like I can
go a whole family tree of people that doesn't exist
because of Q tip. And it's all because he started
to dig into roy Airs more than he started digging
to James Brown.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
And so that gives us this transition from music that
sounded off funky and chopped up like James Brown with
the funky drummer, to a much smoother sound with Roy Airs.
Speaker 6 (17:05):
I say everything begins with Benita Applebum.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Benita apple Bum, like sound wise became the genesis of
every laid back hip hop song that you know.
Speaker 6 (17:15):
Benita Applebum is the one.
Speaker 5 (17:18):
Banina alta Appaum said to kind of put me on
Beanina Alpam, And that's a roy Airs produced group called Ramp.
It's that feel good time for euphorias. So from the
way we rhyme to the textures that we use like
jazz is it. And on top of that, jazz and
hip hop leans on one thing together and that's improvisation.
(17:41):
It's all about making stuff up. This is the sixties
and your cold trained the loneliest monk on stage as
the mother cast, Charlieburry Parker and that having like a
quintet session. You couldn't get up on that stage unless
you were ready to be able to hang with that
particular jam session. It's the same thing with them seeing
if you you see Black Thought, Royster five nine, Rhapsody Nas,
(18:05):
some of the greatest worstments of our time on stage
in a cipher. If you want to call yourself an
MC and get your chops up, you better be ready
to get on stage and get in the cipher and
don't break the cipher.
Speaker 6 (18:16):
But definitely hip.
Speaker 5 (18:17):
Hop bars a lot from jazz with that kind of
like vetting system of guards. System is like a badger
honor almost you can't be called one of us unless
you do this.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
So now we're talking about hip hop borrowing from jazz
in both musical sampling and in the delivery of rap
flow lyrical flow. And then also we're talking about hip
hop borrowing from jazz in the process of kind of
like this writes a passage about who gets to be
called it, who gets to be called a jazz musician,
who gets to be called a hip hop artist. It
(18:48):
feels really heavily layered. Hip hop is Black music, and
it's also some of the most popular music in our culture.
Like we said earlier, black music is American music, just
like black culture is American culture. I think we're seeing
that more and more today with the growing influence of
hip hop on popular culture.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Hip hop has now become scared for a lot of
people to say, but if hip hop is not Americana,
especially because of the consumption of streams and the music business,
but also by the fashion, by the talk, by the slang.
More and more each day I see other racists saying
things that we made up in the street is everywhere,
(19:26):
will continue to be everywhere. People are already fascinated with
black bodies anyway, they're definitely fascinated with black rappers still
to this day that so many older white men they
are fascinated that if they know a young black rapper
like it puts them in a different space. The thing
I see a lot of people say is street crib.
It's always been a part of America and it's going
(19:49):
to continue to grow when more enlightened people get older,
especially young white Americans that like the Jimmy Fallers of
the world, and who has the roots as there Tonight's
show bands right, all the casts on Sports Center who
didn't grow up listening to Johnny Cash or grew up
listening to nas I mean, what do we.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Do with that.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
It's not even just older white men's America. Yeah, it's
in general. It's like, hey, I know this thing. I mean,
we see it all over social media where folks are
using African American English and not using it correctly a
lot of the time, and they feel like it's a
way to give themselves streetcred, like just to make themselves cooler.
(20:29):
But what they're trying to do is get as close
to black as as they can without being black.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
I knew things were really changing when it was the
Oscars I think of last year, and it was Glenn Close.
They asked her about DC Go Go and she started
talking about junk yard band and backyard band.
Speaker 6 (20:44):
And rare asses, and I'm like, look at this man.
Speaker 5 (20:46):
This is placed in one of the whitest spaces ever,
the Oscars, and just that type of thing shows you
that in order to be cool, in order to be creative,
in order to be on the cutting edge, you got
to know what black people are doing.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
And you know, we can't talk about these things without
talking about people who have been a part of this culture,
who have listened to this music, being outcasts or excluded
from things because they identified in this way, you know,
And that kind of gets us into like the cultural
appropriation of music and the culture that goes along with
black music. It's like who gets recognized, who gets credit?
Speaker 5 (21:20):
And the thing about us that we still haven't figured out,
and we're just so free with our creative property or
intellectual property that it can be taken in a moment's
notice and put somewhere else. With so giving is people
we want to share what everybody not knowing it is
being taken from us every time.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Yeah, in the excitement, a lot of things get shared,
and that's how we get back to that cycle of
sharing versus then who's getting credit for these things who's
creating versus who's leveraging opportunities from the creation. Even recently,
Bad Bunny he has a hit called sapphi Era, and
part of the problem was is that he used some
(21:58):
of the beat from Me Elliott's two thousand and one
hit get Your Free Gone. We all know, Get Your
Free Gone, and didn't credit her, and so it was
never properly cleared with Missy and her team. So it's
a really long story. We'll put more about that in
the show notes, But this is something that is still
pervasive today. Culture is political, and music has definitely been
(22:21):
used as a political tool to reflect on current struggles,
to call for revolution, or to even imagine different realities
like what life could be like. We asked Professor Neil
and ninth Wonder to walk us through some monumental songs
throughout history that have been signpost for what's going on
politically in history. Doctor Neil starts with Billy Holliday Billy.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Holliday nineteen thirty nine, Strange Fruit, talking about the practice
of lynching, which folks thought was coming to an end.
What clearly in twenty twenty two, you know, yesterday's mass
lynchings have become today's mass shootings.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Mass strange, true blood only.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
So.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Billy Holliday was a jazz singer, and she was known
for her distinctive vocal style, which was inspired by jazz
instrumentalists like Louis Armstrong and another well known jazz singer,
Bessie Smith. Just recently we saw Billy Holliday's life and
the contributions of her music and what it meant politically
really kind of thrust into the spotlight with Audre Day
(23:27):
doing the film The United States Versus Billy Holliday, and
I was really surprised at just how involved the government
was in the message that Billy Holliday was delivering through
her music. I didn't know that absolutely. I thought it
was really eye opening the entire film, because when we
talk about Billie Holliday today, you know, we just talk
(23:49):
about the music, but the politics was such a major,
major part of it. And so what we saw with
Billy Holliday, which was basically protest through song, is something
we see throughout history in black music.
Speaker 4 (24:00):
Nina Simone talking about Mississippi Goddamn, talking about you know,
anti black violence in the South, a song that she
wrote immediately after the bombing of the sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Alabama's gotten me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest,
and everybody knows about missus damn. The sixteenth Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham had been a center or hub for
civil rights organizing, and on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three,
the KKK members planted dynamite under the steps, and that
(24:36):
attack killed four girls and injured fourteen to twenty two
other people. And this happened just two weeks after the
March on Washington and Martin Luther's King's I have a
dream speech, So fast forward nineteen sixty four. Nina Simone
releases Mississippi Goddamn, and she's referencing what's happening in these states.
And I know I said in nineteen sixty four. You
(24:56):
may be asking, is it twenty twenty four?
Speaker 4 (24:59):
Right?
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Alabama has gotten me so upset. Tennessee's made me lose
my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi. She wrote this
song immediately after the bombing, and the song is in
direct response to the attack and other white supremacist violence
targeting black people across the South, and so that includes
the assassination of Medgar Evers, who was fighting the end
segregation in public schools, securing voting rights and other rights
(25:22):
for black people.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Doctor Neil also mentioned Sam Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come,
which was also released in December of the same year
as Nina Simone's song.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Sam Cooks The Change Is Gonna Come. Right, this idea
that in the midst of everything that was going on,
right the death Somthaga Evers to deaths, you know, shortly
after that of Malcolm X, you know that folks are
hoping and wishing for something to change.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
It's been a lot a long time coming.
Speaker 6 (25:55):
Come.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
There's a movie that captures the importance of Sam Cook's
A Change Is Going To Come, and it talks about
this meeting of some other black leaders, Sam Cook, Malcolm X,
Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
All of them met together in February nineteen sixty four,
and Regina King recently made a movie about it called
One Night in Miami. It just shows like the struggle,
like it shows people are figuring out, like what's going
to go in my music? Do people just want to
hear feel good music? I'm torn.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
These things are happening in my community, right, and I
think a lot of artists are facing that, like what
goes in my work versus what's for me, you know, right.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
I mean we saw that shift. We talked about Beyonce
a lot, but we saw that shift with Beyonce and
her music where at a certain point in her career
she decided that she did want to become more political
with the messaging in her music. And that's when we
had you know, lemonade, Black Is King and things like that.
And I think all of this is really important, t T.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Because when we consider the turmoil, the violence against black
folks and then the protest music that we just talked about,
you know, this is the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
So we're talking about these things happening in nineteen sixty four.
And the Civil Rights Act was passed.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
In July nineteen sixty four, right, And the Civil Rights Act,
the purpose of it was it outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex,
and national origins. It also prohibits unequal application of voter
registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and
employment discrimination. And this was a huge landmark for legislation.
(27:27):
That's July nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
You move a couple months later, we're at February nineteen
sixty five and Malcolm X is assassinated in the audobamb
Ballroom in New York and his death really escalated the
Black power movement. In this revolutionary movement that was really
active in the sixties and seventies and very similar to
the Civil Rights movement. It advocated for, you know, economic, social,
(27:51):
and cultural empowerment for black folks, but it differed a
little bit in the support of more militant approaches to
achieving those goals, and that was really embraced by like
the Black Panther Party organization US in the Republic of
New Africa.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Throughout history, black artists have always found ways to find
joy and celebrate the milestones along the way amid loss
and struggle.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
I mean, James Brown, right, I'm black and I'm proud
right that this moment where folks could be fully in
public and black and not have to worry about them
being punished for expressing what they felt.
Speaker 6 (28:31):
At the time.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On Right, the Quintessential Protests
album Right created as this kind of holistic suite that
spoke to every aspect of what we're dealing with.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
There's too many of you try, you know, Marvin Gay
started out as a crooner. You know, I see the
guys on Instagram trying to wear the little red Marvin
Gay had. But by nineteen seventy one, well, he released
What's going On. We're at the height of the Vietnam War,
and you can hear him grappling with what the country
is going through and what black people are experiencing during
(29:10):
this time.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Talking about the environment, talking about an anti war movement,
talking about black politics, talking about poverty in the ghetto. Right,
he managed to get all of that into a thirty
five minute record.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Doctor Neil also talked about how this music was so
personal to him as well as so many black kids
growing up as these records were being recorded and released.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
The time that I came of age listening to the
message in nineteen eighty two Grand Master Flash and the
Furious Five and this detailed analysis of the hood that
I knew that I was growing up with, right, that
so many people in the world didn't know of. And
this was a time when everybody was calling you know,
when they folks thought about hip hop, all they thought
about or rap music, all they thought about was partying. Bullshit.
(29:51):
Grandmaster Flash and Melly Mel made a whole bunch of
party in Bullshit records that we'd love to this day.
But then they dropped this sociological jam in the Message.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Probably glass everywhere, people pissing on the stage, you know
that just don't care. I can't take the smout, I
can't take the noise. Got no money to move on?
I guess I got no charge, you know. I think
we see this with a lot of artists.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
They might come out with, you know, kind of a
party song or a fun upbeat, and then they're like, Okay,
I have a platform, I have a voice.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
There's something I want to say. So similar to what
we saw with Marvin Gaye. H you see grand Master
Flash in the Furious five shifting a little bit with
the message, that's right. In nineteen eighty two, they released
a song called The Message, and the lyrics describe poverty
in the inner city struggle, and it was one of
the first songs in hip hop that addressed those issues
head on. This political and social commentary was influential to
(30:41):
the growth of consciousness.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
Even Run DMC, a group did we never think about
as being political, could drop a song like It's Like That,
which again talked about the politics of what everyday black
life was. And then definitely for me my generation, anything
that Public Dnomy touched between nineteen eighty six right to
nineteen ninety two has to be on that list.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yes, Ren DMC and Public Enemy were both part of
the new school of hip hop, which you know you
kind of see really growing around the mid nineteen eighties.
Public Enemy built on the foundation that was laid by
Grand Master Flash. In a Furious five talking about this
radical political ideology, doctor Neil lists additional songs and albums
that fit that same mold.
Speaker 4 (31:22):
Rebel without a Pause, Fight the Powers, and one that
stands out. But that album, you know, it takes a
nation of millions to hold us back, and don't believe
the hyphe I mean, it just changed everything. The politics
were radical, the images were radical, the sounds were radical,
the sampling techniques were radical.
Speaker 5 (31:39):
We got to fight the.
Speaker 6 (31:42):
Fight the power.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
It's really fascinating to see that radical political message was
mirrored in the sounds and musical techniques that these artists used.
Ninth Wonder also shared his experiences of coming of age
during this period of music, a time when social and
political consciousness was at the forefront of hip hop.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
Neil is older than me, and you don't like to
say that, but he's older than I am. And I
always like to gloat and revel in the fact that
I was able to enjoy consciousness in hip hop at
the age I got a chance to enjoy it, which
is every kid's formidable years. It takes a nation meetings.
(32:25):
The Hold Is Back came out when I was thirteen.
There You Go the year before a show debut on
TV called A Different World. In nineteen eighty eight, Spike
Lee released School Days. In nineteen eighty nine, Spike re
released Do the Right Thing.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
So what Ninth Wonder is highlighting is not just the
music but also the culture. We're talking about television now
and movies. A Different World was a classic.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Honestly, we talked about a Different World in our Black
History Month episode with X and School Days too. Different
World and School Days and about how it really showcased
aside of black culture that wasn't necessarily always showcased on television.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Absolutely, I think one of the things that I loved
about those shows is they were funny. They were giving
me this glimpse into like, oh wow, this is what
college is like. And I'm watching them years later, right
and still they feel relevant. But they're also talking about
issues like sexual assault, HIV and AIDS.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
Yes, when Freddy was almost sexual assaulted and Dwyane Wade
jumped to the roof of the car to beat up
the guy, these are moments that you will never forget
and it addresses those issues head on and gives you
the tools as young people to know how to deal
with those situations. So that's like mid to late eighties,
and then we moved right at that cusp of like
(33:43):
eighty eight to ninety two. I would say hip hop
is doing a lot of things at that point. So
before we were talking about the East Coast, but the
West Coast is also on the map. Straight out account
It's crazy.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
Quitudes show always say you know NNBA put our straight
out of Compton, Queen Latifa put out All Hell, The
Queen Jungle Brothers done by the Fortress of Nature, Daylight, Soul,
three feet High and Rising a Tribe call Quest People's
exinctive travels in the past of Rhythm I'm fourteen years old,
like I am in heaven, Like this is black black
(34:18):
black black, black, black black black black. Not only it's black,
but it's also Pan Africanism. Then you got Kara ris
One and booge Down productions. Then you have Kin saying
Oslama Lakam. You have Rokkim call himself rock him Ala.
Like now you have an intersection of Southern black Christian
board learning about Islam at age thirteen fourteen.
Speaker 6 (34:39):
This was an amazing time for me and my friends.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
That's wild. I mean, imagine being able to be of
the age where you can understand what's going on, you
kind of understand what's going on in the world, and
you can understand what's going on in the music and
be able to absorb those political and social messages of
the music as it was being released.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Man, you know, I can remember folks wearing like my
older cousins wearing those like big necklaces that had the
symbol of Africa and it was like red, black and green,
and it makes me think about brands like cross colors.
Even the clothes that people were wearing and things that
had the fist on them. I mean, it was just
pan Africanism was a global movement and hip hop was.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
In it absolutely.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
And you know, when you think about who's driving culture,
who's saying this is what's in the musicians were doing that,
and so it feels fitting that they have a place
right there is some of the disseminators of political messaging.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
So far, we've seen hip hop evolve from something that
wasn't explicitly political to a genre that really had consciousness
at its heart. But this period of consciousness and hip
hop didn't last forever.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
Sometimes we like to tell the young generation that, oh,
we were just so political. The only problem is became
a hard realization for me that the high point and
consciousness in hip hop on a surface level, which means
a level that wasn't considered underground, that you can find it,
you didn't have to dig for it probably only lasted
like three or four years eighty eight to like I'll say,
(36:13):
by ninety two, because once Doctor Dre and Snoop, when
the chronic came, it was over.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
Like it was who you can forget it?
Speaker 1 (36:19):
One, two, three and tough Folk, Snoop, Doggie Dog and
Doctor Drake is at the dope and it not making
it trench so Bad Go No.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
This time period that Ninth Wonder is talking about falls
within what many refer to as the Golden Age of
hip hop, so from the mid eighties to their early
to mid nineties. Ninth tells us that things kind of
changed when Bad Boy Records came on the scene. Bad
Boy was founded in nineteen ninety three by Sean P.
Diddy Combs Well Diddy or Puff Daddy Brother Love.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Brother Love, Sean Love Combs, Puffy. So many names, so
many names still save Puff.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
When bad Boy came we was in the club, there
was still a hint of having some type of consciousness,
which means ten Crack Commandments is a conscious zone, right.
It teaches you something. It might teach you the wrong thing,
but it gives you some type of instruction.
Speaker 6 (37:15):
I've been in this game. It may be your animals
us to rule.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Ten Crack Commandments is a track from the Notorious Big
from his album Life After Death. It was released in
nineteen ninety seven, and it's biggs manual on how to
succeed at dealing drugs like number one, never let them
know how much dough you hold or number six that
goddamn credit debt. It While this might not be a
deep exploration of societal issues up front, biggest talking about
(37:43):
the practical ways to make it in this business.
Speaker 5 (37:46):
The hip hop at one point was instructional, whether it
be about Safe six with Jimmy by Boogie Down Productions
or the U N I T Y or I always
say that one of the first versions of Beyonce's Lemonade
and hip Hop from a Master Respectrum was looking at
the front door by main source like he was really,
you know, large professor was really going through it with
his girl, and he was like, you treat me bad.
(38:08):
I don't think I could take it anymore. I'm looking
at the front door. It was political, but it was
also instructional and informational. A lot of hip hop today
doesn't give you any type of instruction whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
We fight every night now that's not in that swift
plus up when we was close sung and wake up
to be rereadd.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
But argument again.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
I think we started to get into the instructions, but
they're telling you left foot stomp and shuffled. But maybe
one day we'll get back to it. Watch just watch Next.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Hip Hop, the Next Man some good instructions. The stallion
does get instrung and say put your hands on your hips.
I feel like the only thing we're missing now is
like hip hop, that's like, this is how you start
at LLC. Let's take a break and when we come back,
we'll talk about community and music, the culture of streaming,
(39:03):
and the future of hip hop and hip hop education.
(39:25):
We're back and we've been celebrating Black Music Month with
Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
But before we jump back in with the two of them,
let's talk about next week's lab. And next week's lab,
we're talking all about linguistics with doctor John Bah the
history accents, dialect, slang, and code switching that's done in
the United States. All right, let's get back to the lab.
Before the break, we were talking about messaging in hip hop.
(39:52):
So we wanted to know what changed from the nineties
to the two thousands to the twenty tens and why
we hear less instructional messaging in hip hop. What's missing today?
Speaker 4 (40:01):
One of the things is missing is intimacy. And I
don't think we can mistake intimacy for sex, because there's
lots of sex in the music, but not intimacy. And
I mean that on a bunch of levels. Ninth is
talked about this in class. There was a time where
we had to listen to music in community. There was
a stereo system in the house. Everybody listened to the
(40:22):
music at the same time. Your kids are in the car.
I mean when my daughters were young, they were trapped
in the car. They had the music taste that they
have now because I played what I played and they
had to listen now in the car, and each one
of them is plugged into their own listening system.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
I remember as a child being just glued to the radio.
My parents, we begged them for, you know, one of
the little portable radios that you could have in your bedroom,
and me and my sisters we would just lay in
front of it and listen to it all day, especially
in the summer and on the weekends, just listening to music.
And then you know, do you remember the box? What's
(40:59):
the box You could call in and put in a
code and then it will play the music video. So
then we went from you know, waiting to hear stuff
on the radio station to watching the box and seeing
different music videos. And then MTV and BT really took off,
so then you could see all these different songs, music videos,
you have CV behind the scenes making the music video,
(41:20):
all these things like that. Remember when Napster first came
on the scene and then you could just get all
the music you didn't have to buy a CD. Yeah,
that changed a lot. So there's the intimacy of listening
to music with other people. But doctor Neil is also
talking about the intimacy in music itself.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
I used to teach just Michael Jackson class, and if
we tend when we think about Michael Jackson and Prince,
we don't talk about the ballads, right, you know, And
I'm like, I'm a big ballad dude, right. So we're
listening to Lady in My Life, which I think is
Michael Jackson's best ballot, maybe Butterflies, you know, on a
good day. We're listening to the song, and what struck
(42:07):
me is that they had no relationship to the music.
Speaker 6 (42:10):
Ie.
Speaker 4 (42:11):
They didn't know what to do with it. So I
asked someone to give a demonstration to do a slow
jam or grind like what my parents used to call it.
And they had no idea what I'm talking about because
they'd never slow danced. Intimacy them and music is like
twerking or that's actually one of the examples that someone use.
But the idea of a slow, intimate dance. I'm old
(42:32):
enough to remember the sixth grade dance. You had to
have a distance, right, It need to be a foot
and a half two feet between you and the girl,
and as you got older, you got to close that gap.
But we got a bunch of young folks who never
experienced that, and it plays out in terms of what
they hear in the music, what they value in the music.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
When Mark Avanil says grind, it's not the grind that
I think that y'all are talking about. The term grind
has evolved over time to mean something a little bit different.
But what he's talking about is just, you know, a
slow song that couples would dance to. I just think
it's really interesting how, you know, the way we consume music,
and this is such a good point, how it affects
(43:12):
the experience, the culture, you know, around music and music consumption.
Ninth Wonder talks about how the digital landscape of music
has affected the way we experience and discover music.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
Now there's no community when it comes to something that
was created by the community. First of all, is not
a turn on the factor. There's no let me let
you hear this because you haven't heard it. It's not
that because whether you know it or love it or not,
every album in the world that comes out on streamings
(43:43):
on your phone. As opposed to being in college and
me walking by a room and somebody had the money
that we to buy this new Peak Rocket Seil Smooth
album that I couldn't get and I'm listening to it like, man,
I'm broke, but he only wanted to get it. I'm
gonna have to listen to it in his room until
I get my refund check and then go to the
(44:05):
mall and then buy it.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Sharing music is a lot easier today. I think one
way during the pandemic that we started sharing music with
each other, having these communal experiences around music was versus
versus was such a huge thing that happened during the pandemic.
So Timbaland and Swiss Beats, they started inviting artists to
(44:27):
share their music be a celebration of the music that
they have put out, and everybody was locked in and
I really enjoyed, you know, texting with friends and saying,
oh my gosh, I completely forgot all about this song
and reading the comments as the verses was going on,
and seeing what other people had to say, and seeing
you know, celebrities being like this is one of my
(44:49):
favorite songs, and I'm like, this is one of my
favorite songs.
Speaker 5 (44:52):
That was the beauty about it, because now I went
to an HBC Houston. When I go back to homecoming,
every time I see somebody, I look in them by song.
It's so crazy, like I see them by album. I'm like,
hey man, we listen to Mob Deeper all the time.
That's the first thing we say. Or when a party
and I played the record and then somebody I went
to school with thirty years ago would come up with
(45:13):
that was our joint, Like you know what I mean,
because either I heard it in his room or he
heard it in my room. Either way, we are tied
together forever.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Yeah, I think there are some things if I was
with somebody during a certain phase. You know, one of
the musicians that I'm a big fan of, and we
talk about it all the time. TT is the dream
And I can't remember where I was when I heard
I Love Your Girl for the first time and I
was just getting an apartment, Like, oh my goodness, what
a time, first apartment, what a time. Man. We're lucky, okay.
(45:47):
And so one of my friends now, even when I
see her, she's always making a reference to like purple kisses,
and you know he was talking about lipstick and stuff
like that. I mean, we were just eating it up, right,
And so you think about those things, you know, and
you remember where you were when you heard this music
and when you heard it with different people.
Speaker 5 (46:05):
The album experience, right. The wonderful thing about this is
it's tangible. We can hold it. That means we can
collect it. It would kill us if somebody stole our
album collection. Most kids with music is not a collection
for them. It is an experience for us. It was
a collection right when it comes to this tangible object,
we had to play it from front to back.
Speaker 6 (46:26):
You can't shuffle this. You have to consume the whole thing.
Speaker 5 (46:30):
That's the thing I think this generation is missing out on,
which is why they don't believe albums are important.
Speaker 6 (46:36):
Some do, some don't.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
Is because they have a chance to make their own
playlist in a moment's notice or listen to somebody else's playlist,
as opposed to me and you guys having to sit
in front of the radio waiting for your song to
come on and unpausing the tape, and then you might
get some of the DJ talking, which you don't went
on that at all. Is that kind of patience and
waiting experience to hearing the song on the radio, so
(47:00):
it's not out yet, you can't have it, and then
a month later it comes out. But then it comes
out on a single. Then you got to get the single,
then you have to get another single, then the album
comes out. And that was the way that hip hop
didn't get so watered down. But of course the powers
of beasts all this thing was a powerful thing and
they made it for so much a commodity that got
watered down, and now it doesn't hold the same shelf
(47:21):
life as it used to.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
I mean, I feel like, yes, there are some people
who are album purists, you know, and streaming has some drawbacks,
but I think it also has some benefits. There's something
magical about playlists, I think, and really, if somebody's able
to curate and really get the vibes right DJ D
Nice D Nice starting club Quarantine yup during the pandemic,
that was special. Yeah, you know, And so I think
(47:43):
everybody was able to kind of join his ig live
and listen to him play song after song and really
get the vibe and the energy going. And one of
the things I really like doing is making playlists and
sharing them with people. And I'm like, this is my
waking up playlist to really get the day started.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
This is my winter playlist, and it's really special because
you know, it's basically like, if you have access to
Wi Fi, you have access to music. And like Ninth
was saying, you know, if he didn't have the money,
he wouldn't be able to listen to the album. Yes,
that was part of the process, and you know how
some of these ritualistic aspects of music consumption make you
(48:22):
feel good. But some folks will never get that refund
check and so they will never be able to listen
to that album unless they're with somebody else. But now
with streaming, everyone has the opportunity to engage and be
impacted by music far and wide, and you also have
the opportunity to discover so you can listen to music
(48:42):
that's being put out. You know, in Germany you can
listen to music that's being put out in Brazil you
can listen to music that's being put out in Nigeria
and be a part of these cultural explorations and expressions
of what's going on at the time in different parts
of the world. Well, one thing that's certain is that
all of this is happening much much faster, oh, both
(49:05):
the production and consumption of music, and sometimes it seems
like this can have an impact on the longevity of
an artist and their work.
Speaker 5 (49:15):
I asked my students all the time, how long do
you consume an album? They say, ah, man, I'm done
with it. I'm done with an artist in about four months.
I'm moving on to somebody else. And I say, well,
that's crazy, because I've been listening to The Day Losses
nineteen eighty nine, you know what I mean. I don't
think they will never experience that experience longevity with an artist,
thing with an artist, watching an artist, I say, yoh,
(49:36):
we waited for an our cast album every two years,
and we're still waiting on the day they decide they
want to do one. Dangelta made us wait fifteen years
for an album. I don't think this generation will ever
get a chance to experience it because everything moves so
fast and it's on to the next so much and
Lloyd's he is not there.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
It's wild because folks give Rihanna a hard time. Rihanna,
when's the next album? What's the next album? Meanwhile, she's
given us makeup, a baby, a fashion line, everything, a
lot of things. And she also gave us like seven
albums in eight years. That's a lot of albums, okay.
And what folks don't realize is that Lauren Hill only
(50:13):
gave us one. And you know that's fine with me. Lauren,
take your time if she comes out another album, suh,
it's over okay, But I'm not trying to rush it.
You have to have patience.
Speaker 2 (50:29):
I think what you're raising is a really good point
because not only has the loyalty that people feel towards
artists changed, but their expectations and standards have too. Sometimes
people have these really high expectations or we see like
the super fan.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
I think we've always seen a lot of fans. I've
seen people on Twitter talking about like, oh, I just
listened to this album. It's top two, and I'm.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
Like, the album came out thirty six hours ago. It
came out midnight, it's Saturday afternoon. The album came out
Friday morning. As soon as the clock went from eleven
to fifty nine on Thursday to midnight, you were able
to stream it. You know, I'm not sure you can
see an album that high and it hasn't even had
two full days, right, it's still raw.
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Yeah, you know, it hasn't even cooked yet. Yeah, it
might be hot for right now, but you might have
to cut that album open and it's raw on the
inside needs to be put back in the oven. You know,
I think we've been taking a look back. We've been
looking back so much at history and saying these are
the roots, these are the people that built the musical
(51:37):
family tree for black music. But I'm really interested in
what the future of music looks like, specifically hip hop
and the recognition of hip hop and academia.
Speaker 5 (51:47):
I would challenge in our hip hop curriculum and what
we teach is hip hop would beat the life out
of any university in the country. The guests that we
get to have my classes did their presentations and one
of the class group presentations is on Rhymes the Coming
And I had my phone on IG Live and guess
who was watching Bust the Rhymes and Buster the Rhymes
got on Live with me and told the class how
(52:09):
much he loved the presentation.
Speaker 1 (52:13):
You really, can you imagine having bust to Rhymes sitting
in on your lecture. We didn't have those guest speakers
me either. Shoot, but doctor Neil also told us that
the class can't be taught to the expectations of the students.
Speaker 4 (52:31):
We have to push them beyond that. So when folks
asked me, it's like, well, what is the class about, Well,
it is a portal into post World War two black
life in the United States through hip hop. Right, So
we're going to start the conversation with the nineteen sixty
five Immigration Act, because without that there is.
Speaker 6 (52:50):
No hip hop. And so we spend two or three
weeks on.
Speaker 4 (52:53):
The Cross Bronze Expressway, the Immigration Act, what's happening structurally
in New York and other kinds of cities before we
touch even one song, and kids are sitting in the
class going, well, when we're gonna talk about jay Z,
when we gonna talk about Drake right, when we're gonna
talk about Kanye And truth be told, we could do
a whole fifteen or sixteen weeks and never even get
(53:15):
to talk about that stuff.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
So for a lot of these students, I guess what
they're experiencing is that the classes and what they thought
it was going to be, and learning the full context
requires going back decades. Without these earlier historical milestones, There's
no Drake, there is no Kanye, there is no jay Z,
no Meg, no Eve, There's no Meg Meg, no City Girls, Okay,
(53:38):
no Little Kim, no Foxy Brown, none of them. And
it's really important to have scholars like doctor Neil and
Ninth Wonder who are pushing the culture forward while also
being historians of the culture. So I like to think of,
you know, like guardians of the galaxy and the guardians
of the hip hop galaxy.
Speaker 5 (53:57):
Right, Yes, I just believe that the petitioners of this
culture need to teach it. The longtime fans turned scholars
of this culture, Mark Anthony Neil, needs to teach it.
We are the ones to have hip hop and scholarship
in the same sentence, and we've done it from HBCUs
to Ivy Leagues period.
Speaker 1 (54:19):
So hopefully that gave you something to think about when
you're jamming to your playlist this summer, and maybe you'll
listen out for references to other lyrics you've heard. Means
that sound familiar. There's a lot to unpack in there, Yeah,
especially in pop music.
Speaker 2 (54:34):
Yes, I encourage everybody to do a little bit of
digging on whosample dot com to find out some of
the references in some of your favorite songs. Absolutely, we've
talked about quite a few things here t T and
it made me ask myself a question. And I want
to ask our listeners what's your favorite style of like
integrating old music and new.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Yes, we are super curious. So if you look into
the Spotify app right now, you should the pole.
Speaker 2 (55:01):
So, Yes, I want to know what's your favorite style
of integrating old music with new Is it sampling like
when somebody takes a beat from an old song and
puts it in a new one. Is it remixing, like
when somebody takes the entire song and remixes the whole thing.
Or is it lyrical callbacks like when somebody uses a
lyric from an old song and takes that lyric and
puts it in their song.
Speaker 1 (55:25):
The one thing we're sharing this week is an extensive playlist.
Be sure to check it out. It'll be linked on
our show notes page at Dope Labs podcast dot com.
That's it for Lab sixty seven. I hope you learned
something in this lab.
Speaker 2 (55:45):
If you have a song that has a hidden hip
hop or jazz influencer reference, tell us about it. Call
us at two zero two five six seven seven zero
two eight and tell us what you thought, or give
us an idea for a lab we should do this semester.
We really like from you, So you can call or
text us at two zero two five six seven seven
zero two eight.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
And don't forget that there is so much more to
dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap key
for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes.
Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it
out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's
guest experts, Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.
Speaker 2 (56:23):
You can find and follow them on Twitter at New
black Man and at ninth Wonder. And you can find
us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Lab Podcast.
Speaker 1 (56:33):
TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho,
and you can find Zakia at z Said So. Dope
Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Owned Media Group.
Our producers are Jenny Rattlet Mass Lydia Smith and Izzy
Ross of Wave Runner Studios. Our associate producer from mega
Owmedia is Brianna Garrett. Editing and sound design by Rob Smerciak,
(56:56):
Mixing by Hannes Brown. Original music composed and produced by
Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Executive producer Corin
Gilliard and creative producer Miguel Contreras. Special thanks to Shirley Ramos,
Jess Borrison, Jasmine Afifi, Kamu Elolia, Till krat Key, and
Brian Marquis. Executive producers from Mega Own Media Group are
(57:19):
us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattley. I was
trying to tie Beyonce to Lyndon B. Johnson another b
Lyndon B. Johnson
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