No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Conjured from Fragments: KMD's Mr. Hood and the Transformative Poetics of the Golden Age Rap Album
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2021
Abstract
Between 1988 and 1991, the rap album took flight. Under the dual impetus of innovations in sampling, and of the album form itself, an explosion of youthful creativity ensured the rap album, mined for more self-consciously artistic potential, emerged as a multi-layered artform that revealed a similarly multi-layered Black genius. For innovators like the Bomb Squad (Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Son of Bazerk), Prince Paul (De La Soul) and others, the rap album was now often “more” than just a rap album. It could at once take on the characteristics of a radio show, a simulated game show, a talking comic book, a picaresque novel, an Afrofuturist vaudeville, or a visit to the movies—and, through any of these, invoke a multitude of stories and critiques from marginalized young Black perspectives.
Drawing on a variety of ideas from Black American cultural studies, particularly those focused on creative transformation as a form of transcendence, this article analyzes the multi-layered creativity of one of this period's most unsung, yet ultimately important albums: KMD's showpiece of sampling transformation and satiric narrative wit, Mr. Hood. Best known as the album that initiated the career of the MC/producer later known as MF DOOM (arguably the most revered figure in underground rap post-1999), it also initiated his surreal approach to sampling non-musical material from sources in popular culture and envisagement of rap as a kind of modern-day folklore. Attempting to find a new way of working across the layers of the rap album—the magical interplay of mood, beat, references, verbal samples, storytelling, etc.—the article argues that such sample-based flights of the imagination represent a continuation of the Afro-magical tradition Theophus Smith calls Conjuring Culture.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music
Footnotes
This work was supported by an AHRC Fellowship, Grant Ref AH/P005853/1, PI: Justin A. Williams. I would like to thank Justin Williams for his wise and generous mentorship at the University of Bristol, where this article was begun; Loren Kajikawa and Mark Katz, both of whom gave indispensable feedback on an earlier version; the delegates of the 2019 Hip-Hop in the Golden Age conference at the Jacobs School of Music, for which this work was initially developed; and the late brothers Daniel and Dingilizwe Dumile for the music that inspired it.
References
References
Agoston, Peter. “The House List Episode 100: DOOM.” Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/thehouselistpodcast/ep-100-doom-1.Google Scholar
Arjini, Nawal. “Darius James's Antic Satire of American Racism.” The Nation, February 28, 2019.Google Scholar
Bailey, Julius H. “Sacred Not Secret: Esoteric Knowledge in the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors.” In Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There is a Mystery,” edited by Finley, Stephen C., Guillory, Margarita Simon, Page, Hugh R. Jr., 210–24. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015.Google Scholar
Coleman, Brian. Check the Technique Volume 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies. Boston: Wax Facts Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Commander, Michelle D. Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Conner, Marc C., and Nash, William R., eds. Charles Johnson: The Novelist as Philosopher. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.Google Scholar
Dahlen, Chris. “Top 100 Albums of the 1990s.” Pitchfork, November 17, 2003. https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/5923-top-100-albums-of-the-1990s/.Google Scholar
Davis, Michael. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. New York: Viking, 2008.Google Scholar
DeLue, Rachel. “Conjure and Collapse in the Art of Romare Bearden.” Nonsite.org 7 (October 11, 2012). https://nonsite.org/article/conjure-and-collapse-in-the-art-of-romare-bearden.Google Scholar
Demers, Joanna. Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Didion, Joan. “New York: Sentimental Journeys.” New York Review of Books, January 17, 1991. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1991/01/17/new-york-sentimental-journeys/.Google Scholar
Ellison, Ralph. “The Art of Romare Bearden.” Massachusetts Review 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 673–80.Google Scholar
Floyd, Samuel A. Jr. “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies and Black Music Inquiry.” Black Music Research Journal 11, no.2 (Autumn 1991): 256–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelburd, Gail. Romare Bearden in Black and White: Photomontage Projections, 1964. New York: Whitney, 1997.Google Scholar
Huddleston-Mattai, Barbara A., and Mattai, P. Rudy. “The Sambo Mentality and the Stockholm Syndrome Revisited: Another Dimension to the Examination of the Plight of the African-American.” Journal of Black Studies 23, no. 3 (1993): 344–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, & Slam Dunkin’, edited by Caponi, Gena Dagel, 293–308. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Iton, Richard. In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics & Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Charles. “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction.” Callaloo 22 (Autumn 1984): 1–6.Google Scholar
Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Kajikawa, Loren. Sounding Race in Rap Songs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Mark. Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Kent, George E. “Ralph Ellison and Afro-American Folk and Cultural Tradition.” In Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Hersey, John, 160–70. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974.Google Scholar
Kernodle, Tammy L. “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Alice Coltrane and the Redefining of the Jazz Avant-Garde.” In John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music, edited by Brown, Leonard L., 73–98. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Krims, Adam. “The Hip-Hop Sublime as a Form of Commodification.” In Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, edited by Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt, 63–78. New York: Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Lemert, Charles and Du Bois, W. E. B. “A Classic from the Other Side of the Veil: Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk.” Sociology Quarterly 35, no.3 (August 1994): 383–96.Google Scholar
Lhamon, W. T. Jr. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the 1950s. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1990.Google Scholar
McLeod, Kembrew and DiCola, Peter. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Miller, D Scot. “The Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black Is the New Black—a 21st Century Manifesto.” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 113–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miyakawa, Felicia. Five Percenter Rap: God Hop's Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Moten, Fred. Stolen Life: Consent Not to Be a Single Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Mumford, Jay “J-Zone.” Root for the Villain: Rap, Bull$hit, and a Celebration of Failure. New York: Old Maid Entertainment, 2011.Google Scholar
Ongiri, Amy Abugo. “Introduction.” In Negrophobia, edited by James, Darius, vii–xvi. New York: New York Review Books, 2019.Google Scholar
Powell, Richard J., Di Giulio, Margaret Ellen, Garcia, Alicia, Trout, Victoria, and Wang, Christine. Conjuring Bearden. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Guthrie Jr. The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Guthrie Jr. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Redmond, Shana. Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Richter, Ernst-Georg. Picaresque Elements in Afro-American Novels of the 1970s. Master's thesis, Freie Universitat Berlin, 1990.Google Scholar
Ro, Ronin. Gangsta: Merchandising the Rhymes of Violence. New York: St Martin's, 1996.Google Scholar
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Schloss, Joseph G. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Tate, Greg. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. New York: Fireside, 1992.Google Scholar
Thomas, H. Nigel. From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988.Google Scholar
Vukovich, Pete. “MF DOOM: Exercising His Right to Get Hostile!” Life Sucks Die 3 (Winter 1999): 32–33, 40–41.Google Scholar
Wang, Oliver. “Turn up the Phonograph Dante Ross.” Wax Poetics 9 (Summer 2004): 15–24.Google Scholar
Floyd, Eddie. “Bring It on Home to Me” and “Hobo.” I've Never Found a Girl. Stax, 1968.Google Scholar
Sir Joe Quarterman & Free Soul. “I'm Gonna Get You.” GSF Records, 1974.Google Scholar
Terminator X featuring DJ Kool Herc. “Thumpin's Goin On.” Terminator X & the Godfathers of Threatt—Super Bad. P.R.O. Division and Rush Associated Labels, 1994.Google Scholar
Floyd, Eddie. “Bring It on Home to Me” and “Hobo.” I've Never Found a Girl. Stax, 1968.Google Scholar
Sir Joe Quarterman & Free Soul. “I'm Gonna Get You.” GSF Records, 1974.Google Scholar
Terminator X featuring DJ Kool Herc. “Thumpin's Goin On.” Terminator X & the Godfathers of Threatt—Super Bad. P.R.O. Division and Rush Associated Labels, 1994.Google Scholar