Democracy of Sound (35 page)

While the technology needed to assemble samples into one fluid collage could be costly, the physical object of the recording itself was often unpolished. The early mixtapes were, like bootleg cassettes of hit albums, cheaply produced and packaged. “As cult objects go, they’re not much to look at: primitive graphics printed on cheap paper and handwritten track listings, frequently inaccurate and incomplete,” the journalist Frank Owen observed in 1994. “They’re scruffy-looking yet highly prized artifacts sold out of small stores in the East Village or record shops uptown.”
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The content of mixtapes signaled shifting tastes in hip-hop. DJs anticipated the next big hits and brought attention to new artists by mixing their words and music with those of other, better-known rappers.
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The DJ served as a tastemaker, connoisseur, and opinion leader. In his work studying British fans of American soul music in the 1970s, anthropologist Mark Jamieson has shown how DJs exercised cultural authority through their knowledge, good taste, and access to prized recordings. Similarly, buyers of mixtapes valued the maker for his judgment in selecting classic R&B and funk tracks, which formed the basis of many
remixes, as well as his acumen at finding the most desirable new music before anyone else. Taxi drivers sought out the best mixtapes, since certain well-heeled customers would pay for a “hold call” just to listen to the work of certain DJs. “A Hold Call is where a person who had some money would want to get into this particular vehicle and do just basically nothing, sort of just ride around for hours and hours,” Grandmaster Flash remembered. “If [the driver] had the hottest tape he would get all the Hold Calls across the [taxi dispatcher’s] radio.”
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Unregulated and entrepreneurial, the mixtape market contained a variety of different patterns of production, distribution, and profit making. Some DJs, like Brucie Bee in the 1980s, sold their tapes directly to people who loved the music they played. “I would spend a day in my house just making tapes,” Brucie recalled. “I would come out with about 100 tapes and then go into everybody’s block that was getting money … I would just jump in a cab and go up in they block.”
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Other DJs simply released the tapes as free promotional materials, which bootleggers in turn copied and sold on the street. Hiding behind a sticker that said “For Promotional Use Only,” DJs insisted that mixtapes were just a noncommercial showcase of their mixing skills, knowing that the work would be replicated and sold by others. DJ Clue, who climbed to the top of the New York scene in the 1990s by mixing together the most sought-after new music on his tapes, claimed not to distribute mixtapes at all. He would simply record the mix and send free copies to athletes, record shops, and clothing stores to ensure that the right people were hearing them. DJ Whoo Kid described the multitiered structure that had evolved in New York by 2003. “I take it to the main [wholesale] bootlegger and he does his thing and kills the streets,” he said. “The main bootlegger has about 300 bootleggers [that he works with]. They all know each other. They all got their own portable pressing machines. It’s not only them, it’s regular people. My main thing is to get it bootlegged.”
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Journalist Shaheem Reid reported that other DJs sold their mixtapes to stores on consignment. Some made money by naming their mixes after commercial sponsors. “We used the bootleggers as our own personal street team,” remarked Lloyd Banks of the group G-Unit.
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By the 1990s, mixtapes became more than a vehicle for DJs to show off their talents. The genre also became a tool for aspiring rappers to distribute their own work on the streets in the absence of a record deal, or for enterprising DJs to leverage their own personal connections and marketing savvy to act as cultural arbiters within the hip-hop scene. DJ Clue was among the first to distribute “mixtapes” in the form of CDs in the early 1990s, and his knack for delivering the newest, most sought-after music became a model for future mixtapes, as much a showcase for cutting-edge music as for DJing virtuosity. Some artists suspected that Clue maintained his competitive advantage by sneaking a digital audiotape (DAT) device into studios and capturing the music before it was even released. Clue used his connections with sound engineers and industry insiders to get
new recordings before anyone else. DJ Kay Slay admitted to finding the “grimiest intern” at a label, who was so underpaid that he would provide Slay access to fresh music in exchange for $75 or $100. “I had one of these at every label,” Slay said in 2005.
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DJs like Clue and Slay followed in the footsteps of 1960s bootleggers, who tried every method of persuasion, including bribery, to obtain unreleased recordings from stars like Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen.

Such tactics violated copyright law, since DJs rarely cleared the use of sound samples on the tapes with the owners of the recordings, but in time, successful DJs like Funkmaster Flex began releasing official mixtapes through established labels. Flex’s 1995
The Mix Tape: 60 Minutes of Funk
was among the first DJ compilations released as a legal mainstream product, consisting entirely of borrowed sounds from other rappers. The recording resembled the sonic pastiche he furiously constructed on air for Hot 97, a New York radio station, including freestyle raps by Erick Sermon and Busta Rhymes alongside a single by Yvette Michelle, a singer whose career was cultivated by Flex.
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The DJ was partly a promoter, plugging himself and pushing new artists like Michelle. He also served a kind of variety-show host, appearing occasionally to comment on the proceedings and introduce artists, who praised the master of ceremonies in their lyrics: “1996 in your ass, Funkmaster Flex, compilation freestyle album, in your ass, we got lyrics for years for all you fuckin’ peers,” Redman and Method Man free-associated on one track. “Who’s that nigga smokin’ buddha on the A train? It’s the Funkmaster Spock rock the spot.”
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Kid Capri, Funkmaster Flex, and others began producing legally acceptable recordings like
The Tape
and
60 Minutes of Funk
in the 1990s, but DJs continued to release mixtapes in the same informal fashion as ever. Many rappers coveted a spot on a popular DJ’s tapes, freely volunteering their work in order to reach a large audience. Mixtapes also offered an alternative path of distribution and promotion for artists without record label deals. Jadakiss remembered being in awe of DJ Clue’s prestige: “We used to sit around the house and listen to Clue tapes and be like, ‘He’ll call us one day.’ So we sat and sat and sat and waited. Eventually he called.” Both DJ Clue and Jadakiss’s group, the LOX, vaulted to mainstream success on the strength of their mixtape fame. As Shaheem Reid notes, the popular rapper 50 Cent’s “debut”
Get Rich or Die Tryin’
was probably his twentieth album in circulation when Aftermath Records released it in 2003. Cent had already put out numerous mixtapes with titles like
50 Cent Is the Future
on the street, striving to build his reputation. He even inked a deal with Columbia Records in 2001, but the label stopped returning his calls when it learned that he had been shot nine times. He then turned to the informal arena of the streets to make his comeback and land another deal. He stood outside radio stations with business partner Sha Money XL, trying to get their mixtapes played on the air, and in time they were.
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Soon after, 50 Cent became one of the most commercially successful recording artists of the early twenty-first century, a clear example of the trajectory from mixtape obscurity to mainstream fame. No less an arbiter of conventional wisdom than
USA Today
declared in 2006 that 50 Cent helped bring mixtapes to the attention of the mainstream. “The often unlicensed and frequently bootlegged collections of exclusive advance tracks, hot street jams, diss songs and freestyles—available for sale via the Internet, small retail shops and street vendors, or as free downloads and file swaps—aren’t just for hardcore fans anymore,” Steve Jones reported.
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Though technically infringing copyright, the bustling trade in bootleg sound collage served as a useful complement to the official record industry—a sort of disorganized minor leagues for cultivating talent. “You run the mixtape game, you have a chance at the mainstream industry,” the rapper Jedi observed in 2005.
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The medium provided an alternative network for new performers to introduce themselves to listeners and build their reputations, forming what media scholar Jared Ball calls “an African American underground communication and press.”
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As Ball points out, mixtapes occupied a peculiar place in the music industry, perceived as a threat by record labels that also stood to benefit from the artists who emerged from the mixtape scene.
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In the new millennium, hip-hop continued to be a participatory medium, a stratified market, and an arena for unpunished piracy. When Ball spoke of mixtapes as an “underground press” he perhaps consciously evoked the political rapper Chuck D’s 1990 description of rap music as “a CNN that black kids never had.”
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Similarly, DJ Red Alert referred to mixtapes as “underground radio on tape” in 1994.
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Anyone with a tape deck or CD burner could become a de facto record label, and the recording industry found ways to take advantage of this spontaneous activity, in much the same way that major labels learned to pluck the most successful rock bands from independent labels.
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While police sometimes raided stores that sold mixtapes, the RIAA considered outright piracy a much higher priority. “We try to focus most of our attention at the higher levels of distribution before it gets to retail,” the group’s antipiracy czar said in 2006. “We leave it for the most part to local police to enforce state laws.… We have trained police in terms of what to look for.”
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In a way, the exuberance of the mixtape culture in the 1990s and early 2000s pushed back against the legal regulation of mainstream hip-hop. Siva Vaidhyanathan decried the effect of copyright enforcement on rap music in his 2001 book
Copyrights and Copywrongs
, documenting how the threat of litigation forced rappers and their labels to obtain costly copyright clearances from rights owners for the sound samples they used in constructing new tracks. “The legal implications of sampling has created a subsidiary industry within rap, fattening the pockets of lawyers, older artists, defunct labels, and sample clearinghouses, who conduct the actual busywork of acquiring rights and negotiating fees,”
journalist S. H. Fernando observed in 1994. “It has also meant that, in the studio, artists do not have the carte blanche to create as freely as they once did.”
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The formerly freewheeling collage and pastiche of hip-hop ran up against a high wall of rents paid to the established industry when rappers signed to major labels and reached mainstream audiences, but DJs in the informal mixtape market blithely disregarded the procedures of copyright compliance, slapping together old beats with the words of new artists and disavowing involvement in the commercial reproduction of their creations.
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But the meaning of the DJ’s work as a cultural impresario remained open to interpretation. As a gatekeeper to commercial success, a well-regarded DJ wielded power not unlike that of a record company; like a record executive, DJs profited from music recorded by others, exploiting everyone from the much-sampled funk musician James Brown to the aspiring rapper who
wanted
to have his music exploited. A hip-hop producer could make a career out of collating and rearranging recorded sounds, winning awards, ad revenue, jobs on the radio, and prestige.
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He became like the curator at a famous museum; in this way, his work mirrored the appropriation art of Richard Prince and others, who rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s by collecting things—photos from biker magazines, cigarette ads, pulp magazine covers—and simply putting them on display.
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The musician and theorist Ian Svenonius argues that, like the appropriation artist, the DJ’s skill was not
making
a new expression but simply choosing among goods, in this case recordings. His work resembled “the new role of the bourgeoisie as stockbroker/trader/designator-of-worth and handler-of-commodities,” Svenonius declared in his 2006 polemic
The Psychic Soviet
.
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For Svenonius, the traditional recording artist was the counterpart of the industrial worker, an iconic figure of the twentieth century who superseded the individual craft of the painter or sculptor through the power of mass production. By the end of the century, he suggested, the DJ was pushing out the rock star or singing sensation by removing labor from the equation entirely. He became the ideological and artistic equivalent of the financier, the reigning king of a deindustrialized America: “Like the rulers on Wall Street, he has no actual talent except to play with other people’s labor. His talent is his impeccable taste and his ability to turn junk into gold, like his stockbroking masters.”
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The DJ’s defenders would no doubt agree—the young people who first assembled the bricolage of hip-hop in the Bronx did indeed “turn junk into gold.” As apartment buildings burned and drugs, poverty, and violence wrecked lives, New Yorkers of the 1970s seized on whatever tools were available to create a billion-dollar industry. At the same time, hip-hop reflects a broader aesthetic of appropriation that characterized American culture in the late twentieth century, from the exhibitions of the Museum of Modern Art down to the derivative
remakes of films, TV shows, and comic books that stream out of Hollywood. The question here is how an unregulated, informal aspect of that culture—bootlegging—related to the whole. Constructing a mixtape required more creative input than recording a rock concert or making identical copies of commercially released albums, since the DJ cleverly selected and juxtaposed parts of different recordings in the mix, creating a new kind of composition. They put a personal stamp on what they assembled, to a greater extent than the rock or jazz bootlegger who designed the packaging of a live recording. On the other hand, producing and
selling
a mix of other people’s sounds was far less permissible under American copyright law than recording and trading tapes of the Grateful Dead, even though some rappers wanted their music to be bootlegged, as did the Dead.