My interest in the old South Bronx is inseparable from my interest in hip hop music. And what I love about later hip hop, especially the mid-nineties New York variety, is its abundant use of white noise to create musical texture. In the hands of RZA, 4th Disciple, El P and others, the subliminal sounds of city life are patterned into apparent meaning--rain on pavement, the hiss from an old radiator, arguing neighbors, an express train passing. Listen to that stuff for a while, and you'll begin to feel like the old man in Paul Auster's City of Glass, 'reading' the streets as if they formed a great big secret book.
Of course, finding patterns in the aural landscape and re-presenting them is basic to all musical grammars, and artists have done so in urban America since ragtime days if not earlier. What is unique about sample-based hip hop is the degree to which it works with "registers of the real" rather than representations; i.e., the difference between an actual train whistle and a harmonica that evokes one. The difference is not merely technical, it is also ontological.
But old-school hip hop, and by that I mean the bare-bones seventies stuff, built from breaks, isn't the sound of 'the streets.' It's the sound of society getting on in spite of 'the streets,' celebrating survival on a Saturday night at the T-Connection or the high-school gym to the beat of a wind-up funky drummer. It creates a temporary social space above and against the desolation of uptown nights; that same wonderland of glowing floor tiles and disco balls that helped Tony Manero to forget his shitty hardware store job for a few fleeting hours every weekend.
Only later would artists try to make music out of ambient noise, when the sampler became an essential tool of the trade. Not coincidentally, the tone of the music and of the culture in general changed with the advent of that machine from upbeat to uptight. Heads now kept time instead of hips, and "looking the negative in the face" became a defining feature of hip hop aesthetics. What I am suggesting is that the sampler abetted hip hop's obsession with 'street life' by making it possible to capture, edit and pattern the sonic traces of daily life to an unprecedented degree.
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"The breaks" are an ur-form of sampling--hand-cranked loops that are always about to slide back into the same old shit. Limited to two turntables and a mic, djs/emcees had to speak the present in the borrowed musical grammar of the past. Though old school hip hop recontextualized disco, funk, and soul, it could not break those forms open, the way cops and shrinks break the expressions of filmed subjects down into hundreds of discrete, unwitting gestures.
