Sampling Soul 3.0
Duke University
Department of African & African American Studies
AAAS 334-01
Fall 2012
Tuesday 4:40pm – 7:10pm
Ernestine Friedl Bldg, 107
Instructors:
9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit) | @9thWonderMusic
Course Description
Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s and became the secular soundtrack of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists such as Aretha Franklin and James Brown and record companies such as Motown and Stax, as well as the term “Soul” became symbols of black aspiration and black political engagement. In the decades since the rise of “Soul,” the music and its icons are continuously referenced in contemporary popular culture via movie trailers, commercials, television sitcoms and of course music. In the process “Soul” has become a significant and lucrative cultural archive, particularly for two generations of Hip-Hop artists and producers.
Co-taught by Grammy Award winning producer 9th Wonder and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal, “Sampling Soul” will examine how the concept of “Soul” has functioned as raw data for contemporary forms of cultural expression. In addition the course will consider the broader cultural implications of sampling, in the practices of parody and collage, and the legal ramifications of sampling within the context of intellectual property law. The course also offers the opportunity to rethink the concept of archival material in the digital age.
Books
Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations | Brian Ward
Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure | ed. Monique Guillory & Richard C. Green
Parodies of Ownership: Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law | Richard L. Schur
Creative License: the Law and Culture of Digital Sampling | Kembrew McLeod & Peter Dicola
That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader | ed. Murray Forman & Mark Anthony Neal
Making Beats: the Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop | Joseph G. Schloss
The Grey Album: the Blackness of Blackness | Kevin Young
Week 1—Sampling Sampling
The Art and Aesthetics of Sampling
August 28, 2012
Introduction to sampling as a practice. What are the historical and artistic contexts for sampling practices> How do terms like appropriation, borrowing, parody, pastiche, collage and “theft” factor into our understandings of sampling practices? How have sampling practices impacted contemporary art?
Week 2—Sampling The Birth of Rock &…er, Rhythm & Blues
Race Music, Cover Scams, and Elvis Presley’s Ass
September 4, 2012
Soul Music was the logical extension of the period of “Race Music”—as Black music was defined by the recording and radio industries from the 1920s—where the music was incubated in the segregated spaces of Black American life. The music crossed over in the 1950s with the practice of “covers”—where White performers recorded songs originally recorded by Black Rhythm and Blues artists, to greater acclaim and financial reward—leading to the emergence of Elvis Presley at the “King” of Rock & Roll.
Readings: Ward, Just My Soul Responding | Introduction; Part 1: Deliver me from the days of old (1-169)
Discussion Question: (Beta)
Week 3—Sampling Soul
The Politics of Soul; The Soul of Politics
September 11, 2012
Soul Music emerged in the late 1950s, combining the drive of rhythm and blues, with the flourishes of the black gospel tradition. By the 1960s it was part of a broader social movement articulated politically in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, philosophically in the concept of Black Nationalism and the Black Arts Movement and stylistically in the flourishing of Afros.
Readings: Ward, Just My Soul Responding | Part 2: People get ready; Part 3: One nation (divisible) under a groove; Epilogue (173-452)
Discussion Question (# 1)
Week 4—Sampling Black Power & Politics
The Cultural and Historical Legacy of Soul
September 18, 2012
In the 1970s Soul became a “brand” invoked directly and indirectly in ad copy, television commercials, film and television and of course music. Decades later ‘Soul’ has become a general phrase connected to a nostalgia for the period of the 1960s, often minus allusions to the political struggles of the era.
Readings: Guillory & Green, Soul | Scott, “It’s All in the Timing: The Latest Moves, James Brown’s Grooves and the Seventies Race Conscious Movement in Salvador, Bahia-Brazil” (9-22); Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia” (23-31); White, “Fragmented Souls: Call and Response with Renee Cox” (45-55); Fared, “Wailin’ Soul: Reggae’s Debt to Black American Music” (56-74); Rux, “Aunt Emma’s Zuni Recipe for Soul Transitions” (75-86).
Screening: The Black Power Mixtape
Discussion Question (# 2)
Week 5—Sampling The Pleasure(s) of Soul
The Soul of Black Folk
September 25, 2012
By the late 1960s ‘Soul’ became a cultural reference point related to notions of style and feeling, that marked Black bodies as exotic in the context of the mid-20th century. Soul located the slippery slope between exoticism and pathology, played out within a landscape of Black sexual politics.
Readings: Guillory & Green, Soul | Serlin, “From Sesame Street to Schoolhouse Rock: Urban Pedagogy and Soul Iconography in the 1970s” (105-120); Wald, “Soul’s Revival: White Soul, Nostalgia, and the Culturally Constructed Past” (139-158); Jackson, “Ethnophyisicality, or an Ethnography of Some Body” (172-190); Guillory, “Black Bodies Swingin’: Race, Gender, and Jazz” (191-215); DeFrantz, “Stoned Soul Picnic: Alvin Ailey and the Struggle to Define Official Black Culture” (216-226); Gonzales, “The Legend of Soul: Curtis Mayfield!” (227-235); Simon, “The Stigmatization of ‘Blaxploitation’” (236, 249)
Discussion Question (# 3)
Week 6— Sampling Blackness
Black Culture as Intellectual Property
October 2, 2012
Though various forms of black culture have circulated freely in the United States and across the globe, they have often done so as the property of corporate entities. What is the relationship between black bodies as chattel and black culture as property? What happens when the cultural expressions of a formerly enslaved peoples becomes intellectual property?
Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership | Chap 1: From Chattel to Intellectual Property; Chap 2: Critical Race Theory, Signifyin’ and Cultural Ownership; Chap 3: Defining Hip-Hop Aesthetics; Chap 4: Claiming Ownership in the Post-Civil Rights Era (1-98)
Discussion Question (# 4)
Week 7—Sampling Hip-Hop Aesthetics
Transformative Uses: Parody, Memory, Community
October 9, 2012
How have the aesthetics of Hip-Hop challenged the legitimacy of Intellectual Property Law and in the process transformed how we think about intellectual property and its value?
Readings: Schur, Parodies of Ownership | Chap 5: “Fair Use” and the Circulation of Racialized Texts; Chap 6: “Transformative Uses”: Parody and Memory; Chap 7: From Invisibility to Erasure? The Consequences of Hip-hop Aesthetics
Neal, Ebony.com | "Fair Use," Al Green and President Obama’s Reelection Campaign (http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/fair-use-al-green-and-president-obamas-reelection-campaign)
Discussion Question (# 5)
Week 8— Sampling Sampling
The Culture of Digital Sampling
October 23, 2012
Is sampling beats “stealing” music and evidence of a lazy, uncreative impulse in contemporary art? Or is it a legitimate art form?
Readings: McLeod & DiCola, Creative License
Screening: Copyright Criminals (dir. Benjamin Franzen, 2009)
Discussion Question (# 6)
Mid-term Examination Distributed
Week 9—Sampling Hip-Hip (Origins)
Hip-Hop Origins? Origins of Hip-hop?
October 30, 2012
Hip-Hop was born nearly forty-years ago in the borough of the Bronx, in the city of New York, but it’s roots arguably can be traced to much earlier forms of black vernacular expression including the Jamaican “sound systems” that a young Clive Campbell was exposed to in his native Jamaica, before he migrated to New York City in the late 1960s as part of a wave of immigrants in the aftermath of the 1965 Immigration Act. Yet every place and space that has embraced Hip-Hop has done so with its own narratives of origin.
Readings: Murray & Neal, That’s the Joint! | Castleman, “The Politics of Graffiti” (13-22); Chang, “Zulus on a Time Bomb: Hip-Hop Meets the Rockers Downtown” (23-39); George, “Hip-Hop Founding Fathers Speak the Truth” (43-55); Pabon, “Physical Graffiti: The History of Hip-Hop Dance” (56-62); Tate, “Hip-Hop Turns 30: Watcha Celebratin’ For?” (63-67); Flores, “Puerto Rocks: Roots, Rap, and Amnesia” (73-91); Rodman, “Race...and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity” (179-198); Wang, “Rapping and Repping Asian: Race, Authenticity, and the Asian American MC” (199-223).
Mid-Term Examination Due
Week 10—Sampling Gender, Sampling Sexuality
He/She/Queer Sounds | He/She/Queer Samples
November 6, 2012
Although African American musical forms like rap music are now accepted forms of mainstream popular music, not all of the music produced within these genres are accepted. Sampling Queer offers a critical way of thinking about how various sonic tropes that are sampled are often rendered queer by virtue of not adhering to conventional understandings of soul, hip hop, and R&B.
Readings: Murray & Neal, That’s the Joint! | Clay, “I Used to be Scared of the Dick: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity” (348-357); Dyson & Hurt: Violence, Machismo, Sexism and Homophobia” (358-369); Hill, “Scared Straight: Hip-Hop, Outing, and the Pedagogy of Queerness” (382-398); Morgan, “Hip-Hop Feminist” (413-418);
Royster, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Volume 19, Number 1, March 2009 , pp. 77-94(18) |“Feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no”: Grace Jones and the performance of Strange in the Post-Soul Moment, ”Francesca Royster;
Discussion Question (# 7)
Week 11—Sampling Race, Space & Resistance
The Politics of Sound
November 13, 2012
Arguably what has always made rap music political has been its sound—a sound that has regularly transformed the spaces the it has inhabited. The larger question is how often have rap narratives matched the political urgency of it’s sound—and does it matter whether it does?
Readings: Murray & Neal, That’s the Joint! | Miller, “Rap’s Dirty South: From Subculture to Pop Culture” (270-293); Perry, “Global Black Self-Fashionings: Hip-Hop as Diasporic Space” (294-314); Lena, “Voyeurism and Resistance in Rap Music Videos” (462-475); Perry, “My Mic Sounds Nice: Art, Community, and Consciousness” (503-517); Peterson, “Dead Prezence: Money and Mortal Themes in Hip-hop Culture” (595-608); Holmes Smith, “I Don’t Like to Dream About Getting Paid: Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul” (672-689).
Discussion Question (# 8)
Week 12—Sampling Beats
The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop
November 20, 2012
In Making Beats, ethnomusicologist Joe Schloss argues that sample-based hip-hop is a legitimate art form unto itself.
Readings: Schloss, Making Beats.
Discussion Question (#9)
Week 13—Sampling the Blackness of Blackness
On the Black Art of Escape
November 27, 2012
Part one of a meditation on blackness, using the mashup as metaphor.
Readings: Young, The Grey Album | Overture; Book One: Elsewhere; Book Two: Strange Fruit (3-188)
Discussion Question (#10)
Week 14—Blackening the Sampling of Blackness
Towards a Post-Soul Poetics
December 4, 2012
Part one of a meditation on blackness, using the mashup as metaphor.
Readings: Young, The Grey Album | Book Three: Heaven is Negro; Book Four: Cosmic Slop (189-406)
Discussion Question (#11)
Final Examination Distributed
