The Net-savvy hip hoppers who formed Support Online Hip Hop hope to help challenge the powerful music industry and turn every musician into his or her own label.
At 10 p.m. sharp on a Wednesday early this year, in the cavernous Silicon Alley headquarters of The Pseudo Online Network, a voice booms: This is 88 Hip Hop on your Internet dial, your online, worldwide radio show. A tall guy in a sweatshirt labeled DJ A. Vee stands behind a pair of turn-tables and pumps out a smooth, bass-heavy beat. A hundred people in oversize down coats begin to bop to the music. A pretty MC named Mecca leans into a microphone and introduces a group called The Derelect Camp, and eight stoned Derelects crowd into the sound room. DJ A. Vee ups the tempo, and the Derelects take turns freestyle rapping, improvising rhymes. It's a good 10 minutes before all eight exhaust their powers of off-the-cuff-verse, at which point Mecca asks them how it feels to be on the Net.
Before and after the show, the Pseudo scene is much more businesslike. Most people coming in off the street immediately start networking - trading JavaScript tips, swapping mix tapes, recommending ISPs or record labels. Over the squeak of sneakers on the softwood floor, a small group hangs out around a leather couch. Felicia Palmer blurts out ideas and gesticulates manically. Next to her, Randy Nkonoki-Ward half-follows the conversation, half-schmoozes acquaintances meandering by. Reclining on the couch, Steven Samuel rubs his recently shaved head and seems contemplative, his eyes revealing the thoughtfulness of an artist or philosopher. And Pascal Antoine, dressed in slacks and a pressed white shirt, sits with the reserved posture of an experienced businessman at a power lunch.
Under other circumstances, these four probably wouldn't be friends - they probably never would have met. But today they're in the same small space at the same time. They all know the business of hip hop music, and they've studied the production of new media. They see big opportunities opening up for hip hop artists - and themselves.
Hip hop began with an analog hack, when disc jockeys transformed turntables into musical instruments and created a whole new musical genre. But time caught up with them. As digital samplers and CD players replaced vinyl records and turntables, these artists were forced to confront the demise of their brand of electronic music. "Hip hop may be the first musical culture of the 20th century, or perhaps history," says noted rap scholar and Net entrepreneur Harry Allen, "to experience a material crisis due to a technology shift: from analog vinyl playback, which DJs use for cutting and scratching, to compact disc playback. It's almost certainly the first to experience such a crisis at the height of its popularity. It's definitely, absolutely the first to do so because of the replacement of analog data storage technologies with digital ones."
Digital technology's head-on collision with hip hop has produced an interesting result: digital storage is altering the sound of the music, and digital networking is transforming the process. Indeed, networking holds out the promise that one day the Net will allow profitable self-distribution and promotion. Simply put, Net-savvy hip hoppers hope the Web will turn every musician into his or her own music label.
Last September, here at Pseudo, Steve and Felicia and Randy and Pascal came together for the first time. Soon after, the four founded Support On- line Hip Hop, a loose network of Web sites revolving around hip hop culture. Today, more than 5,000 people and 2,500 sites claim membership, making www.sohh.com one of the busiest mom-and-pop hip hop hubs. Part community center and part new-media business, Support Online Hip Hop may not draw crowds like The Microsoft Network, but, then, it's produced and managed by two people - Felicia and Steven - who both have day jobs. A homemade search engine catalogs independent hip hop sites. Turntable DJs mine its data to collaborate with faraway wordsmith MCs. Webmasters seek out Shockwave beats and CGI scripts. And fans hunt down those starry URLs dedicated to their favorite artists.
Of course, this independent-minded collective is not alone. At least three big forces are lining up to shape the distribution of music online. First, there are the groups of musicians, like Support Online Hip Hop, who hope to control the way their sounds are produced, marketed, and sold. These include representatives from almost every musical genre and various competing players within each. Then there's the old-guard music industry, the powerful record labels and broadcast networks just starting to face the reality of Net radio and multipoint distribution. They're also beginning to look ahead to the inevitability of downloadable albums. And finally, there's the third force, the high tech behemoths like Intel and Microsoft that really grok the technology but haven't got a clue about the sound. They have initiated their own online music ventures with an eye toward the inevitable electronic commerce bonanza on the horizon.
It's within this unstable landscape that Steve, Felicia, Randy, and Pascal have decided to stake their future. They've had their run-ins with the monied heavyweights of the music industry. But the technological upheaval and the entrance of new players gives these small-scale entrepreneurs hope - and considerable fear. Networking technologies will certainly challenge the distribution models that have defined the music industry, and they could very well enhance the power of the artist. But the details of this chip hop convergence are just beginning to pan out. THE HACK
It was the summer of 1974, a day like any other in the South Bronx. An impromptu block party was under way, and those gathered longed for a little dance music and a beer or two. The sun was out. The subways screamed. Just another lazy weekend. Not so for young Grandmaster Flash.
Flash had spent the previous three years living a monastic lifestyle, and it was time for his devotion to pay off. "I put up with my mom's wincing every time I lugged home a dirty speaker from an orphaned radio or a potentiometer from the guts of a broken record player," he recalls. Educated in electrical engineering at Samuel P. Gompers Vocational High School, he spent a couple years looking for a needle that would stay in the vinyl groove. At the same time, he went through various turntables looking for one that would not drag as he mixed the music. And he burned another year optimizing the mixer for a smooth transition between two records played simultaneously - by adding an external queuing system, he was able to hear the songs in his headphones before he mixed them.
But it was all worth it. He'd built the record player's killer app, and on this summer day he had his moment in the sun. As he approached the neighborhood park, he repeated a simple mantra: Take the break and repeat it, take the break and repeat it. In every piece of music, there are moments of transition when the beat changes. The break might be the movement from verse to chorus in a pop song or from strings to woodwinds in a classical work. The change in rhythm within that momentary transition is called the breakbeat. The technology that allowed musicians to repeat it over and over on time and in precision is one of the innovations to which hip hop's forefathers can stake claim.
Slowly, Flash pulled out two copies of the same album. He slipped one onto each turntable. He then played a breakbeat on the first, and just as this was ending, he switched to the start of the same passage on the second. Then the first. Then the second. Then the first. Then the second. It was the quick-mix theory of DJing played for the first time, the first infinite loop of a single breakbeat repeated with scientific precision. Flash waited for the accolades. The crowd should have been in a frenzy, but, damn, they weren't. "There were 800 people there, but it was dead quiet. It was heartbreaking," he recalls. "Some people were like: 'What is that bullshit?' and others were just hanging with their mouths open."
The music was a little too revolutionary. So Flash recruited MC Cowboy to serve as a vocal ambassador for the new technology. Cowboy rapped over the beat, layering lyrical verse onto the music Flash made by playing two records at a time. It was Cowboy who also coined some of dance music's popular call-and-response phrases: Throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care and Everybody say 'ho' and the like.
In the early '70s, DJs like Grandmaster Flash, Kool Herc, and Afrikkaa Bambaataa earned their chops playing beats in parks and on street corners. They pitted their technical skills to lay claim to musical hegemony in the neighborhood. According to lore, some DJs even siphoned juice from municipal lampposts to drive their massive sound systems - until the cops showed up. Hits like The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" took hip hop from the streets of the South Bronx to Main Street. In the '80s, the looped breakbeat was further popularized with the widespread deployment of digital samplers, which play loops of prerecorded sounds. But digital sampling itself is merely a taped version of the analog loop that Flash and others pioneered.
Since then, the music industry has seized upon hip hop in various forms, from Vanilla Ice to Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys to the Fugees. Today all electronic DJ music - including techno, house, and ambient - owes its reliance on turntables and samplers to Flash's invention. More than 20 years later, you can't walk into an elevator in a mall in Des Moines, Iowa, without hearing a muzaked version of the looped breakbeat he made possible. It's the ubiquitous background sound of the '90s - courtesy of Flash and hip hop's forefathers. THE ARTIST
Steven Samuel roams the same streets in the Bronx that Grandmaster Flash once scavenged. It's a neighborhood filled with five-story walk-ups, where kids toss baseballs in vacant lots in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. Not normally thought of as a hotbed of creativity, this was the birthplace of America's last enduring pop-music form. "Hip hop started with experimentation and innovation," says Steve. "With digital networks we are witnessing its rebirth."
In the early '90s, Steve and six friends from the neighborhood formed a hip hop group called the Troubleneck Brothers. In 1992 they released their first album, Fuck All Y'all, and by 1995 the Brothers had landed three videos on Black Entertainment Television and three singles on the radio. Having recently inked a distribution deal with Stepsun Entertainment, these 16- to 24-year-old businessmen thought it was only a matter of time before they would catapult into the hip hop stratosphere. Then things began to fall apart. The music label began to meddle in the day-to-day operations of the group, telling the Brothers how to dress, what to say, even what type of songs to write. "Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre were big at the time, and our label wanted us to record this song called 'Drive-by New York,'" recalls Steve. "There was only one problem. There are no drive-bys in New York."
It didn't take long for Steve to figure out what many before him already knew: the music industry cares nothing about art and everything about money. A bunch of suits thought they could tell him to make music that wasn't from his heart. He now says, with a sly smile, that he left the group because of "creative differences." But those creative differences mask a greater transformation, one Steve couldn't have articulated back then.
Early in 1995, Steve drifted. He worked as a messenger, carrying packages in the subterranean world of New York's subways. Sometimes he'd catch only a couple of hours of sunlight, and the money sucked. But at night he returned home, where he shared quite a few odd attachments with his father. As a city postal worker, Steve's father also dealt with packages. But the old man's passion was the family computer. In 1976, Steve's father had purchased his first machine, a TRS-80 Model 1 (the computer came with a cassette deck - the disk drive hadn't been invented). He spent 20 years and many desktop models teaching himself to program in C. The proto-hacker then kept coding lottery-crunching algorithms in a one-man war to nail New York State's jackpot. He scored a few small hits along the way, which nourished his lotto fever.
In the solitude of life after the Troubleneck Brothers, Steve, long familiar with computers, began to explore the burgeoning online world. One day, while flirting with anonymous women in AOL chat rooms, he accidentally stumbled upon a hip hop forum. Rhyme-savers from across the country were improvising verses and battling the poetry of other rappers. Baited by an MC, Steve responded with a few lyrics of his own. By the end of 1995, after a few two- to three-hour sessions, Steve became an honorary member of the Cybermics, what he calls the first online posse of hip hop MCs. The Net offered a new interactive medium that dovetailed nicely with the call-and-response style of hip hop. Without music to shield their online rapping, only the most talented freestylers could keep up.
"Online hip hop was something completely different," says Steve. "They rapped, sure, but more than that they had invented a new language to capture the immediacy of the Net.
One guy got drummed out of the hip hop chat room because he had prewritten his rhymes. When they started to call him a pre-be, I just cracked up."
But Steve was learning more than to steer clear of canned lyrics. By 1996, Steve had mastered HTML, Perl, and JavaScript. The marriage of rapper and webmaster had him hooked on online hip hop. Indeed, he now believes that the World Wide Web has pushed the music into an era of massive change: It's given rise to international influences and multilingual rhyming. It's merging technological jargon with the vocabulary of the street. And it's allowing people from all over the planet to instantaneously collaborate on a single musical work.
"American artists have sampled everything from jazz to classical music, but kids from other countries aren't confined to a 4/4 measure," says Steve. "And they aren't confined to rhyming about life in America. We're beginning to hear some real bizarre shit." THE MARKETER
Steve's partner in rhyme, Felicia Palmer, knows about experimentation, and she displays no visible fear of its risks. Her compact stature can't contain her enthusiasm. Her eyes never seem to blink. And her mouth, well, her mouth works fine - all the time. She sold Steve on the idea of being an independent Web publisher. She talked the other members into joining Support Online Hip Hop. And she convinced Essence Online to hire her as their webmaster before they even knew what the Internet was. Felicia Palmer is a born marketer, a salesperson with a penchant for long odds.
Felicia also grew up listening to hip hop's precursors play the concrete playgrounds in the South Bronx - her brother was a DJ in a local hip hop crew. And though she left the neighborhood to study at Cornell University, Felicia never strayed far from home. And she always returned to the hip hop scene. One night in 1992, while checking out a music industry event at The Grand in Manhattan, she met Steven Samuel. "I was standing beside the stage when the Troubleneck Brothers stepped up," she says. "I met eyes with little Stevie, who stood out from among the seven brothers because he looked about 16 years old. Of course, now he'll tell you that I was after his wisdom, but back then he thought I was a groupie trying to kick it to him."
That night was the beginning of a long relationship. On a whim, in 1995, Steve and Felicia launched an email-based hip hop trivia contest with a mix-tape giveaway on AOL. They received hundreds of replies, a response that opened Felicia's eyes to the burgeoning online hip hop community. For Felicia, the trivia contest turned out to be guerrilla marketing for her next big project.
In March 1996, Steve and Felicia launched 4Control, a publication devoted to chronicling the surprise convergence of digital technology and hip hop. While digital recording and distribution promised to reinvent the music industry, many in 4Control's target audience were still hacking analog electronics. Nervous that hip hoppers might miss out on the digital revolution, the zine's first issue proclaimed: For those of you wondering who we are - we are some kids from the Bronx who decided it's time to give hip hop a true presence in cyberspace. To date, hip hop online has been wack, boring, and mediocre. Outside of the hip hop room we created on AOL, there's no central place for headz to get down. It is ironic how you can find thousands of rooms for Teen Chat or Romance Connection on any online service, but a hip hop area is virtually nonexistent. This is reminiscent of the "ghettoization" of hip hop, when we could only hear rap music three hours a week on Saturday nights or catch rap videos during Yo! MTV Raps. Is there a lack of demand for hip hop? We think not.
The online version of 4Control was launched at the same time. With more real estate and less overhead costs than print, the webzine grew quickly. It published the wisdom of hip hop's now forgotten forefathers. Online MC battles reminiscent of the '70s glory days lit up the server. Slowly Steve and Felicia added layers of new content, chat spaces, and the latest RealAudio streams the same way Grandmaster Flash and Cowboy built layers of beats and rhymes.
Early this year, Felicia made the decision to morph 4Control into Support Online Hip Hop. With its hip hop search engine linking independent sites and a section with new-media tips and techniques, the venture really took off. "Support Online Hip Hop has developed a strong community," Felicia says in perfect marketingspeak. "And it will become a business. We have the highest daily traffic volume of any independent hip hop Web site, and we have a very desirable demographic. We are merging the community and business aspects of the site, so that independent artists and webmasters ultimately will be able to conduct business through its distribution channels." THE SHOWMAN
Before Felicia recruited Randy Nkonoki-Ward to become a founding member of Support Online Hip Hop, he was the host of a novel but rather strange media venture. In January 1996, with some help from Nynex, Randy pumped out the first nationwide hip hop "radio" program.
From his bedroom, Randy and his collaborators would cut records, drop beats, and break dance. With the underground sounds of J-Live, The Arsonist, and Mr. Complex, the scene seemed like a homey reincarnation of Flash's block party. Listeners would dial 1-900-88-HIP-HOP, and on the other side of the phone Randy "broadcast" his national radio program. A kind of hack into the radio world, it wasn't the most successful business model. "My radio show cost 99 cents a minute, and not everybody has that kind of money to spend," says Randy.
While putting together his 900-number show, Randy would leave mix tapes from the previous concerts around town - one at a local café, another at a record store, others at parks or wherever. That's how someone from The Pseudo Online Network, a New-York based netcasting superstation, stumbled across Randy's sound.
These days Randy takes www.88hiphop.com worldwide every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. EST. The hundred or so rap aficionados who show up at Pseudo in the flesh come to jack in to online hip hop. It's a hangout where new-media headz devote equal time to bitching about commercial radio, vowing to do something about it, and soaking in alternative. All the while, multiple streams of RealAudio and CU-SeeMe push underground hip hop into the Net's consciousness.
At normal radio stations, DJs pick songs that appeal to the target audience: 18- to 25-year-old Latinas, 25- to 40-year-old black men, white suburban teenagers with disposable income, whatever. This commercial reality leads musicians into the old music industry runaround: the radio station would love to play your song if only it sounded like the hot artist that the major label was pushing, while the label would love to sign you if only your music resembled what was playing on the radio. For artists like The Derelect Camp, the Net offers a new venue for reaching an audience outside the homogenized musicindustry machine.
For the time being at least, 88 Hip Hop and other fledgling Net radio outfits still have the Web more or less to themselves. Bandwidth supports little more than radio-quality audio, and few online ventures are turning a profit yet. That means that the big boys of the music industry haven't arrived. And, according to a recent Jupiter Communications report, the bit players have an additional edge - online sales of niche music genres have flourished, while sales of mainstream music have languished. In other words, the little guys can do what the Web was supposed to do all along: turn passionate people into publishers. They can experiment and target their music to extremely narrow audience niches - ones that can aggregate quickly when gathered from around the world.
Randy hosts proven acts like Afrikkaa Bambaataa, De La Soul, and the Jungle Brothers and lesser-knowns such as Brother J, Heltah Skeltah, and the Crash Crew. The high point of his efforts was a show he put on in February that featured GhostFace Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan. More than 7,000 people checked out that event. That may not seem like huge numbers, but he thinks it's just the beginning. THE DIGERATO
Pascal Antoine, the final founder of Support Online Hip Hop, is an independent Web publisher who looks the part of the professional. He speaks in complete, grammatically correct sentences at all times. And, while he holds a corporate day job as an Internet analyst for ChaseMellon Shareholder Services, Pascal really likes to form complete sentences about Fresh Finesse, his Web-based bulletin board.
In the late '80s, Pascal attended MIT, where the caffeinated geekiness often breeds alienation. Pascal and 26 other African American students survived by banding together in a cooperative living arrangement they called Chocolate City. "It was a place to chill out after class, get some work done, and hang out with some very intelligent brothers without being labeled a nerd or brainiac," recalls Pascal.
Back then, the MIT Media Lab was relatively new and way ahead of its time. But Pascal saw the promise and migrated toward new media, joining a seven-person team building a virtual tour of Boston. He was responsible for programming individual sequences so that when users turned a corner, the proper digital film sequence would cue. He also did a lot of the grunt work. Pascal inked butcher shop windows and Keep Off the Grass warnings for a town that existed only in virtual space. He re- created city grids and skyscrapers, subways and soda shops. Painting street signs for an entire city that's totally devoid of human beings gets you thinking.
One of the things he thought a lot about was how people would use these new spaces, how inhabitants would navigate virtual worlds. "Virtual Boston was exact down to the letters on the shop windows, but there was no one there," says Pascal. "It made me realize that when the Web incorporates more visual and tactile interfaces, the next great herd will colonize its wide-open spaces."
Nowhere is the need for new interfaces more critical than in the hip hop community. Music is heard. And hip hop is more of an oral culture than most musical forms - raps are often winding and self-referential narratives built around a distinct vocabulary and set of experiences. Keyboards limit both access to the Net and artistic expression within Net-based hip hop. Moving interfaces away from text toward more immediate oral and visual ways of communicating, Pascal says, will bring new communities online.
Today, Pascal is busy figuring out what his people want from an online community. He describes his current project, Fresh Finesse (www.freshcom.com/), as "where cyberspace meets the 'hood." It's a virtual city where Brazilian hip hoppers trade mother jokes with kids from neighborhoods in the United States. Pascal doesn't censor postings, and the community has grown organically and developed a life of its own.
Pascal thinks the success of Fresh Finesse is a sign that the herd will come, but the imminent arrival of large numbers of new people also raises troubling questions - especially for those who know hip hop history. As online hip hop becomes more popular, the success will attract the soulless commercial interests. Pascal and the other Support Online Hip Hop members are all for making money off the inevitable convergence of new media and hip hop. But what happens when big business crashes the party? THE PARTY
At a trendy downtown restaurant in Manhattan, impatient reporters stand in line while Intel and CNET employees check press credentials. Inside, older guys in suits order Tanquaray martinis. Waiters in ties serve ribs - sans bones - on bite-sized puffed cornbreads. It all seems a bit out of scale when compared with 88 Hip Hop, but Intel and CNET's joint online music venture, Mediadome, brings out the stars. Everyone's there to see the Fugees, the 1996 commercial success story of hip hop, and to talk serious business. The Mediadome isn't about giving voice to underrepresented artists - it's about making money. This gathering is making a new introduction: Hip hop, meet Silicon Valley - Silicon Valley, meet hip hop.
Steve and Felicia are witnessing the power of Silicon Valley firsthand. Dozens of PCs are located throughout the restaurant. Steve stands in front of a VRML demo depicting a virtual turntable. The audio sucks, but the point isn't lost on Steve. Intel and CNET clearly have resources way beyond Steve's reach.
Intel, unsurprisingly, hopes Mediadome will spark interest in multimedia and help sell a few more microchips. CNET sees it as a way to build its brand. For Support Online Hip Hop, the arrival of these new kids on the hip hop block creates both opportunities and risks. Because these high tech firms are moving toward the same space as Support Online Hip Hop, the two groups are both potential allies and competitors.
People like Felicia and Steve occupy one end of the online hip hop spectrum. Media-dome, a true multimedia colossus, sits on the other end. The creatives know the music, and the corporations know the silicon. The music industry has yet to arrive en masse, but that, too, will pass. "A lot will change in the coming years," says Harry Allen. "Bandwidth will increase, and ecommerce will become viable. Computers will become more intuitive, but also more kinesthetic. The holy grail of the collision between hip hop and digital media is the oft-promised notion that every artist will become his or her own music label."
If you listen long enough to the folks heralding that collision, you begin to hear them singing the psalm of new media: In the information age, you control the means of production - your mind. If you're lucky, you own the product - your ideas. But it's at the distribution level that the ultimate battle for commercial supremacy of new media will be fought. That psalm portends a coming judgment day, when all the forces are aligned. And the lyrics to that psalm might very well end up being the words to the title track from the Troubleneck Brothers' first album: Fuck All Y'all.
