Reality Hunger (31 page)

In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the “real thing”): theft without apology—conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.

Graffiti artists use the stuff of everyday life as their canvas—walls, dumpsters, buses. A stylized representation is placed on an everyday object. In visual art, as in other media, artists take unfiltered pieces of their surroundings and use them for their own means.

In that slot called data, the reality is sliced in—the junk-shop find, thrift-store clothes, the snippet of James Brown, the stolen paragraph from Proust, and so on.

In hip-hop, realness is something to have and express but not question. Realness is sacred. Realness is taboo. Realness refers to a life defined by violence, drugs, cutthroat capitalism—a life not unfamiliar to superstar rappers like The Game (who has been shot five times) and 50 Cent (nine times) when their crews shoot at each other. “I got you stuck off the realness,” Prodigy of Mobb Deep raps in the song “Shook Ones Pt. II,” probably the most widely quoted use of the term. “We be the infamous / you heard of us / official Queensbridge murderers.” It’s Mobb Deep’s realness that makes you a “shook one”; it’s Prodigy’s realness that got you stuck. This leads to the term’s larger meaning, the meaning Cormega takes, for example, in titling his debut album
The Realness
. There’s no title track to explain the term. It’s posted at the front of the album like an emblem representing all that follows. The same for Group Home’s song “The Realness,” in which DJ Premier samples “Shook Ones Pt. II” to isolate the words “the realness” and “comes equipped.” Melachi ends his verse by saying he “comes equipped with that Brainsick shit,” referring to the guest rappers from the Brainsick Mob, but that’s all we know about these terms. There’s no definition of realness, only a declaration that they’re equipped with it. In the spoken-word introduction to his song “Look in My Eyes,” Obie Trice says, “Every man determines his definition of realness, what’s real to him.” Realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back. Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.

Cultural and commercial languages invade us 24/7. That slogan I just heard on the TV commercial: I can’t get it out of my
head. That melody from the theme song to that syndicated sitcom that arrives at seven every night: we’re colonized by this stuff. It invades our lives and our lexicon. This might be of no consequence to the average media consumer, but it spells trouble for the artist. There is now a slogan, a melody, a raw building block of art living in his brain that he doesn’t own and can’t use.

The evolution of copyright law has effectively stunted the development of sampling, thereby protecting the creative property of artists but obstructing the natural evolution of human creativity, which has always possessed cannibalistic tendencies. With copyright laws making the sampling of popular music virtually impossible, a new technique has evolved in which recordings are made that mimic the recordings that the artists would like to sample. These mimic recordings—not nearly as satisfying as sampling the original record—are then sampled and looped in the same way that the original would have been. We don’t want a mimic of a piece of music, though; we want the actual piece of music presented through a new lens. Replication isn’t reproduction. The copy transcends the original. The original is nothing but a collection of previous cultural movements. All of culture is an appropriation game.

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end. What can we call our own except energy, strength, and will? If I could give an account of all that I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, there would be but a small balance in my favor.

A great man quotes bravely and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopedia of his table talk is presently believed to be his own.

Mixtapes are used—as they’ve traditionally been used—to advertise and promote a new record, but they’re also becoming a forum for illegal music: music that has uncleared samples and thus can’t be released through proper channels. Much more than a collection of songs, mixtapes have a host who introduces the programs and talks in between songs as if the listener were at a live show. A DJ selects the music and mixes many different songs together into new pieces. Many times the singers from the selected songs will customize the song and add new twists unique to that particular mixtape. The new vocals are often extremely self-reflexive, mentioning the mixtape itself and how it was made. In the majority of mixtapes I’ve heard, the original songs are re-presented in unique new ways, but record labels then bust their own promotional operatives. Which is similar, in a sense, to the situation regarding file sharing: the companies complaining about downloading (e.g., Sony) are the same companies making the machines that do the downloading. Instead of prosecuting people who have an interest in their product, these companies could try to figure out how to use this consumer interest to their advantage. Mass-media producers are wasting their time trying to hold the dam together, but it broke several years ago. The technology to duplicate, copy, and sample mass-produced media isn’t going away. What do we do with “outlaw” works of art? If I’m burning copies of
Titanic
and selling them as supposedly
real copies of the movie, that seems illegal, but if I use elements of
Titanic
in a
Tarnation
-style film, that doesn’t seem wrong to me. I think it should be a question of intent. However, both cases are wrong in the eyes of the law.