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Chapter 2: Let my tape rock until my tape pops

An alternate history of hip-hop as told through mixtapes

The hip-hop mixtape - ever-present, if not always visible in hip-hop history - reflects a competitive culture of innovation as expressed through the creative application of media communication technologies. From their earliest appearance as homemade cassettes to the digital distributions that proliferate on the web today, mixtapes make material one of hip-hop's central tensions as they activate both the pop industry's commercial stakes and popular culture's joyfully resistant potential. Driven by a spirit of constant revision and reinvention, the mixtape DJ relies on the pop industry for raw materials just as he challenges its conventions. The tapes themselves give voice to people disenfranchised by consolidated and de-localized media channels and exposes the shortcomings of the contemporary intellectual property regime. Despite the mixtape's myriad implications across disciplines, it remains largely unexamined in hip-hop scholarship.

What makes a hip-hop mixtape different any other mixed tape?

The mixtapes discussed below differ from the more common homemade compilations of the same name traded by music fans since the 1960s. (Moore) Although those mixed tapes and CD-Rs leverage many of the same consumer technologies as hip-hop mixtapes, they are typically produced in very small quantities and intended only for a very limited circulation. When Robert Christgau made "his own personalized Clash record" in 1978, he may have written about it in the Village Voice but the tapes themselves were strictly friends-only. (Moore) The mixtapes produced by hip-hop DJs, on the other hand, circulate in more diverse economies. As the examples below illustrate, ambitious production, distribution, and circulation among fans distinguishes hip-hop mixtapes from other types of homemade compilations.

As the dominant global pop idiom, hip-hop's complex economic, political, social manifestations have inspired considerable scholarship across disciplines. Surprisingly, there has been comparatively less attention paid to the intertwining of hip-hop culture with the history of media and communication technologies. Foregrounding the demand for technical innovation in hip-hop offers a new analytic framing for the issues raised by other scholars concerned with hip-hop and youth cultures. This chapter will emphasize the formal and contextual qualities of the examined mixtapes rather than investigating their content. Where possible, I will suggest further reading to address some of the intriguing, inspiring, startling, and downright bedeviling lyrics and imagery presented by the recordings discussed in this chapter.

Brief introduction to the hip-hop mixtape

At first glance, the hip-hop mixtape, dubbed to cassette or burned to CD, shares many formal characteristics with the traditional pop album. Both album and mixtape include a purposefully ordered series of recordings divided into tracks that can be accesssed individually or played sequentially by listeners. But while each track on a typical album contains a discrete song recorded by a single artist or group, a hip-hop mixtape is built from several different types of overlapping recordings that may include dozens of artists. [fn tony touch's mixtape with 50 MCs] Unlike a traditional album by a single artist or group, mixtapes are credited to a DJ, essentially acting as aggregator, editor, and curator of these various components.

In the production of a mixtape, the hip-hop DJ draws on the interrelated practices of recording studio engineers, on-air radio personalities, turntablists, and dance club DJs. Like the editor of any multi-author volume, the mixtape DJ asserts his or her identity through the selection and sequencing of pre-existing recordings. Exceding the conventional editor's role, the DJ may further manipulate the chosen recordings by halting, scratching, blending, or rewinding them during playback. In some cases, the DJ will also talk over the recordings, either in response to their content or to directly address the listener.

As the recordings discussed below demonstrate, DJs take wildly varied approaches to the arrangement of a mixtape. In the earliest cases, the mixtape is documentation of a DJ mixing records live on turntables in a club, on the radio, or in a home studio with little to no adjustment. At the opposite end, mixtapes may be carefully assembled using multi-track audio editing software in a personal computer. Most of the mixtapes included below fall somewhere in between, balancing performance with the layering and post-production afforded by contemporary music technologies. More than a single form, the mixtape is an approach to organizing recordings that is responsive to varying contexts, able to circulate and express meaning differently depending on changing local constraints.

Although term "mixtape" was coined in the informal cassette trading economies of the 1970s, hip-hop mixtapes have been distributed almost exclusively in digital formats for the last decade. In fact, exploiting the latest storage media is one of the many ways in which mixtape DJs compete with one another. The significance of a cassette versus a CD versus an mp3 are in constant negotiation among DJs and listeners. Distribution is equally varied and competitive. Street corner sales, bootlegging, and other forms of face-to-face commerce accompanied the early tape trading era and one need only hang out in Harvard Square or Downtown Crossing on a Saturday afternoon to see that the informal economy remains a primary channel for mixtape distribution. Of course, like many other areas of the informal economy, mixtapes are also sold, shared, and distributed online via message boards, blogs, direct download sites, and torrent trackers.

((( TODO need a paragraph to explain "informal economy" and to tie the creation and exploitation of alternative economies to my bigger argument of innovation. Good source? )))

Methodological approach

Lessig's model of four regulatory forces

To better enable comparison among the selected mixtapes, I am borrowing an analytic tool Lawrence Lessig initially created to facilitate discussion of digital property rights. (Lessig 1999 TODO) For a given right, Lessig's model examines in turn the effects of market, architectural, legal, and social regulatory forces. (Lessig 2004 121) This flexible framework is also an effective tool for investigating the conditions within which popular culture is practiced.

((( TODO include image of Lessig's model here. )))

In the image above, the dot at the center is object of regulating forces. It can be used to represent individuals, groups, artifacts, and other regulatory structures. In the case of hip-hop culture, the dot can be used to represent many different stakeholders: a pop song, the dancers in a party, a radio listener, the distribution of mixtapes, or an emerging business. Although this illustration appears to suggest that the dot is distinct from the four forces, its mobility and freedom are determined by their balance.

To demonstrate the utility of this model, we can use it to examine the impact of regulating forces on the release of a new pop single. Contract law regulates the formal relationships among the record label, artists, management, producer, engineers, duplication facilities, packing designers, distribution networks, and retail outlets. If the recording contains samples from any pre-existing recordings, copyright law contrains the reuse of these extant materials. The law is empowered to regulate the release of a pop song because it injects the threat of punishment into each of these arrangements. (Lessig 2004 121) By violating a contract or infringing on a copyright monopoly, one risks state-supported sanctions in the form of fines or the loss of personal liberty.

Social norms discipline the release of a pop single in different ways from the law. Whereas the the boundaries of the law's regulatory power are relatively clear, social expectations shift considerably depending on variables difficult to enumerate. For example, if there are lyrics on this pop single that some people find offensive, they may impose much stronger punishment than would the state if the lyrics are legally defined as obscenity. The offended people may join together to protest the single. They might even call for a boycott of all singles released by the record company, thus affecting the livelihood of all its artists and employees.

Market constraints are effected through conditional relationships such as, "You can do X if you pay Y." (Lessig 2004 122) The pop single is destined to circulate as a commodity within the conventional pop music economy. If the single does not resonate with a large enough audience or the record label does not budget enough capital to appropriately market the single, it is unlikely to sell enough copies to recoup the cost of production. Furthermore, if there happens to be a glut of this type of song at the time of its release, it will similarly be constrained by the regulatory force of the market. For the pop single, the marketplace disciplines participation with the reward or loss of capital.

In Lessig's explanation of this model, architecture means "the physical world as you find it." (Lessig 2004 122) For the release of a pop single, the physical world includes as widely varied architectures as the highway system, the number of radio stations in a given city, and the machinations of the iTunes Music Store. Architecture may also concern the storage medium containing the pop single. Will it be released as a vinyl single? A CD? An mp3 or other downloadable format? Each of these architectures constrains the circulation of the single in its own way.

As is apparent in the examples above, the four regulatory forces overlap, affirm, contradict, and regulate each other. For example, though copyright law imposes one set of restrictions for the reuse of existing creative material, social norms maintain different standards. Sampling from an out of print soul record without permission may garner social goodwill from music fans at the same time as it transgresses a legal constraint. Similarly, paying off the program director of a radio station may be in accord with industry social norms and market expectations at the same time as as it violates legal standards. However, as the laws concerning payola are poorly enforced, the record label will likely risk state punishment to ensure that its pop single is played on the radio.

((( TODO create diagrams for these examples. )))

[fn In the discourse of regulation, the law circulates differently from market, architectural, and social forces. In a footnote to his discussion of this model, Lessig describes law as the only regulatory force that "speaks as if it has a right self-consciously to change the other three." (Lessig 2004 317)]

Hip-hop mixtapes reflect shifts in the balance of regulatory forces acting on hip-hop culture and the ability of hip-hop participants to resist discipline and appropriation by the dominant media industries. Across hip-hop history, the mixtape form reveals moments in which the pop market fails to satisfy the hip-hop audience, in which legislation conflicts with social norms, and where new technologies present novel affordances for the hip-hop practitioner. The process by which mixtapes engage in constant renegotiation with regulatory boundaries reflects the values of revision and innovation characteristic of the hip-hop approach to cultural production.

This chapter will examine in detail five mixtape recordings in chronological sequence. It is by no means an exhaustive history of the mixtape. Each artifact was selected from many other equally fascinating possibilities but all of them demonstrate creative responses to the peculiar conditions of their historical moments. These examples are not meant to be exceptional but rather representative of widespread practices in hip-hop culture.

This project is made considerably richer by the archival efforts of hip-hop fans and bloggers. All of the mixtapes discussed here were gathered from blogs, discussion forums, and other media-sharing sites on the web. In recent years, cassette collectors have been digitizing their collections and trading the resulting recordings online. That these grassroots efforts are criminalized by existing copyright law and undermined by competing digital audio formats is a shameful state of affairs I intend to address in future research.

Party tapes: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4 MCs - Live at the Audubon Ballroom, 1978

((( TODO include img of Flash's live tapes ))) ((( TODO create clip of melle saying "hotel motel" )))

The first recordings to be identified as hip-hop mixtapes were "party tapes" recorded and traded by hip-hop fans in the late 1970s and early 1980s when hip-hop began to achieve it's first major visibility outside of the South Bronx. At that time, the creative interaction between MC and DJ that is now called "hip-hop" or "rap music" was almost exclusively a live performance. There were not yet any studio recordings of hip-hop/rap music on the market and the form was seldom heard on commercial radio. When early mixtape producers recorded the live performances of groups like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4 MCs, they created a market for recordings of hip-hop that did not previously exist.

((( TODO improve this section w details from CSWS, yes yes. Is it too rushed? I am trying not to re-write the history of hip-hop DJing but there are some core concepts and terms that need to be established. )))

Grandmaster Flash's events at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom attracted attendees from around New York City. Artists, musicians, and disco enthusiasts came up from their lofts and studios downtown to see the acrobatic breakdancers and experience the quick-mixing hip-hop DJ style. In contrast to the smooth, extended mixes of the downtown disco DJs, Flash ran swiftly through his record crates, emphasizing the seams between and within them as he went. (Freedberg) In time, clubs outside of Harlem and the Bronx began to feature DJs playing in the hip-hop style. People who grew up hearing DJs like Flash and Kool Herc at teen dances and public park parties in the Bronx followed the music to bigger, more upscale venues in Manhattan. (Chang 128)

Among his many contributions to early hip-hop culture, Grandmaster Flash is best known for perfecting and popularizing the breakbeat-focused approach to DJing. Dance music enthusiasts in the disco tradition tend to emphasize the DJ's auter role as expert selector of songs. (Graham) Breakbeat DJs, on the other hand, increased the granularity of music selection by identifying not just songs but the most pleasureable _parts_ of songs. By manipulating two copies of the same record, the breakbeat DJ could effectively isolate and loop the best parts of a song - the break - indefinitely.

((( TODO i am sure that there is a great quote from Flash, Herc or someone else describing the break. )))

"Live at the Audubon Ballroom" begins with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4 MCs already on stage and in full swing. Beneath the rapping, one can hear Flash juggling a break from the Fatback Band's "Fatbackin'." (Spitfire) As was true with many of the most popular breaks, the "Fatbackin'" break features the rhythm section and does not include any of the vocals from the original. This emphasis on instrumental passages facilitates live rapping, encourages dancing, and anticipates the largely instrumental techno and house music to come in the 1980s and 1990s. Each time Flash cuts back to the start of the "Fatbackin'" break, he signals the return and by extension, his transformative role, by mixing in a single blast of the brass section. ((( TODO include clips from this section )))

Flash's set list in 1978 did not include any records that would be found today in the "Hip-Hop/Rap" section of iTunes, a Newbury Comics, or the Virgin Megastore. No one had yet tried to recreate hip-hop in a recording studio so Flash drew on existing disco and r&b recordings - some familiar, some obscure, some unexpected - to create the high-energy sonic atmosphere that the dancers and MCs desired. The records that Flash selected only became "hip-hop" at his intervention. By manipulating the playback of these artifacts of the pop music industry in an unexpected way, Flash used the material products of a dominant cultural form (disco pop) to create a resistant form (hip-hop) that would ultimately supercede it.

Breakbeat DJing is a highly precise, technical activity. [fn Flash as elec engineer. TODO] It requires an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and an unusual intimacy with each recording. The breakbeat DJ must be able to quickly locate the desired part of each individual record, cue it, and mix it in time with an on-going program. Similarly, to accurately cue and mix records in the breakbeat style required a steady, practiced finesse with phonograph equipment that was not designed for such activity. To maintain the rhythm and control of the breakbeat style, DJs needed to find unusually precise turntables, cartridges, needles, and mixers. In some cases, equipment required modifications. One such modification that is occasionally still practiced is the use of household items like pennies or playing dice to add extra weight to a turntable's tonearm so that the needle will stay in the groove while the DJ manipulates the vinyl record. ((( TODO is this the best mod example? ))) Not only did DJs like Flash have to reuse existing music recordings in their creation of hip-hop, they applied the same creative approach to the technologies used to create and playback their music.

In late 1978, when this recording of Grandmaster Flash party was made, the term "hip-hop" may not yet have been in use, but the competitive spirit that characterizes a hip-hop approach to cultural production was firmly in place. In Flash's day, the depth of one's record collection was the locus of competition between DJs. Some peculiar practices emerged that reflect this social regulation. To stop "trainspotters" from identifying their song selections at parties, breakbeat DJs would soak the labels off of their most obscure records before bringing them to parties. (TODO cite?) While the technologies and techniques needed to practice breakbeat DJing were on display for observation and imitation, the actual breakbeats themselves were not. Transparency, in this era of hip-hop culture, was only practiced insofar as it encouraged widespread competition. Anyone could see how to be a breakbeat DJ, but not everyone could sound like Flash.

Some party tapes were made by holding a microphone up to the PA speakers and include all of the ambience of the event: people talking, flirting, singing along, and responding to the MCs. Other tapes like "Live at Aubudon Ballroom", were made by party promoters or the DJs themselves and were recorded directly from the mixing desk. With no hip-hop on the radio or in record stores, these tapes provided the only opportunity to hear the DJs and MCs outside of their parties. Tapes were dubbed and traded among friends so it is difficult to ascertain exactly how many of a given tape were put into circulation.

The scarcity of hip-hop in traditional pop channels meant that tapes carried not only cultural value but a significant monetary worth for fans, DJs, and tape traders. Brucie B recalls duplicating cassettes in his apartment and selling them in his neighborhood for $20 a piece, "I'd go on this block and make $100, go on that block and make $100." (Reid 2003 8) By the late 1970s, DJs were experimenting with new types of tapes to meet the demands of their fans. Years before Sony would produce its first portable Walkman cassette deck in 1979, party tapes were made to be blasted out of a slow-moving car with its windows down. From the start, hip-hop recordings were tools with which fans could express themselves in public spaces. Realizing this use for party tapes, Grandmaster Flash offered bespoke mixtapes for wealthier customers in which he would "continuously shout out [the tape buyer's] name using an echo sound effect" atop the mix. At their peak, Flash charged as much as a "dollar a minute" for these one-of-a-kind tapes that might run up to 120 minutes in length. (TODO Mtv)

Sound-systems and DJ-technicians

Unlike a typical nightclub DJ who plays records on a permanent installation, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and the other South Bronx DJs were also responsible for building and maintaining the sound systems on which they played. Their success as DJs depended not only on having a keen ear for dance music and an adventuring spirit to its juxtaposition but also an expertise to the operation and repair of high-end audio gear: speakers, amplifiers, mixers, turntables, microphones, and a bevy of sound effects. A young Herc was granted access to his father's sound system only after he covertly rewired it to achieve higher gain and clarity. (Change 68) Flash, who regularly modified his equipment with soldering iron and screwdriver, credits his fascination with electronics for keeping him in his room and out of the gang violence that permeated his neighborhood's street life. (Chang 112) With the towering aesthetic influence of these early practitioners, it is easy to overlook the technical prowess that enabled their contributions.

Copyright Term Extension Act of 1976

The innovations of hip-hop's pre-pop era accompanied a growing awareness among members of the creative industries that accessible media technologies were affecting accepted distinctions between audiences and producers. One manifestation of this awareness is the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1976, a major revision to U.S. Copyright Law that established the foundation for today's intellectual property regime. Although party tapes like Live at the Audubon Ballroom were likely not yet on the minds of the pop music industry in 1976, they exemplify exactly the kind of outsider activity that prompted the changes made to copyright law.

On one hand, the Act recognized the need to formally protect certains kinds of expressive, academic, and critical reuse by codifying guidelines for fair use. Based on existing common law, the guidelines are meant to assist judges presiding over cases of alleged copyright infringement. They provide four dimensions for the investigation of a controversial reuse: 

 "1. the purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, transformative or reproductive);
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity);
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the market (or potential market) for the original work."

(17 U.S.C. 107)

To illustrate the impact of this approach to copyright, imagine that Perception Records, the label that released "Fatbackin'" in 1973 filed a lawsuit against Grandmaster Flash for juggling their record in the opening sequence of "Live at the Audubon Ballroom." Would fair use provide a convincing defense? Or would a judge find that Flash was infringing Perception's copright?

A breakbeat-laden party tape contains countless instances of transformative, if potentially infringing, reuse. It is also a commercial commodity that may effect changes in the market value - positively and negatively - of the source recordings. [fn Evidence exists that selection by a hip-hop DJ increases the market value of a recording. Obscure songs containing well-known breakbeats consistently fetch high prices in the used record market. Likewise, organizations such as the Bridgeport Group speculatively purchase the publishing rights to large catalogs of old pop recordings in the hope that they will one day be reused by hip-hop producers. (TODO davey d)] For Grandmaster Flash to negotiate a license for each of the records he used would have been prohibitive expensive for the independent artist. Would a judge determine that accompanying breakbeat juggling with live vocalists constitutes sufficiently transformative reuse to be a fair use? Or is the commercial potential of the hip-hop mixtape strong enough that Flash should have sought a licensing agreement in advance of reproducing his party tapes? [fn TODO quote "don't sample" in the case of Bridgeport/Pfunk/NWA.]

The 1976 copyright legislation anticipates a culture of widespread creative reuse but does not appear to see the degree to which this reuse will blur the distinctions betwee commercial and non-commercial activity. Hip-hop is not only vanguard in its approach to material cultural production but it immediately renders inadequate the brand new copyright legislation. As hip-hop enters the pop economy in the next example, we will see how the regulating force of law begins to conflict more clearly with hip-hop social norms and the affordances of media production technologies.

Pop singles: Sugarhill Gang - "Rapper's Delight", 1979

In 1979, hip-hop crews like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 4 MCs were a powerful force in New York City nightlife but because they were not recording songs of their own, they remained entirely invisible to the pop music economy at large. Many of the city's independent record producers desperately wanted to be the first to release an actual hip-hop single but they were repeatedly stonewalled by skeptical artists. For early practitioners like Flash, hip-hop was the product of numerous interrelated cultural practices that came together in the block parties, teen dances, roller rinks, and clubs of New York. Chuck D of Public Enemy, then a Long Island teenager, remembers struggling to imagine hip-hop in a pop context. "I did not think it was conceivable that there would be such thing as a hip-hop record," he recalls, "How you gon' put three hours on a record?" (Chang 130)

Obstinate local celebrities could not prevent the industry's eventual appropriation of hip-hop culture. It took a group of unknowns, discovered in a Jersey pizza shop, to do what established hip-hop artists deemed impossible and record the culture's first single. "Rapper's Delight" is a 15-minute approximation of hip-hop music as understood by fans on the dancefloor. The instrumental foundation is an interpolation of Chic's "Good Times" arranged and performed by a recording studio house band. A 16-bar passage from song's main theme is repeated countless times in an attempt to emulate a breakbeat DJ juggling the summer's hottest song. The Sugarhill Gang's rhymes draw on the routines they have been hearing for years at parties (the memorable "hotel, motel..." line can be heard on "Live at the Audubon Ballroom" at TODO xx:xx) but their comedic storytelling verses predict the prominence of rap lyrics in hip-hop's future.

While the Sugarhill Gang's record carried little weight among New York City's dominant hip-hop practitioners, it was an enormous hit everywhere else in the world, shortly becoming the best-selling 12" vinyl single of all time. (Chang 131) The popularity of "Rapper's Delight" in record stores and on the radio affected the market demand for hip-hop recordings and, within a year, Flash and his contemporaries were all trying to repeat its success. Without the liberating nievete of the Sugarhill Gang, these established hip-hop artists largely failed to translate the energy and spirit of their live performances and mixtapes to the short format and constraints of the recording studio. In most cases, the role of the DJ was reduced to that of a consultant as they vainly tried to coach studio musicians into replicating the quick-mix routines over which their MCs were accustomed to rhyming. Furthermore, the rhymes of groups like the Furious 4 MCs tended to rely on call-and-response interaction with the audience and fell flat outside the context of a party. (Chang 133)

Although older fans proclaimed "Rapper's Delight" the death of hip-hop, its spread exposed more young people than ever to hip-hop's unique approach to material culture. If the older generation believed hip-hop dead, it was only because they underestimated the radical degree to which hip-hop's demand for constant innovation might transform the culture itself. As hip-hop entered the pop industry, the balance of regulatory forces acting upon it shifted. The breakbeat style which defined hip-hop's sonic presentation for nearly a decade was difficult to emulate in the staid architecture of the recording studio and its disregard for copyright law troubled businesspeople committed to making money from hip-hop singles. Mixtapes, once hip-hop's only recorded form, suddenly shared the marketplace with 12" vinyl singles, making them appear "bootleg" in comparison. Hip-hop culture was certainly not dead in the 1980s nor was it entirely driven by the pop music industry. The continued evolution of the hip-hop mixtape reveals a thriving spirit of creative experimentation and clever reuse.

((( TODO Schoolly D anecdote re: bootlegging in 1985-1986. Coleman 408 )))

Home studio recordings

The rising popularity, demand, and value of mixtapes during hip-hop's transition from performance to material pop commodity encouraged more DJs to make recordings outside of the live party setting. Using the same turntables, mixers, and microphones that they might bring to an event, the DJs constructed home studios in which they could more carefully assemble mixes for distribution in the lively mixtape economy. Working at home meant that mixes could be rehearsed, more carefully sequenced, and recorded with higher fidelity than on party tapes.

In a conventional "multi-track" recording studio like the one that the Sugarhill Gang used to record "Rapper's Delight", pop music is rarely played by a whole band in a single room the way it might be done in rehearsal or concert. Usually, the engineer divides the band by instrument or voice and records each part separately in isolation. Even when the musicians play simultaneously, they are often in different rooms and can only hear one another through headphones. Audio signals captured in these various spaces are routed into a single mixing console where the engineer can balance, manipulate, and blend them.

The final step in such a recording project is the "mix down." Once everyone is satisfied with the playback coming from the tape machine, they record a final "mixed" version of the song in which all of the distinct channels are irrevocably merged into two channels: left and right. With a little more aural massaging, this mixed-down version is what will be commercially duplicated and distributed.

((( TODO image of a big Ampex MM1200 )))

((( TODO interesting bit about multi track tape but maybe too much technical blah blah? could be a footnote?

TODO when do we mention TASCAM's first 4-track compact cassette tape recorder (1979)?

TODO seems that there needs to be a later section on home multitrack that spans 4track to digital to garageband... perhaps in the 90s section? that's when i start seeing it more commonly

)))

In the 1970s and 1980s, standardized "compact" cassette tapes were a convenient medium for sharing and trading hip-hop music but they presented a special set of affordances and constraints to a DJ using them in a home studio setting. Unlike the engineer working in a multi-track studio, the mixtape DJ had few opportunities to correct mistakes. With no intermediate stage between recording and the final "mixed down" product, DJs had to either perform their blends, scratches and transitions perfectly in a single take or interrupt their mix by periodically pausing the tape deck. Considering that one side of a tape might last as long as sixty minutes, most homestudio mixtapes of this period typically contain several smaller mixes separated by tiny, almost imperceptible moments of silence where the DJ paused the tape to catch his breath.

Pause Tapes

When dual-deck systems became available at affordable consumer prices, the peer-to-peer mixtape trade greatly expanded as hip-hop fans duplicated and traded their collections. Soon, however, hometapers discovered that by holding the pause button the first cassette deck while rewinding the second, they could emulate the looping and cutting techniques of a live DJ mixing on turntables. Just as Flash drew from a wide range of popular music in his parties and performances, these early "pause tape" architects mined compelling breaks from a variety of sources to create their compilations. The participants in the pause tape phenomenon effectively mimicked the selecting, sequencing, looping, and blending practices of the live DJ without access to turntables or a mixer. These fan practitioners demonstrated that the hip-hop approach to material culture was not the product of a particular technological architecture but rather a creative orientation that could flourish across a variety of technological platforms.

Shout outs

((( TODO include audio selection of brucie b shoutouts )))

Grandmaster Flash's custom tapes were not the only ones to feature a mixtape DJ's voice during the party tape era. Acting as much like a radio personality as a party DJ, World Famous Brucie B would call out the names of friends and family on his widely distributed tapes. Although hip-hop was largely invisible on commercial radio of this time, the mixtape DJs' layering of pre-existing records and live voices provides an important link in African-American radio history. Starting in the mid-1980s, high-energy hip-hop "mixshows" like Mr. Magic's "Rap Attack" draw equally from the creative approach to media technologies heard on the 1970s mixtapes as they do the fast-talking "hepcat" radio personalities from 1950s soul and r&b programs. (Sarig xiii) For radio DJs trying to bring hip-hop to the airwaves, homemade mixes like Brucie B's provided a model for performing the energetic party DJ style in an enclosed studio.

Break-beats without break-dancers

The home studio experience also divorced the hip-hop DJ mix from the dancefloor. Although the party tapes were played in cars, shops, and homes, they were usually products of the dancer/DJ relationship. The move to a home studio did not reduce the significance of the body in hip-hop culture but rather attended a shift in the role that hip-hop played in the lives of its participants. No longer simply the soundtrack to the best parties in the city, hip-hop could become the soundtrack to city life itself. By recording and playing mixtapes in a variety of settings, the DJs and listeners recoded their bedrooms, living rooms, basements, stoops, shopping malls, schools, and restaurants with hip-hop significance. Whereas the hip-hop party represents a temporary resistance to accepted methods for experiencing pop music, the mixtape spreads that sense of pleasurable possibility throughout the zones of day-to-day life.

With the flurry of hip-hop singles that followed the success of "Rapper's Delight", fans began to hear rappers on the radio. The DJs' tapes were no longer an exclusive channel for hip-hop's musical output. Though one might expect this proliferation of hip-hop in the traditional pop industry to dull the energy of the mixtape trade, it appears to have instead triggered hip-hop's competitive spirit. The home studio afforded new freedom for DJs accustomed to the demands of a dancing audience and DJs like Brucie B began to include music from farther reaching genres and moods in their mixtapes. Once serving only as documentation of the innovative hip-hop performance, the mixtapes following "Rapper's Delight" shifted the locus of hip-hop creativity from the party to the studio.

Blend tapes: Ron G - "Mixes #1", 1991

((( TODO include video from Yo MTV jams )))

Closer analysis of Ron G "Mixes 1"

Ron G's mixtape begins like so many party tapes - with a little hiss and a noisy crowd. But when Ron's voice comes in on top, he addresses the tape's listener and not the cheering audience. The audience sounds are being played off of a record. They were recorded cheering elsewhere, pressed to vinyl, and appropriated here for dramatic effect. The audience shortly noise fades away beneath Ron G juggling the break from the Honeydrippers "Impeach the President" and introducing himself on the microphone. The strings from Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" suddenly fade in atop the beat and the two songs proceed in sync, effectively indistinguishable as separate tracks.

((( TODO constituent parts: Impeach the President, the Honeydrippers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtnCkG_P2jA

Who's Making Love, Lou Donaldson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM49GZ6fJgU

Human Nature, Michael Jackson

)))

Ron G is present throughout the mix both vocally and in his manipulation of the included songs. He frequently calls out to listeners, demanding their attention. As the first chorus comes to an end, he urges them to, "Check out this second verse. Come on!" In addition to these vocal interjections, one can hear the pitches of the songs warble occasionally as Ron G nudges the records with his fingertips to keep them in time. Likewise, beat is not kept steady but is constantly scratched and cut up, adding a new rhythmic density to the familiar r&b classic.

After another minute, Ron G fades out "Human Nature", shouts out a few of his friends, and brings in the intro section of Jackson's "Man in the Mirror." As the intro gives way to the first verse, Ron G scratches in the thumping beat to Biz Markie's "Make The Music With Your Mouth." Swept up in the music, Ron alternates singing along with the lyrics to inserting himself into them, as he does here: 

 MICHAEL JACKSON: "It's gonna feel real good ...
 RON G		 :   - Ron G is gonna ... -
 MICHAEL JACKSON: Gonna make it right."

Swiftly dismissing "Man in the Mirror" after another minute of playback, Ron continues to juggle the Biz Markie beat, now giddy with excitement as he introduces the next song. "I want y'all to check out this Miami Vice joint", he cries out as he brings Phil Collin's "In the Air Tonight" into the mix. Riffing off of the assumption that the audience for his tape is familiar with the track's appearance in the pilot episode of Miami Vice, he goes on, "This is for y'all with the smooth-ass cars..." Ron's treatment transforms Collin's ode to isolation into a bass-heavy dance club track. He even ruptures the ultra-serious tone of Collins' vocal with his silly interjections: 

 PHIL COLLINS: "I can feel it coming in the air tonight.
 RON G	      : - So -
 PHIL COLLINS: - Hold on...
 RON G	      : - Tell your momma to -
 PHIL COLLINS: Hold on .. "

((( TODO include Miami Vice fanvid )))

Ron G calls himself "the World's Youngest" but in his 1991 mixtape, we can cleary hear the lasting influence of breakbeat DJs like Grandmaster Flash. Much remains structurally unchanged. The home studio tools are the same - mixers, turntables, vinyl singles, a microphone and an echo effect - as is the breakbeat DJ's core competency in scratching and juggling two copies of the same record. But the tone and timbre of the mixtape has changed. With hip-hop on TV and the radio (not to mention the Billboard Hot 100!), the mixtape was freed of its role as the exclusive channel for hearing hip-hop outside of a party. Mixtapes could have disappeared following hip-hop's ascendency to pop stardom. Instead, they flourished.

As the hip-hop's pop presence grew, so did the mixtape DJ's record collection. While disco, funk, soul, and r&b records familiar to the 1970s party DJ continued to form hip-hop's aesthetic core, record stores now stocked "hip-hop" singles alongside the likes of other new genres like electro, new wave, house, and freestyle. Whereas Flash's break-juggling techniques created hip-hop music from pre-existing pop recordings, younger DJs like Kid Capri had access to records made in the spirit of these pioneers. Flash had to juggle the Fatback Band by hand but not only would DJs to follow have access to a bevy of unlicensed breakbeat compilations but they lived in a world of pop records that effectively contained pre-juggled breaks.

Rockboxes: drum machines and samplers

Hip-hop's pop sound changed dramatically in the years to follow the fifteen-minute anomaly that is "Rapper's Delight." Newer tracks fit better into the pop radio format with verses, choruses, and rarely lasted longer than four minutes. Chang writes critically of this period as a time when "hip-hop was refined like sugar" but pop music's constraints revitalized a music beginning to sag under the weight of its own conventions. (Chang 134) The hip-hop approach to music, originally a creative orientation toward existing recordings, was now being focused on the creation of new materials. Harnessing the intangible quality of the breakbeat that captured the imaginations of DJs like Flash and Herc became the hip-hop producers' obsession.

((( TODO include images of the mpc60, the sp1200, and the 808 )))

Rather than rely on virtuoso DJs to create tracks live with their hands, the new generation of hip-hop producers, like the pause tape architects, exploited new technologies to achieve the dynamic repetition, layering, and cutting that characterized hip-hop's "soul sonic force." (Rose 1994 62) Accessing the same cultural tradition as the breakbeat DJs who sought out and modified their turntables, needles, and mixers, the producers achieved an intimate understanding of the available recording studio technologies. As the rise of hip-hop attends the increasing visibility of samplers, sequencers, and drum machines, some observers have suggested that hip-hop sonics are an effect of these new technologies. But as Rose describes in detail, the hip-hop producers articulate a pre-existing set of stylistic priorities through and with sampling technologies, not because of them. (Rose 1994)

Hip-hop producers in the 1980s and 1990s spoke also about subjective qualities among their machines. The MPC60 "feels" one way, the SP-1200 "swings" another, and the TR-808 "booms" when properly tuned. (Rose 1994 76-77) These observations reveal a certain sensitivity among hip-hop practitioners to details which may not be immediately apparent to listeners outside of the largely-black dance music discourse. Hip-hop producers, engaged with hip-hop's continuing demand for revision, reinvention, and innovation, sought tools to express and extend their aesthetic commitment to rhythm and repetition. Samplers and drum machines replaced turntables only insofar as they afforded a deeper engagement with that commitment.

When breakbeat DJs isolated specific passages from their records, they increased the granularity with which a DJ might select music to play for a crowd. Enabled by adept application of a sampler, hip-hop producers further improved this precision by sampling specific drum hits rather than complete phrases. Marley Mal discovering that he "could take any drum sound from any old record, put it in here and get that old drummer sound." (Rose 1994 79) By combining sampled drum hits, melodies, and phrases from many different sources, producers created new musical passages that behaved like breaks but could be manipulated to a level of detail that evaded even the most technical DJ. Producer Bill Stephney was astonished at the layering enabled by such careful sampling, "a kick from one record on one track, a kick from another record on another track, a Linn kick on a third track, and a TR-808 kick on a fourth." A sequencing computer could synchronize even these densely layered arrangements such that kick drum sounds from six disparate sources could play in time and sound to the listener like a single instrument.

Hip-hop music commodified

((( TODO include img of A and B side of a record label w/ inst + acap )))

With their innovative approach to music production technologies, practitioners in the 1980s successfully ported the hip-hop approach to cultural production from the party to the studio. But what about the media on which the recordings were duplicated, distributed, and sold? Surely hip-hop could not alter the industrial machinations of pop music, even if it was emerging as the latest cash cow. The records were still cut to vinyl and dubbed on cassette, weren't they?

"Good Times", the Chic song that provided inspiration for the "Rapper's Delight" beat was an undeniably resonate record for hip-hop fans in the summer of 1979. It "sent dancers running to the floor" and MCs "lining up to the mic." (Chang 131, 237) But hold the record in one's hands and find little material difference in "Good Times" from any other disco single of its era. Four years earlier, Mel Cheren of West End Records pioneered the 12" "DJ-friendly" format for disco and insisted on including an instrumental version on the record's B-side several singles to facilitate mixing, blending, and extending the track. (Graham) This structure would be familiar to dancehall reggae DJs who were accustomed to receiving an instrument "version" on the B-side of their 7" singles. (Marshall TODO) Both the disco and reggae examples demonstrate material changes to a conventional publishing practice in order to better serve an existing musical practice. With hip-hop redefining itself in the recording studio, how would it's records material differ from those that came before?

Since the introduction of a Parental Advisory sticker in 1985, rap singles typically include a version with curse words silenced, reversed, replaced, or otherwise obscured. Affixing the sticker and cleansing the vocal tracks are not required by law but are voluntary measures taken by industry participants to avoid censure by radio and TV stations wary of drawing negative attention from anti-obscenity groups. Examining the various terms used to distinguish the original from the edited versions on rap records reveals the cool irony with which hip-hop culture simultaneously undermines as it participates in the traditional pop economy. "Radio", "TV", and "Clean" tracks accompany "Street", "Club", and "Dirty" versions, thereby activating the pleasure of taboo and invalidating their mediated pop representations by constrasting them with real, physical spaces.

[fn TODO Creativity in constraint. Sound fx on Ludacris. Striptease v. TMI on Ying Yang Twins.] [fn TODO The Club, imagined space. Rap Valhalla.]

In addition to the edited versions, many hip-hop singles also include instrumental and acapella tracks. While Cheren's visionary introduction of the instrumental dance track accompanied the extended mixing style of a disco DJ, the hip-hop instrumental invites significantly greater participatory activity as it suggests listeners write, perform, and record their own rhymes atop the record. Even in the most conventional pop settings, rappers typically rhyme on top of their own instrumental singles.

The inclusion of an acapella track deserves special attention. Unlike the instrumental version, it is difficult to casually listen to a naked rap vocal. Absent instrumental accompaniament, the acapella rap models the artist's vocal technique just as it foregrounds the low barriers to start creating hip-hop music. Of all the features of a vinyl single, the inclusion of an acapella track demonstrates mostly clearly the intention of hip-hop producers to manufacture producerly raw materials for reuse by fan practitioners. To buy a hip-hop single with these various versions is to buy the hip-hop equivalent of a How-To kit. The four tracks on the 12" single contain all of the necessary components to begin creating, versioning, and performing ones own hip-hop music.

It took the investigative intervention of breakbeat DJs like Grandmaster Flash to locate the producerly possibilities in Chic's "Good Times" single. As hip-hop moved into the marketplace, it subtly ruptured the durability of the pop music substrate. By including the component parts of its songs on the same commodities circulating in the pop economy, hip-hop inscribed its artifacts with the material means for reinvention. Like the "View Source" function in your web browser, the instrumental and acapella tracks highlight their own producerly gaps and act as welcoming invitations to engage creatively with the media environment. Instead of shearing off its participatory spirit, the production of hip-hop commodities security the centrality of creative experimentation.

Using the past future to make the future past

((( TODO slice out Redding/ Eric B blend. )))

For a teenager like "The World's Youngest" Ron G, hip-hop and pop music were never distinct. Mentored by the senior Kid Capri, it is appropriate that Ron G is a remembered best for his "blend" tapes on which he reworks pop and r&b songs in a hip-hop mode. The blend is performed by carefully synchronizing the simultaneous playback of two different records. In a home studio with three turntables or a sampler, DJs like Ron G could weave non-stop layered collages from their collection of 12" singles. Enabled by the increasing availability of instrumental and acapella tracks, the blend DJ makes connections among seemingly disparate areas of the pop landscape. Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" lends a tender melancholy to Eric B and Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul" just as the latter reimagines the former with a newfound sense of urgency.

With hip-hop and rap now visible on the pop stage, competition grew ever more fierce in the wings. To compete as a mixtape DJ, one had to offer something different from what was happening in the clubs and on the radio mixshows. Furthermore, with contracts being signed and records being pressed, the mixtape was not the best site for creating new hip-hop tracks. Instead, as Ron G's blend tape demonstrates, the mixtape DJ could provide context for the rapid expansion of hip-hop and highlight a lineage between hip-hop and older forms of black pop like r&b.

But simply juxtaposing interesting tracks sequentially was not enough to satisfy hip-hop's need for innovation. Ron G and his contemporaries like Doo Wop and Kid Capri faced a twin challenge: to present relevant new tracks from hip-hop's pop economy at the same time as they upended expectations with surprising blends, interpolations, samples, and lost classics. The locus of competition for the hip-hop mixtape DJ had shifted again, from the selection of great songs to their timely (re)contextualization.

The production and deployment of acapella/instrumental records on blend tapes reveals a dimension to hip-hop's drive toward innovation not easily seen in its pre-pop incarnations. Rose suggests that the commitment to repetition and recontextualization in hip-hop music is the result of black cultural tradition in contact with post-industrial urbanity and technology. (Rose 1994 63) The expression of this tradition need not only be aesthetic, however. Hip-hop's adaptation to changing social, technical, legal, and economic contexts suggests that the repetition heard in hip-hop music is actually reflected in the growth of the culture itself.

Recursion is a special type of repetition in which the results of a given procedure is fed back into the same process. For a visual example, hold a smaller mirror up to a larger one and peer into the reflected image. You will see an endless repetition of the same image. But each instance of that image is not the same as the previous one, they are each subtly changed, distorted by the process of being reflected. Recursion is also heard at large events when a live microphone is pointed at the PA speakers and produces a ear-splitting squealing sound.

The continued evolution of hip-hop culture appears to suggest a similar process of feedback and repetition. When Ron G juggles the instrumental side of Biz Markie and Marley Mal's "Make the Music With Your Mouth", he is performing the process of isolation and looping that Marley Mal used to craft the beat in the first place. Like sampling from a sample, Ron G is dealing with hip-hop records in the manner of their construction, treating the products of hip-hop's past with the same creative license that established the culture.

In his analysis of Free Software culture, community, and technology, Chris Kelty coined the term "recursive public" to describe a group of people engaged in the construction of open software and networks. One characteristic that makes this group "recursive", is they don't just "argue about technology, but they also argue through it". (Kelty 29) Though I am not prepared to argue that hip-hop represents another recursive public, it certain does display some fascinating recursive properties. Just as the discourse of Free Software is as much its tools as the expression those tools enable, hip-hop culture deploys media and communications technologies in unexpected ways to revise and express its own cultural priorities. ((( TODO, there is something rich in this paragraph; deserves further attention. )))

Blends samples mashups and copyright

For all its commercial success, 1991's hip-hop music was still subject to the ambiguous copyright legislation enacted in 1976. Multi-tracked digital sequencing and sampling enabled producers to create ever more pleasurable webs of intertextual reference for culturally literate audiences. (Rose 1994 89) Unfortunately, skeptical listeners lacking the needed literacies derided the creative reuse as theft. The real theft, of course, was taking place in the courtrooms where copyright infringement lawsuits were heard. The U.S.

Through a systemic process of racist exclusion and exploitation, countless black r&b, soul, and funk artists were cut out of the publishing and licensing arrangements for their songs. (Chapple) Therefore, a lawsuit over the reuse of African-American pop history by predominantly black hip-hop producers revives and profits from the industry's racist past. Despite this obvious legacy, unscrupulous rights-holders nevertheless hired kids "to sit in a room and listen to hip hop record after hip hop record for the sole purpose of catching a [potentially litigious] snippet." (Davey 1997)

This ominous legal environment meant that Ron G's exciting r&b/hip-hop blends held no commercial potential within the conventional pop industry. Record companies wary of lawsuits over short sampled hits and phrases could not risk the certain litigation or devastating licensing fees that an authorized blend tape attract. As a result, mixtape DJs like Ron G were kept backstage to circulate their mixtapes in the grey informal economy of the street; the same venue as dealers of bootleg videocassettes and imitation luxury goods.

In contrast to their relative invisibility on the dominant media channels, mixtape DJs were often well-known to their local communities. For DJs in a city like New York, this esteem could translate into other opportunities to capitalize on hip-hop's pop success. Surely the opening track to "Mixes #1" served as an appropriate audition when Ron G was hired to remix Michael Jackson's "One More Chance." Furthermore, the innovations of the mixtape DJs could be heard in the pop sounds produced elsewhere (Mary J. Blige's hip-hop-influenced r&b is one notable example), though contraints on sampling meant that they were often imitated with interpolated "replay" tracks by studio musicians, their potential semiotic richness diminished.

((( TODO footnote about mashups/blends. Save this for later. [fn "The mixes are called blends... Not mash-ups!" (DJ Soul)] )))

Promo tapes: DJ Clue - Clue for President Vol. 1, 1997

((( TODO include audio from the beginning of the clue tape. )))

DJ Clue opens his mixtape with silence. Over the light hiss of rolling tape with characteristic echo effect, he shouts out a list of affiliations and friends; his voice bouncing around the empty sonic space. Without ceremony, the first song starts to play: a tense, organ-driven beat with verses from three of the day's most popular rappers, Jay-Z, Ja Rule, and DMX. Like Ron G, Clue's presence is felt throughout the recording. He laughs at the clever punchlines, shouts his name, and calls out the names of the artists.

A curious thing happens at the end of this first track. Nothing.

Clue's mixtapes are not mixed in the sense that we have seen in our previous examples. He allows the opening song to play to its conclusion and fade out before jumping in to introduce the next song, "New for 9-8. DJ Clue- minati! Representing Queens. We're gonna set this shit off with Jay-Z featuring Memphis Bleek. You know how we do it." Another song starts and we hear Clue laughing on top of it. "You heard?"

For fans of the genre-defying bricolage found on tapes by Ron G, Kid Capri, DJ Premier, and others, DJ Clue must have seemed a retrogression. The blending, cutting, looping, and layering pioneered by Grandmaster Flash and taken further by the later DJs is all but absent from Clue's compilations. In fact, Clue's only aural intervention appears to be his voice, incessantly echoing across every track.

At first, the song selection on "Clue for President" would be similarly bewildering. None of the tracks reach as far back into pop history as Ron G's reworking of Otis Redding. Rap fans looking closely at the tracklist would recognize nearly all of the artists' names but none of the song titles. Of the dozen songs on side A, only one had ever appeared on a conventional pop album in 1997. Six of the remaining tracks would be released in 1998, four were never officially released, and one was recorded specially for this mixtape.

Whereas the breakbeat DJ obscures the identifying information on his records, DJ Clue boasts about his. He calls out the artists' names ("New Lox!"), their labels ("Bad Boy!"), and even their release dates ("Coming in March 98!"). Fans of the technical prowess and unexpected juxtapositions that characterized most of mixtape history dismissed Clue's unblended compilations as uncreative, haphazard bootlegs. Like the party DJ who could not conceive of recording a hip-hop single, these critics could not see that Clue had changed the terms by which mixtape DJs might compete. Instead of trying to further innovate on the creative manipulation of dusty records, Clue focused instead on exclusive content.

Clue's insessant chatter on "Clue for President" takes on new meaning when we consider this new locus of competition. Instead of addressing the audience or responding to the music as did Ron G, Clue is marking his territory by "tagging" the audio. No other mixtape DJ will be able to reuse the songs with Clue's voice echoing over every verse and refrain. Thus tagged, they remain exclusive until official release.

The capital value of Hip-hop music, already a powerful market force in 1991, rose dramatically in the six years between Ron G's "Mixes #1" and "Clue for President." The introduction of barcodes and Soundscan reporting technology in 1991 suddenly gave the music industry access to more accurate sales figure than ever before. Within a matter of weeks, the numbers began to paint a surprising picture. The three best-selling albums in the U.S. were by Garth Brooks, Skid Row, and N.W.A. (Chang 416) Before Soundscan, the industry considered country, metal, and rap to be niche, peripheral subgenres. Now that they could see the degree to which these diverse, regional musics were driving retail sales, their budgets adjusted accordingly.

Initially, this attention brought with it new opportunities for hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs. But in 1996 after independent labels collectively outsold them, the five major labels started to buy out the indepedent labels. This consolidation hurt the network of independent distributors and mom&pop record stores that had nutured and supported hip-hop's growth. As a result, some of hip-hop's practitioners were able to build their businesses and demand access to channels that were previously closed off to the young black entrepreneur. Unfortunately, the consolidation that enabled this growth also effected a narrowing of the culture's aesthetic diversity. (Chang 445)

Another type of consolidation was putting the squeeze on hip-hop's support structure. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated commercial radio such that a single company could own as many as seven or eight stations in a single market. In the first year following passage of the Act, twenty percent of commercial stations in the U.S. changed ownership. Six months later, more than one thousand mergers had taken place. After five years, there were seven percent more stations in the nation but the number of owners fell by 25 percent. (Watkins 2005 137) The community-based urban radio dramatized in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing gave way to a layoffs, shrinking playlists, and syndicated programming.

DJ Clue's compilation-style mixtapes proved excellent promotional tools for record companies with dense release schedules and limited opportunity to get their artists heard on commercial radio. Where earlier DJs had learned to hack their turntables and studio gear, Clue learned to hack the music industry itself. By forging relationships with employees, contractors, artists, and affiliates of popular record labels, Clue was able to gain access to recordings long in advance of their official release. (Bell) Rather than undermine conventional retail sales, a Clue mixtape could create excitement about forthcoming albums among the hip-hop community.

Chuck D called hip-hop "the Black person's CNN" and with urban media outlets threatened by marauding conglomerates like Clear Channel, 1997 needed a new channel. In this context, Clue tapes sound more like an alternative to commercial radio than a DJ mix. Whereas radio personalities like Funkmaster Flex might traditionally have been the ones to "break" new records, mixtape DJs like Clue could play a similar role as long as they could sustain a regular release schedule. [fn Later in his career, Clue produced a handful of mixtape-like compilations in cooperation with record companies. These recordings tended to receive lukewarm reception from critics in part because they lacked the timely urgency of his work with the informal economy.]

In 1991, Ron G's blend mixtapes served as calling cards for his remunerative work as a producer, performer, and remixer. The tapes' mobility in the formal economy was restricted because of their ambiguous legal status. By 1997, however, the backstage hip-hop economy had flourished in parallel with its onstage manifestation and mixtapes were sold in independent outlets across the country. In his 2001 press materials, Clue claims, “If the RIAA were to count the tapes I’ve sold independently over the years, I would’ve been certified multi-Platinum by now.”

The volume of Clue's output was further enabled by a transition from cassettes to compact discs. As mixtapes were still largely duplicated by DJs using consumer equipment, cassettes required a considerable investment of time to reproduce. Compact disc replication, on the other hand, demanded a serious initial investment but otherwise reduced production costs. Furthermore, although CDs were cheaper to produce, consumers seemed willing to pay more for them when sold alongside cassettes. [fn TODO price fixing class action lawsuit.]

At first glance, "Clue for President" seems an odd detour from the path established by Grandmaster Flash and Ron G. Clue abandons the aesthetic priorities of the breakbeat DJ in favor of hosting a rather conventional compilation that has more in common with a pop album than a live DJ mix. Yet, as we have seen, Clue's mixtapes demonstrate an adroit response to changing technical, legal, social, and market constraints. Though their mixtapes differ sonically and structurally, Clue, Ron G, and Flash all responded to increasingly powerful regulatory forces with a creative curiosity driven by a competitive commitment to innovation.

Imitating albums: 50 Cent is the Future

More than any other rapper, 50 Cent has leveraged his biography like a brand. He is the hustler-turned-MC who survived being shot to achieve multi-platinum pop success, or so goes the legend. (Matthews) Equally mythologized is a trio of mixtapes released following his recovery. In 2006, XXL magazine selected "50 Cent is the Future" as the "best mixtape ever" and numerous fans posting to the DatPiff mixtape messageboard concur. (Datpiff)

If Clue's radio host approach to DJing marked a surprising twist in the mixtape narrative, "50 Cent in the Future" truly obscures the role of the mixtape DJ. From the cover art to the recorded content, G-Unit DJ Whoo Kid is largely absent from "50 Cent is the Future." Presumably, Whoo Kid is responsible for selecting, sequencing, arranging, and producing the mixtape but, unlike Clue or Ron G, his presence is rarely foregrounded on the recordings. Rather, it is 50 Cent who is usually heard shouting over tracks with an echo effect on his microphone.

In 50 Cent's origin myth, the criminal relationships that lead to his shooting also resulted in being blacklisted from the pop music industry. Though he had been preparing to record and release a conventional album, he suddently found himself without institutional support. In the oft-repeated story, 50 recorded enough material independently to fill three mixtapes. With the exception of a handful of "drops" from radio personality Kay Slay, DJ Clue, and DJ Whoo Kid, 50 Cent and his two partners, Tony Yayo, and Lloyd Banks, are the only artists that appear on "50 Cent is the Future."

((( TODO check the net, are my facts correct here? is this a collection of tracks from other mixtapes? )))


4. "Whoo Kid Shit"

5. Just Fuckin Around some very basic scratching

9. Clue N 50 "DJ Clue - Grand Theft Audio 2"

11. CMC Shit "All this shit I put out on the mixtapes, I got a million! Oh my god!"

"It's a freestyle. What the fuck you want for free?"

Denied access to the conventional processes for producing pop albums, 50 Cent and DJ Whoo Kid have created a hybrid mixtape / album. Where Clue's mixtapes offered exclusive access to tracks that would be later included on conventional albums, "50 Cent is the Future" presents songs recorded specifically for release as a mixtape. Like Clue's mixtapes, there is no overlap from one song to the next and each track concludes with 50 or Whoo Kid talking as the beat fades out. Clue might ruffled some feathers with his pre-release exclusives but on "50 Cent is the Future" we can hear an artist effectively bootlegging himself.

In addition to original productions, 50 Cent popularized the practice of "beat-jacking" in which he constructs new songs atop the instrumentals of popular hip-hop singles. Beat-jacking draws on the layering practices of Ron G's blends and the freestyles heard on Clue mixtapes. But unlike the live improvisation of a freestyle rap session, the beat-jacked song is often written and rehearsed like a traditional pop song with verses and a chorus. Rapping on a beat made popular by another artist competitively expresses an alternate hip-hop history in which the beat-jacking rapper replaces the original artist. For 50 Cent, beat-jacking inserts his voice into a pop industry from which he was denied access.

"50 Cent is the Future" demonstrates a full appropriation of the multi-purpose personal computer for creating hip-hop music. In 50 Cent's semi-autobiographical film, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'", we see a reconstructed image of the portable mixtape studio. 50 Cent stands in a bathroom with a mic stand and headphones while Whoo Kid sit outside the door at a large desk covered in electronics. The microphone and headphones lead into a portable mixing console into which Whoo Kid is also feeding the output from a sampler/sequencer.In the background of the shot, we can see a turntable and a laptop sitting on the edge of the desk. These twin artifacts represent the oldest and newest media technologies to be appropriated for the expression by hip-hop practitioners. The camera cuts away and we see a figure rendered in silhouette assembling mixtapes by hand while an inkjet printer and CD replication machine attached to the laptop churn out new copies. The screen fades to black, swiftly replaced by a brightly-lit street scene in which we see a teenager purchase the mixtape with cash from a man standing at a folding table.

For all that "50 Cent is the Future" blurs the distinction between pop album and mixtape, it represents a significant shift in power between the mixtape DJ, marginalized in the conventional pop economy, and the pop producer. With the appropriation of the personal computer, the technologies of performance, production, recording, duplication, and distribution are all assembled for the hip-hop practitioner. This does not signal shift away from the conventional pop industry, with its enormous capitalization. Rather, 50 Cent's disruptive production of a hybrid mixtape/album affords him access to the traditional channels, the exploitation of which makes him extremely wealthy.

"50 Cent is the Future" effected a shift in the popular understanding of a hip-hop mixtape. No longer an ephemeral form circulating in a parallel but ultimately distinct space from the conventional pop economy, industry employees and hip-hop fans begin to see the production and circulation of mixtapes as an essential facet of the larger ecology of hip-hop commodities. At the end of 2001, hip-hop album sales had fallen 15% from the previous year yet it appears that mixtape production and distribution was surging. (Chang 446)

As much as "50 Cent is the Future" brought the structural conventions of a pop album to the mixtape, they also brought the semiotic richness of the mixtape to the album. 50 Cent's exclusion from the dominant hip-hop industry was widely-known among his fans. This narrative backdrop imbued his mixtapes with additional significance. Despite lyrics that concerned little more than hypermasculine gangsterism, 50 Cent fandom also expressed a resistance to the depersonalization of hip-pop in the pop industry.

Beat-jacking drew little attention from copyright litigators, but the distribution of 50 Cent's mixtapes attended both the spread of high-bandwidth internet access across North America and a growing paranoia about unauthorized digital duplication among music industry stakeholders. DJ Whoo Kid explains the unusual method by which his mixtapes are circulated, "I take it to the main [wholesale] bootlegger [who] has about 300 bootleggers [that he works with]. They all know each other. They all got their own portable pressing machines. It's not only them, it's regular people. My main thing is to get it bootlegged." (Reid 2003 5) By shifting the responsibility for mass duplication and distribution to the "bootleggers," DJs like Whoo Kid and Clue sacrifice potential retail profits to avoid the risks associated with unauthorized copying. With all of this copying, close relationships with traditional industry stakeholders appears to have shielded DJs like Whoo Kid from persecution for copyright infringement.

[fn "Bootlegger" is an unfortunate term that obscures the diversity of stakeholders who may play this role. Some of the downstream duplicators may fit the "bootlegger" stereotype of a petty criminal making unauthorized copies of DVDs but a significant number are simply the owners of independent retail outlets. After receiving one copy of the mixtape, they use their own resources to replicate the disc and artwork. It seems disingenuous for Whoo Kid to characterize these important figures in the hip-hop economy as criminals. (Bell) In addition, fans routinely copy and share mixtapes on- and off-line so it is not uncommon to see two copies of the same mixtape with slightly different tracklists or unmatched artwork.]

Like Ron G and Clue before them, DJs like Whoo Kid use mixtapes to access capital from the conventional pop music industry industry. "I make more money from advertisers," claims Whoo Kid whose other mixtapes feature artists with upcoming albums and occasionally bear the names and images of new video games. (Reid 2003 5) Whoo Kid also reveals that a system of post-millenial payola has emerged in which pop music marketing budgets include as much as five thousand dollars per track to buy space on a mixtape. (Reid 2003 3)

50 Cent and Whoo Kid's innovative approach to production and circulation inspired a surge of attention, creativity, and capital in the mixtape economy. In the years to follow "50 Cent is the Future", nearly every rapper to achieve high visible in the conventional music industry preceded his pop album with a mixtape of beat-jacking freestyles and exclusives "for the streets." No artist exploited this formula more successfully than revived child star Lil Wayne.

Replacing albums: DJ Drama ft. Lil Wayne - Dedication II

Lil Wayne, the teenage rapper who sang "bling, bling" on B.G.'s 1999 single of the same title, largely fell out of the public eye shortly after the turn of the century. Following the model set by 50 Cent, Wayne adopted the mixtape form as a vehicle for his return to the pop music industry in 2004. Seemingly driven by rumors that his rhymes were "ghostwritten" by older artists, Wayne embarked on a tireless recording schedule beginning with a mixtape titled "Tha Drought." From original material to freestyles, jacked beats, guest verses, and remixes, Wayne released hundreds of tracks between 2004 and 2007. Following this prolific period, Wayne released an album through conventional pop channels. Perplexing to those outside of hip-hop, "The Carter III" became the highest-selling album of 2008. (Cohen)

Although "50 Cent is the Future" blurred the distinction between a pop album and hip-hop mixtape, its conventional structure and purpose ultimately left the pop album unchallenged as the dominant form for distributing hip-hop music. 50 Cent used mixtapes to circumvent barriers to accessing traditional pop channels. Wayne, on the other hand, neglected an available opportunity to produce a pop album in favor of circulating recordings on mixtapes. While 50 Cent's commercial success positioned the mixtape as a kind of hip-hop "minor league", Wayne's success with "The Carter III" undermined that traditional structure. 50 Cent's success is a validation of the pop industry. Wayne succeeds in spite of it.

"The Dedication II" is a collaboration between New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne and Atlanta mixtape DJ Drama. Released in May 2006, "The Dedication II" is among the most widely-heard tapes of all time. Datpiff.com, a hip-hop fan site with mixtapes for download, recognizes over one million listeners to the 77-minute recording. Acknowledging the role of digital distribution in the spread of mixtapes, DJ Drama calls himself "the iPod king." It has also received more critical attention in pop media outlets than any previous mixtape, having been reviewed in the New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and New York Times alongside the hip-hop press.

"iPod King"

Mixtapes give DJs a medium through which they can present innovations in the sound and style of hip-hop music. The combination of hip-hop and r&b found on Ron G's mixtapes formed the foundation of later trends in the conventional pop industry. With digital distribution spreading mixtapes far beyond their geographic origins, DJ Drama exploited the mixtape's education potential to introduce culturally-specific Southern hip-hop music to audiences in other regions. Though Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami were always important hubs in the hip-hop network, the capitalization of hip-hop was not equally distributed. For most of the 1990s, Southern artists in places like Mobile, Memphis, and Houston were marginalized by a hip-hop discourse centered on Los Angeles and New York City. (Grem) Working in a similar hybrid mode as Whoo Kid, Drama's single-artist mixtapes increased access and visibility for the diverse accents, styles, and concerns of Southern hip-hop culture during the 2000s.

"The Dedication II" opens with the sound of DJ Drama scratching the first few syllables of a Lil Wayne acapella on which he proclaims, "You already know what the fuck it is, man." And for those listeners who have been following the evolution of the hip-hop mixtape, much of what is to follow will be familiar. Drama incorporates all of the earlier mixtape innovations. Drawing on Grandmaster Flash's non-stop overlapping mixes, Ron G's surprising blends, Clue's pursuit of exclusivity, and Whoo Kid's album-size vision, "The Dedication II" represents a culmination of mixtape history.

Of course, "The Dedication II" is remarkable not just for its derivative qualities but for Drama's innovative integration of these influences. While a traditional understanding of authorship concerns the composition, arrangement, and performance of a piece of music, Drama asserts his authority by strongly emphasizing the sequencing of his mixtape. The various tracks on "The Dedication II" are knit together with snippets of recorded conversation between Drama and Wayne that form a coherent dialogue when heard in the proper sequence. For example, on a few occasions Drama will begin a song, only to have Wayne interrupt its playback because the listener is not "paying attention." Listening to the tracks in a different sequence would render this exchange nonsensical. This temporal discipline calls forth the live performances of party tapes and the immediacy of a hip-hop radio broadcast. At times, listening to "The Dedication II" suggests the intimacy of two friends taking turns sharing their favorite songs. Listeners are encouraged to "sit back and [listen]" to the tape, challenging the iPod imperative to "rip, mix, burn" lengthy albums.

The Importance of Place

Of all the mixtapes examined so far, "The Dedication 2" demands the greatest degree of hip-hop literacy to unpack. Each track on the mixtape contains interrelated meanings activated by regional and historical tensions within the hip-hop community. The first three beats are from The Diplomat's "Get From Round Me", Dem Franchize Boyz' "Oh! I Think They Like Me", and Young Buck's "Bang, Bang." For hip-hop fans, these tracks carry significant place-based energies. The Diplomats are a Harlem group who departed from New York convention by incorporating the sounds and styles of Southern hip-hop artists; Dem Franchize Boyz, an Atlanta group, were widely derided for the apparent simplicity of their sparse "snap" music; and Young Buck is a rapper from Tennessee recruited to represent a Southern sensibility by G-Unit, 50 Cent's New York-based group. For the literate listener, this contextual information provides additional tools and dimensions with which to engage the recording.

On the tracks crafted by his in-house production team, Drama continues to foreground regional difference in his choice of guest rappers. Of the five rappers on "Cannon (AMG Remix)" four of them explicitly declare their geographic location. Widespread access to broadband internet enables producers in different home studios to share digital audio fragments. It is entirely possible that none of the voices heard on "Cannon" were recorded in the same studio. Each rapper might have gone to his or her local studio, recorded their performance, and emailed the resulting file to Drama for assembly in his Atlanta studio. Not simply a matter of working with studio engineers, rappers themselves need technical expertise to participate in such collaborations.

Mixtapes traditionally documented the sounds of a particular place. A mixtape by a Bronx DJ would sound different from a mixtape produced in Oakland. With distance now distorted by online distribution, mixtape participants are compelled to assert their geographic presences explicitly. On "The Dedication 2", for example, Drama, Wanye, and their guests name numerous specific locations. In his shout-outs alone, Drama mentions all of the following places using their colloquial names: Hollygrove, Magnolia projects, New Orleans, Philly, Harlem, G-town, Bridgeport, the Hollow, A-town, the 4th Ward, West Side, Bankhead, Adamsville, Chi-town, Detroit, Duval County, Memphis, East Bank, West Bank, the 305, Miami, and New York City.

As a DJ committed to bringing together various regional hip-hop communities, Drama expreses this hope for unity most eloquently through his nuanced selection of music. The beats jacked for "The Dedication II" are drawn from songs made popular by Southern arts in 2005 and 2006. Knowing Lil Wayne's reputation as a lyricist will attract attention outside of the South, Drama selects these beats strategically. The result is an artifact _through which_ he argues for the validation of Southern hip-hop. ((( TODO this point can be made more strongly, clearly. )))

Hurricane Katrina

Recorded within a few months of the Hurrican Katrina disaster, "The Dedication 2" examines the Hurricane Katrina disaster from several perspectives. Near the end of the mixtape, Wayne speaks to both the displaced youth of New Orleans and to their new neighbors:

In the track that follows these comments, Wayne raps, "Straight up d-boy / Seventeenth Ward / Katrina turned my neighborhood into a seashore" to which Harlem MC Juelz Santana responds, "Wayne / I feel your pain and I see your stress / How they think people are supposed to get through Katrina on a FEMA check?" Yet the frustration in these lyrics are dwarfed by the final track on which Wayne parodies the refrain from Field Mob's country-rap hit "Georgia": 

 "We from a town where
 Everybody drowned
 Everybody died
 But, baby, I'm still praying witcha
 Everybody crying
 Nobody trying
 But there's no doubt in my mind
 That it was (Georgia) Bush"

The prominence of Katrina on "The Dedication 2" contrasts sharply with the disaster's fading presence in the national news. Speaking directly to the people living with the disaster day-to-day, Wayne exploits the mixtape's role as community radio. The wealthy rapper is likely not living in temporary housing but his expression of sorrow, anger, and regret give voice to people feeling disenfranchised and forgotten. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of these socially-conscious lyrics with his boastful, more conventional party raps demonstrates hip-hop's commitment to the political significance of pleasure. Wayne and Drama remind listeners that for the effects of Hurricane Katrina are an everyday reality for the "New Orleanian". Yet they package this sober message among songs that celebrate a fantastical non-reality. Rather than diminish the mixtape's political significance for listeners living in daily ignorance of the Katrina reality, I wonder how this organizing principle might provide comforting moments of escape for the New Orleanian himself?

((( TODO, the above assertion = opening a can of worms. Earlier I said that I would be largely avoiding discussion of content but this part seems an important manifestation of mixtape innovation. Drama/ Wayne are very explicitly using the mixtape as a form of community radio. )))

Circulating the Dedication

In a video posted to his YouTube account, Wayne describes the daily recording regimine that enables his unusually prolific output. Producers send him instrumental tracks attached to email. He records vocals in his own studio and returns the results later that same day. (TODO xxl interview?) Once released, Wayne yields control over the distribution of this material. As a result of this liberal attitude about ownership, Wayne's voice temporarily achieved a kind of omnipresence in hip-hop music. In a Decemember 2007 analysis of Datpiff.com, I observed 628 mixtapes containing material recorded by Wayne, of which 174 listed him as the primary artist.

Though the abundance of recorded material might have made listeners weary, Wayne's provocative public persona and increasingly strange aesthetic sensibility inspired an unusual dedication among his fans. Though Wayne appeared regularly as a guest rapper on singles from other artists, he all but ceased releasing his own records. Instead, he relied on downstream duplication to re-distribute his DIY productions. Unlike Whoo Kid who periodically passed completed mixtapes onto a small circle of "bootleggers", Wayne released a constant stream of new freestyles, remixes, and original tracks. Mixtape DJs were left to collect and sequence this material in whichever way they saw fit. As a result, Wayne's oeuvre lacks authoritative markers to signify which mixtapes represent "official" releases.

((( TODO i am not sure that the following section is necessary, though it is an interesting opportunity to mobilize Levy's collective intelligence as it pertains to mixtape fans :

Lil Wayne fans used messageboard, blogs, YouTube videos, and torrent websites to aggregate and track information about Lil Wayne's appearances on various mixtapes.

For example, DJ PC, a poster on Datpiff, made the following comment about a mixtape by DJ Arshizzle:

PC demonstrates an extensive knowledge of both Wayne's output and the mixtape economy that could only be possible because of the circulation of mixtapes on the web.

)))

"The Dedication 2" is a rare artifact among mixtapes featuring Lil Wayne as it is clear that the rapper collaborated in its production. The formality of his collaboration with Drama suggests a new distinction between albums and mixtapes in which "official" mixtapes occupy a different category from those produced without artists' explicit cooperation. This new hierarchy is evidence of a change in the mixtape's relationship to the pop industry. Mixtapes like "Clue for President", "50 Cent is the Future", and "The Dedication II" reflect a colonization of the mixtape form by the traditional pop industry.

Lil Wayne highlighted the growing distinction between "official" mixtapes and the work of independent mixtape DJs in a 2008 interview in which he insulted mixtape DJs for stealing from him when they reuse his recordings. Wayne goes on to demand that mixtape DJs, "stop putting my face on the cover of your CDs," revealing a more nuanced understanding of authorship from the era in which DJs like Clue, Ron G, and Doo Wop felt free to use whichever records they could obtain. (Malo) The ease with which digital audio can be replicated and transmitted means that mixtape DJs no longer needed the kinds of social connections that gave Clue access to exclusive material. Wayne affirms the importance of these interpersonal relationship when he criticizes a DJ a series of unauthorized Lil Wayne mixtapes titled "The Drought Is Over", 

 "[They] put out a CD on me every month but I couldn't tell you what none of [them] look like in person." (TODO Drama radio interview)

For years, DJs described hunting and "digging" for new records in record stores, want ads, estate sales, and second-hand shops. (TODO Scratch) DJ Clue took the desire for novelty that motivates the "digging" DJ and applied it to new, unreleased material. It appears that the web-savvy mixtape DJs scouring peer-to-peer networks, messageboards, and blogs are taking up the same "digging" impulse. The move to digital digging appears to have agitated and made explicit a previously implicit social norm.

Wayne's anger confused many fans who had been following his recorded output through mixtapes. On a blog post discussing the interview, the comments of some fans reveal a widespread confusion about authorship in digital mixtapes, 

 "If he says he did not put out no mixtape but yet theres about 25 [Lil Wayne] mixtape[s] burning space on my [hard drive], then darn, kinda explains why so many songs are repeated." (Mr Starks)

http://nahright.com/news/2008/05/28/lil-wayne-fuck-you-if-youre-a-mixtape-dj/#comment-1093334

Other commenters suggested a reading of the mixtape ecology that validates the work of some DJs over others, 

 "[A]ll these DJ’s arent even notable DJ’s though, just teenagers sitting at home behind a comp uploading shit to datpiff" (PHOENIXXX)

http://nahright.com/news/2008/05/28/lil-wayne-fuck-you-if-youre-a-mixtape-dj/#comment-1093218

PHOENIXXX's dismissal of teenagers using the web to craft and share their mixtapes is a repetition of the reluctance to change that has accompanied each moment of transition in hip-hop history. In an effort to discredit the younger generation of mixtape DJs, some commenters calls forth the names of earlier DJs, 

 "RON G use to put out tapes every month with exclusives and blends. chill will had the craziest blend tapes and now the art form of djing and making a mixtape has changed and sadly the art form is no longer respected. damn shame." (Jose S.)

http://nahright.com/news/2008/05/28/lil-wayne-fuck-you-if-youre-a-mixtape-dj/#comment-1093354

"mixtapes aint been hot since Clue and Kay Slay stopped making them" (PHOENIXXX)

As our examination of mixtape history demonstrates, each of these DJs introduced innovations that challenged convention and drew criticism. That the "teenagers [...] uploading" their mixtapes might be similarly targeted suggests that they, and not DJ Drama or Lil Wayne, carry forth the spirit of competitve innovation that drove the earlier mixtape DJs. When, in an effort to discredit the makers of unauthorized mixtapes, Drama declares, "I've never done an unofficial tape with nobody", he actually distinguishes himself from the vast majority of mixtape DJs. (TODO Drama sirius radio) Until the turn of the century, nearly all mixtape DJs operated in social contexts that did not require permission.

DJ Clue and Whoo Kid innovated the mixtape form by altering its relationship to the market regulation. By establishing connections with the traditional pop industry stakeholders, they altered the ways in which mixtapes were produced and circulated. DJ Drama carried these changes forward on his "Gangsta Grillz" mixtapes by bringing back some of the aesthetic innovations of earlier mixtape DJs and experimenting with digital distribution. Inspired by Whoo Kid's successful circumvention of traditional barriers to entering the pop industry, DJ Drama used his mixtapes to help Southern artists engage with previously inaccessible pop channels.

The discourse surrounding Lil Wayne's comments attests to a rising tension in hip-hop regarding the production and circulation of mixtapes. In the 1990s, mixtapes like "Clue for President" suggested a taste-making role for the mixtape DJ. The pop music industry could use fans' reaction to songs on Clue's mixtapes as a tool for planning their releases but they could not supercede Clue's expertise in assembling the mixtape. But in an economy where inclusion on a Whoo Kid mixtape is worth $5,000, a new hierarchy emerges in which a few mixtape DJs like Clue, Whoo Kid, and Drama are validated by the pop music industry to circulate unreleased material while the rest are derided as "suburban teenagers" or criminalized as "bootleggers."

Of course, an optimistic reading of the distinction between "official" and "unofficial" mixtapes is that the "official" mixtape is slowly replacing the pop album. When artists signed to major labels work with a mixtape DJ, they often do so in tacit violation of their recording contract. The labels likely do not prosecute their artists for this transgression because the mixtape appearances have a positive impact on traditional record sales. However, with the affordances of digital distribution, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which emerging artists opt to deal directly with mixtape DJs rather than enter notoriously unrewarding major label recording contracts. (Albini)

Mixtape sharing sites like Datpiff and MixtapeTorrent indicate that that the new locus of competitive innovation in mixtapes may not be the work of Drama or Wayne at all. Whereas Clue shifted the focus of mixtapes to exclusive content and Whoo Kid appropriated the formal structure of the conventional pop album, thousands of mixtape fans today are work in concert to distribute tapes by DJs like Drama. Rather than a short list of a few mixtape DJs that could be named in this paragraph, the innovation in hip-hop music distribution is the result of thousands and thousands of mixtape DJs working in parallel. Characterized, perhaps accurately, by some critics as "teenagers sitting at home behind a computer," these digital DJs upload dozens of new mixtapes each day, most of which will never be burned to a CD or dubbed to a cassette.

((( TODO include Datpiff screenshot. )))

Among the richest archives of contemporary hip-hop music in existence is Datpiff.com, a hip-hop fan site geared toward sharing and discussing mixtapes. The Datpiff model is similar to media-sharing sites like YouTube. Users upload their mixtapes, which are then assigned a unique URL and embedded into a display framework with ratings, listener history, and space for comments. Datpiff, which is clearly in danger of litigation, provides a link at the bottom of every page leading to detailed instructions on how to have material removed from the site. But like most of the mixtapes examined above, Datpiff appears to flourish through some combination of tacit industry approval and benign neglect.

((( TODO it took me a while to work up to this point about distributed innovation in the Drama/Wayne era. Might need some re-organization to put that right up front. )))

Copyright catch up

The legal ambiguity of hip-hop mixtapes was clearly established by Grandmaster Flash's party tapes in 1978. With Flash juggling breaks and the Furious 4 MCs rapping atop the mix, the tape bore a material reuse of existing recordings that could not simply be classified as copyright infringement. The Copyright Act of 1976 provided guidelines to protect such transformative reuse of copyright materials but also gave preference to non-commercial uses. Hip-hop's entrepreneurial tradition kept mixtapes circulating in new economic circumstances that would make it difficult to determine their commercial status.

During the 1990s, the highly visible use of samplers in hip-hop production attracted negative attention from litigious rights holders and lead to numerous costly out of court In addition tosettlements. A cottage industry emerged in which unscrupulous organizations purchased the rights to collections of aging pop recordings in the hope that they would be sampled and provide opportunity to profit from hip-hop reuse by way of either a licensing agreement or copyright infringement settlement. (Wu) One unfortunate side effect of this phenomenon was that the semiotically rich practice of layering samples from many sources became a financial risk for record labels releasing hip-hop albums. Mixtapes, with their liminal legal status, became a medium on which tracks with uncleared samples might flourish.

In 1998, Congress revised the 1976 Copyright Act and added new provisions specifically concerning the reuse of digital media for creative purposes. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) extended the duration of the copyright monopoly for corporate-owned works (most recordings of contemporary pop music) to 120 years after their creation or 95 years after publication, whichever comes first.

[fn In addition to the CTEA, Congress also passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in 1998 (DMCA). This grandly-named legislation collected together several regulations that affected the circulation of cultural artifacts in digital spaces. Title II of the DMCA, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) protects service providers from liability for the actions of their users. This provision anticipated online media-sharing services like YouTube and Flickr. To secure "safe harbor" protection, service providers must agree to take an administrative role in handling material alleged to infringe a copyright. Unfortunately, the mechanics of this process unfairly advantage large corporations and burden individual creators. For examples of the effect that the DMCA takedown process can have on the online media ecology, see MIT Free Culture's YouTomb project. http://youtomb.mit.edu ]

The extension of the copyright term did not directly affect the practices of hip-hop producers or mixtape DJs as even the fourteen year term set in original U.S. Constitution would be too long for DJs using tracks that were not even yet published but its passage indicates the degree to which the aesthetic priorities of the hip-hop practitioner were not reflected broadly in the pop music industry of the time. It was not long until the copyright litigation that plagued the highly visible pop industry participant affected the mixtape producer.

Among the best known cases of a mixtape being targeted for uncleared samples is the 2004 "Grey Album" by DJ Danger Mouse. Drawing on the pioneering work of DJs like Ron G and producers like 9th Wonder, Danger Mouse crafted a "full-length blend" by combining samples from the Beatles "White Album" with acapellas from Jay-Z's "Black Album." The result garnered modest critical attention before lawyers representing record label EMI demanded Danger Mouse cease distributing the unauthorized remixes. Fans resisted EMI's attempts to stem the circulation of the mixtape by posting mp3s of the remixes to their website in an act of civil disobedience called "Grey Tuesday." (Howard-spink) Notably, as is customary in hip-hop, the acapellas used on the "Grey Album" were commercially available on the B-sides of Jay-Z's singles. Despite making no official comment on the controversy, Jay-Z later released a full-length acapella CD of the "Black Album" and produced an authorized set of genre-transgressing blend-style remixes in collaboration rock band Linkin Park. While the music industry spoke through lawyers and in the language of law, the fans and artists concerned responded largely through their use and exploitation of media and communication technologies.

[fn Ironically, the "White Album" was one of the first pop records to incorporate a kind of analog sampling by reusing bits of tape on "Revolution #9".]

[fn regarding Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals anti-sampling decision in 2006. (Lessig 2008 104)]

In May of 2006, the Recording Industry Association of America, a music industry trade group, published an article in its news letter concerning "hot spots" for music piracy in the U.S. The article detailed the activities of investigators and law enforcement raiding businesses suspected of selling or manufacturing unauthorized copies of CDs and DVDs. In addition to the run-of-the-mill bootlegger, the article describes "enterprising pirates" who produce "unauthorized compilations of popular hits" along with "bonus tracks." If there is any conclusion that this report concerns mixtapes, it is clarified later in a section dealing with "urban" music: 

 "Urban music [...] is almost exclusively found in a lower-quality format burned to blank CD discs with packaging far less likely to be confused with legitimate products. A large portion of the urban piracy market consists of compilations of music from various artists and multiple albums."

Despite acknowledging the differences between mixtapes and simple unauthorized replications, the article groups them all together under terms like "illegal" or "pirate" music. In addition to statistics regarding sales of unauthorized recordings, the article lists common characteristics of a "pirate" product. It is low-priced, "too good to be true", sold in usual places, and packaged with "blurry graphics." (Riaa TODO)

Raid on DJ Drama's studio

((( TODO include video from Fox coverage. http://blip.tv/file/1310796/ )))

"Home movies never threatened Hollywood, as long as they remained in the home." (Jenkins 136)

On January 16, 2007, less than one year after the release of the RIAA report on mixtapes, a SWAT team raided DJ Drama's studio in Atlanta. Drama and his partner Don Cannon were arrested at gunpoint. All of their studio equipment was seized and the premises were searched by police officers with dogs. Perhaps most violating, however, was a humiliating portrayal of the two DJs by FOX5, the local FOX News affiliate.

The report, run on television and the web, obscures the relationship of DJs like Drama and Cannon to the conventional industry and mischaracterizes their enterprise as a bootlegging operation. Matthew Kilgo, a representative from the RIAA, is pictured standing in front of a wall covered in sound-dampening foam. He describes the Gangsta Grillz website from which fans can order mixtapes but does not what is sold in any meaningful terms. The report continues with images of men in RIAA windbreakers packaging slim jewel cases into brown cardboard boxes. Despite close-up shots of mixtape cover art, music industry award plaques, musical instruments, and recording equipment, Stacey Elgin, the reporter on the scene, refers to the materials being produced in the studio as "illegal CDs." In a final insulting swipe, one of the officers on the scene is prompted to confirm that the search did not turn up drugs or weapons, though, he concludes, "it's not uncommon [...] to find other kinds of contraband." (TODO fox)

In the days following the raid, artists who worked with Drama seemed reluctant to speak out in his defense. It was as if the pop music industry was only willing to take advantage of mixtapes' liminal status when convenient. DJ Drama's sister, filmmaker and activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons used MySpace to circulate a provocative reflection on the raid. In her letter, she asks, 

 "Was this solely about mixtapes? Would this have happened if this wasn't a Black run company? One of the claims is that Tyree (DJ Drama) was racketeering. Well, this alleged racketeer is a legitimate businessman who played and continues to play a pivotal role in the careers of numerous known and unknown hiphop artists, which by direct extension helps the recording industry immensely." (Simmons)

 When a MTV News reporter asked Brad Buckles, executive vice president of the RIAA's Anti-Piracy Division, if the RIAA was specifically targeting mixtapes, Buckles declined the opportunity to clarify the mixtape as a distinct form from bootleg CDs,
 
 "Whether it's a mixtape or a compilation or whatever it's called, it doesn't really matter: If it's a product that's violating the law, it becomes a target." (Aswad)

"The Dedication II" is an exciting mixtape that incorporates the influence of all the mixtapes trends that preceed it. Drama demonstrates an expertise at compiling, sequencing, and crafting a compelling mixtape that balances his own presence as DJ/curator with the talents of its featured artist. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the raid on his studio, there are barriers to further merging the informal economy in which mixtapes circulate with the traditional pop economy. It appears that the mixtape form is tolerated by industry stakeholders as long as it remains a marginal or supporting artifact rather than a competitive one. Fortunately, the radical distributed innovation of teenaged bedroom DJs on Datpiff.com suggest that the competitive creativity of the mixtape is beginning to manifest in other spaces and in other forms.

Post-mixtape

In January of 2009, Village Voice music critic Jeff Weiss published an article titled "The Mixtape Will Save Us All" in which he suggests that the success of Lil Wayne following his participation in the mixtape trade is a possible "business model for the Internet age." For Weiss, the raid on DJ Drama's studio "inadvertently sparked the Golden Age of Mixtapes" by forcing distribution into online spaces. Weiss further supports the notion of a coming mixtape "Golden Age" by pointing to recent validation of the form by other pop music critics marking "the medium's full bloom into a legitimate art form [...] as coherent and complex as any album." (Weiss)

((( TODO participation v. appreciation bordieu as mobilized by fiske 90)

For the same reasons that Weiss mobilizes in support of his "Golden Age", I argue that we are entering a post-mixtape era in which the mixtape, as we have known it, will likely not show further innovation. Surely the Dramas, Whoo Kids, Clues, and Diplos of the world will produce fantastic new hybrid album/mixtapes in the future, but, so long as they are organized according to the constraints of a compact disc, they will not be radically different from ground-breaking forebears like "50 Cent is the Future." That the mixtape is now attracting traditional markers of pop success - music critics and retail sales data - might say more about the declining state of the conventional pop industry than it indicates any sort of ascendency of the mixtape form.

More than just new distribution channels for conventional mixtapes, Datpiff and other online mixtape resources might point to a mobility of the spirit of competitive innovation found on Flash's party tapes and Ron G's blend tapes that extends beyond the boundaries of the mixtape artifact. Perhaps the technical innovations demonstrated by mixtape DJs are actually local manifestations of a more general hip-hop approach to cultural production. If so, the same young people that would have appropriated turntables, samplers, and CD-burners in the past are now testing the efficacy of new media tools like YouTube and MySpace to express hip-hop's compelling aesthetic priorities. The results of these experiments will likely not appear at all similar to the mixtapes of the past. While the transition from cassette to CD to mp3 maintained the coherence of songs and tracks, YouTube videos do not at all circulate with similar constraints.

The next chapter will explore in detail the Crank Dat dance craze, a phenomenon that manifests the same spirit of technical innovation and creative competition that drove hip-hop's mixtape innovators.

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