Ivory Soul

The relationship between black soul music and the hip hop aesthetic is deep and wide, and for those with a stratified, fatalistic view of music history this is pretty much taken for granted. 50s Rock & Roll naturally led to 60s R&B which naturally led to 70s funk and soul which naturally led to hip hop. However, as hip hop critic Jeff Chang has argued, hip hop and its aesthetic are the product of a very specific coincidence of certain people in time and space. Take it back far enough, and hip hop can be reduced to the actions of maybe fifty individuals in a specific part of New York City, and regardless of how pervasive the music may seem today, without people like Kool Herc, Busy Bee, Grandmaster DXT etc., hip hop as we know it would have never come about. In his book Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop, ethnomusicologist-cum-hip-hop aficionado Joseph G. Schloss explores the origins of the soul aesthetic in hip hop beats, putting forth what can be called the Sesame Street Theory. Many of the would-be producers of the late 80s and early 90s were children of the 70s, and like most American children then and since, they watched Sesame Street. And Sesame Street in the 70s was a great fucking show.



It was also a show defined by its funky, happy, black soul-inspired soundtrack and its multi-racial cast. In Schloss' view, its walking distance from Sesame Street to the Good Life Café, and from Check 1-2 back to 1 2 3 4 5 - 6 7 8 9 10 - 11 12.

Regardless of whether or not Schloss is "right," soul music is the fossil fuel of hip hop. But we've hit peak production. By the time Dilated Peoples started rocking, we had already over-exploited our American Soul reserves. These days, the blogosphere has pretty much leveled the digging playing field to the point where producers who don't know the difference between a 45 and a 78 now have access to the most esoteric CTI and Philly International "wax." Unless you are someone like Kanye West who can just pick something off the radio and clear the sample with a phone call, even if its something that came out last year, it is far more difficult to stay soulful and still be fresh.

In solving this dilemma, we should look to the Jackson brothers. But no, not those Jackson brothers. Otis and Mike Jackson, aka Madlib and Oh No, have released albums in the last few months which display what can only be described as Loop-Digger Imperialism. The most recent installment in the Beat Konducta series, a sort of Encyclopedia Madlibica, is a tribute to the music of India's film industry. Meanwhile, younger brother Oh No's arguably better effort, Dr. No's Oxperiment is, as his Myspace puts it, "an audio tour of Turkish, Lebanese, Greek and Italian Psych-Funk." Apparently in the 1960s and 70s, Americans weren't the only ones with groove and soul.

In fact, when one looks at the influence of hip-hop music in musical traditions globally it isn't difficult to imagine a world, 40 years ago perhaps, where musicians in Europe, Africa and the Middle East interpreted their musical heritage via American Soul and R&B, which was comparably popular at the time. It should logically follow that in exotic and obscure lands the world over, like untapped oil fields under an unsuspecting Persian Kingdom, are stacks of unheard loops, American Soul set to tabla and sitar.

As much as I like this oil metaphor, my own contribution as a Loop-Digger Imperialist has to do with a different country raped by Europeans for a valuable resource: the Ivory Coast. About a year ago I picked up Assalam Aleikoum Africa: Vol. 1 from Gozi-Riya in Madison.



Released in 1976 on the Antilles label, Assalam Aleikoum Africa: Vol. 1 is basically the greatest hits of the Societé Ivoirienne du Disque, a long-dead record label based in Abidjan, the capitol of The Republic of the Ivory Coast. Even after its alleged independence from France in 1960, The Republic of the Ivory Coast was inundated with French coffee and cocoa traders (i.e., the sons of failed slave traders) even throughout the 70s. Large, cosmopolitan cities like Abidjan became cultural Meccas for West Africans, and the Societé Ivoirienne du Disque is one of the results. This combination of oppression, creativity and opportunity could just as easily describe Detroit or Muscle Shoals, and indeed the Societé was a contemporary of Gordy's Motown and Stewart & Axton's Stax.

And all historical trivia aside, Assalam Aleikoum Africa: Vol. 1 - from the Osibisa-esque title track to the Hendrix tribute - is primo.

Assalam Aleikoum Africa - Francis Kingsley & Emitais

I am, however, a Jealous Digger, and so that's all you'll get from me. I'm not going to zip the whole album up and send it out to be pillaged by the hip-hop world's French coffee traders. Can you dig it?

In Memory of Helen P.

I was at the Madcity Music Exchange in Madison, WI, about a week ago digging in the crates. I had come for something specific, but finding it gone from the shelf, I started flipping through the shoeboxes of R&B 45s at the back. The turnaround on 45s at Madcity is pretty slow, and after several boxes of the same Love Unlimited and 5th Dimension singles I was about to cut myself off when I saw a box of sleeveless 45s I didn't recognize. Usually I don't fuck with loose 45s because they've obviously been stacked in someone's garage for three decades and sound like shit. But when I started going through this box I was shocked to find several original pressings of Stax, Hot Wax, and Soul Train singles, tucked away like little weed nuggets in your pocket. They were in pretty bad shape, but at a buck each I snatched them up. What struck me when I got home is that most of them had the same name, "Helen P.", ball-pointed on to their labels. I started to think what type of person this decidedly un-funky name might have belonged to, and the journey that these records must have taken from the plant to my crate.

At some point they had been in mint condition, probably when Helen was in college in the late sixties. She'd probably taken good care of them; good taste is usually accompanied by an understanding of value. But, as all things do when they age, these records got began to wear down under un-replaced styli and other vinyl hazards.

But these records were pretty gnarly. The entire left channel was gone on many of them, and it was obvious that Helen's dancin' days had ended at some point (1982? 1986?), and her record collection had gone into storage. It was probably during this point that most of the real damage had occurred. Helen P.'s awesome collection of 60s and 70s funk and soul 45s had been laid to rest. Until recently, when apparently something separated Helen from her 45s. Thinking about the boxes of CDs and LPs that are still at my parents house after four years of college, which will probably remain there until they move out, I came to a conclusion as morbid as it was certain: Helen P. was dead. The last four or five years have seen a renaissance in digital music technology that is slowly killing the record collector. Twenty minutes on the internet can yield what a year of careful digging used to, and as a result we seem to be losing the personal connection with the music we choose to listen to. When your i-pod gets ganked or your computer crashes and you "lose all your music," its no big deal. Another few months of Limewire and you are back where you were, plus the new Kanye album or whatever. But a collection of vinyl is different. The image of a dedicated DJ slowly sinking under the weight of his own wax is one that has stayed with me, and as said DJ will surely tell you, the more cumbersome a collection of vinyl becomes the more difficult it is to prune it. And so I am certain that Helen P. died quietly and with dignity late in 2007, and her funk-less nieces and nephews dragged her old 45s to the Madcity Music Exchange.

I was looking at stuff through a microscope a few months ago when I came to a somewhat disturbing realization. There is hair on everything. Every penny, every Cheez-It, every 45 record has little pieces of hair and skin all over it. This is why your mother tells you not to put things in your mouth. The relevance of this little epiphany is that although I paid for those 45s and they are now in my home, Helen is worn deep into every groove. In fact, my crates of wax are a genetic index of everyone who as ever owned or listened to the records they contain. My wax, and by extension my beats, are a bottleneck through which the experience of hundreds of people is forced. This is, as far as I am concerned, as close to the heart of Hip Hop as I am going to get as a white man born in the mid-80s. Hip Hop music has never been an avenue for self-promotion so much as it has been a medium for self-realization, and realization of the self is the culmination of realization of the world around us. We as a culture have an obligation to reinterpret what our elders have left behind. The beat in them is gone, but their selves remain, ground into the grooves of wax.