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Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

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Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#21

Post by ilamont »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #13
kawsper wrote: post #12

In Denmark we had MyMusic.dk, which later rebranded to Bandbase.dk, they were active from 1998 to 2013, they stored a lot of free underground music for a lot of up and coming artists. They died when their data host Nirvanix went bankrupt, they lost all of the media files (with no backups), but according to Wikipedia customers were given 14 days to move their data. A lot of culture disappeared that day :(

>customers were given 14 days to move their data 14 days is not nearly enough for private customers to react. Often vacations can be longer than that, and people don't usually vacation with their laptops and external HDDs to places with fast broadband, just in case they need to make a spontaneous external backup of their cloud data. Imagine by the time you come home all your data is irrecoverably gone. That's fucking…

I recently got a While not a backup-related issue, it forced a scramble on my end. I am sure hundreds of others didn't see it or couldn't react until well after the fact.

Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS.

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#22

Post by harrylove »

porterbeats wrote: post #18
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #7

Rap is like a set-up, a lot of games A lot of suckers with colorful names I’m so-and-so, I’m this, I’m that Huh, but they all just wick-wick-wack

Hip-hop can be bland and shallow (like any other genre) but there's lots of unique and interesting music if one takes the time to get into it. Deltron 3030 (self titled) and MF DOOM's MM...FOOD are fantastic on a lyrical and production level

The parent comment is quoting a classic bar from "My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions[0].

[0] - https://genius.com/376131

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#23

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ilamont wrote: post #21
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>customers were given 14 days to move their data 14 days is not nearly enough for private customers to react. Often vacations can be longer than that, and people don't usually vacation with their laptops and external HDDs to places with fast broadband, just in case they need to make a spontaneous external backup of their cloud data. Imagine by the time you come home all your data is irrecoverably gone. That's fucking…

I recently got a While not a backup-related issue, it forced a scramble on my end. I am sure hundreds of others didn't see it or couldn't react until well after the fact. Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS.

>Shopify said this is allowed per its developer TOS.

Without any kind of legislation saying otherwise, these companies can put whatever the fuck they want in the TOS, which is the cheat code that allowed tech companies to extract obscene profits while completely skipping on customer support costs and legal liability.

But this could always come to an end if there's political will to legislate. In my home country a new law was passed that says companies can't keep you on hold for more than 10 minutes before you talk to a real human when you call customer support, and now companies are scrambling to hire enough customer support to deal with the new law because previously they'd leave you in a queue for 45 minutes on hold hoping you'd give up.

So it's definitely possible to not fuck over consumers, all it needs is the proper regulations in place since you can't always rely on the good will of for-profit corporations. Yes, that will make it more expensive for tech businesses to operate and reduce their profit margins, but if your business was supposed to be profitable only when skirting the law, not offering customer support, and fucking over your customers on a whim, then I don't need your business to exist in the first place.

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#25

Post by cing »

dep_b wrote: post #3

The blog era, that was so cool. The most rare stuff you could find, including some background. Now it's usually on YouTube mostly devoid of context and only single tracks.

Heck yes. Music pirates have done a whole lot to help preserve hip-hop history by ripping/archiving countless rare/underground 12" and cassettes that are definitely not available on streaming platforms; we're talking alternative versions of songs like clean edits, remixes, acapellas, instrumentals which supported hip-hop producers and DJs in the early days.

For example, check the posts in the early 2010's of sites like this, https://hiphop-thegoldenera.blogspot.com/, of course all the links are broken now.

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#26

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

harrylove wrote: post #22
porterbeats wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hip-hop can be bland and shallow (like any other genre) but there's lots of unique and interesting music if one takes the time to get into it. Deltron 3030 (self titled) and MF DOOM's MM...FOOD are fantastic on a lyrical and production level

The parent comment is quoting a classic bar from "My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions[0]. [0] - https://genius.com/376131

Thanks. Seems like my comment's getting downvoted which I hope is just people not familiar with KRS-One.

Edit: Never mind, it's gone positive now.

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#27

Post by fidotron »

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I believe when it all became known about what Afrika Bambaataa had been up to the whole foundations of hip hop as a credible art form fell away, and it has been in decline ever since. Maybe the offshoots are more commercially popular than ever but that serious audience seems to have given up on the core product.

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#29

Post by Exmoor »

I've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a big fan of the record label Bear Family, a German label that specializes in releasing boxsets from R&B/Rock&Roll/Country artists from the 20's-70's. Want to hear every song The Carter Family ever recorded in their original incarnation? They have a 12 CD boxset for you! They generally do this be acquiring the original master tapes from the labels, which often include a lot of previously unreleased songs or alternate takes, and remastering them.

Hip-Hop probably has a higher percentage of this material than almost any other genre, especially once you get to the mixtape/blog era. Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples, so even if clean recordings were available official release would be impossible.

Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story

#30

Post by jmopp »

stronglikedan wrote: post #16

Tangential, but I think the streaming services are preserving the story just fine on their own. No matter how many times I skip or dislike a hip hop song, they all keep shoving them down my throat with their recommendation engines. Very frustrating. /rant

The article spends a great deal of time explaining why streaming services can't be relied on to preserve the history.

Not to mention that a lot of early hip-hop might not have its samples cleared. These songs would not likely be on streaming services due to copyright issues. There is also the issue we've seen with streaming services disappearing huge chunks of the catalogues to avoid paying residuals. If we don't put effort into saving history, it can very easily get lost.

On top of this, there's a distinction to be made between Top-100 pop music, and the artists who influenced them in their youth. If a random mixtape from the 80s had a huge influence on you as an artist, those who enjoy your music would love to get a listen of it.

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