Live Hip Hop’s Journey Through Time

IN THE FOLLOWING ESSAY I GRAPPLE WITH THE QUESTION OF HOW HIP HOP TRANSFORMED FROM A PERFORMANCE-BASED GENRE TO THE RECORD-BASED GENRE WE'RE ALL FAMILIAR WITH NOW IN THE 21ST CENTURY....

The boys rush in through the front door, one of them carrying a small red plastic bag from Virgin Megastore. Laughing and talking with an excited loudness, the boys run into their room, directly pass their mother in the living room, and slam the door shut. There, they open up the bag containing their latest hip hop purchase, Nas’s “Hip Hop is Dead.” The CD cover is quickly torn free and the CD is put into the stereo. The boys sit on their bed, each holding onto opposite ends of the CD case as they both examine the booklet and all its contents, while listening to the music itself. Their gaze is only broken when their mother walks into the room and asks sternly, “Hey, hey, what’s all this noise about?”

The same disapproving motherly tone could be heard years earlier, in the room of similarly aged boys growing up with hip hop in the 70s. This time, the mother would be reprimanding her children for staying out so late, questioning them as to where they had been all this time; it was, in fact, five in the morning. Of course, she knew where they had been—to a party, dancing to the wee hours of the morning. When she finally left the room, exasperated and tired, the boys stayed awake discussing the cool songs they had heard played by the party’s master DJ, Kool Herc. There were sounds they had never heard before and they could barely sleep thinking about it all.

How has the focus of hip hop changed so dramatically over the last three decades? Has the CD or iPod become the focal point for hip hop, with current fans staring amazingly at the recorded piece or the iPod screen, instead of the stage with the performer on it? Being a hip hop fan in its early existence meant attending parties where one could watch DJs deconstruct familiar music to the most foreign-sounding material, where one could observe MCs and b-boys battling one another for the top spot till morning, and where one could respond to the MCs’ hollers and chants as they said them. Love Bug Starski, a DJ and MC during the peak of the Bronx hip hop scene, recalls his boyhood; “You know the way some people go to church to catch the Holy Ghost? That’s how I caught the Holy Ghost—at a party. That was my spiritual thing” (Fricke, Ahearn 141).

The element of live performance is not valued as much as it was in the days Starski was describing. Firstly, hip hop performance is valued at a much lesser degree commercially; current hip hop artists ride high on the Billboard charts, selling millions more than artists in other genres, but are simultaneously almost inexistent on the top-grossing concerts charts. Actually, at the end of 2003, 50 Cent had sold 6.5 million copies of his Get Rich Or Die Tryin album—making the album the top-selling one of the year—yet was ranked in the mid thirties on the list of top-grossing tours (NPR). It’s not only that hip hop shows are grossing sizably less than stars like Celine Dion and the Dave Matthews Band, but it’s also that the number of scheduled hip hop shows is meager in comparison with other genres. In fact, according to Yahoo Tickets, there are 53 remaining “Hip Hop/Rap” shows for the year 2007, while there are 226 remaining “R&B/Soul” shows this year, 300 for “Blues/Jazz,” 500 for “Country,” and 1,000 for “Rock/Pop” (Yahoo!). However, at the same time, seven out of the Top Ten singles on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, the last week of April 2007, are hip hop records. These startling numbers signify this transformation of hip hop to a record-based medium, as well as bring up the question of: where have all the hip hop performances disappeared to? The change has much to do with the introduction of gangsta rap in the late 80s and the reaction of the American public towards it. However, it’s important to realize that the shift didn’t occur in a vacuum and also involves the gradual changes in the advancement of recording technology and the general changes in the American cultural climate. A changing moment for hip hop was the release of Run DMC’s 1986 “Walk This Way,” a collaboration with rock group Aerosmith. The track marked a new fusion of genres and also brought hip hop to an even wider audience. In fact, Run DMC’s Raising Hell album, which contained “Walk this Way,” became the first rap album to go platinum (Palmer). This kind of exposure though, would also provide the landscape for hip hop to be seriously scrutinized. On top of that, media attention upon issues like gang violence and the spread of drugs in African American neighborhoods was increasing (Toop 164).

Interestingly enough, the group that hugely put hip hop on the mainstream map, was also the first to be put under the microscope for promoting the gang violence that occurred on their “Raising Hell” tour. The tour was met with much controversy after gang violence occurred outside of concerts in New York, Pittsburgh, and Atlanta; after the incident at the Pittsburgh show, Public Safety Director John Norton said, “The lyrics in the songs are provocative and pornographic. They incite violence” (Swenson). Controversy erupted even more after the Long Beach show, when gang violence prevented the show from even beginning; the Chicago Tribune later reported that, “300 gang members savagely attacked the audience with broken chairs” (Swenson). With a word like “savage” resonating in the backdrop one can imagine how quickly security measures at hip hop concerts increased.

With the “Together Forever” tour—headlining Run DMC and the Beastie Boys—came also a press release that informed the public of “crowd control barriers,” “walk-through metal detection units,” and a double barricade system between the stage and the audience (Racine).

The same story, yet with a different cast, retold itself in December 1992, when 60 gunshots were fired outside of an Ice Cube concert at Seattle’s Paramount Theater (Rosen). At this point, there wasn’t much in the media cheering on this musical genre. While in 1986, many newspapers reported with alarm in reaction to the Run DMC incident, there was an attempt to also explain the incident, contextualize it with facts about hip hop’s history; one writer explained how rap music’s “disc jockeys” were actually “collage artists, building turntable noises…or other sounds into clever arrangements” (Palmer). Another writer, while covering the Run DMC incident, called hip hop “the first biracial forum since rock,” and highlighted the 50-50 black-white ratio at a Beastie Boys concert (Racine).

Yet the language of the media was not at all apologetic or even impartial in the early 90s, in the wake of “gangsta rap” and the circulatory talks of censorship of hip hop. The New York Times published articles about gangsta rap’s detrimental effects on children (Hill 103). In 1995, the New York Times also published an article about hip hop titled “Lyrics From the Gutter”; the article denoted rappers as “artists,” with quotations around the word, and called for action against hip hop because the issue “is about forestalling America’s slide toward decivilization” (Bennett and Tucker). The next year, a 10-page story on Death Row’s chief executive, Suge Knight, was featured in the New York Times—actually headlined “There’s a Billion Dollars on Top of a Hill”—portraying Knight as a heavy, forbidding gangsta figure who managed a label which sold millions of records (Hirschberg).

With all the negative media on hip hop circulating throughout the early 90s, it was difficult to get any hip hop show on the road. Dr. Dre essentially cancelled his 1993 tour—it was “indefinitely postponed”—after seven shows because of “promotion problems,” according to the LA Times (Philips). Hip hop arena shows, like Dre’s, began disappearing because “insurance rates prohibited promoters from hitting the road, and bad press kept venue operators from buying into the few acts that tried” (Alexander).

One of the few acts promoters were willing to take upon was the House of Blues’ “Smokin’ Grooves” tour in 1996. Essentially, it was an urban Lollapalooza, headlining acts like the Fugees, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, and Busta Rhymes (Alexander). Though it was seen as a success for the state of hip hop performance—in fact, the tour repeated for three more years—in addition to being praised for bringing together a multi-cultural audience, the tour was also indicative of all the problems that were still facing the state of hip hop performance. The tour consisted of only one type of hip hop artist—the fairly non-threatening one. In addition, it seems as if this series of concerts was more of an isolated incident, simply a strategy to profit from hip hop short-term and not at all from a long-serving, mutual perspective. The fact that the tour was discontinued in 1999 is evident of that.

Also in 1999 came the hope for a new successful hip hop tour, the Ruff Ryders/Cash Money Millionaires tour—featuring acts like DMX, Eve, and Juvenile. However, when six people were stabbed backstage of a Boston arena show, the tour’s shows in Miami, Tampa, and Philadelphia were cancelled or postponed (Boucher). Again, the prospect of violence, immediately discouraged promoters from continuing their hip hop deals. Walter Howell, of Global Entertainment Insurance—which secures underwritings for concerts—explains the situation on an audio podcast, “If hip hop acts got publicity that a shoot-out happened next to their show, because there was a hip hop show there; you read that, you’re working as an underwriter insurance company, are you going to want to do a hip hop show? No!” (NPR). Howell explains further, “After a hip hop artist gets his first no, he will likely go to a competitor, but there’s a consolidation of insurance companies, and there aren’t too many competitors…insurance companies can deny coverage based on solid evidence or sheer whim” (NPR). With the current structure of the live industry, hip hop artists are really bereft of performance opportunities.

Besides hip hop’s denied access to big arenas, hip hop could neither flourish in the clubs of New York. This is a shocking fact, considering that uptown clubs in the 80s were booming. Kool DJ AJ, early hip hop DJ and promoter, says of club Disco Fever; “you could go there and hear the best DJs in New York” (Ahearn, Fricke 241). Sha-Rock, female MC of the hip hop group Funky Four Plus One, says, “That was the club where everybody went on a Friday or Saturday” (241).

In the May of 2001, DJ Funkmaster Flex of Hot 97 held a hip hop showcase at Manhattan’s Tunnel club. The Village Voice reports that “no other club night in the city has ever been subject to such strict police measures” (Owen). Yet, the prospect of violence in clubs was also a concern in the 80s; Art Armstong, who ran a club called Ecstasy, talks about how he had a crack security force and proudly states how he had no shootings or cuttings take place in his club (240). DJ Funkmaster Flex talks about how the chance for violence in the 80s was more probable than the chance in today’s club nights. He says, “There seems to be this concerted effort in the media and among the police to target hip hop as a menace to society…no matter what the press says, hip hop is less violent now than it was in the past. That’s because today, the hip hop DJ’s following is made up of individual consumers, not gangs and crews” (Owen). Either way, at Funkmaster Flex’s hip hop showcase, one must remove their shoes and pass through a metal detector before entering (Owen).

With the nature of such a live industry—one where promoters avoid hip hop shows like the plague, one with the consolidation of insurance companies, and one with high-level police control over clubs—hip hop artists have no other choice but to glue themselves to their recording studios. A combination of this denial of access to venues as well as the advancement in recording technology propelled hip hop artists to focus on their recorded material.

After “Rapper’s Delight” was released in 1979, hip hop culture became obsessed with the record. Grandmaster Flash says, “the game of hip hop changed. ‘Rapper’s Delight’ just set the goal to whole ‘nother level. It wasn’t rule the Bronx or rule Manhattan, or rule whatever. It was now how can you make a record” (Ahearn, Fricke 196). Later, in 1987, the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) was introduced, allowing recording artists an alternative to the analog tape. DAT made recording easier, offering reliability, low price, and digital storage capabilities (Audio Recording History).

Music journalist, Steven Ivory, points out that most hip hop acts “do not hone their talent on stage; they hone their talent in the studio (NPR). It seems that the obsession with the record that Flash was talking about never really wore off. However, it seems highly unlikely that the fervor for recording, stimulated by “Rapper’s Delight,” could fully sustain itself till today. It must be then that the current situation of live hip hop relates to bigger societal changes. Philip Auslander suggests, in his book Liveness that society has placed live performance secondary to “mediatized” forms of entertainment like television (Auslander 6). The various reasons for continued interest in performance, according to Auslander, is the appeal to all the senses—not just the visual and auditory that the television offers—and the sense of community that “emanates from being part of an audience that clearly values something you value” (55).

Even if television doesn’t offer use of all senses, it has become more interactive today—the prime example being a show like “American Idol” which asks viewers to determine the winners of the show. The power of hip hop in its early years was exactly this opportunity for interactivity; ordinary listeners were able to be a part of the creation process, through the live experience, and especially through features of the performance like call-and-response, rooted in Black tradition.

Secondly, “a sense of community” has changed to mean something totally different; community has been molded to mean virtual communities, in the age of Myspace, Facebook, Second Life, and the “Social Music Revolution” Last.fm. This doesn’t mean that individuals no longer have the drive to achieve community through concerts; it just means that their time has been diverted in pursuits of other, more convenient pursuits of community.

With a general audience preoccupied with other activities, as well as a live industry resistant to booking hip hop concerts, what should the hip hop industry do? Previously, the industry had reacted by strengthening its recording and production arm, almost giving up on the live industry, it seems. The cycle is disheartening: promoters don’t give performers a chance, performers turn to focus on recording, never developing their performance skills, further distancing promoters from hip hop performers. Ultimately, the cycle breeds an artist generation of unskilled performers.

In an attempt to revive the hip hop performance industry, Dave Chappelle of the “Chappelle Show,” along with Michael Gondry, the director of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, created the movie “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” (Wesley). Chappelle organized a free block party in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood of Brooklyn with a significant history of its own. The concert comprised of performances by Kayne West, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, the Roots, Common, Big Daddy Kane, and Talib Kweli.

Though Chappelle deserves accolade for arranging such an event, this incident reveals the real problem with hip hop’s performance industry. This utopian concert was arranged by a comic, an outsider of the hip hop industry; there needs to be an infrastructure within the industry to support hip hop artists. That infrastructure can mean more schools devoted to developing performance skills within hip hop, as well as what Donnell Alexander of the Village Voice calls a “minor league system” of smaller clubs (Alexander). Just like the Beatles sharpened their performance skills, playing in small venues in London—watching the audience reaction’s to specific songs—hip hop needs the same infrastructure.

The interesting thing about all this is that hip hop artists are squeezed out of a lot of their revenue when releasing recorded material, specifically because of the revenue cuts that come from sampling songs. In addition, concerts for artists of other musical genres are the major source of their revenue stream. The potential revenue within the concert industry should be more appealing, one would think. With hip hop artists denied access to performing in arena venues, the hip hop industry needs to start from the bottom, and build its own infrastructure, outside of the Live Nation dominated live industry sphere.

The cultural force of live performance in hip hop in the early 70s and 80s seems light years away. To this generation, what Love Bug Starski described to be “his spiritual thing,” “his Holy Ghost,” merely induces this generation with a weird nostalgia of something we’ve never known or experienced, yet want to envision.
To delight our imaginations a little bit, perhaps next time “we” will be the mothers watching our children run excitedly into the house, absorbed in their own teenage world of music. Perhaps, we’ll even rebuke them for making too much noise or for coming home too late. Though, perhaps, secretly, we must be thinking: yes, this is a good sign.

- May 2, 2007

**Works Cited:

Ahearn, Charlie; Fricke, Jim. Yes Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 2002.
Alexander, Donnell. “Smoke and Mirrors.” The Village Voice. 6 Aug 1996: pg 55.
“Audio Recording History.”
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.
Boucher, Geoff. “This Rap Tour is Really Smokin’: The Up in Smoke Lineup is Stellar.
But the Genre, a Dynamo in Record Stores, Does Not Have a Proven Track Record on the Road.” Los Angeles Times. 15 Jun 2000: Pg 6.
Philips, Chuck. “Dr. Dre Tour ‘Indefinitely Postponed’ After 7 Shows.” Los Angeles Times. 23 Sept 1993: F2.
Hill, Patrick B. “Deconstructing the Hip Hop Hype: a Critical Analysis of the
New York Times’ Coverage of African American Youth Culture.” Bleep! Censoring Rock and Rap Music, Vol. 68. Ed. B.H Winfield. Greenwood Press, 1999. 103-114.
Hirschberg, Lynn. “There’s a Billion Dollars on Top of a Hill.” New York Times 14 Jan
1996, natl. ed.: SM26.
Owen, Frank. “Hip hop Under Heavy Manners.” The Village Voice. 29 May 2001: pg 38.
Palmer, Robert. “Rap Music, Despite Adult Fire, Broadens It’s Teen-age Base.”New
York Times. 21 Sept 1986: A23.
Pesca, Mike. “Black Music Acts on Tour” Podcast. NPR. 2 Sept 2003.
Racine, Marty. “Taking the Rap/Run DMC, Beastie Boys: Black and White and Shades of grey.” Houston Chronicle. 18 Jul 1987: Pg 10.
Rosen, Craig. “Violence Heats Up Outside Ice Cube Seattle Concert.” Billboard. 9 Jan
1993: Pg. 14.
Swenson, John. “Run-DMC Drawing Rapt Attention.” Chicago Tribune. 11 Sept 1986.
Toop, David. Rap Attack 3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000.
Wesley, Morris. “Chappelle Throws a Jubilant ‘Block Party.’” Boston Globe. 3 Mar 2006: D1.
Yahoo! Tickets. (Search by Category.)

Is the Album Dead?

THIS IS A PAPER I WROTE EXAMINING HOW TECHNOLOGY SHAPES AND IMPACTS THE MUSIC INDUSTRY...

I have about a 15 minute walk to campus everyday from my Union Square dorm. During that time, my ears are usually plugged with my iPod, which is either playing upbeat morning wake-up music or a news podcast. One morning, I was listening to a music podcast, reviewing the albums that were released that week. The podcast DJs were discussing a particular album, when one of the DJs, very matter-of-factly stated that it was obvious that the album was dead. He explained that consumers could now buy whatever singles they wanted off iTunes, and were therefore not obliged to buy an entire CD. Therefore, the DJ explained, if an artist wanted to sell his album, and survive against the competing force of iTunes, he would have to put together a concept album, in which the individual tracks were significantly linked to one another.

I continued to listen to the reviews as I rushed to class and only once I had gotten to class, sat in my seat, and tucked my iPod into my knapsack pocket, did I realize the weight of the words I had just heard. Was the album really at the risk of dying? I laugh as I write this now because it almost seems as if I had suddenly heard that a relative, God forbid, was dying. But, truthfully these words left me feeling panicked and uneasy. Would the album collection I kept meticulously organized and treasured with my life, be completely archaic to the next music generation?

With the introduction of Apple’s iTunes, the current music generation was faced with imminent change. Not only was digital downloading made easily (and legally) portable—especially more so than the days of such devices as Rio’s mp3 player—but consumers were able to purchase individual songs. Previously, consumers could buy entire albums to hear one song they liked and be left unsatisfied with the rest of the album’s content. Indeed, many took advantage of the new opportunity, and year after year digital downloads increased. While there were 20 million individual songs downloaded in 2003, there were 140 million in 2004, and then 367 million downloaded in 2005 (NPR). Last year, 581.9 million digital tracks were purchased (Gallo). Yet, here is the music industry in the year 2007 and in its seventh consecutive year of declines in album sales (Gallo). According to Soundscan, US album sales, both physical and digital, fell 10 percent in 2007’s first quarter, compared to the same period in 2006 (CNN Money). From this vantage point, it seems as if the music album really is slowly being escorted out of the music scene, with the single possibly substituting it as the ultimate money-maker.

Yet, according to some, this isn’t the album’s first near-death encounter. Melinda Newman, Billboard columnist, points out that “the whole concept of listening to an album from start to finish really started to go out with the CD. Because you really could just cherry pick the tracks without having to go over and pick up a needle” (Frontline). Before the CD, consumers purchased music in the form of the LP, Long Play. It was at this point that the notion of the album really came into being. Firstly, the LP further lengthened the time of uninterrupted music from previous formats, thereby providing consumers with more music at once (Pearsall). Secondly, the LP did not feature a per-track programmable interface. Selecting specific tracks on the LP was a difficult task that required extreme skill, since one had to be careful not to scratch the vinyl. Because of the technical structure of the LP, the music album was established as a full body of work, each track intermingled into the next.

The CD, compact disc, released in 1978, not only served the role of providing the consumer with a new music device, but was also instrumental in molding the way in which consumers listened to music (Frontline). Since the CD allowed for easy switch between tracks, consumers surely considered the music album in a new light: individual tracks that made up a whole. The CD’s subtle splintering of the concept of a full body of work was a prelude to the birth of offering singles through the digital downloading world.

Along with the change in the approach towards music, the switch from vinyl to CD also brought a compromise to the music experience, from a listening aesthetic perspective. The conversion between analog audio to digital audio (Pulse Code Modulation) is actually subject an added noise—quantization noise—because not all of the data is captured in the process, though PCM also results in the digital audio having a wider dynamic range.

The move from CD to digital also carries with it a similar compromise of listening aesthetics. CD’s 44.1 kHz are compressed into a digital compression format, whether it be AAC, MP3, or WAV; the track is lessened in quality so that it can be reduced in size and therefore take up less space on the consumer’s computer (Heid). When MP3 was the standard compression format, it was said that “the technology works best for bright, loud music such as rock and roll, [but] it makes classical music sound dull to trained ears” (Morgan). Interestingly enough, dial-up modem was also the standard at this point, and one downloaded song would actually take a little less than an hour to upload. That means that downloading an entire album would take almost a day (Morgan). At this point, the online music market seemed less threatening in the role of killing the album because practically, it was more time efficient to purchase the physical album. The album only really seemed to be in danger once hi-speed internet became fairly common—coupled with concerns of piracy.

Besides the birth of digital downloads, some point fingers at MTV for killing the album. To some, MTV ushered in a single-oriented music climate. Michael Guido, a music industry attorney, says, “The album died when MTV was born…it made the record industry a one-trick pony. It became only about a three-minute single and a visual image…[it] became about trying to sell a $16 CD based on three minutes of music” (Frontline).

Ultimately through, it seems that iTunes was the most instrumental in the actual breakdown of the traditional album model. Statistics for 2006 do indicate a severe drop in album sales and an increase in digital single sales. “Some 588.2 million album units sold last year, down 4.9 percent, while consumers purchased 581.9 million digital tracks—a 65 percent increase from 2005’s 367 million sold” (Gallo). This year, the figure for the top selling album is meager—3.7 million units for Disney’s “High School Musical.” This is actually the lowest top selling album for the year, in the last 15 years SoundScan has been keeping sales figures (Gallo). However, it is important to look at digital album sales, which actually grew 198 percent; 4.6 million albums were sold digitally in 2005 and 13.6 million were sold in 2006 (Online Media Daily). Yet, the fact still remains that the typical iTunes customer is more commonly buying singles than albums. Actually, a NPR broadcast noted in 2005, that “people who choose to pay for downloads are 30 times more likely to pay for a single than an album” (NPR).

This sort of talk of iTunes killing the album has actually been around for years. However, only very recently, March 29th of this year, Apple announced a new feature called “Complete My Album.” iTunes customers can now upgrade their singles to complete albums and receive full credit for those songs that were previously purchased as singles (Apple). Apple has merely done away with the possibility of a consumer doubly paying for a track, but also, in its effort, is surely attempting to extract itself of the killing-the-music-album reputation.

However, I must concede that even with my precious and delicately organized CD collection in mind, as well as a very real part of me anxious for the future of music, I still hesitate to fully blame iTunes for killing the album. I also hesitate to fully agree that the album is on its death bed. It’s important to realize the many facets of the online music business. For example, Emusic, the Number 2 digital music store, says that over 60 percent of all its downloads are full-lengths albums (CNN Money). It’s evident that there is still an audience for the music album and additionally that there are music artists who are supplying quality albums and not just hit singles. Another example that, to me, represents the music climate we’re in is the Gnarls Barkley success story. When “Crazy” was made available on iTunes in England, it skyrocketed to the top of the singles’ chart purely on the basis of download sales; it actually went to number one before the physical album was released (Leonard). That in it of itself proves the force of the downloading market, specifically iTunes’ single-oriented model. But what we fail to realize is that Gnarls Barkley’s album “St. Elsewhere” sold very well and peaked at number four on the Billboard 200. I think this proves that a single has the opportunity to drive consumers towards the album, with the condition that the material is actually good. I don’t think the Gnarls Barkley story is merely an anomaly and I think it’s possible for other artists to use the online singles download market to attract consumers to their album, if and only if they fully deliver on the album.

Did iTunes change the music model, the consumer’s music experience? Yes. Just as the LP and the CD changed the mind frame in which the consumer listened to music. I do admit that this new musical experience is saddening to me in some ways. For example, I just bought three spectacular albums, yet I uploaded them into my iPod, and there they went, disappearing into a shuffle of music. Somehow the album loses its charm and inherent magic. Yet, at the same time, isn’t it nice to listen to your favorite album at the start of your day, even when you’re rushing to class?

- April 17, 2007

***Works Cited:

“Digital Album Sales Triple.” Online Media Daily. 3 April 2006.
Gallo, Phil. “Digital Dales Boost Music Industry” Variety. 4 Jan 2007.
“iTunes Sings a New Album Sale Format” CNN Money. 29 March 2007.
Heid, Jim. “iTunes Encoding Strategies.” Playlistmag.com. 13 Sept 04.
“iTunes Introduces Complete My Album.” Apple Press Release, 29 March 07.
Leonard, Devin. “Gnarls Barkley to the Rescue.” CNNMoney.com. 27 Nov 06.
Morgan, Cynthia. “Technology Quickstudy: MP3.” ComputerWorld. 10 May 1999.
Pearsall, John. “The Audio Century, Part I: The Twentieth Century and the Birth of
Audio Technology, Some Thought on Where We’ve Been, and Where We Might Be Going.” Positive Feedback Online. Issue 14.
Sydell, Laura. “Internet Downloads Revive the Concept of Hit Singles.” NPR (audio). 28
Feb 2005.
“The Way the Music Died.” Frontline. (put in website) March 2004.

"STRANGE FRUIT"- Eclectic Analysis

THE FOLLOWING IS A MULTI-FACETED LOOK AT BILLIE HOLIDAY'S "STRANGE FRUIT." I TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT THE SCORE, LYRICS, THE HISTORICAL & CULTURAL CONTEXT IN WHICH THE SONG WAS RECORDED IN, THE EMOTIONS THE SONG CAPTURES, AND MORE...

The recording could be heard here.

Click on Billie Holiday’s 1939 Single Version.

Open Listening
Improvised; Crying; Eerie; Bitter; Melancholy
Dark; Emptiness; Haunting; Angry; Vocals; Dramatic
- Horn in the beginning sounds like a variation of long and short cries
- Text and music match: words like “swinging” sound like they’re swinging and words like “pluck” sound sort and plucked!
- In the beginning, the cymbals sound like wind blowing (perhaps across the empty field)
- Vocals don’t start on the downbeat
- Vocals are arresting; seems like the vocals are at the front and the music is somewhere in the background.
- Blood on the trees and blood at the roots? What an analogy! She’s using fruit to depict hanged bodies! And she’s calling it “strange”—what a euphemism!
- Perhaps the tree’s roots contain blood because black slaves must have died to help grow the fields; or perhaps the lyrics are implying that Southern racism has deep roots—engrained in the culture and mindset of the people—and is not merely on the “leaves.”
- There’s something about that last note, when Holiday sings “crop.”

Historical Background
Before recording “Strange Fruit,” Billie Holiday first performed the song at Café Society, a New York City nightclub—located right here in Greenwich Village. The club was one of the only truly integrated venues in New York City at the time, and was known to be a place for the progressive-minded. When Holiday performed the song at Café Society, a disturbed silence followed. In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday recalls, “There wasn’t even a platter of applause when I finished...then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everybody was clapping” (Margolick 16). While the elite audience was certainly aware of the lynching that was occurring in the South, Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit” made the grave situation ever so tangible. Additionally, the performance introduced a fairly new category of music—the protest song (17).

In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday claimed to have written “Strange Fruit” herself. In a performance of the song for BBC TV in 1958, Holiday introduced the piece as “a tune written especially for me” (Katz). In fact, Holiday neither wrote the anti-lynching song nor had the song written specifically for her. Instead, a Jewish American schoolteacher from the Bronx wrote the song “Strange Fruit.” Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, originally wrote the piece as a poem, inspired from seeing a photograph of the lynching of two black men--Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. Meeropol, an English teacher in the 1930s and an active member of the Teachers’ Union, published the poem—then titled “Bitter Fruit”—in New York Teacher, a Teachers’ Union publication. After writing the music to the lyrics, Meeropol had the song performed at Cafe Society, at a Cabaret Night hosted by the Teachers’ Union’s Theatre Arts Committee. Story goes that the founder of Cafe Society, Barney Josephson, arranged for Meeropol, Holiday, and himself to meet (Katz). The song was played for Holiday and it was decided that Holiday would record it. Her record label, Columbia, refused to record it—not thinking that it would be a commercial success and not wanting to antagonize Southern customers (Margolick 63). This led Holiday to record the song with Commodore Records in 1939. The release spurred much controversy—radio stations refused to play it and publishers refused to touch it. However, “Strange Fruit” became one of Holiday’s most famous songs, reaching the number sixteen spot on the Billboard charts by July 1939 (Kolodzey).

Syntax

For a copy of the score (for educational purposes only) click here.

- The piece is in the key of B flat minor.
- The piece is thoroughly composed.
- In regards to form, there is no repeating verse or chorus.
- In measure 5, the F7 is major. Usually the fifth of a minor scale is a minor chord. The fact that there is a note that is out of the key creates a stronger sense of leading.
- At measure 15 (“gallant south”), the bass line descends chromatically.
- The use of numerous seventh chords makes us feel like we’re constantly being led somewhere (seven is always wanting to go to the tonic.) Some examples that are particularly effective are: measure 17 (“twisted mouth”) and measure 21 (“burning flesh.”)
- At measure 22, each note in the phrase “here is a fruit” remains on the same C note. Use of a triplet should also be noted.
- From measure 22 till 27, there seems to be a sequence that’s slightly “jazzed” up rhythmically.
- In measure 27 (“tree to drop”), the notes descend chromatically.
- At measure 27 (“tree”), there is a diminished chord.
- At measure 29 (“strange”), there is a one chord in first inversion.
- In the last measure—31—we’re about to resolve to the tonic, but there is a G stuck in there, which prevents us from fully resolving.

Sound in Time (Phenomenological)
For this section, only sound—vocals and instruments—will be focused on. All syntactical analysis will be suspended, as will any reference the music or lyrics bring to mind. “Strange Fruit” lasts for 3 minutes and 13 seconds, beginning with over one minute of an instrumental introduction. The following is a temporal breakdown and description of the sounds on the track:

0:00 to 0:07- The horn’s first cry—slow and controlled. Meanwhile, the sound of cymbals rings in the background—almost sounding like water gently flowing down.
0:08 to 0:13- The horn’s second cry—more staccato and loose.
0:14 to 0:27- The horn’s third cry—longer and then a rest.
0:28 to 1:09- Piano (with bass underneath) begins playing a soft, smooth, almost inviting tune. At one second, the sounds will invite you in, and the next second you’ll be brought down.
1:10 to 1:38- Vocals begin (piano, bass, and horns underneath.) The voice is subtle and restrained and the instrumental sound is dark and dreary. The voice is annunciating words clearly and certain consonants ring louder through alliterations.
1:39 to 1:49- short instrumental section begins about first vocal section ends.
1:50 to 2:21- second vocal section begins. Again, the voice is subtle, yet slightly building. The backing music is gloomy and melancholy.
2:22 to 2:41- the voice becomes more dramatic and direct. Short phrases follows, each building upon the next, more emotional and upfront.
2:42: second of silence, all instruments drop out of the picture, and the voice comes in before the instruments return.
2:43 to 2:50: vocal improvises and descends painfully.
2:51 to 2:53: another slight moment of silence, voice begins before instruments come back.
2:54 to 3:10- vocals’ last line, dramatic, a sense of release, yet a tiny (and simultaneous) sense of lingering.
3:11 to 3:13- the cymbals are audible for a few seconds.

Referential Analysis (Text and Representational)
The text for the piece is as follows:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop

Here is a strange and bitter crop

Without any sort of historical knowledge, the first line of “Strange Fruit,” may seem strange itself—stimulating questions as to what sort of fruit was being spoken of. Once “black body” is mentioned, it is clear that the fruits represent human beings hanged on trees. Throughout the song, there is use of innocent, calm, and pretty words to describe the South, paired with painful words to describe the hanged bodies. The juxtaposition of these words is powerful. Here is a breakdown of the second paragraph (bolded are the words in reference to the South and italicized are the words referring to the black body):

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
And the sudden smell of burning flesh

The way in which the words sit so closely together—the fact that these words are in the same paragraph—represent the duality of the South. While the Southern landscape can be flowering and fruitful, colorful and clean, the landscape also features death, savageness, and hateful murder. The irony of this passage is extremely powerful.

Musically, the piece refers to a cry that is bitter and angry—one that is uncontrollable, but must be controlled. The horns in the beginning of the song remind me of the sounds of the shofar, a horn—usually a ram’s horn—that is blown 100 times during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah (the New Year.) The blowing of the shofar consists of four distinct blows—one that is a long and sustaining note (tekiah), a sighing sound of three short notes (shevarim), a very rapid series of short notes (teruah), and an extremely long single note (tekiah gedolah.) According to Jewish tradition, each blowing represents a different cry. Naturally, the beginning section with the three distinct horn phrases reminds of the crying sounds of the shofar.

The crying extends past the horn section. In fact, it sustains through the entire song. It seems to be more restrained and calm in the beginning of the sound, and becomes angrier and more severe as the song reaches its end. The backing music seems to be flat, generally quiet and withdrawn. Such a musical landscape seems to represent emptiness.

Virtual Feeling
Virtual feeling is present in every song; it is the actual feeling that was present in the making of the piece, transferred into a “virtual” song format. Each listener has the ability to interpret a piece of music in their own way—and essentially, create their own virtual feelings. To me, the song is debilitating and sucks out energy from me each time I listen to it with real focus, and especially each time I sing it aloud to myself. While the music and vocals are subdued and controlled for the majority of the song, the resulting emotions are overpowering. The imagery is provoking; one almost feels like they can smell the burning flesh. The vocals are haunting. And the instruments are simultaneously muted and inviting, yet dark and saddening.

What human emotions are exactly grounded in this song? Before I begin to ponder that, I must recognize that since I have no ability to actually understand what was going in the minds and hearts of both the songwriter and vocalist, I can only speculate about the “actual feeling” they placed in the composition and recording.

In the beginning, there seems to be an element of hesitance in the way the story is told. It almost feels as if the vocalist does not want to speak the words and therefore make the truth a reality. As the song progresses, inherent in the sound are feelings of disdain and disappointment—most prominently in spots such as “strange fruit hanging from poplar trees.” I can just imagine the vocalists’ brow lowered when singing the word “hanging.” The emotion builds and a true anger seems to appear once the sequence of short phrases begins, starting with “here is a fruit, for the crows to pluck.” It feels as if the vocalist is clutching onto the “fruit,” showing it to the audience aggressively, almost shoving it into their faces and saying, “here it is—you can’t deny it.” The lyrics become progressively more detailed and uglier. When the words “for the wind to suck” are sung, my breath is taken away and that’s when I feel weak and close to crying. The last phrase of this building paragraph is disturbingly pathetic—“for a tree to drop.” At this point, the body is not just hanging, but it has been burnt, attacked, disintegrated, and then eventually dropped into nothingness. After such terrible imagery, the vocalist returns to that puzzling word—“strange” to describe the situation before her. How incredibly ironic and euphemistic.

Onto-historical World
New York in 1939. Americans are still in the era of the Depression and have yet to enter World War II. “Strange Fruit” was recorded in April of 1939 and performed in New York’s Café Society earlier that year. All this precedes the official start of World War II, as it also precedes American awareness for what was really going on in Hitler’s Germany. At the same time, during the later half of this decade, many Northern Americans were involved in an anti-lynching movement, lead by the NAACP (Katz). There was a lot of action pushing for an anti-lynching bill, but each time it went to Congress, virtually all of the Southern senators rejected it (Katz).

It seems that by 1939, Americans were aware of the lynching occurring in the South, but that they would be seriously surprised to see it as a performance and to hear it as a song. It seems that “Strange Fruit” was the first black protest song aimed at a largely white audience (Margolick 55). Some say that Andy Razaf’s “Black and Blue”—released in 1929 and made popular by Louis Armstrong—was the first black protest song for a white audience. While “Black and Blue” inferred a resistance towards racism, “Strange Fruit” seems to really be the first protest song to so directly confront America’s dark secret.

Having all this in mind, I try to imagine what it would be like sitting in that audience, listening to such a horrifying piece of music. Here’s a video of Billie Holiday performing the song in the 50s. Though the performance occurs a decade or so after the song’s initial release—and therefore is expressed in a different onto-historical context—it is still helpful to get a visual representation of the song in order to help us imagine what it would be like sitting in that audience, hearing the shocking song for the first time.

I would imagine that the audience sitting at Café Society, hearing Billie Holiday’s version of “Strange Fruit” for the first time, would be chilled. They would be shocked to hear Holiday sing a song that was politically-charged (since up to that point, Holiday had been singing about love and romance), stunned to hear such piercing music, and taken aback by the courage Holiday had to sing such a song in public. While Café Society was known to attract a high caliber of progressively-minded people, I still think they would be genuinely surprised to hear a black person—and especially a black woman—stand up against such injustice. David Margolick, author of Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights, points at an example depicting the cultural context during the release of “Strange Fruit”—the release of the 1939 movie Gone With the Wind, a film that was deeply condescending in portraying the black character (Margolick 6). Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit” did not only wake up Northerners to the injustice occurring in the South, but it also challenged racial roles.

Second Open Listening
After such thorough analysis, listening to “Strange Fruit” is certainly a different experience. Now, I hear the recording and I think about the varied cries that begin the song and how that reminds me of the shofar blowing. I hear Holiday timidly beginning the piece and then progressively getting more emotional, bitterer, and angrier. Now, each moment the music catches my breath, I understand that the piece was composed with numerous seventh chords to make it feel as if the music is always leading and always wanting to resolve. Additionally, I now understand why I had always felt hanging at the end of the song, when Holiday sung the word “crop”—because the song did not fully resolve.
What I am realizing from my second open listening is that the historical and cultural analysis really had an impact on me and is a lot of what I hear now when I listen to the song. The image that I see in my mind when listening to the song is the image of the lynched men—their heads cocked to the side, their bodies inert—the image that inspired Meeropol to produce the song.

Performance Guide
I think it would firstly be beneficial for a performer to have a deep understanding of the historical and cultural context of “Strange Fruit.” Such a song carries extreme emotional weight and a performer must be emotionally invested when performing the song. As far as technicality, a performer should pay attention to dynamics—making sure to begin singing softly and subtly and ending strongly. A vocalist must also make sure to focus on the several points in the melody when notes are made natural.

The following people have performed “Strange Fruit”: Cassandra Wilson, Tori Amos, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Ross, Nina Simone, Sting, just to name a few.

Meta-critique
The strength of the eclectic method is that each approach—syntactical, historical, phenomenological, referential, virtual feeling, and onto-historical—is valuable and enhances the listening experience. I was surprised to see that even though I had listened to the same song dozens and dozens of times by the end of this assignment, each time I focused on a new approach, I discovered something new! The eclectic method forces the listener to focus—to suspend other disciplines and only concentrate on one angle. Sometimes it’s difficult. For example, when describing sound-in-time, it was always tempting to include something referential. However, being forced to separate those parts of the brain was very useful.

Also, the order in which the eclectic method is formulated was very beneficial to me. I especially thought that having the virtual feeling section after the referential analysis—especially the textual—made it easier to really feel and connect with the piece. I also think the sound-in-time section really enabled the syntactical findings to shine.

Having said all that, I am not sure how much the eclectic method creates the space for reuniting all the separate disciplines. The second open listening didn’t bring everything together so fluidly for me. Perhaps, it was because I was too drained from listening to the piece. Additionally, I feel that the historical analysis could sometimes create a block in understanding and appreciating the work. Reading things about Billie Holiday’s alleged lack of intelligence interfered with my interpretation; apparently Barney Josephson—the man who brought Meeropol and Holiday together—expressed that he felt that Holiday didn’t understand what the song meant when he first showed it to her (Margolick 44).

All in all, this experience of putting together an eclectic method of “Strange Fruit” was fascinating. I have never delved so deeply into a study of a singular song. The method allowed me to completely involve myself in a musical piece and also revealed to me the joy and satisfaction of searching for depth within music.



**Works Cited
Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Running Press: Philadelphia. 2000. (is this correct form?)
Strange Fruit. Dir. Joel Katz. Videocassette. California Newsreel, 2002.