Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Hip Hop and Transmedia

de Bourgoing's article Hip Hop Goes Tansmedia: Seven Laws covers seven of the basic ways that the Hip Hop culture in the LA area leverages new and emerging social media technologies to change the way that Hip Hop is heard, promoted, and makes money. The article uses examples from the LA Hip Hop culture to show that artists are no longer tied to traditional production deals to become successful.

In the first third of this class we talked about the way that information was categorized in the digital world. This article deviates from this greatly and instead shows how technology is affecting the society that we live in. The two topics are connected but in a subtle fashion. The traditional path of music took to become digital goes something like this. A band gets together and plays music. The music sounds good and the band gains notoriety by playing locally. The band is singed to a major record company who has the finical assets to create numerous physical artifacts that can be sold to allow the bands music to be heard. Hip Hop was always an uncomfortable guest in the house of traditional music authorship. It got it's start with sampling and most often was performed live or recorded on to cassette tapes. The music and beats that hip hop was built on was often borrowed from already popular music. Music is no longer well represented by physical objects. Instead it is a digital object that is more inconvenient when transfered to a physical object. It is unsurprising that Rap was one of the first music styles to throw off the shackles of production and embrace this new media. Many rap stars long ago discovered what most of the rest of the music interindustry is just now discovering. Selling music in the digital age requires a product that is more then just a pleasant song. If you wish to make money as an artist now you need to sell consumers your life style.

In Paul Miller's Rhythm Science he discusses many of the aspects of hip hop and what it is and is not. He discuses how in the digital age people are more apt to pick and choose the culture you adopt to make your own. In the section DJing is Writing he covers the idea that in order to understand music you must understand the references within music in a similar fashion to understanding the references a book might make to other works of literature. He goes on to talk about how the hip hop culture is pick and choose. You don't have to take it all in and make it you. He talk about how hip hop also reflects this philosophy. Basically everything in life is fair game to be used to to identify yourself.

This connects in a similar fashion to the free form ideas behind the 3rd order of order. Definition is not something to be written in stone in this new age. Music no longer come only in sheets with 4 note progression. People no longer image themselves after they favorite celebrity. You are a conglomerate of everything you have consumed and the aspects of it that you like best and choose to express. It is a complicated idea but understandable. What makes something new is not original content but rather old content as shown through the filter of you. In the same way you are a conglomeration of your experiences repackaged and broadcast using with your conception of self as the filter.