Dial "M" for Musicology

Hiphop at Cornell University

I just got a press release from Cornell University Library which seems remarkable enough to pass along:

The Cornell University Library (CUL) Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has acquired a significant archive on the history of hip hop and rap music, documenting its emergence in the Bronx in the 1970s and early 1980s. Among notables in the collection: nearly 1000 sound recordings, and the photographic archive of Bronx photographer Joe Conzo Jr., as well as “textile art, books and magazines, and a collection of more than five hundred original flyers designed by Buddy Esquire and others.”

The materials in Cornell’s hip hop collection were the gift of collector and author Johan Kugelberg, and formed the basis for the forthcoming book Born in the Bronx: a Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop (Universe, November 2007) , edited by Johan Kugelberg (author), Afrika Bambaataa (foreword), Buddy Esquire (contributor), Jeff Chang (contributor) and Joe Conzo (photographer).

There's an easy joke to be made here. Hiphop and Cornell! Ha ha! Ivy League be keepin' it gangsta, yo! OK, now, everybody done? Did we get that out of our system? Good.* I think this is kind of a big deal, for reasons that the press release gets: "CUL officials said the archive is an important addition to the library’s collections documenting 19th and 20th century American life, offering original research materials for students and scholars in various fields, including music, American studies, urban studies, theater, film & dance, art history, African American studies, government, literature, and history." Whether you love hiphop or hate it, you can't deny that it's the most important musical genre to emerge since the 1960s, and as hiphop heads always like to say, hiphop isn't just music -- it's a complex of cultural forms (music, dancing, visual design,  verse, fashion) grouped around a shared social/political sensibility. So hiphop recommends itself to history and offers itself to a wide variety of historical disciplines.  Why wouldn't an Ivy League rare books and manuscripts collection want a piece of this?

I think it must be very difficult for university special collections departments to figure out which aspects of vernacular culture are worth collecting. Pop culture is like a stock market. Back when I lived in the Bay area I used to go to Amoeba Records on Haight, which has a vast stock of used records. In the documentary Scratch you see shots of famous DJs walking the aisles at Amoeba with their little toy record players, trying out different records and looking for good breaks, and you do actually see this in real life -- a young generation of musicians going to the bottomless well of old pop culture to find new sounds. And it was always interesting to see which records they chose -- which kinds of records became scarce and expensive, and which ones stayed stubbornly available and cheap. The price stickers became a kind of crude cultural stock-price indiicator. It seemed like they couldn't give Stan Kenton and the Modern Jazz Quartet away; Chico Hamilton, on the other hand, was a hotter property. Who knows why? And the thing is, it's hard to figure out the eventual cultural importance of this or that pop-cultural figure, which is what special collections departments have to figure out if they're going to go to the trouble of acquiring some cache of papers. When I first got interested in Les Baxter, all his old stuff was moldering in boxes in some U-Stor-It place in Los Angeles, and after making a couple of quick inquiries was told that a couple of educational institutions had passed on acquiring them. Eventually Arizona figured out that Baxter is actually kind of a big deal. I would think that the greatest single ability you would want in a special collections curator is the ability to figure this sort of thing out before anyone else does -- an ability to play the market, in other words. This seems to be the secret of Tom Staley's legendary success at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

More on the collection here. There's a kickoff conference in a couple of months, too.

*The other day I mentioned the tendency of a certain generational cohort of white people (mine, and older) to start working a Robin Williams routine** whenever hiphop is put in any context that is taken to represent white middle-class culture. Interestingly, Matthew Yglesias wrote about a related instance a couple of days ago, when Rich Lowry, speaking at some political-punditry event, played the National Review's sharing a NYC building with a hiphop label for laughs.

**Nooooooooo

The pop sublime

OK, I just made that up -- "the pop sublime." It sounded good and trendily academical. A lot of academics have been slinging the sublime around lately, creating new customized versions of the sublime, which is to say, the old Kantian notion that one might experience certain things -- the starry sky, a mountain, etc. -- not as beautiful, exactly, but as both exhilarating and terrifying. The sublime registers as a sensation of shock and awe in the face of something inconceivably vaster that oneself and indifferent to one's own puny existence. Adam Krims has lately written of the "hip hop sublime," which got me thinking about the various extensions of the "sublime" idea. The "technological sublime" has been around a while: maybe it was Fredric Jameson who got this ball rolling when he wrote, in his famous essay on postmodernism, that postmodernity marks a point where you can't represent technology anymore -- or more accurately you can't represent the agency of technology, the way it works, its lines of force. According to Jameson, what you represent, as an architect or sculptor or poet or whatever, is "the sense that beyond all thematics or content the work seems somehow to tap the networks of the reproductive process and thereby to afford us some glimpse into a postmodern or technological sublime, whose power or authenticity is documented by the success of such works in evoking a whole new postmodern space in emergence around us." Which is a pretty good description of, say, a William Gibson novel, or The Matrix. So our gasp of mingled fear and pleasure is supposed to come from the moment when we glimpse the whole impossibly huge system of manufacture and reproduction. Or maybe you don't really see the system itself, which is too huge for any mortal mind to encompass, but rather the impossibility of the mental task, and thus, indirectly, the hugeness of the thing itself, like a glimpse of the Gorgon in Perseus' shield.

But I kind of don't buy it. It seems to me that the "technological sublime" is an aesthetic concept -- a fiction one keeps in mind to heighten the pleasure of reading Neuromancer or watching The Matrix or whatever. It works as a metaphor; it's an as-if way of perceiving something, an interpretation rather than the straightforward registering of something unproblematically out there in the world of consensual reality, like a mountain or an exploding bomb. But you don't gasp in terror and exhilaration at a metaphor. I always feel as if there's something self-dramatizing about people who go on about the "technological sublime," because if you buy into the concept you are saying that the perception of technology really does provoke the old shock-and-awe response. But come on, seriously, it doesn't, unless you really do cringe in fear of your iPod.

But I think people do get into the idea of the "technological sublime" anyway, because it is a dramatically satisfying way of viewing our world. So you can invent various  other "sublimes," all of them united by a shared sense of omigod that's really huge. Like, for example, the hugeness of all the recordings ever made. At UT we have something called the Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC), which has something like a quarter of a million recordings. This is only a fraction of all the recordings ever made, but standing there, in the underground vault that houses them, crowded on all sides by shelf after shelf of old records, most of which you've never even heard of, is a sublime experience, sort of. Or you can kid yourself into thinking so. At a rough calculation, it would take 22 years to play all 250000 records, and that's playing records 24/7/365 'round the clock. So the HMRC, and more generally the great abstract Platonic Archive of Sound, the sum total of all the sound ever recorded, of which any real archive is only a fragment, presents the mind with something it can never fully grasp.

So, the pop sublime: the sense of shock'n'awe you feel when confronted by the mountains of pop music you've never heard of. I've recently been listening to a Rhino anthology of psychedelic pop from the late 1960s.  I've heard of very few of the bands on this compilation, let alone the tracks, and almost all of them are great. It's not as if there's some alternate canon out there, hiding behind Dylan and the Beatles and so on, waiting to come into its own; it's that there is an infinity of possible canons, and this foregrounds the arbitrariness of canons per se. Presented with an anthology like this (and Rhino has many of them -- it's their specialty), you can feel the concepts and categories shifting under your feet. It's a moment where, like the narrator of Borges' short story The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, you encounter not only alternative things but alternative conceptual schemes for things:

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies recall those that Dr. Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese dictionary entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that animals can be divided into (a) those belonging to the Emperor, (b) those that are embalmed, (c) those that are tame, (d) pigs, (e) sirens, (f) imaginary animals, (g) wild dogs, (h) those included in this classification, (i) those that are crazy-acting (j), those that are uncountable (k) those painted with the finest brush made of camel hair, (l) miscellaneous, (m) those which have just broken a vase, and (n) those which, from a distance, look like flies.

The best representation for this moment of the pop sublime (a contrived, slightly BS concept I am nevertheless going with right now) is this clip from Doug Pray's documentary Scratch, which shows DJ Shadow, known as the most compendious digger of record crates in all of hip hop, navigating his way through a kind of hip hop version of Borges's Library of Babel.

Texas Prof Nabbed in Glenn Gould Shocker

My student Leanne sent me this news item: an Austin-area woman named Barbara Moore (described as a "college professor," though the article does not say which college)* is on trial for stealing "photographs, books, compositions, audio and video recordings, letters and items such as hats and gloves" from the Glenn Gould Archive at the Library and Archives Canada. Moore was busted by Kevin Bazzana, a musicologist with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, whose Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work is one of the finest monographs of modern performance studies. (His second book, Wondrous Strange, is also the pick of a crowded field of Gould biographies). Bazzana noticed that a page of doodles he had seen in his own researches appeared on a Manhattan art dealer's website.

This story has everything: a bent prof like on Law and Order (from Austin, no less), an academic sleuth, and the ubiquitous figure of Glenn Gould himself, who is somehow the one classical performer to have become an honorary hipster and an icon of the literary-intellectual imagination. And it brings up something worth noting: the precarious condition of research libraries and archives. There is no institution in Western civilization more admirable than the modern research library system. Research libraries co-operate to make a network designed to make everything ever written accessible to as many people as possible, and they compete with one another to preserve the personal papers of artists and intellectuals -- treasures that, in earlier times, would often have ended up in the fireplace. And these treasures are made available to basically anyone with a library card and a stated desire to do research. (In the U.S., at least: apparently the major European archives, like the French Bibliotheque Nationale, are much more restrictive, but I haven't had any experience with them.) And through interlibrary loan (ILL) you can get almost any book published in modern times, including very rare books: during my own research I ILL'ed a first edition of Chandler Brossard's Who Walk in Darkness, which is worth hundreds of dollars. (A librarian at the University of Minnesota once told me that they had caught someone ordering rare items through ILL and selling them -- a pretty easy hustle back then, though surely the ILL system has gotten wise to it since.)

Research libraries can easily fall prey to parasites because they operate on trust. They are not usually well-staffed or well-guarded, and after you've been working in an archival collection for a few days staffers will often let you get on with your work with minimal supervision. I always appreciate the fact that most archivists take a fairly charitable view of researchers and try to make their work easier. This case of pilferage from the Gould archives makes me mad because it seems obvious that the perpetrator exploited that trust.

From Wes Phillips' blog Stereophile, a PSA from Jack Black about a different kind of theft. Mr. Black's parting words are, however, entirely appropriate here.

*This story says Moore taught at Austin Community College, though there's no sign of her on the ACC website.