Dat Mixtape Project for New Media Literacy

By: Derrais Carter (This is the first draft of a larger project. It needs YOUR feedback)
In “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” Henry Jenkins, Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robinson, and Margaret Weigel report on new media literacy and participatory culture in the digital age. New media literacy is defined as “cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape.” Jenkins et al’ provide a list of eleven new media skills including appropriation and distributed cognition; both of which are central to this project. I use appropriation and distributed cognition to evaluate the generative potential of www.datpiff.com, an online free mixtape website. I have two guiding questions for this analysis. First, how do mixtapes utilize appropriation at the juncture of history, memory, and time? Second, how can datpiff be used to promote distributive cognition in the digital age? To answer these questions I first explain musical sampling in hip hop and the role it plays in mixtape creation. I then provide numerous mixtapes from datpiff.com on my blog in order to make a case for their importance to distributive cognition. By placing them on my blog, I am providing a public forum for people to openly engage and discuss their interpretations of what is being done on these mixtapes. It is similar to the comment function of datpiff, however my comment section reflects what aspects of these mixtapes can help class exercises.
Throughout this project I include various multimedia clips to illustrate my method, and I offer no definitive conclusion. Rather, I present the reader/listener with a productive space for his/her own mediation in the continuation of this endeavor.
Datpiff is an online free mixtape download community dedicated to promoting hip hop music. The name, datpiff, meaning “that superior” is meant to position the website as THE mixtape authority. Generally, datpiff is aimed at the free circulation/distribution and evaluation of mixtapes. Guests may browse the entire site, but uploading and downloading privileges are reserved for registered users. Uploaded mixtapes are created by professional deejays (djs) and producers as well as amateurs. The mixtape upload feature helps level the professional playing field for up-and-coming djs and producers because their work is not separated from the more experienced artists. Also, underground, or independent, producers can showcase instrumental beats while artists provide users with remixed and unreleased lyrical verses. I am analyzing datpiff because the free content, in conjunction with sampling websites and free audio software, provide free educational tools for classrooms in the digital age. There is no “standard” mixtape on datpiff, thus my analysis is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather I use datpiff to present an “opening” of what the website offers for classroom media literacy.

Dat business
When the datpiff homepage loads, the advertisement at the top of the page offers a bit of irony. The ad is for www.Lawyers.com. This specific ad highlight’s divorce (although it seems plausible to place copyright at the center of the ad). Other advertisements on the homepage are powered by videoegg which is a rich media ad company . Red Robin family restaurant and Superpages use the same ad space at different times. Whenever the user holds the mouse over the ad for three seconds a multimedia commercial loads. Refreshing the page, however, exposes the user to a new set of ads. A Suntrust ad replaces the Lawyers.com ad and videoegg is replaced with an interactive ad where the user can make Susan Boyle slap herself by clicking her hand as she cries.
The left side of the homepage is roughly divided into five sections which provide users with a list of featured mixtapes and videos. The first section features three mixtapes that may not gain the exposure of mainstream rappers and djs. These mixtapes feature more local/underground rappers. The second section promotes the eight most popular mixtapes of the last 24 hours. The next section highlights the top eight videos for that day. The fourth section focuses on the top eight mixtapes being steamed live and reloads every five minutes. The final section highlights the week’s top videos. Users can also vote on mixtapes with a 1-5 star rating system.

Dat Techne

As an interactive endeavor, this project seeks to engage readers/listeners and provide spaces for their input. The aim of this section is to define terms and ideas that are key to making this project generative: remix, blend/mash-up, sample, and flow.
A remix is an altered version of a song. An authorized remix, in the popular music genre, includes added lyrical verses from featured guest artists, but it can also contain a reconstructed instrumental track . Also, popular music remixes tend to be very similar to the original song. A blend, or mash-up, is an unauthorized remix that has been created from a variety of sound resources in a collage-like fashion to invent a new product . Sampling refers to “the act of taking a portion…of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song.” Sampling makes blends/mash-ups possible:

“Unpack the meanings, unstuff the fragments and the logic remains the same: the part speaks for the whole, the whole is an extension of the part. It’s a holographic thing” DJ Spooky

Adam Haupt argues that “hip-hop artists make informed artistic and political choices when using samples during the construction of new music texts.” Haupt politicizes hip hop sampling practices too quickly, for not all sampling choices are political. According to 9th Wonder, a major hip hop producer, Haupt’s claim is not always true: click here for Soul Culture Video

Haupt generalizes the complexity of the sampling practice by making it SO political. In fact, it is the contentious relationship between samples and historical configurations of identity that make samples important, and not all songs containing samples have such political complexity.

Samples typically make up the core of the song, yet they augment, diminish, loop, or fragment aspects of the original composition so that something new might be created. Some samples, though, change the pitch and/or tempo of the original song and change the lyrics. This is the case with “My Way Home” by Kanye West featuring common. In “My Way Home” Gil Scott-Heron’s song “Home is Where the Hatred Is” is the core of the composition (audio clip).

Kanye West and Common - "My Way Home" (instrumental)



Gil Scott-Heron - "Home is Where the Hatred Is"



The Kanye West track is a slowed down version of Gil Scott-Heron's song. A more complex example is "Fragments" by Wu Tang featuring Del Ta Funkee Homosapien samples Marvin Gaye's "Flying High"

Wu Tang and Del The Funkee Homosapien "Fragments"


Marvin Gaye "Flying High"


A major term in this datpiff techne is flow.

“Flow. Machines that describe other machines, texts that absorb other texts, bodies that absorb other bodies. It’s a carnivorous situation where any sound can be you, and where any word you say is already known. Flow, counter-flow. The idiot as processing device, slave to the moment, outside of time because for him there is only the moment of thought. No past, no present, no future” DJ Spooky

“Rembrandt, Rouke, I am art with the flow…the way I put it together tear em’ apart wit the flow” Jay-Z

“There’s something bout the way the Nina Simone piano flow. It's like a Michaelangelo painted a portrait of Maya Angelou and gave it to a sick poet for the antidote. If music gets you choked up, this is the tree and the rope" Kanye West Get By (remix)

Flow, or the term formally known as appropriation. To Flow is to play with language and time. In terms of hip hop and sampling, flow results in a composition of linear fragments and looped recordings which come together on a sonic terrain. Flow diminishes historical chronology and memory because it respects neither. In fact, flow operates on two levels. On one hand, flow is about the creative moment which seeks not to bring forth some nostalgic iteration, but to relish the potential of NOW. When DJ Spooky writes that flow has “no past, no present, no future” the present is assumed to be an arbitrary descriptor of one’s embodied position. On the other hand, flow is FIXED in time because it provides continuity in rap music. With flow, the arrangement exists in a temporal chamber of fluidity and continuity. Without the temporal rhythmic balance, or the beat, flow fails. Flow’s chronological discontinuity can create a rhetorical moment. It can also “open” a space for new ideas which I explore below. One debate that is continually rehashed in American culture is the way in which the Civil Rights Movement leaders are represented in contemporary black popular culture, especially in hip hop. In 1999, the rap duo Outkast was sued by the managers of Rosa Park’s estate because they named a song after her.

Likewise, cartoonist Aaron McGruder received scathing criticism for his use of Martin Luther King Jr in the animated series The Boondocks.

Two issues are at stake in both scenarios. On one hand, members of the Civil Rights Movement are fighting to maintain their legacy. On the other hand, a generation of artists are claiming and reimagining history on their own terms. In addition to the two scenarios described, I remixed a song by rapper Jean Grae by incorporating a clip from a Studs Terkel interview with Martin Luther King Jr. I use King’s statement on hate and haters as an introduction to Grae’s song titled “Hater’s Anthem.



Analyzing mixtape mash-ups often requires knowledge of sampling and remixing, which I have provided above. In addition to the terminology, I have found and utilized free websites and programs for this particular project. Since datpiff is structured around free access to digital materials, these same free tools should, and could be, incorporated into a classroom. It is with this “free” logic that I used the following websites and software as resources for engaging creative work using mixtapes:
the-breaks (sample info)
whosampled (sample info)
youtube
Audacity –music editing software
Windows Movie Maker

Your TURN
Prior et al’s Cultural History Activity Theory, or CHAT, emphasizes how activity is positioned within a network of systems which are both concrete and discursive, so understanding activity depends on how people, institutions, materials, and language position a person(s). Activity is central to CHAT. Prior et al state that in mediated activity “action and cognition are distributed over time and space and among people, artifacts, and environments and thus also laminated, as multiple frames or fields coexist in any situated act. In activity, people are socialized…as they appropriate cultural resources, but also individuated as their particular appropriations historically accumulate to from a particular individual…[which] opens up a space for cultural change, for a personalization of the social.”
The reader/listener’s task is to interpret, evaluate, and comment on the embedded mixtapes below. Your feedback will work like the comment section on Datpiff. The main difference between datpiff’s comment section and my comment section is you are expected to analyze each original song as well as the mixtape hybrid. So, for instance, how does “Fools Rush In” differ from “Ten Crack Commandments”? What happens when both songs are blended? The intent here is to create a pool of evaluations and try to form a general consensus. Why comment? Your engagement and feedback is part of a large endeavor called distributive cognition which uses technology to expand cognitive processes. So, by using technology to think through and evaluate this material, we are DOING new media literacy.


Blue Eyes Meets Bedstuy

Download Mixtape | Provided by DatPiff.com

Frank Sinatra - "Fools Rush In"



goes with...

Biggie - "Ten Crack Commandments"



Hannibal King Presents American Gangsters
Starring: Jay-Z and Frank Sinatra

Download Mixtape | Provided by DatPiff.com

Frank Sinatra - "Glad to Be Unhappy" goes with "Pray"



DJ Swindle Presents: AlMatic (Al Green and Nas)

Download Mixtape | Provided by DatPiff.com

Download Mixtape | Provided by DatPiff.com

Sound of the Times: Glam Hop :_(

Not too long ago, I lamented the turn that Hiphop had taken towards pop music. While I have begun to reconcile my frustrations with the filth it produced--largely by avoiding the radio altogether--I was perusing my ought-to-be-expired subscription to Rolling Stone and found out that "Flo' Rida Smashes Sales Record" with his new single "Right Round" sampled from the 80's band Dead or Alive's single "You Spin Me 'Round (Like a Record)"--selling "636,000 downloads [in] its first week." I've been planning to write this blog post for awhile, but it has suddenly taken a turn in approach, so bear with me and don't judge without seriously considering what I've said:



Hiphop has finally publicly sold-out to white kids. And you can quote me on that, but only if you give some kind of detail on my explanation.

Honestly, I wouldn't care if that didn't include some kind of bizarre disdain for the white people themselves. I've met a wealth of white kids who have a encyclopedic knowledge of Hiphop...the kind of depth of knowledge that inclines me to think that, if a rapper were pandering to them, Hiphop would be much better off than it is. But rappers aren't appealing to these proud examples of sonic integration--they're appealing to the kids they don't really like, the ones they want little to do with: the B*tches and the W*ggaz. Hiphop is appealing to the white kids whose only contact with black people involves sneaking off and watching Oz in the wee hours of the night or slumming on BET. They're appealing to the white kids who genuinely believe that there is a way to "act black" and that the two or three black kids at their school aren't really "black" enough to serve as examples of the "black experience" in America.

In short, rappers are stereotyping their audience as white-flight produced, suburban white kids--and forsaken me!

Thus far, I sound like I'm the only one doing the stereotyping, right? Not the rappers, they're doing what they do best: entertaining. Right?

Wrong! Consider one of my favorite rappers, Jay-Z, and his best album, "The Black Album." I'm not enough of a conspiracist to believe that the title was a conscious statement that this is an album made for his black audience--but it was the last album he ever made which consciously included the scrutinizing black audience which had once been the core of Hiphop.

"If you can't respect that, your whole perspective is whack, maybe you'll love me when I fade to black?"~ December 4th

Jay-Z more than frequently uses double and triple meaning in his lyrics and that line, after he returned to rap with "Kingdom Come," stood out to me. I wasn't sure how to take it. I realize that in context he's merely saying "don't judge me for my past" and that you have to respect his rise from the dirt. But the question is who is he speaking to? Who is the audience? And regardless of the audience, does that line gain some meaning upon his return?

My answer is yes. He did "fade to black" and many people do "love him" now that he has. He receives all of the same praise, but he's clearly downgraded his lyricism--the quality which the core audience cares the most about. But, I contend, the core audience is a transracial (as in transcendent of race--alternately post-racial) group. The core audience isn't just black, and it hasn't been since Run DMC "Rock[ed] This Way." But if we grant meaning to that particular line, and the title, and consider the quality of Jay-Z's work since then, it would seem that he's "fad[ed]" to his core "[honorary] black" audience.

Yeah, he has a right to expand his audience. Please do. I want to see Hiphop grow and evolve as much as any 'head, but not this way, Hov. Not this way.

I'm not done though. I'll give you another example of one of my favorites. Cee-lo.

How many people listened to Cee-lo before he became the bizarre lead singer of Gnarls Barkley? I did. How many Gnarls Barkley fans realize that Cee-lo is a member of the "Dungeon Family" which happens to be led by Outkast? How many Gnarls Barkley fans know that Cee-lo's career began with a group called Goodie Mob, in which he was the bizarre character--similar to Andre 3000 of Outkast? Probably quite a few know all that now, but it has probably become a bizarre bit of Gnarls Barkley trivia which is quickly becoming unfashionable to acknowledge.

Cee-lo's been weird. And I actually LOVE Gnarls Barkley. So my beef isn't with the lyrics as much as what Cee-lo has had to sacrifice to be on top--and who he sacrificed to get there.

"Their god's only a graphic, the sky's computer blue/ There is a moral malfunction, what will the machine do to you/ They maliciously monopolize the mass/ Niggas sleep rap and fuck they surprise you last/ when you sell them your soul they supply you cash/ But you can die for all they care, with your expendable ass/ Because they know a new nigga, a brand new nigga/ Will jump right in them tap shoes even if his feet bigger/ Ain't shit sweet nigga, it's deeper than the street nigga/ You and I just a virus they gonna delete nigga/ Some people say go on and join what you can't beat nigga/ I won't take the mark so I can't eat nigga/ Holla if I'm talking to ya, (AH!)"~ Microhard from "Pefrect Imperfections"

Or better yet, consider this one:

http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 3.0 (Win32)">

"Let's get started shall we, cause you know it's time gone/ Every time these niggaz rhyme wrong/ So uhh, lights, camera, action I'm on/ I'll have them standing in line to get their mind blown/ I'm selling soul/ Rapping and singing and screaming and yelling soul/ Manufacturing, marketing, pricing, packaging, and e-mailing soul/ With no rehearsal, this one verse'll whole hearse you/ Now a commercial, but what I must first do/ is make my presentation a bit more personal/ Everything must go - for a small price you can have the heart of me/ There is no part of me that can't be calculated into a commodity/ My musings amount to a milestone a million miles above monotony...But isn't it amazing, how the antenna ain't nothing but a sinner...And I give it to you at God-speed, but yet it's gentle/ And when I rhyme I make reading fundamentals/ or even black and white/ My lyric is live in living color/ my flow is fluorescent/ Like scripture highlighted in bright yellow/And all this for $9.99, shit that's wonderful/ And the great thing about it is, if you disagree you're money's refundable/ But there's always something rewarding, about every Cee-Lo Green recording/ Cuz even after all your expenses people still aspire affording/ It's incredible how convincing I can be with a camera pointed at me/ But really sometimes rapping feel like tapping to make a cracker happy/ But when the ??? play and the beat get bumping like adolescent acne/ It's kinda sad but it's SHOWTIME/ my sentiment exactly/ So don't get mad, everybody's doing it/ You know you wouldn't mind a commercial with your own tennis shoe in it/ Whether you're selling a dream, selling a scheme, or playing a role/ Like it or not we're selling soul"~ I am Selling Soul from "Cee-lo Green's the Soul Machine"

This is coming from the album that begins with Cee-lo saying he's literally the "soul machine" and that you should push his button to "start him up." Cee-lo makes it more than abundantly clear where he is being pushed for economic success. The following album wasn't a solo album, it was Gnarls Barkley. This is not to say that he has completely downgraded his talents, but merely shifted gears. His songs have become more obtuse and radio friendly. If you haven't noticed, when Gnarls Barkley dresses up for photo shoots, Cee-lo, more often than not, dresses up as some white guy from pop culture. He's actively chosen to minstrel for the hoards of white kids who don't want to hear the true depth of his music.

Or as Andre 3000 said: "You don't want to hear me/ You just wanna dance!"

What it amounts to, to my white readers, is that rappers know you're out there. They are making music "for you." Or at least they think they are. I would like to think that you are all smarter than that. In fact, I know that a lot of you are--because a lot of the Hiphop audience left for Indie Rock; it's gotta mean something, right? It implies that they don't think very highly of you. They hate you--in a way. But they'll take your money. Just like black entertainers always have when they have no other choice to survive in their field. If they want to continue making music, they have to pander to you. And really, it's not entirely the artists--though in the case of Jay-Z and Cee-lo, I think it is--but also the labels and their "market research." They've turned you into a mindless-horde demographic. They assume that you'll buy anything that makes you move, without ever questioning where it comes from or what it means. And far too many of us have. We all share the blame somehow. But anymore, the power rests in the hands of that cinematic stereotypical crowd: 3-4 white kids and the token. When you all turn your backs on the insults lodged at you from the music industry, Hiphop will be resurrected.

Or you'll bury it for all eternity...like ragtime or something.

And so it was.

As exemplified by these two titans of Hiphop, rappers had to downgrade their talents in order to succeed. They had to appeal no longer to their core perceived-black audience, but to the bubblegum popping, colorblind-by-ignorance, "speak so well" suburban white young adult audience. (If you'll pardon my malice and vitriol.)

I've watched in anger as Jay-Z, Cee-lo, Common, and many of my favorite rappers gave way to 50 Cent (who measures the greatest rapper by profits), Kanye West ("pop is a good thing. you're popular!), Soulja Boy (OMG!), and now Flo Rida (have you seen that video! does that sh*t make ANY sense?).

And so, what I think has happened, is that Hiphop--my beloved genre--has transitioned into its creative dark age (linguisitic irony! pun not intended). It has become Glam-hop. It will someday be remembered as an embarrassment to the genre, much like hairbands are to rock fans today. I hope that real Hiphop heads will partition this phenomenon out of our minds.

(I realize I'm a little all over the place here. I'm placing the blame in a lot of places. I'm really not blaming "white people"--it's just that "white kids" are the demographic I feel certain the labels are speaking to anymore. What else could explain the creation of  Flo Rida's "Right Round"? Which means the problem/solution lies in the source of that perception. I imagine there's a grain of truth in there somewhere, so how can we as fans answer that?)