Pop Tourism

a quick question, in addition to miami bass, what is the score with new orleans bounce?

"What is the score with New Orleans bounce?" A quick answer: I don't know. But since when has my ignorance ever shut me up? So, at least in regards to Cash Money Records, with most of the music by Mannie Fresh: It's part of the trend away from breakbeats and back towards explicit use of drum machines. Or so I've read; breakbeat vs. drum machine never was a distinction I gave much of a shit about. More interestingly: It has long melodic motifs in background ("long" as in sometimes longer than one or two measures). Juvenile's "Back That Azz Up" is quite beautiful. Often these motifs will be in European- derived diatonic sweetness, which is why I call them "motifs" rather than "riffs." Rhythm is bouncy (I suppose). Words are, um, dirty south. The motif thing has had a big influence on Swizz Beatz in the Ruff Ryder New York.

In general, the genre (hip-hop) as a whole is so secure in the hip- hopness of its beats and raps and its cut-and-paste identity that it's willing to paste in any old (and new) melodic and tonal anything without stressing over whether that thing has r&b pedigree. Compare to c&w, which is perpetually obsessed with whether it's losing its eternal twang.

Frank sez "Latinos in hip-hop seem to be expressing "Latin" mainly through language and accent while sticking to the same hip-hop beats and melodies as the non-Latins." It's also worth pointing out that plenty of those beats are shot through, heavily, with Latin influence. Not just in the sense of any record with congas/timbales/etc. automatically have "Latin percussion," though that's true, but think of War, who were from East L.A. and had a HUGE Hispanic audience. And the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache," widely regarded as hip-hop's national anthem and for my money the greatest record ever made, whose two-or-so-minute-long conga/bongo/percussion breakdown could have been cut-and-pasted out of a song made in Puerto Rico or Cuba and none of us would be any the wiser. (Compare Candido's "Jingo," on Salsoul, which has a very similar breakdown and rhythmically splits the diff between disco and whatever Latin dance style the original--it's a remake--was based on.)

In terms of "club," many of the most influential DJs/producers, from the beginning to now, have been Hispanic. Masters at Work are the most obvious example; those guys have recorded everything under the sun, from M/A/R/R/S-style hip-hop cut-ups to pounding vocal house anthems, but DJ Sneak's "You Can't Hide from Your Bud" is one of the most influential house records of the 90s for its filtered disco cut- up. Quite a ways from the K-Tel comp, but it shows how important Latin music continues to be even in the haughtiest underground-dance circles.

Re: New Orleans Bounce. It should be mentioned that there is quite a strong connection between Miami Bass and bounce, both historically and musically - the same obsession with sex, and pretty much the same springy programmed beats, though bounce's tend to be lighter and slower so as to not obscure the MC - Nelly's tracks for example could be a much slower take on miami bass, right down to the synthetic handclaps. An obvious exception to this is "Bombs Over Baghdad", which sounds like an imaginary "Welcome To The Terrordome (Quad City DJs Mix)". Mannie Fresh tends to augment the slowed down rhythms with frantic ticking-over snares to give the sensation of heart-racing panic, high-speed chase scenes etc.

I think the possible next step in miami bass's incorporation into hip hop will be MCs rapping at half-speed under regular miami bass beats. There's a remix of Mya's "It's All About Me" (R&B, I know) which demonstrates the idea quite nicely: the BPM is much faster, but the vocals are actually slightly slower than the original.

Agreed on "Back That Azz Up" - morose string-swept action, the music could almost be from Aphex Twin's Richard D. James album. My favourite Cash Money track however is The Hot Boys' "Help" - glitzy horn blasts, baroque harpsichord runs and beats tripping over themselves - love it.

Thinking about what Frank said re: hip-hop's lack of a rigid musical self-identification. Perhaps because hip hop's social-cultural signifiers (the black rapper, the ghetto, guns/drugs/sex etc.) are so strong that there's virtually no need to adhere to any musical rules - the music ceases to be the signifier of hip hop's hip hopness, but instead merely the ornate border for other signifiers.

The situation is different with a lot of indie hip hop, where the MCs cover a much broader range of material but the DJs are trapped in a stultifying worship of some pure hip hop ideal (from Eric B to Prince Paul to The Bomb Squad to RZA), placing much of the music's self-identification within the music. There are of course exceptions to this, but it seems to be the most common approach.

Tim's point is excellent. That is all.

"There's a remix of Mya's 'It's All About Me' (R&B, I know)..." Question: how much does the distinction between r&b and hip-hop hold anymore? E.g. Mya's "Best of Me," featuring rap by Jadakiss, prod. by Swizz Beatz, on the radio right next to, say, Eve's "What Ya Want," featuring singing by Nokio and Eve herself, produced by Swizz Beatz. This is a genuine question, since my ear isn't to the ground here, but I'm assuming that the same person is buying both Jay-Z and Aaliyah; at this point the two seem closer to each other in genre and audience than either is to, say, Macy Gray.

Overlap of multiple demographix here, I think. The rap only crowd can go for the R&B crossovers, the R&B crowd can go for the tracks which are sometimes rap crossovers (rap artists ALWAYS have rap on albums, but oft. only a few crossover-capable songs, and similarly R. Kelly for ex. will have his single and then the repackaged remix with the rappers for a slightly different market). There's also the whole set of soul singers with far less rap influence, and who don't tend to collaborate or share producers in the same way. I'd argue the two are fairly melded in the general pop landscape, but there still exist strong currents of the "pure" stuff which increase as the lens moves from the pop center.

Ha! I'm reviving this thread just because I want a lot of people to read it.

A year on, now that "pop tourism" has become thoroughly de rigeur across the board (Truth Hurts ==> Holly Valance ==> No Doubt) have the resonances/implications/meanings/effects of the practice changed? (meanwhile I'm still waiting for that miami bass explosion I was talking about)

Something I was thinking about the other day: assuming hypothetically you're against the practice of stealing from other genres, which is worse: "Addictive", or Oasis's "Hindu Times"? Is stealing direct from the subcontinent more or less justified than worshipping at the alter of those who stole from the sub- continent?

Tim, are you talking about "Addicted To Bass" because i showed it to an argentinian friend and she said the intro sounded exactly like cumbia, till the first minute. I have no idead what cumbia is so i cant say if thats true

Truth Hurts' "Addictive" actually. The intro to "Addicted To Bass" hs a vaguely latin feel to it I guess, but I'm not in a position to be more specific than that.

Cumbia is a very frustrating music to dance to. Pleasant, fast, but somewhat rigid and sexless without being ecstatically so.

have the resonances/implications/meanings/effects of the practice changed?

By "practice" do you mean "pop tourism" as practiced on the ILM board of as practiced elsewhere (by musicians, for instance)?

I'm not sure that Truth Hurts and Quik sampling Mangeshkar in 2002 is different in kind from the Real Roxanne and Howie Tee sampling Elmer Fudd in 1986: it's not so much tourism as grab bag/party favors. But we'll see if there are any consequences, followups, imitations. What I struck me about "Addictive" was how much the sample ruled the song.

What struck me, that is. I didn't strike me, though perhaps I should have.

I took a two hour cumbia workshop back in the spring, but I'm still not really sure how to do it, or sometimes even how to recognize it. It didn't help that this was folklorically oriented, when I am mostly interested in how it would be danced to in clubs (not that much gets played in clubs around me, but occasionally it happens). It's Colombian, by the way (did someone say that already?), but it's fairly popular in other Latin American countries.

Many of the cumbia movements reminded me of things I had done in African dance classes long ago.