Black Noise, Tricia Rose, 1994 – Chapter 3: Soul Sonic Forces – Technology, Orality, and Black Cultural Practice in Rap Music. {Wesleyan University press}
This chapter was one of the initial sparks of the idea I have for the cultural studies essay, in its discussion of the western traditional view of musical complexity and composition, and its lack of understanding of the value of repetition and aural tradition.
page 62
‘I immediately flashed to a history lesson in which I learned that slaves were prohibited from playing African drums, because, as a vehicle for coded communication, they inspired fear in slaveholders. I suggested that perhaps the music was more complicated than it seemed to him’.
page 64
‘At the same time as rap music has dramatically changed the intended use of sampling technology, it has also remained critically linked to black poetic traditions and the oral forms that underwrite them.’
‘Rap’s rhythms – “the most perceptible, yet least material elements”- are its most powerful effect. Rap’s primary force is sonic, and the distinctive, systematic use of rhythm and sound, especially the use of repetition and musical breaks, are part of a rich history of New World black traditions and practices. Rap music centres on the quality and nature of rhythm and sound, the lowest, “fattest beats” being the most significant and emotionally charged.”
page 65
‘Rap music revises black cultural priorities via new and sophisticated technological means.’
These revisions do not take place in a cultural vacuum, they are played out on a cultural and commercial terrain that embraces black cultural products and simultaneously denies their complexity and coherence. This denial is partly fuelled by a mainstream cultural adherence to the traditional paradigms of Western classical music as the highest legitimate standard for musical creation, a standard that at this point should seem, at best, only marginally relevant in the contemporary popular music realm (a space all but overrun by Afrodiasporic sounds and multicultural hybrids of them). Instead, and perhaps because of, the blackening of popular taste, Western classical music continues to serve as the primary intellection and legal standard and point of reference for “real” musical complexity and composition. For these reasons, a comparative look at these two musical and cultural forces is of the utmost importance if we are to make sense of rap’s music and the responses to it.
Sonic Warfare (Steve Goodman, 2010, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – chapter 16 –
The importance of rhythm, and its underlying existence all around us is made very prominent by this quote from page 86
‘If a particle ceased to vibrate, it would cease to be… We can therefore say that vibrational energy is the energy of existence’
‘The rhythmic motions of a noise are infinite’ – Luigi Russolo (The art of noises, 1913)
John Cage —
- “ I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be any more than they are”
- “There are two things that don’t have to mean anything, music, and laughter, don’t have to mean anything as in that they don’t have to mean anything to give us pleasure”
- “The sound experience which I prefer to all others, is the experience of silence”
- “If you listen to Mozart or Beethoven, you realise they will keep sounding the same, but if you listen to traffic its always different”
“We are the music we play, and our commitment is to peace, to understanding of life, and we keep trying to purify our music, to purify ourselves so that we can move ourselves – and those who hear us – to higher levels of peace and understanding.” – Albert Ayler
‘the purpose of the music is to achieve a levitation or a trance, which is the existence beyond the normal existence’ … “the strongest manifestation of a cultural continuum’ …. ‘what art is is the abstraction, if you will, of what we exchange everyday’ – Cecil Taylor