Mixed Messages
hip-hop's original medium stays relevant, and illegal
PrintDown on Canal Street amidst hordes of vendors hawking knockoff handbags, cheap sunglasses, and all kinds of scarves, in a tiny stall below the awning advertising car stereos, there is one man who calls himself an artist.
“I’m famous,” he asserts when asked his name. “You should know who I am.” Unlike his neighbors selling glitzy fake Rolexes and Marc Jacobs perfume, this man doesn’t push designer knockoffs—or at least, not the same sort of knockoffs. This man is a DJ, and he deals in mixtapes: one of hip-hop’s most beloved, influential, and controversial commodities.
The mixtape has existed as an alternative to the studio record since hip-hop’s very beginning. Mixtapes, then called “party tapes,” first surfaced in the 1970s, when New York-based DJs Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc began to distribute tapes of their sets recorded at clubs such as Harlem’s The Rooftop. These tapes supplemented the DJs’ income, and featured a combination of the day’s hit songs and the DJs’ shouting.
In their early days, mixtapes were often highly personalized. DJs like Grandmaster Flash sold customized cassettes, on which they would repeatedly shout the name of the tape’s recipient over the songs. Later, DJ Brucie B sold shout-outs in the club for 20 dollars to eager fans.
The late ’80s and early ’90s saw the closing of several clubs central to the New York DJing scene. As a result, tapes recorded at home supplanted club sets. This opened up opportunities for lesser-known artists who lacked prestige in the club scene but could compile innovative homemade tapes, blending hip-hop beats with smooth R&B.
Queens native DJ Clue, who emerged in the early ’90s, made mixtapes that emphasized the verbal talent of the rappers they showcased instead of the DJ’s acrobatic turntablism. By featuring exclusive tracks and freestyles on his tapes, Clue shifted the mixtape industry’s focus from the DJ to the rapper and established himself as a groundbreaking tastemaker in the process. He is credited with spreading the word about the early work of rap giants including Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z.
Today’s mixtapes follow in Clue’s tradition, boasting otherwise unreleased freestyles, collaborations, and remixes, as well as voiceovers—where one artist raps over the beat and instrumentals of another artist’s song. Mixtapes are produced by DJs—big names include DJ Drama and DJ Whoo Kid—and can be completed with far less time and money than a studio album. As Mike Chickery, the head customer service representative and operations manager of online mixtape vendor MixUnit.com, says, “With studio albums you have artists dropping every one to two years, whereas [with] mixtapes you have the artist dropping every two weeks.”
The release of a studio album is a costly operation—when big-label record executives seek to maximize profit and minimize risk, the artist’s creativity, honesty, and quirkiness can become qualities to suppress. “If you’re on a label then you’re signed under contract, and the people above you who are making money off of you have a lot more say in terms of what the track [on your studio release] should be, whether you can or can’t say certain things,” Chickery explains. “On a studio album, they [hip hop producers] want every song to be perfect.”
The mixtape aesthetic, on the other hand, unapologetically embraces imperfection and cheapness. Bright colors, bad Photoshop jobs, excessive bling, and even the occasional pair of thong-clad female asscheeks grace the cover of the slim jewel case in which a typical mixtape is found.
Echoing shouts, reverberating gunshots, and “futuristic” effects that sound like they belong in Windows 2000 “Full Tilt!” pinball game—space edition—all liven up the typical mixtape’s sonic landscape. Columbia College sophomore Sam Schube, whose iTunes library boasts a handful of hip-hop music, recognizes that “with the mixtape, you get a lot of throwaway shit.”
Low-budget production, however, means less adulterated content—often a refreshing alternative to slick, corporate hit material. Rappers enjoy more musical, thematic, and lyrical autonomy on mixtapes, since tracks are free to be specific, explicit, honest, and quirky. “Diss tracks,” for example, are songs in which rappers pointedly attack their rivals while flaunting their rhyming talent. The mixtape is prime breeding ground for hip-hop’s notorious inter-artist beefs.
Chickery credits the mixtape’s candid aesthetic for the form’s popularity. “A lot more artists go the mixtape route because it allows them to have more freedom and more independence,” he says. “There’s a handful of artists on our site that haven’t dropped an actual studio album in years.”
Schube considers Wale’s 2009 “Mixtape About Nothing” an example of the creativity that flourishes on mixtapes. As its title suggests, the “Mixtape About Nothing” is based on the TV series “Seinfeld.” Though fascinating, the concept is hardly a recipe for commercial success. “The form [of the mixtape] allows you to get at some things that you wouldn’t necessarily get through a commercial enterprise,” Schube says. “And that’s fun.”
One of the standouts on Wale’s mixtape is “The Kramer,” a track that begins with a clip of actor Michael Richard’s racist rant at a comedy club in November 2006 and launches into what Schube refers to as a “huge epic destruction and deconstruction of racism.”
Members of hip-hop’s elite rely on mixtapes to stay in touch with their fans and stir up hype in the lull between studio albums. One of the best known examples, Louisiana-based rapper Lil Wayne, catapulted from moderate success to epic superstardom because of a series of mixtapes he put out following 2005’s “Tha Carter II.” By the time “Tha Carter III” dropped in 2008, Weezy-mania was already running rampant—his album sold over one million copies in its first week.
For aspiring rappers, the mixtape is a bid for recognition within the hip-hop community—a chance to show, tell, and then some. For a few, it can lead to a lucrative future in the hip-hop business. Queens-born rapper 50 Cent, for example, got his start with mixtapes and eventually caught the ears of Eminem and Dr. Dre. Contemporary rising stars like Kid Cudi, Wale, Gucci Mane, and OJ da Juiceman have all used mixtapes to jumpstart their careers.
Successful mixtapes have been critically acclaimed even outside of the hip-hop world. In 2006, the New York Times called DJ Drama and Lil Wayne’s mixtape “Dedication 2” one of the year’s top ten recordings. Rolling Stone referred to the Clipse and Re-Up Gang’s mixtapes “We Got It For Cheap 1 & 2” as “stellar.” In recent years, even indie tastemaker Pitchfork.com has included several mixtapes on their “Best Of” lists.
Despite all the ways the form helps rappers, mixtapes are risky territory for the DJs who distribute them. On Canal Street, vendors are guarded when it comes to discussing the product they sell. While they’re eager to make transactions, when asked about their wares, vendors are quick to claim that they’re manning someone else’s stand. They adamantly refuse to answer questions. “How do I know you’re actually writing an article?” one wants to know. “How do I know it’s not for something else?”
Their paranoia is justifiable. As a commercial product, mixtapes exist in a legal and political limbo. As befits the form’s casual nature, mixtape DJs often lift beats and samples from other studio tracks without permission. Although DJs consider tracks with re-worked beats and hooks to be their own property, the RIAA classifies most hip-hop mixtapes as “pirated CDs,” lumping them together with illegally copied CDs and DVDs.
In 2005, the NYPD raided East Village record store Mondo Kim’s and arrested five employees, all on charges of “failure to disclose origin of a recording in the second degree and trademark counterfeiting in the third degree.” In 2007, mixtape A-listers DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon were arrested and charged with felony for violating Georgia’s anti-bootlegging and racketeering laws. According to authorities, cops seized 81,000 “pirated” discs from their Atlanta headquarters—though Drama claims it was more like 25,000—as well as recording equipment and four cars.
Drama and Cannon were released the next day on $100,000 bail and are back to making mixtapes. Kim’s employees, on the other hand, say the store has given up the mixtape trade for good.
These raids, like several others, were prompted by RIAA initiatives. Ironically, many record labels that the RIAA represents are the same ones that encourage their rappers to put out mixtapes so they can reap the benefits of the hype. Universal Records, for example, receives 85 percent of sales of records released on Lil Wayne’s Cash Money Records. It is also one of the four most influential members of the RIAA, along with Sony, EMI, and Warner.
Those selling their albums on the street can also run into trouble for failing to pay taxes on their sales. While the First Amendment protects the sale of CDs on the street, New York vendors are subject to a plethora of rules that regulate everything from the size of the table to their distance from the street.
Chickery claims that over the course of the past decade, the Internet has been responsible for taking mixtape culture out of the underground. “Now it [the mixtape industry] is a lot more mainstream and a lot more easily accessible,” he explains. Since music channels like MTV have shifted programming away from music videos, mixtapes are a more viable way than ever to build hype.
“Before mixtapes got really big, if you were a hip-hop fan you know they existed,” says Chickery, but “you needed to live in a big city … and have access to stores that would get this content.” Nowadays, a Google search for “hip-hop mixtapes” yields several pages of mixtape vending sites that are well within reach for anyone with a computer and a credit card.
And sometimes a credit card isn’t even necessary. The same technological advances that brought mixtapes into the mainstream are now hurting the sales of mixtape vendors. Chickery blames the rise of Internet file-sharing sites for MixUnit.com’s declining sales. “Back when we started, it [the number of copies sold of popular mixtapes] used to be anywhere from 500 to 1000,” he says, adding that nowadays his site is lucky to sell 200 of the hottest tapes. “We’ve definitely seen our numbers take a big hit.”
Some see the mixtape’s iffy legal status as a go-ahead for guilt free illegal downloading. Schube, for one, downloads his mixtapes for free. “I figure it’s fair game,” he explains.
Are sites like MixUnit and MixTapeKings clinging to an outdated concept of the music biz by charging for their mixtapes? Maybe. To say that capitalist entrepreneurship is not in the spirit of the mixtape, though, is to nostalgically dismiss the facts. Even in the days of Flash and Bambaataa, cash was a key incentive.
But even though the record industry as we know it is its deathbed, mixtapes are probably not the medium of the future. Though the mixtape’s candidness appeals to the hip-hop ethic, the studio album’s polished production remains a valued part of the hip-hop aesthetic. Wale’s “Kramer” derives its greatness from spontaneity, nuance, and lack of censorship, but “Tha Carter III”’s success suggests that time, money, and polished production can still pay off
12 November 2009
vol. 7, issue 9
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