Christian hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was “put together” by Eliza Flower, whose sister, Sarah Flower Adams, had written the lyrics in the form of a poem. Eliza set Sarah’s poem to the music of Lowell Mason’s “Bethany.” Over the years, it’s been set to other tunes as well. Eliza Flower never gets credit for writing the song, credit going only to Adams for the lyrics and Mason for the music, although it was Flower who “edited” the two together.
In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the “real thing”): theft without apology—conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.
Graffiti artists use the stuff of everyday life as their canvas—walls, dumpsters, buses. A stylized representation is placed on an everyday object. In visual art, as in other media, artists take unfiltered pieces of their surroundings and use them for their own means.
In that slot called data, the reality is sliced in—the junk-shop find, thrift-store clothes, the snippet of James Brown, the stolen paragraph from Proust, and so on.
In hip-hop, realness is something to have and express but not question. Realness is sacred. Realness is taboo. Realness refers to a life defined by violence, drugs, cutthroat capitalism—a life not unfamiliar to superstar rappers like The Game (who has been shot five times) and 50 Cent (nine times) when their crews shoot at each other. “I got you stuck off the realness,” Prodigy of Mobb Deep raps in the song “Shook Ones Pt. II,” probably the most widely quoted use of the term. “We be the infamous / you heard of us / official Queensbridge murderers.” It’s Mobb Deep’s realness that makes you a “shook one”; it’s Prodigy’s realness that got you stuck. This leads to the term’s larger meaning, the meaning Cormega takes, for example, in titling his debut album
The Realness
. There’s no title track to explain the term. It’s posted at the front of the album like an emblem representing all that follows. The same for Group Home’s song “The Realness,” in which DJ Premier samples “Shook Ones Pt. II” to isolate the words “the realness” and “comes equipped.” Melachi ends his verse by saying he “comes equipped with that Brainsick shit,” referring to the guest rappers from the Brainsick Mob, but that’s all we know about these terms. There’s no definition of realness, only a declaration that they’re equipped with it. In the spoken-word introduction to his song “Look in My Eyes,” Obie Trice says, “Every man determines his definition of realness, what’s real to him.” Realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back. Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.
Cultural and commercial languages invade us 24/7. That slogan I just heard on the TV commercial: I can’t get it out of myhead. That melody from the theme song to that syndicated sitcom that arrives at seven every night: we’re colonized by this stuff. It invades our lives and our lexicon. This might be of no consequence to the average media consumer, but it spells trouble for the artist. There is now a slogan, a melody, a raw building block of art living in his brain that he doesn’t own and can’t use.
The evolution of copyright law has effectively stunted the development of sampling, thereby protecting the creative property of artists but obstructing the natural evolution of human creativity, which has always possessed cannibalistic tendencies. With copyright laws making the sampling of popular music virtually impossible, a new technique has evolved in which recordings are made that mimic the recordings that the artists would like to sample. These mimic recordings—not nearly as satisfying as sampling the original record—are then sampled and looped in the same way that the original would have
In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the “real thing”): theft without apology—conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.
Graffiti artists use the stuff of everyday life as their canvas—walls, dumpsters, buses. A stylized representation is placed on an everyday object. In visual art, as in other media, artists take unfiltered pieces of their surroundings and use them for their own means.
In that slot called data, the reality is sliced in—the junk-shop find, thrift-store clothes, the snippet of James Brown, the stolen paragraph from Proust, and so on.
In hip-hop, realness is something to have and express but not question. Realness is sacred. Realness is taboo. Realness refers to a life defined by violence, drugs, cutthroat capitalism—a life not unfamiliar to superstar rappers like The Game (who has been shot five times) and 50 Cent (nine times) when their crews shoot at each other. “I got you stuck off the realness,” Prodigy of Mobb Deep raps in the song “Shook Ones Pt. II,” probably the most widely quoted use of the term. “We be the infamous / you heard of us / official Queensbridge murderers.” It’s Mobb Deep’s realness that makes you a “shook one”; it’s Prodigy’s realness that got you stuck. This leads to the term’s larger meaning, the meaning Cormega takes, for example, in titling his debut album
The Realness
. There’s no title track to explain the term. It’s posted at the front of the album like an emblem representing all that follows. The same for Group Home’s song “The Realness,” in which DJ Premier samples “Shook Ones Pt. II” to isolate the words “the realness” and “comes equipped.” Melachi ends his verse by saying he “comes equipped with that Brainsick shit,” referring to the guest rappers from the Brainsick Mob, but that’s all we know about these terms. There’s no definition of realness, only a declaration that they’re equipped with it. In the spoken-word introduction to his song “Look in My Eyes,” Obie Trice says, “Every man determines his definition of realness, what’s real to him.” Realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back. Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.
Cultural and commercial languages invade us 24/7. That slogan I just heard on the TV commercial: I can’t get it out of myhead. That melody from the theme song to that syndicated sitcom that arrives at seven every night: we’re colonized by this stuff. It invades our lives and our lexicon. This might be of no consequence to the average media consumer, but it spells trouble for the artist. There is now a slogan, a melody, a raw building block of art living in his brain that he doesn’t own and can’t use.
The evolution of copyright law has effectively stunted the development of sampling, thereby protecting the creative property of artists but obstructing the natural evolution of human creativity, which has always possessed cannibalistic tendencies. With copyright laws making the sampling of popular music virtually impossible, a new technique has evolved in which recordings are made that mimic the recordings that the artists would like to sample. These mimic recordings—not nearly as satisfying as sampling the original record—are then sampled and looped in the same way that the original would have
Similar Books
