For more than 20 years, Harry Allen (rapdotcom@aol.com) has been integrally involved with the hip hop music scene. As a journalist for The City Sun and The Village Voice, he was the first to proclaim the truism that "hip hop is the new jazz." As the Media Assassin for the politically charged rap group Public Enemy, he warned a hip hop nation of millions "don't believe the hype." In 1992, he created The RhythmCultural Institute, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to "capturing, keeping for the future, aggressively defining, and promoting the expansion of hip hop music and culture."
Lately, Allen has turned his attention to the digital realm, focusing on the confluence of hip hop culture and the information revolution. Embracing technology and the Internet, he created the newsletter rap dot com and is developing a Larry King-style talk show with Chuck D under the aegis of their multimedia production company, Scramjet. Allen aims to "educate and excite, inform and infuriate," which is what he did in this e-mail interview with Matt Haber.
Wired: Why is hip hop wired?
Allen: In our long, influential tradition, hip hop is the first African-American music that would be impossible without electronic technology. People in our culture have taken turntables, digital samplers, and other dry tech and made them sing. These devices continue to bring in bucketloads of money for their manufacturers because of the new uses hip hop created - uses that weren't anticipated in their instruction manuals.Hip hop artists took transmitters and turned them into production units, which required a lot of technical mastery. But many people seem to think African Americans are alienated from technology.
That African Americans are alienated from technology is a myth. There is far more evidence showing quite the opposite. When useful technology is not kept from us by white people who practice racism, or when it is not used to oppress us, we usually find energetic ways to get a new maximum out of it.Additionally, I say that the power of hip hop lies in its ability to radically combine sounds, imagery, text, and other media within its form. While artists in other genres have begun to explore multimedia technologies, hip hop artists - whose music and culture exemplifies the colourful, deeply layered, wildly associative content upon which multimedia feeds - have been silent for no good reason. After all, what is a Das EFX lyric - with its multitudinous references and cross-references - if not hypertext? What is a thick DJ Premier track - subtly pointing to and counterpointing the words of Guru's monotone - if not multimedia?
So hip hop is a form of hypertext?
Hip hop is massively hypertextual, which is the reason I started this journey. There is a huge dialogue within the hip hop culture, in which artists strike references to other artists, other records, news events, cartoons, TV shows, advertising, imagery, words, inflections, sounds, ideas, and concepts of all kinds. The manner of construction is pastiche, an ongoing methodology within African-American art forms, whether one is looking at Romare Bearden, listening to Charlie Parker, or twisting to Public Enemy. I believe it's black people who will ultimately give multimedia, the information superhighway, and all of these cold, stiff technologies the warmth, if you will, the funk, they so badly need.You say rap dot com covers hip hop, the Internet, new technology, and new ideas. What was your inspiration for the magazine?
I was trying to guess, based on the past, what the next black music would be like. I knew, for it to be a success, it would have to employ the traditional values and tools of global black musical culture - syncopated rhythm, improvisation, repetition, the voice as an instrument and a tonal ideal, rough tonalities, et cetera. Also, it would have to be community-based (i.e., "folk" in its origin) and free, or near-free, at least initially.I concluded that by about 2015, the form to replace hip hop as the dominant African-American youth music culture would be a digital one, that it would be viruslike (as we understand the term now), and would move semiautonomously through digital networks. Someone would put a sound together, send it; someone else would get it, add to it, send it. A whole bunch of people would get it, add to it, send it. It would be incomprehensible to anyone looking at it from outside the culture. But it would merely reflect the understandings and the concepts of technology of the day.
When you say that it would be incomprehensible to outsiders, you could be talking about the gangsta rap of today with all its detractors in politics and the industry.
True. What do you think would happen to the current debate around the Communications Decency Act, the Clipper Chip, and gangsta rap if Scramjet suddenly announced that we were going to distribute gangsta rap records through the Internet using PGP?Whose responsibility is it to bring hip hop music and culture to the Internet?
It's there already, and it's been brought there by the people who 1) have Internet access; 2) have technical interest and facility; and 3) are passionate about the culture. But what's absent are real hip hop skills. There's no equivalent to a DJ Premier or Method Man. There are few serious black music professionals on the Net.However, the portent of online commerce - of the beat creators in Harlem, Chicago's South Side, and Oaktown exchanging "data" with beat lovers everywhere - is to me the great, naked call to hip hop from the Net. When such transfer becomes easy and commonplace, hip hop will mutate into something even more organic and powerful. It will, essentially, become the ultimate hack.
What do you see as promising on the Internet? What's discouraging?
What I find encouraging is that John Lee (see "Gang War in Cyberspace," Wired US 2.12, page 146), one of the greatest hackers in the world, is black, and living, to quote rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard, in "Brooklyn Zoo." What I find discouraging is that to Wired, his chief significance is that a white person called him a "nigger."Matt Haber (mah0547@is.nyu.edu) is a freelance writer and student based in New York.