SAMPLING SPACE Remixing community design.
Fall 2018 Advisor: Elgin Cleckley and Bill Sherman
The Bronx, despite a tumultuous history marked by injustice, poverty, and racial stigmas, is the undeniable birthplace of what is now one of the most popular and lucrative genres of music that exists today: hip hop/rap. More than a genre, this music sparked the evolution of an entire culture that would come to permeate this borough in the 1970s. A study of it’s remarkable history reveals that the now widely recognized “pillars of hip hop” (DJing, MCing, breaking, and street writing) were developed by youth in the Bronx as a means of self-expression and protest for a community that had been stripped of their voice and subjected to unfit living and working conditions with little opportunity for upward mobility. In spite of the poor living conditions and lack of ownership community members had over both private and public spaces, this new culture found creative and effective ways to make use of what they did have. A young boy’s bedroom in a disregarded and dangerous housing project became a place of experimentation for mixing, sampling, and other turntable tricks. The network of trains in the city became a canvas, and ultimately a billboard, for street writers who could promote themselves and their message by tagging the trains on the line. A well frequented neighborhood park became an open-air community center featuring music and dancing just by setting up a simple folding table with some sound equipment and laying out a piece of cardboard for a dance floor. The origins of hip hop at its very core are a study in the appropriation
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