Academic Archive: Volume I
by Joe Allen
When discussing record hunting in an article about beatdigging in Life Sucks Die, Mr. Supreme said, “I’m like a magnet to breaks! I can just pick up any record and it will have a beat.” Because of the many ways to employ samples, I have heard other producers express similar sentiments. I identify with this uncanny serendipity although not necessarily with records. Besides collecting records, I have been accumulating other source material that resembles either the cut-and-mix aesthetic of hip-hop or the impulse to collect; my archive includes everything from the collages of Romare Bearden and the cultural theory of Walter Benjamim to novels such as Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Nathaniel Mackey’s Djbot Baghostus’s Run. Everywhere I turn, more hip-hop manifestations rise to the surface. In fact, the very day I came across the Mr. Supreme quote, I was reading the first novel, City of Glass, of Paul Auster’s postmodern detective series, The New York Trilogy [see fig. 1]. The novel has very little to do with the practice of sampling—the closest relationship might be the fragmentary nature of identity or the presentation of different and shrouded versions of the same events. Nonetheless, the novel contains a remarkable passage when the detective Quinn first confronts Stillman, the man he has been watching and following aimlessly around New York. Stillman has been writing a book and he explains his compositional strategy:
fig.1
My work is very simple. I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You only have to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purposes admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds—from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverized to the putrid. (94) 1
I thought I was reading about digging for beats and samples; not about the way writers absorb and sample source material. As the Auster quote suggests, though, the process has a striking relationship.
In each issue of Wax Poetics, this column will discuss the relationship between the hip-hop practice of record collecting and sampling to other art, literature, and theory. Such multidisciplinary comparisons will place the hip-hop aesthetic in a larger cultural, historical, and artistic context. Just as the Arethra Franklin sample on Mos Def’s “Ms. Fat Booty” has caused many of us to check Aretha’s beautiful track “One Step Ahead,” hopefully “The Academic Archive” will inspire of few readers to track down a different kind of source material.
Fig. 2
First up is a painter, writer, and composer from London, Tom Phillips, and his lifelong project A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1980, first edition; 1987, first revised edition; 1997, second revised edition) [see fig. 2] which draws inspiration from William Burroughs’s much noted cut-up technique. But rather than cut up his own work, Phillips initially sought to rework and retextualize the first coherent book he could find for threepence: he found A Human Document (by W. H. Mallock, published in 1892) on “a routine Saturday morning shopping expedition.”2 Phillips describes his technique at the end of his second revised edition: “I merely scored out unwanted words with pen and ink,” thereby creating poetic fragments that read down the page. Then, “It was not long though before the possibility became apparent of making a better unity of word and image, intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature.” Thus, Phillips employed painting, rendering many of the 368 pages into stunningly beautiful and unique watercolor or gouache paintings that surround, highlight, and incorporate the leftover text [see fig. 3]. His resulting text contains “poems, music scores, parodies, notes on aesthetics, autobiography, concrete texts, romance, mild erotica, as well as the undertext of Mallock’s original story.” According to Phillips, A Humument “is a reasonable example of bricolage, and . . . perhaps a massive deconstruction job taking the form of a curious unwitting collaboration between two ill-suited people seventy-five years apart.” Phillips’s compositional technique unquestionably shares much with the practice of hip-hop sampling: signifying on an original work of art, chopping, and then recontextualizing pieces of the original, adding new layers, and ultimately assembling a new work of art.
Fig. 3
Phillips has continued to revise his work by first publishing ten smaller volumes and now three editions (each revised) of the entire work. When he began varying his original text, he had to find a second copy of Matlock’s novel. The copy he found “had belonged to one Lottie Yates who had herself ‘treated’ it to some extent, heavily underlining passages that seemed to relate to her own romantic plight. . . . Thus, in 1902, someone had already started to work the mine.” How many times do we go back to the archetypal beats and breaks only to mine them again and uncover untouched possibilities (see Q-Bert’s mixtape Preschool Break Mix)
With two more volumes, Phillips will have completely overhauled his first edition. Because each page has such a “rich set of alternatives,” he has proved to himself the “inexhaustibility of even a single page” by producing over twenty variations of page 85 [see fig. 4]. In the third edition of A Humument, Phillips even samples his previous editions, as he says, “In some recent pages I have incorporated elements of their printed predecessors.” For instance, the painting on page 105 includes a picture on the wall which is “made from fragments” of the original edition of the page [see fig. 5]. Hip-hop artists aren’t the only composers who sample their own work (see Diamond D: “I took a blues break and I broke it”).
With a digital sampler, a song, sample, or break can be altered and re-altered in a similar fashion. Phillips’s comments are reminiscent of the endless possibilities of use of the inexhaustible archive of recorded and found sounds. Although hip-hop producers have sampled other mediums, the medium of choice remains the vinyl LP. Rob Carrigan of the Sound Library record store in NYC believes that most beats and funky loops have been uncovered—a testament to the research capabilities of the legions of beatdiggers. Yet, he comments, “We won’t run out of samples. We’ve reached that point where every record, every kind of music is samplable.” Noted producer Showbiz agrees: “There’s a lot of different sounds out there, a lot of different records that haven’t been touched” (qtd. in Soulman’s World of Beats Vol. 4a). For instance, Soulman’s latest mix Neva Stop Diggin’ contains a track of breaks and loops culled from Spanish records. DJ Premier adds that the “underground will live forever,” knowing full well that he and others (see the People Under the Stairs’s Question in the Form of an Answer) will proceed to dig for samples, cutting and chopping small bits and pieces of sounds until a new sound takes shape.
Joe Allen is an Assistant Professor of English at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY. Much of his research has focused on cultural studies including contemporary fiction and music (especially hip-hop). He recently published a chapbook titled He’s the DJ, I’m the Turntablist: The Progressive Art of Hip Hop DJs on Mississinewa Press. Also, “The Operatic Incongruity of Nathaniel Mackey’s Djbot Baghostus’s Run” will appear in the forthcoming collection of essays Black Orpheus on Garland Press.
Notes:
- Paul Auster, City of Glass (Penguin Books, © 1985).
- This and subsequent Tom Phillips’s quotes from A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel [Third Edition] (Thames & Hudson, © 1997).
