Quiet Noises; The Interplay Between Silence, Sound And Space In Hip-Hop Music. “Ancient life was all silence.” -Luigi Russolo “ All life is a rhythm. All death is a rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life resumes.” - Samuel R. Delaney, The Einstein Intersection This meditation on the state of what I refer to as, “post-urbanized sound”, represents the echoes of a passion flickering quietly, agitating the milieu of one’s memory. Since the earliest strokes of images that float in the dusty canvas that is my adolescence, sound has been an imperative language. The desire to linguistically commune with the non-human has intrigued me. To cuss out trees, speak through the concrete, and listen to the waves of air sluggishly drift through the sky, represents for me what Nietzche referred to as “the free spirit”, creating a theatricality of sounds that drunkenly and independently remained invigorating through their complexity. Grayness and sharp tones bouncing off bricks in quiet “suburban villages” all remained imperative to sustaining the desire to listen to music. Hear what vertiginous enigmas were to infect me. Enter hip-hop. Severed sound in several pulsating pieces re-conjoined as my mind’s shadow. It is the rhythm synthesized and thumping through the eternal theater that is a speaker. An aural syntactical galaxy beyond the futuristic sounds of Sun Ra whose cosmological free jazz in the 1960’s can be linked to the 21st century Atlanta-based group Outkast. These “hip-hop hyper-realists” permeate through the seams of pop culture utilizing their inherited Afro-Psychedelic personas to rupture the flow of the “post-urbanized” soundscape. The aforementioned example is one that is fragmentary to the wholeness that the music of hip-hop encompasses. A progression of sound displayed by the imaginary act of early 20th century Italian Futurist musician Luigi Russolo intoxicating one’s ears with his noise-instrument the “Intonumori” over Krs-One’s vocals. The world is our borough now. No longer can such impossibility be realized on a local sonic scale. The technocultural eruptions in art, music, and literature are catalysts for further development and understanding of the human experience. Such eruptions of immense magnitude include the formation of the ARPAnet (the original cyberspace) in the late 1960’s into a mass-consumed entity (Internet)[1], creating a grand possibility for a hyper-realized, real-time artspace. Thus creating continuity beyond the European gallery into a unique space for the interplay of thought, art and more specifically, the future of hip-hop. This can be simplified as the “technofication” of 21st Century artistic aesthetics. This shit is global and thus must be personified as such. Extending that notion, this meditation will focus on the ever-expansive interplay between sound, silence, and space, along with various components that construct a fragment of the hip-hop milieu. Conceptually hip-hop extends the relation between sound and humanity far beyond that of an urbanized Orpheus, or a synthesized Leadbelly, but rather thrives uniquely at the interplay between silence, space and sound. The spatial qualities imbedded in hip-hop are vast in nature. In comparison to the polyrhythmic stutters of drum n’ bass, hip-hop elucidates space with expansive non-Euclidean contortions. The sonic curvatures, endless and distanced by temporality, incite an interest that twists the cerebral resonance knob as if Chuck D was a member of Kraftwerk, with force. If one listens to Wu-Tang Clan’s self-indulgent manifesto from their now classic first record, 36 Chambers, “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthin’ To Fuck Wit’”, you get the feeling of an interplay between empty space and a synthesized pulse. This lazy pounding of particles strikes just as you think the track is going to be eclipsed by time and enter a state of perpetual aural blackness. The fluidity and balance of the composition is in the silence that stretches between each beat, like a drunken pendulum. In her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” Susan Sontag describes mid-20th Century art as being “noisy, with appeals for silence”. Her reference to the desire to achieve a state of silence through what is seemingly noise-filled is reducible to the aesthetics of hip-hop today, exemplified by the expansive body of a RZA track. Yet when one ventures through the cemented imagination of the “human sampler” himself, Grandmaster Flash, in comparison to say John Cage then the notion of silence is obfuscated by texture and ultimately sound. Hip-hop extinguishes the dualism between sound and silence, blurring the lines between the two, like being cross-eared, due to hip-hop’s nonlinear character. When one speaks of silence, then one is referencing a non-soundscape that still permeates through the air fiddling the distant blackness, a sort of effect that is deemed “open”, as Sontag conceptualizes it. In the 1960’s the Mexican author Octavio Paz wrote in a poem, “Silence stands erect and questions me. But I move forward, and plant myself in the center of my memory.”[2] Paz’s words graffiti an act of what hip-hop extracts out of the human experience, the relationship between movement and abstractness. Presence/ absence. Hip-hop decentralizes mobility as a central force and enables sound to catalyze movement through a dispersed invisibility. You are no longer here. To encounter a silence is to be questioned, and ultimately plummeted to flip the future, as Paz encountered. If one listens to the crevices of rhythmic resonance imbued into plenty of hip-hop tracks throughout its history, the ears get swallowed by their sonic inquiries. But extending the notion into the “memetic imagination”, what role does silence play as an aural replicator? Does John Cage’s composition “imaginary landscape no. 1” scored for four turntables in 1939 [3] extend to the minimal soundscapes of the abstract hip-hop milieu created by avant-emcees Anti-Pop Consortium? Does Stockhausen and Steve Reich share a sonic commonality with De La Soul? These conundrums spin static in our heads. Yet the concept of perception requires focus on the internalization of the object perceived, as promulgated by the mind. Beyond any epistemological constraints silence can be perceived through its internal structure, or its “body”. What does one experience when poking around inside the body of silence? The results are individual ramifications upon the senses, perhaps a psychedelia of the mind. Sound quickly becomes the shadow of absence and embodies the non-soundscape mentioned earlier, amplifying each pulse of the beat to slap the track’s skin making the eardrum hollow with reverb. And in accordance with KRS-One’s declaration that “real bad boys move in silence”, the certainty of replication as infringing upon intellectual property becomes physical in the beat. When in 1997 DJ Shadow followed in the echoes of the plethora of “futurhythmatic” footsteps of post-industrialized urban deities that spoke with their hands, he amalgamated the physicality of vinyl into a “cognitive noise-sculpture”, as I refer to it. The sonic leaps sedated into sticky snare-taps bending waves that bubbled in his debut endtroducing, also consisted of a heavy, wet dose of quietness. One experiences such tracks as “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt” introduced by a sampled-male voice interrupting the frequency of fluidity and implementing a state of awareness as to what was about to happen; the beat was going to drop like burning metal from human hands. Upon examining the structure of this soundscape the ability to hear the gaps of space float around the aural universe becomes deafening. The beat permeates through your ears and recalls what the 1950’s linguist Zellig Harris referred to as the “likelihood constraint”[4]. This entails the “likelihood” of elements co-occurring within a given language. Extending this to contemporary hip-hop the realization that silence and sound are indeed elements co-occurring is elucidated by the sluggish beats in Shadow’s tracks, once again displaying the nonlinear character of hip-hop. In comparison to the noodlings of Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, Dj Shadow’s work is composed of “quiet matter”(silence as a physicality). Therefore the salient sounds in their neonate states of being as replicated by early pioneers of electronic music in the beginning of the 20th Century, become louder with temporality. Or so it seems. Its all perception. In his essay entitled “expressive language” the 20th century author and thinker Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones), stated “speech is the effective form of a culture”. In this sense speech is referencing sound. The two enter a state of unification to harbor communication, which he later comments as being “only important” because it is the “broadest root of education”[5]. And that ultimately what cultures have to propagate is experience. Hip-hop’s cultural framework is constructed of syntax, sound and silence. Speech is silence within hip-hop culture. Hear the hiss of spray cans across the city’s cemented sculptures. The microphone’s stillness bursting inside an emcee’s hands. All is speech. The late 20th Century “concept engineer” Kodwo Eshun describes hip-hop as being “headmusic”[6], strictly reserved for the mental milieu. Where else but in the mind can silence paint blackness? Hip-hop is a linguistic odyssey through the spatialized body of the mind. Lets not forget that Hendrix rhymed with his fingertips; all proto-hip-hop cultural elements intended to be perceived. Yet when the French iconoclastic artist Marcel Duchamp created his series of compositions of chance entitled “Erratum musical” in 1913 [7], fragments of his Dadaist mentality could be heard in the chance elements of New York hip-hop producer Marley Marl’s work. When in 1981 Marl was attempting to sample a voice from a certain song and “accidentally, a snare went through” [4], he realized that the snare was not intended yet he dug the sound and went back to it. This discovery replaces the notion of causality and intent with chance and other elements not fervent in traditional Western thought until cut-ups of mind-matter occurred in the 20th Century in all areas of art and life, including hip-hop. But back to the ever-expanding (all puns intended) view of silence, sound and space within the streets of Illmatica. Where does literature and hip-hop’s sonic cuerpo become a node? In 1926 the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges declared that “all poetry is the confession of an I, a personality, a human adventure” [8]. In their debut release tragic epilogue, Anti-Pop Consortium follow the “otherness” that Rimbaud described as the “I”, and created a literary entity that synchronized sound and text. Borges spoke from the self, Anti-Pop, as a conglomerate speak from sound (encompassing many selves), and both create(d) magic. Anti-Pop’s minimal rhythms, sliding synthesizers swaying atop their unparalleled lyricism. Where is the commonality between the two? The “human adventure” in hip-hop today represents a nearly incalculable degree of literary newness, fusing technology and art. When one is “keystyling” (freestyling via the Net), or interacting in a digital cipher, where is the “I”? The Hua-Yen school of Chinese Buddhist philosophy, which dates back to the 7th century during the T’ang dynasty, propagated that the self is elemental to the entity of totality so thus embodies that very wholeness. Take the following situation for example; Fa-tsang showed the Empress a statue of the Buddha filled with stillness that was situated in the center of a room that was decorated with innumerable mirrors each reflecting the Buddha. Question; one or many Buddhas? [9]. The self (or any individual entity in the broader Eastern sense) when fragmentary, is that wholeness in the sense that without that individual entity the wholeness would cease to function. Aside from looping the question that has challenged many a thinker throughout human history concerning the one and the many, a similar situation arises when considering the art of hip-hop situated in the decentralized structure of the Net. From its metaphysical implications to its tinkering with identity, the Net plays an imperative role in expanding the limitations of hip-hop. Furthermore the “I” in hip-hop’s digital soundscape then is solidified as a simulacrum by the fluctuating roles played by emcees and producers alike. Example; the Wu-Tang Clan’s inherent fascination with comic book characters being reflected in everything from their identities and pseudonyms to the average underground emcee’s moniker. The theatricality and characterization of emcees is of Artaudian proportions. Seeing the words “Ghostface Killah” dance across a Mayan temple, tweaking the minds of its inhabitants. Disorientation? (“for those that don’t understand”), hells yeah. Language is generally utilized to elucidate and sculpt through speech, yet when one considers what is heard when reading “Native Son”, “The Einstein Intersection” or any of Kant’s critical noodlings you realize that the mind sets the soundtrack of text through the tongue. It dips the syntax of the lingua franca that hip-hop’s severed English symbolizes in the dendrites that rest neatly in our heads. The node is in the rusty can of syntactical graffiti that wets our existence with meaning. Shit is deep. So then… Space. Where does the spatialized corporeality of hip-hop encompass a vertiginous infinitum? In the German collagist, and fervent Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters’ work, space is contorted to embody a non-Euclidean entity. Feel the discarded fragments of “found-objects” that adorn several pieces with your eyes and your lids creak with dismay. Skip to 21st Century drum n’ bass and you get Roni Size’s bpm’s sliding off the skin of light, the influence is still present; mutability. The present methodology towards the broad spectrum of postmodern art is the ability to contort and inculcate influences while blurring the ever-questionable status of originality. The expansion of absence within a focused “canvas of sound” if you will, is a node for many hip-hop producers today. The psyche of invisibility is imbued in the feedback loop of mind and machine, intent and noncausality. Space, within hip-hop music, is a circular entity that quickly dissolves the conceptualization of absence as non-aural. When one digs in the crates to find a dusty rendition of Grandmaster Flash’s seminal cut on life in the Rotten Apple, “ (name of track)”, one hears the act of space embodying sound. Particles of New York are lying around the track, making it stretch and contort your ears. Marshall Mcluhan defines this as “acoustic space” or the effect from the nonlinear causes of being bathed in an electronic environment. DJ Premier’s beats doing quadruple time as 26 screens display the anatomical structure of silence, consuming your peripheral vision. Simultaneously voices are shattering your consciousness, catalyzing the brain to stretch and scream through movement. Synthesized winds are sculpting a flurry of frozen waves around your ears, light begins to pulsate in a deep drone of bliss. Atmosfera electronica total. Space as point of departure from reality as known to the urban landscape and as an excursion into the fields of what Jean Baudrillard called “hyper-real”[10], i.e. the “post-urban”. Think of moonlight on mescaline. Or Lee “Scratch” Perry on…well, just think of “Scratch”. Space imbued in hip-hop’s milieu is nonlinear and freely overlaps with sound and silence to compose what Eshun refers to as “mixillogical”, the area of electronic music where logic is dead and its ashes are brushed against hip-hop’s imagination to create a Bretonesque ouevre. “Post-urbanized” hip-hop is here to disrupt the traditional perception of music as escape , music as an 18th century European artifact. Instead it electrifies the air, makes your lungs swell with intensity and explores the area between one thought and the next. Or as some refer to it, infinity: the nexus of abstraction. In constructing space, hip-hop elucidates the interplay between art and its theoretical implications. It disturbs the fluidity of knowledge, it blurs the once demarcated lines of linearity in the sonic strata of popular culture, into the subterranean. In the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Kant’s various Critiques he states that “in order to know something, we need not only have a representation, but to be able to go beyond it”[11]. How does this relate to the structure of hip-hop in the 21st C.? Representation is constructed in numerous forms; silence, sound and space, encompassing only a fragment of its totality. Yet it is in the synthesis of these forms that knowledge is grasped, in the mixture. Once again displaying the nonlinearity of hip-hop music. The Net’s dispersed spatial “body” is an example of the fusion created by these synthesized forms of representation and is symbolic to hip-hop’s corporeal construct. In everything from Terminator X’s utilizing a backwards guitar riff, the lifting of various string samples to influencing the British mechanized-techno duo Autechre. The overall relationship between machine and humans within the hip-hop cultural landscape has been in a constant rupture. The influence of objective sound sources and the inculcation of experimentation is guiding the once traditional memes within hip-hop’s cultural milieu and reconfiguring them completely. The meme-flow includes the mythical allegiance to the street, “rawness”, and the overall resurgence of anti-feminine attitudes as just a few examples concerning the vertiginous malleability that hip-hop is now “embodying”. This aural shower of blades to the ear is like George Bush reading Ishmael Reed. The offbeat numbness flowing rusty through your veins, scratching your bones. Something just isn’t right. But its just that feeling of uneasiness and throwing the equilibrium off-kilter that is infecting the creative minds dispersed throughout the “body” of hip-hop music. When the abstract group Dalek , whose lyrics include references to Egyptian mythology, “sound-poetry”, and Emmanuel Kant, decides to juggle noise on the same stage as the German Krautrock band Faust, then we have entered a new structure of “post-urbanized” sound. So then how does one go beyond the (all puns intended) synthesized representation of hip-hop music? It is in the experiment. It’s the call to experiment beyond hip-hop, to grasp the levity of tinkering with recombinant styles of existence and creating newness. What the postmodern Neo-materialist thinker and philosopher Manuel De Landa refers to as the “destratification”, or the composition of heterogeneity, in a given dynamic system. Composing an archetype of fresh, hyper-accelerated sounds. Hearing the weight of a shadow thump across a benign landscape. Bytes of streaming tradition dripping from the soft syntax of a language that’s stabbing upwards from its ancient grave. The street is a nonlinear path that leads to the rural worlds of Australia back to Brazil, forward to Japan, skip to Switzerland, through Mexico, past Germany, and ultimately encompasses the cosmological openness that’s expanding daily. But where are you in this equation? Somewhere lodged in the muted voice of reason and the illogical, doing voodoo dances in the severed “body” of Afrika Bambataa’s “Planet Rock”. Hip-hop as a language is somewhere in the nature of thought and a hyper-commercialized society. Dead vowels are being sold at your local Wal-mart, where elements of human existence are always at an everyday low-price. Through this commodified art-space, the question of intellectual property in relation to the legality of art is at an ever-expanding climax. At the "Signal or Noise? Conference on Intellectual Property and Digital Media", held last year at the Harvard Law School, Chuck D gave an animated lecture in respect to hip-hop and the “mp3 revolution” [9]. He spoke of hip-hop’s role as a catalyst for defiance within the musical hierarchy displayed by major music labels. Denouncing the record industry’s horrendous marketing and economic perils, Chuck reiterated what hip-hop heads have been thinking for a while, “we’re getting fucked”, in a nutshell. The evidence of major record labels utilizing tactics much in the American corporate tradition (e.g. charging 18 dollars for a disc that requires less than 5 dollars to construct) was elucidated rather proficiently by Mista Chuck. The socio-economic spectrum of hip-hop’s hyper-accelerated state is rapidly contorting as well. Text, sound, art, legality and multiculturalism are all elemental in excavating an eloquent answer to the questions burning screens across the globe. In Luigi Russolo’s seminal text entitled “the art of noises” written in 1913, he explicates that “ancient life was all silence. In the Nineteenth Century with the invention of the machine, noise was born.” [12] We dwell with wires dangling from our skin, with a new electric environment that has usurped the art world, one of hybridity and interconnectivity. It is this rupturing of silence within the hip-hop world that overlaps with space, and various other components within the electronic milieu, creating that new sound I simply deem “post-urbanized”. No longer do beats and intellect have to roam streets, representing identities that are always in flux. Its beyond cosmological noise, or science-fiction soundtracks to Phillip K. Dick, or Delaney. It’s 21st Century hip-hop music for the alien everywhere. The human experience involves a plethora of links. The elements of silence, sound and space are simply nodes in the infinitum of hip-hop. The resonance of thick, space-splitting beats, atop a numb silence that bounces from the frail body of space is what the 21st C. hip-hop experience entails, amongst other links. Literature, art and sound are interconnected within the 21st C. hip-hop “body”. The voice of Thomas Edison, coupled with Killah Priest’s cosmological flow, heard atop an El-P beat. John Cage’s compositions for toy piano, JFK’s speech on the Cuban Missile Crisis atop an Earl Blaize track, can freely bump into each other without friction. The aforementioned is exemplary as to the freedom within the “post-urbanized” sound. Its implications in that dreaded phrase, “real world”, that slapped us as teenagers slacking around, abound as well. Political science guru and renowned humanitarian Noam Chomsky’s belief that in order to a construct a future society questions about human nature and freedom must be addressed, is imbedded in the lazy beats that contort heads to flow with the air’s pulse. The techno-cultural critic and freelance writer Erik Davis stated “Music reveals itself as a mystery, a mystery that is perhaps the most basic condition of consciousness” [13]. The human experience is reducible to static without musicality. It’s in the sound. Now where’s that GZA disc…
Copyright © 2001 Martin De Leon |