Beats!!

So, I contracted in to make some beats for this class. I thought why not post them on the blog so everyone can see them. Here they are, along with an artists statement.


Beats:

Africa.mp3 Lowrider Identity Crises.mp3 sad b cause im not u.mp3 Whitey.mp3


Artists Statement:

            Becoming disenchanted with anything is a confusing and unsettling process. I view my relationship to the art of hip-hop very much as process of disenchantment. Starting in the realm of unconditional love, I have grown to feel almost nothing but a mild dislike and discomfort for the genre and culture. I have given my self a challenge in this course, not only to focus on the culture and genre that now I feel I have little to nothing to do with, but to create within that genre. I wanted to make hip-hop make sense to me again, to feel some kind of connection to the genre I formerly loved so intensely and would have defended to no end. 

            The main reason I had a falling out with rap music was that at a certain point, after my testosterone surge began to wear down and I was making my way out of the adolescent years, I found rap hard to relate too, in fact impossible. I didn’t share the same struggles as my favorite rappers and all though I could adhere to the most basic of their emotional context I could not agree with the morals of rap music of the sexism and violence. Even the artists that rap samples I could not relate entirely too, although I love jazz and funk and soul, that music is not my parents music and the reworking of those samples is not my own expression. Black music was not mine to manipulate, I felt too outside of hip-hop to participate anymore and so I left it all behind.

            So, starting over again. I picked up my old rap production tools: my drum machine, my sample library. I started from scratch. I didn’t want my beats to sound like other Madlib or J-dilla or Just Blaze or Pete Rock, I wanted my beats to sound like me. To do this I had to dig into the music of my past, the music of my father and my own listening history. I sampled only songs that held some real location in my history, my fathers favorite song, the song I listened to when my first girl friend broke up with my after a week (tragically) in sixth grade. I also only sampled white musicians, music I felt like I had the right to manipulate and not feel like an outsider doing. But I also wanted my beats to sound like hip hop, so I incorporated the sounds of hip hop the rhythms of hip hop the tools of hip hop. The product is one that I feel is entirely my own.