contradiction

One of the greatest assets to hip hop culture is the recency of its appearance. The foundation for its development has been a democratic ethos that allows for the transformation and rewriting/mixing o f cultural texts. Brevity lends itself to transformation; new voices still could play a potentially significant role in historical development of its power. The remix and the graffiti paintbrush are two of the most durable elements of what can be identified as hip-hop culture; both take an otherwise static text and write over it while using the remainder of the original as a feature of the new message. Not just the text or message of the graff matters, but also the fact that it took over an otherwise public space and made it into a canvas. Every time someone writes about hip hop it puts cultural dynamism in potential crisis. The challenge is to develop a self-sustaining cultural practice that makes that crisis transformative but open to challenge in its own right. Writing about the culture of the remix has the potential to gloss over the role of writing in solidifying/tying down a practice (by committing an idea to permanence in a text), but also the layers of copyright, bureaucracy and technical knowledge which make that writing inaccessible and thus divorced from the culture it otherwise lauds. So, I think these things set out potential political goals for the dimensions of hiphop culture that focus on organized power: copyright law, technological empowerment, and the general transformation of our educational system towards a participatory model.

Duncan