Blog #7

de Bourgoing

First and Lastly

• Spread your brand: "Hip hop today feeds from both an active online and offline presence that contaminate each other." Use the social networks and special interest blogs to drive listeners to your performances. Use file sharing or free music distribution to widen your audience. Let your music cross-pollenate, borrow from other media in the genre, it'll borrow from you.
  
  DJ Spooky says: "...writing's infectiousness, the way you pick up language from other writers and remake it as your own." & "[DJing] ... builds on the early successes of file-sharing to create a milieu where people can exchange culture and information at will and create new forms, new styles, and new ways of thinking. The DJ spreads a memetic contagion..." & "Today we have an entire youth culture based on the premise of replication..."
  
• Shamelessly sell your identity - marketing is one of your media and is integral to the spreading of your message. Your brand is built on your message.
  
  DJ Spooky says (slightly out of context, but nonetheless true): "...identity is for sale to the highest bidder."
• Take your cause or your movement and make it part of your music.
• Collaborate - it's the core of the medium.
• Use storytelling - write your music. Tell a story, be theatrical.
• Don't forget the ladies of hip hop (this is an argument?)
  
• Live in the genre, learn from the past, use it.
  
  DJ Spooky says: "You can always squeeze something out of the past and make it become new." & "...sound/writing and in an era of rhythm science, both serve as recursive aspects of information colage." & "Sampling, DJ culture, and the hip-hop zone are founded on ancestor worship and the best rhythm scientists are constantly expanding the pantheon ... There has always been an American hybrid multicultural scene and the music was always a reflection of that." & "Hip-hop is always innovative and it can absorb almost anything."
  

Miller aka Spooky

Third

Miller's piece is an apologia for the remix - describing its situation as an art form, its foundations and its significance relative to the culture that came before and the culture that's forming even now to succeed it. From Goethe to Duchamp, from classical myth and legend to Edison and Freud, from Emerson to Surrealism then all the way forward to Grandmaster Flash and further forward to Ninja Tune; Miller's scope scratches back and forth through tim elike a record on the DJ's turntable... All to arrive at his key premise - because it's both agglutinative and innovative, hip-hop and DJing are significant aspects of culture and are ultimately additive creative experiences.

Chorus

Second

deBourgoing is at least partly inspired by the profit motive - her scene website is of course going to profit from encouraging hip-hop to utilize online resources to build their scene. However she acknowledges a basic point that Miller has and which builds very strongly on what O'Reilly noted - the online marketplace is unsurpassed in available manpower for any sort of intellectual or communicative task, and is by far the best vector for any kind of contagion - whether memetic or broadly cultural.