One Year of BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS
One Year of BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS
1, 2, 3, the book is called BDP...
It’s been a year since Boogie Down Predictions dropped!
While I was writing my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019), I gathered up some friends, and we put together an edited collection as sort of a companion to Dead Precedents. Time was one of the aspects of both hip-hop and science fiction that I didn’t get to talk about much in that book, so I started asking around. I found many other writers, scholars, theorists, DJs, and emcees, as interested in the intersection of hip-hop and time as I was. I had three solid pieces at the end of the first day! As I continued contacting people and collecting essays, I got more and more excited about the book. Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism is a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture, as well as what that means for the culture at large.
Here’s my Preface to Boogie Down Predictions:
Preface:
“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.”
— William Gibson“What can you do? You can’t turn back the clock.That’s why you keep on moving, and you don’t stop.”— Babbletron, “The Clock Song”
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So begins the prologue to L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between. Time is as inescapable as it is impossible to conceive. Technology tries to tame it, chopping it into discrete bits and arranging them in manageable lines: the alphabet, the printing press, the clock, the internet. Marshal McLuhan once wrote, “Just as work began with the division of labor, duration begins with the division of time, and especially with those subdivisions by which mechanical clocks impose uniform succession on the time sense.” From Frederick Taylor’s studies of time and scientific management to the division of labor of Taylor and Henry Ford, the inventors of modern industrialization, division and duration are operative terms for the technologies of time.
If you were asked to name the salient elements that define hip-hop music, sampling would be among the first things to come to mind. If you’re reading this, you know it started manually with fingers finessing black vinyl, chopping and stretching tones on two turntables. The manual mixing of recorded sounds by DJs allows them to, as Naut Humon puts it, “Manipulate time with your hands!” Reconfigured and recontextualized notes lift hip-hop out of the linear, tying it equally to both forgotten pasts and lost futures. Because of sampling, hip-hop’s manipulation of sound is also its manipulation of time. More so than any other musical genre, hip- hop toys with temporality.
Further stretching this frame, the aesthetic of hip-hop’s early days feels like possible futures. Way before Tupac and Dr. Dre danced in the desert and Chuck D was doorman to the Terrordome, things were always already going down in the Boogie Down Bronx. The post-apocalyptic scene there in the early 1970s, the repurposing of left-behind technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphics on every building wall, and the gyrating dance moves: an entire culture assembled from the freshest of what was available at hand.
Whereas the dominant (read: “European, white, male”) culture of the 20th century regularly pictured the next century through stories and inventions, that hasn’t been the case as much among those same folks so far in the 21st. Even as far back as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which viewed its 1887 present from a fictional year-2000 wherein the United States had evolved into a technologically enabled, Marxist utopia. Twenty-first century tales that venture to look that far ahead rarely find such positive results, especially where technology is concerned.
With that said, it would be remiss to talk about hip-hop and its tumultuous relationship with time without mentioning Afrofuturism. “Afrofuturism is me, us [...] is black people seeing ourselves in the future,” says Janelle Monáe, whose futuristic R&B concept records The ArchAndroid, The Electric Lady, and Dirty Computer imagine android allegories in alternative futures. Afrofuturism addresses the neglect of the Black Diaspora not only historically but also in science-fiction visions of the future.
Through its relationship with time and its technological manipulation thereof, hip- hop also invites us to view different vantages of the future. Just as it recycles and revises the past, hip-hop also invites us to re-imagine the future. As we will see, these re-imaginings are far from apolitical. William Gibson is fond of saying that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Any reader of history knows that he past isn’t evenly distributed either. Drawing different conclusions from the past and picturing a future that is different from the present are the very essence of resistance.
“Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us,” writes the technologist and musician Jaron Lanier. “But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement,” That banging is the rhythm. That banging is the beat. That banging is the celebration of days past and the longing for better ones to come. As Kodwo Eshun writes in his 2003 essay, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” reprinted herein,
Afrofuturism approaches contemporary music as an intertext of recurring literary quotations that may be cited and used as statements capable of imaginatively reordering chronology and fantasizing history. Social reality and science fiction create feedback between each other within the same phrase.
Though this dialog between social reality and its fictional futures has occurred since we started telling stories, mechanical and digital reproduction has made the exchange easier and much wider spread. The division of sampling and duration of remixing keeps the feedback flowing in time. As Jacques Attali puts it, “Our music foretells our future. Let us lend it an ear.”
Charles Mudede’s Book Nook
Our old friend Charles Mudede Recommended Boogie Down Predictions as a Christmas gift, pointing out a few of the features of the text as well as a special appearance by a cat.
Ytasha Womack, who wrote the Introduction, and I did an event for Boogie Down Predictions this July at Volumes Books in Chicago, and you missed a treat if you weren’t there.
Thank you!
Many thanks to Jamie Sutcliffe and Mark Pilkington at Strange Attractor Press for their support and enthusiasm, Dominic Rafferty for the stellar layouts, and Savage Pencil for the dopest cover. Thanks to those who contributed words, images, and direction, those who wished us well, and those who didn't.
And thank you for checking it out!
If you don’t have a copy, do yourself a favor!
BDP in Houston in October
On Sunday afternoon, October 8th at 3 pm at Houston Public Library's African American History Research Center at the Gregory Campus, the poet, artist, activist, and teacher Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton and I will be discussing hip-hop culture, myth-making, and Afrofuturism. Mouton’s memoir, Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth, (Henry Holt, 2023), explores the use of modern mythology as a path to social commentary.
Join us!
Thank you for reading,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com