Back when I first started listening to hip hop music (around 1982; i'm old), it wasn't easy to get your hands on it if you lived in the suburbs. Record stores in the suburbs didn't stock hip hop until the Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill" and Run DMC's "Raising Hell". I had a circle of friends that could get me bootlegs - basically, mixtapes from people with hip hop records. I threw all of them away years ago. And I've been kicking myself ever since. I miss those old mixtapes so much. One of them was Afrika Bambaataa's "Perfect beat", over and over, both sides of the cassette, for 60 minutes. I loved it, listened to it constantly, never got tired of it. Another was entirely "Roxanne" songs - "Roxanne's doctor", "Roxanne's a man", etc.
Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
71–80 of 128 posts
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#72Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#73Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#74Maybe 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.
Afrika Bambaataa undeniably played a significant role in the early days of hip hop, but his sound hasn't influenced the genre for over three decades. If we start discrediting half a century of art based on the actions of a single individual, we'll be left with very little. Should we consider techno and all its offshoots invalid because of Derrick May's sexual assaults? Write off rock as art because Jerry Lee Lewis ma…
not at all. most listeners have no idea who he is. nor is he relevant in contemporary hiphop
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#75I'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…
> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s
I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#76Also its 50 year anniversary according to the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-66471617
The 50 year anniversary hype is everywhere.I personally agree with the last paragraph of the article:
'He also mentions that he finds the 50th anniversary of hip hop mile-marker a bit disingenuous. The birth of an entire movement can’t be attributed to one act. “I’m definitely not a person to shit on hip hop’s anniversary, or its founders,” he says. “These influential figures are extremely important. They changed the world and they deserve recognition and they deserve compensation. One hundred percent, underlined, big cap, bold letters. Capitalism, industry, commerce require neat stories. But we also have to be like, is this the whole story, or is this a convenient story?” Likely the latter, and it’s incomplete.'
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#77I'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…
> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?
Technically no, pragmatically maybe…
If the information has been lost through using a lossy codec like MP3, there’s no getting it back.
But there are “AI upscaling” techniques that use models to fill in the missing pieces. It isn’t really restoring the original, more like painting over a crack in a style that is typically used by similar artists in similar contexts. Such models could produce a result conceptually similar to what a cover band might produce.
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#78In 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 :(
In Australia, we had ozhiphop.com/forum.
It was a super active forum between 2001 - 2010. Really the only online meeting place for local hip-hop until social media took over. It was the launching place of many careers (including Action Bronson's albeit indirectly).
Sadly all seems to be lost to history too.
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#79Maybe 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.
Given that a lot of 80s-90s hip hop music the musicians claimed to perpetrate murder, drug crime and sexual exploitation - would you expect the audience to much care?
Country music talks about drugs more than other genres
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/why-country...
Re: Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
#80I'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…
> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?
Audio compression literally throws out data. It's audio the human ear isn't likely/able to hear but it's still gone. Different codecs and even different implementations of codecs throw out different audio data.
Any sort of upscaling is going to involve a lot of guesses about what was thrown out. For every codec and implementation there will be a lot of possibilities of what the original data might have looked like. At the end of the process you likely aren't going to get a result that necessarily sounds better than the low quality encoding. There will likely be a lot of artifacts introduced by the upscaling.
It's not impossible but something you'd need a specially trained AI to do I would think.