Vice Magazine: The Syria Issue (November 2012)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · activism, arab spring, hip hop, journalism, music, photography, revolution, syria, war
Special issue on Syrian civil war, featuring work of Robert King.
“VICE commissioned renowned war photographer and videographer Robert King to embed with the ragtag troops of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo, smack dab in the heart of a conflict that is ripping Syria apart. He returned with footage that has made us very scared and very sad for the future of the country. We’ve compiled Robert’s footage into a series of raw, largely unedited vignettes that present a snapshot of the ancient city as it crumbles and burns while its citizens are killed indiscriminately.” (Editors)
Vice Magazine, Volume 19, Number 11
Publisher John Martin, November 2012
148 pages
Michael P. Jeffries: Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · gender, hip hop, music, music criticism, race, rap
Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans?
These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music’s fans—young men, both black and white—and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people’s daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans’ voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2011
ISBN 0226395855, 9780226395852
280 pages
Joanna Demers: Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, hip hop, intellectual property, law, music, musique concrète, sampling
Is music property? Under what circumstances can music be stolen? Such questions lie at the heart of Joanna Demers’s timely look at how overzealous intellectual property (IP) litigation both stifles and stimulates musical creativity. A musicologist, industry consultant, and musician, Demers dissects works that have brought IP issues into the mainstream culture, such as DJ Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” and Mike Batt’s homage-gone-wrong to John Cage’s silent composition “4’33.” Demers also discusses such artists as Ice Cube, DJ Spooky, and John Oswald, whose creativity is sparked by their defiant circumvention of licensing and copyright issues.
Demers is concerned about the fate of transformative appropriation—the creative process by which artists and composers borrow from, and respond to, other musical works. In the United States, only two elements of music are eligible for copyright protection: the master recording and the composition (lyrics and melody) itself. Harmony, rhythm, timbre, and other qualities that make a piece distinctive are virtually unregulated. This two-tiered system had long facilitated transformative appropriation while prohibiting blatant forms of theft. The advent of digital file sharing and the specter of global piracy changed everything, says Demers. Now, record labels and publishers are broadening the scope of IP “infringement” to include allusive borrowing in all forms: sampling, celebrity impersonation—even Girl Scout campfire sing-alongs.
Paying exorbitant licensing fees or risking even harsher penalties for unauthorized borrowing have become the only options for some musicians. Others, however, creatively sidestep not only the law but also the very infrastructure of the music industry. Moving easily between techno and classical, between corporate boardrooms and basement recording studios, Demers gives us new ways to look at the tension between IP law, musical meaning and appropriation, and artistic freedom.
Publisher University of Georgia Press, 2006
ISBN 0820327778, 9780820327778
178 pages