Black Music Month with Mark Anthony Neal & 9th Wonder – Lab 068

It's warm outside. It's cookout season. Oh yeah, and you know I'm ready to gear up the playlists. Oh yes, the playlist can make or break the vibes of any cookout. Anyone. You put the wrong song in the wrong order, it's a rap. Remember when we made a playlist, a cookout playlist. Yes, you gave me a little bit of smoke. People gave me a little bit of smoke because I was adding some contemporary rap to the plays, like TT, You've got

Some As my Auntie there A said, that's where the kickback. Okay, the to be okay for all generations.

Fair, fair, fair. Some people didn't like my playlist. I think that that's just fine. I'm open to criticism.

Well, it's a perfect time to think about the playlist and the music you choose, and really the music all around us. Because this month is Black Music Month, which was formally recognized by the United States in nineteen seventy nine with President Jimmy Carter. And I feel like it took too long.

Okay, Yes, I'm TT and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify.

This is Dope Labs.

Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy dost of friendship. It's Black Music Month, so this week we're celebrating black music and getting into the history, the culture, the politics, all of it with some very special guests. We really wanted to know more about the roots of hip hop and jazz and how black music and artists have been at the forefront of popular culture and what's next in music. Let's

Sometimes you'll hear people say black pop culture or black culture is everywhere, and.

It's not wrong. But I think we have the level set when we talk about black music because terms and phrases evolve over time and their meanings do too. Black music is not just hip hop, rap and R and B. When we say black music, we're referencing the history of music created, performed, and celebrated by black artists and audiences. We also know that black music is popular absolutely. I think we also know that black music influences other genres

Yeah, like you want the footnotes, yes, you want to give me all the afran wants the citations, Okay. And I'm really interested in not just the people, because sometimes folks don't get credited, and we know how history can be massaged, and so I'm interested in the sonic relationships between the music we see today and earlier genres that are still booming, like jazz and soul.

And I'm really curious about how the messaging in hip hop has changed in recent decades.

And if we look back, we got to look forward. What's the future of black music looking like. We're seeing increasing popularity, which also can invite this other cousin, which is appropriation. And we're also seeing academia take a look at hip.

Hop and black music.

And so I think it's really interesting to to kind of project and say what might it look like in the next ten to twenty, maybe even fifty years.

Let's jump into the dissection. Our guests for today are doctor Mark Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.

Mark Anthony Neil, James B. Duke, Distinguished Professor of African African American Studies at Duke University. I am born and raised from the place that we affectionately call the Bookie Down Bronx, aka the home of hip hop.

Ninth Wonder, producer, college professor, DJ Avid, basketball junkie, and father of a French bulldog.

Doctor Neil and Ninth Wonder are both professors and Duke University's African and African American Studies Department. Professor Neil also teaches classes in English and gender, sexuality and feminist studies and has published several books on Black popular culture and Ninth Wonder is also a rapper, record executive and producer who worked with Mary J. Blige, Jay Z Drake, Destiny's Child, Kendrick Lamar, J Cole, Eric Abadu, Mac Miller. The list goes on and on and on.

So when you look across the music genres, and you don't even really have to look that deep, it becomes really clear that Black musical artistry and its influence spans so many different categories of music. So we can trace back the spirituals and folk music to blues, to rock and roll, the jazz, and then the hip hop.

The roots of all of these.

Genres are steeped in black culture. We ask doctor Neil to explain just how strong those roots are.

It is everywhere we talk about classical music, right, and we think about European cats with white wigs and Beethoven, all those kind of folks, But that's not in the music that originated in the US. America's classical music is Black music, and most specifically, jazz music is America's classical art form. There's very few examples of popular music in the US in twenty twenty two that have not been

Right.

You can't watch a McDonald's commercial or any other commercial without some sort of reference to black musical styles in that context.

Those are some really great points, especially about how classical music in the United States is black music, and today's popular music is at least influenced by black music and culture. If it isn't that explicitly. It really is. Even what he's saying about the McDonald's commercial that R and B is not random behind them to night, It's really not.

And what we're doing now is thinking about music as this soundtrack to struggle or commerce or just everyday life. And so it makes a lot of sense that music can serve as a historical signpost for what's going on in the culture.

Music is a signal, a capturing of things that are going on in the culture. Right, So if you want to know what's happening with black people, all you have to do is listening to the music at any given error.

Okay, stop. Not so many ways that stories or messages get passed down, and music is one of those. And when you look at music, there are so many ways within music that we pass down stories and messages. And we're going to get into that later. In the episod.

So, but first we wanted to take a closer look at some of the foundational elements of black music and trace how those ideas have evolved throughout genres over time. Before we start tracing these I think we have to acknowledge a major part of Black music that we're not going to talk about TT right right, and that's the influence.

Of the Negro spiritual.

So when we think about musical devices, particularly African musical devices that are part of Black American or African American culture, So rhythms, melodies, and beats, that's what people who were stolen from Africa, that's what they had. They kept what they could of their culture, and we see that in the music. And we definitely see that in like Negro spirituals and that influence work songs, you know, the songs people saying while they were working in fields and doing

Yes, that feels like the first brick of building the house of hip hop, Doctor Neil breaks it down.

So whenever you hear black music, you're hearing musicians very consciously sampling and drawing from traditions that came before them. If you're listening to Bebop in the nineteen forties, it's a Childiebird Parker pulling a tune from Tin Pan Alley

Set up, thanks set up. It makes a lot of sense that funk and soul has a huge impact on hip hop. A lot of the elements from funk and soul show up in hip hop. James Brown, aka the Godfather of Soul, is the most sample artist of all time. And then the drum break improvised by Clyde Stubblefield, who often worked with James Brown, and he's on James Brown song Funky Drummer is one of the most sampled songs in hip hop. The name of those tunes up on Drama, imp on your drama. It's such a connected web.

Once you start looking at how many times somebody has been sampled, you know you have to ask her.

Are you talking about just sampling the beat?

Are you talking about sampling the lyrics and quoting those right? Are you talking about, you know, covering somebody song exactly? And when it comes to James Brown, all of the above, you know all of the above. And the really big thing to note is that if he's a most sampled artist, that the second most sampled artist.

The group is not even close, not even half of the amount of times that he's been sampled.

Basically, what we hear now is often a refabrication of sounds and sites and things that we heard before. Everybody lost their mind listening to Silk Sonic some new song and I'm like, well, you know that's a love train, right. I'm like, well, I've been listening to the original love Train right for forty years by Confunction, So everything that's new is not new.

Got a listen. Confunction did it first.

And I love Bruno and Anderson aka djp Wee a lot, but it's hard to fight confunction. Confunction ran so that they could hobble behind them. So you know, we can trace the connection between soul, funk, and R and B to hip hop. But there's also this connection between jazz and hip hop. Two ninth Wonder, along with a musicians Robert Glasper, Ters Martin and Kamasi Washington, released an album

One of the reasons why myself, Kamasi, Robert Glasper and Tares Martin did Dinner Party was to show that kind of bridge it's always been there because you got some jazz cats that don't really job with hip hop like that, but you have some new age hip hoppers that know nothing about jazz, and we were trying to show in a section of the two.

So there's the sampling of music, but then there's also musical influence on lyrical delivery.

When the idea of rap flow started to change, like in the early eighties, you know, the Curtis Blows and the Houdini's and all of them had the same type of you know rap flow, Prince Twish and Braks to but when Rock Kim came along, he made the distinct relation to I get a lot of my flows from John Coltrane, how he plays the sax, and also the

Max Roach was a drummer and composer, and he's known as a pioneer of bebop and one of the most important drummers of all time.

You know, like doctor Neil said, Rock Kim kind of changed things. We went from Curtis Blow with these are the breaks, You're like, what felt like kind of stiff rapping, and then we went to kind of floey rapping with Rock Kim and someone who's even more recent, who really should be credited if he hasn't been enough for his ability to kind of change the course of hip hop is q.

Tip ram truck, what as sea bull point something with a gold rode ain't nothing the r I'm the hood with it. Ninth highlights q Tip, who is a solo artist and also a member of a tricoll Quest.

I teach you hip Hop production class and one of the guests we had on Zoom one day was q Tip.

From a trib Call quest A trib Call Quest. It sound and the musical contributions of the individual members had a huge fingerprint on music transitioning in the late eighties to nineties.

I wanted to know.

Why in the late eighties hip hop shifted from a lot of soul sampling a lot of James Brown, James Brown, James Brown, to Les McCann and Roy ayres right and q Tip is like the genesis of that, q Tip said, man I grew up in a neighborhood around Weldon Irvine, and I'm like, what, like what is that?

Like?

Weldon Irvine and a lot of jazz cast that he grew up around influenced the sound that change of generation.

Weldon Irvine was a musician and artists. He's most known for his song Morning Sunrise, which came out in nineteen seventy nine, and that sampled on Jay Z's track Dear Summer and that came out in two thousand and five.

He was a mentor to many hip hop artists in New York as well as Nina Simone's musical director. So you know that's big, just that.

Texture of music.

We call him top of the family tree because with our Q tip, you don't have common most quality, badu jail, little brother, slum village, the roots outcast, like I can go a whole family tree of people that doesn't exist because of Q tip. And it's all because he started to dig into roy Airs more than he started digging to James Brown.

And so that gives us this transition from music that sounded off funky and chopped up like James Brown with the funky drummer, to a much smoother sound with Roy Airs.

I say everything begins with Benita Applebum.

Benita apple Bum, like sound wise became the genesis of every laid back hip hop song that you know.

Benita Applebum is the one.

Banina alta Appaum said to kind of put me on Beanina Alpam, And that's a roy Airs produced group called Ramp. It's that feel good time for euphorias. So from the way we rhyme to the textures that we use like jazz is it. And on top of that, jazz and hip hop leans on one thing together and that's improvisation. It's all about making stuff up. This is the sixties and your cold trained the loneliest monk on stage as the mother cast, Charlieburry Parker and that having like a

But definitely hip.

Hop bars a lot from jazz with that kind of like vetting system of guards. System is like a badger honor almost you can't be called one of us unless you do this.

So now we're talking about hip hop borrowing from jazz in both musical sampling and in the delivery of rap flow lyrical flow. And then also we're talking about hip hop borrowing from jazz in the process of kind of like this writes a passage about who gets to be called it, who gets to be called a jazz musician, who gets to be called a hip hop artist. It feels really heavily layered. Hip hop is Black music, and it's also some of the most popular music in our culture.

Hip hop has now become scared for a lot of people to say, but if hip hop is not Americana, especially because of the consumption of streams and the music business, but also by the fashion, by the talk, by the slang. More and more each day I see other racists saying things that we made up in the street is everywhere,

Do with that.

It's not even just older white men's America. Yeah, it's in general. It's like, hey, I know this thing. I mean, we see it all over social media where folks are using African American English and not using it correctly a lot of the time, and they feel like it's a way to give themselves streetcred, like just to make themselves cooler. But what they're trying to do is get as close to black as as they can without being black.

I knew things were really changing when it was the Oscars I think of last year, and it was Glenn Close. They asked her about DC Go Go and she started talking about junk yard band and backyard band.

And rare asses, and I'm like, look at this man.

This is placed in one of the whitest spaces ever, the Oscars, and just that type of thing shows you that in order to be cool, in order to be creative, in order to be on the cutting edge, you got to know what black people are doing.

And you know, we can't talk about these things without talking about people who have been a part of this culture, who have listened to this music, being outcasts or excluded from things because they identified in this way, you know, And that kind of gets us into like the cultural appropriation of music and the culture that goes along with black music. It's like who gets recognized, who gets credit?

And the thing about us that we still haven't figured out, and we're just so free with our creative property or intellectual property that it can be taken in a moment's notice and put somewhere else. With so giving is people we want to share what everybody not knowing it is being taken from us every time.

Yeah, in the excitement, a lot of things get shared, and that's how we get back to that cycle of sharing versus then who's getting credit for these things who's creating versus who's leveraging opportunities from the creation. Even recently, Bad Bunny he has a hit called sapphi Era, and part of the problem was is that he used some of the beat from Me Elliott's two thousand and one hit get Your Free Gone. We all know, Get Your Free Gone, and didn't credit her, and so it was

Holliday nineteen thirty nine, Strange Fruit, talking about the practice of lynching, which folks thought was coming to an end. What clearly in twenty twenty two, you know, yesterday's mass lynchings have become today's mass shootings.

Mass strange, true blood only.

So.

Billy Holliday was a jazz singer, and she was known for her distinctive vocal style, which was inspired by jazz instrumentalists like Louis Armstrong and another well known jazz singer,

Nina Simone talking about Mississippi Goddamn, talking about you know, anti black violence in the South, a song that she wrote immediately after the bombing of the sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in nineteen sixty three.

Alabama's gotten me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about missus damn. The sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham had been a center or hub for civil rights organizing, and on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three, the KKK members planted dynamite under the steps, and that attack killed four girls and injured fourteen to twenty two other people. And this happened just two weeks after the March on Washington and Martin Luther's King's I have a

Right?

Alabama has gotten me so upset. Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi. She wrote this song immediately after the bombing, and the song is in direct response to the attack and other white supremacist violence targeting black people across the South, and so that includes the assassination of Medgar Evers, who was fighting the end segregation in public schools, securing voting rights and other rights for black people.

Doctor Neil also mentioned Sam Cooks A Change Is Gonna Come, which was also released in December of the same year as Nina Simone's song.

Sam Cooks The Change Is Gonna Come. Right, this idea that in the midst of everything that was going on, right the death Somthaga Evers to deaths, you know, shortly after that of Malcolm X, you know that folks are hoping and wishing for something to change.

It's been a lot a long time coming.

Come.

There's a movie that captures the importance of Sam Cook's A Change Is Going To Come, and it talks about this meeting of some other black leaders, Sam Cook, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown.

All of them met together in February nineteen sixty four, and Regina King recently made a movie about it called One Night in Miami. It just shows like the struggle, like it shows people are figuring out, like what's going to go in my music? Do people just want to hear feel good music? I'm torn.

These things are happening in my community, right, and I think a lot of artists are facing that, like what goes in my work versus what's for me, you know, right.

I mean we saw that shift. We talked about Beyonce a lot, but we saw that shift with Beyonce and her music where at a certain point in her career she decided that she did want to become more political with the messaging in her music. And that's when we had you know, lemonade, Black Is King and things like that. And I think all of this is really important, t T.

Because when we consider the turmoil, the violence against black folks and then the protest music that we just talked about, you know, this is the backdrop of the civil rights movement. So we're talking about these things happening in nineteen sixty four. And the Civil Rights Act was passed.

In July nineteen sixty four, right, And the Civil Rights Act, the purpose of it was it outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origins. It also prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. And this was a huge landmark for legislation. That's July nineteen sixty four.

You move a couple months later, we're at February nineteen sixty five and Malcolm X is assassinated in the audobamb Ballroom in New York and his death really escalated the Black power movement. In this revolutionary movement that was really active in the sixties and seventies and very similar to

Throughout history, black artists have always found ways to find joy and celebrate the milestones along the way amid loss and struggle.

I mean, James Brown, right, I'm black and I'm proud right that this moment where folks could be fully in public and black and not have to worry about them being punished for expressing what they felt.

At the time.

Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On Right, the Quintessential Protests album Right created as this kind of holistic suite that spoke to every aspect of what we're dealing with.

There's too many of you try, you know, Marvin Gay started out as a crooner. You know, I see the guys on Instagram trying to wear the little red Marvin Gay had. But by nineteen seventy one, well, he released What's going On. We're at the height of the Vietnam War, and you can hear him grappling with what the country is going through and what black people are experiencing during this time.

Talking about the environment, talking about an anti war movement, talking about black politics, talking about poverty in the ghetto. Right, he managed to get all of that into a thirty five minute record.

Doctor Neil also talked about how this music was so personal to him as well as so many black kids growing up as these records were being recorded and released.

The time that I came of age listening to the message in nineteen eighty two Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five and this detailed analysis of the hood that I knew that I was growing up with, right, that so many people in the world didn't know of. And this was a time when everybody was calling you know, when they folks thought about hip hop, all they thought about or rap music, all they thought about was partying. Bullshit.

Probably glass everywhere, people pissing on the stage, you know that just don't care. I can't take the smout, I can't take the noise. Got no money to move on? I guess I got no charge, you know. I think we see this with a lot of artists.

They might come out with, you know, kind of a party song or a fun upbeat, and then they're like, Okay, I have a platform, I have a voice.

There's something I want to say. So similar to what we saw with Marvin Gaye. H you see grand Master Flash in the Furious five shifting a little bit with the message, that's right. In nineteen eighty two, they released a song called The Message, and the lyrics describe poverty in the inner city struggle, and it was one of the first songs in hip hop that addressed those issues head on. This political and social commentary was influential to the growth of consciousness.

Even Run DMC, a group did we never think about as being political, could drop a song like It's Like That, which again talked about the politics of what everyday black life was. And then definitely for me my generation, anything that Public Dnomy touched between nineteen eighty six right to nineteen ninety two has to be on that list.

Yes, Ren DMC and Public Enemy were both part of the new school of hip hop, which you know you kind of see really growing around the mid nineteen eighties. Public Enemy built on the foundation that was laid by Grand Master Flash. In a Furious five talking about this radical political ideology, doctor Neil lists additional songs and albums that fit that same mold.

Rebel without a Pause, Fight the Powers, and one that stands out. But that album, you know, it takes a nation of millions to hold us back, and don't believe the hyphe I mean, it just changed everything. The politics were radical, the images were radical, the sounds were radical, the sampling techniques were radical.

We got to fight the.

Fight the power.

It's really fascinating to see that radical political message was mirrored in the sounds and musical techniques that these artists used. Ninth Wonder also shared his experiences of coming of age during this period of music, a time when social and political consciousness was at the forefront of hip hop.

Neil is older than me, and you don't like to say that, but he's older than I am. And I always like to gloat and revel in the fact that I was able to enjoy consciousness in hip hop at the age I got a chance to enjoy it, which is every kid's formidable years. It takes a nation meetings. The Hold Is Back came out when I was thirteen. There You Go the year before a show debut on TV called A Different World. In nineteen eighty eight, Spike

So what Ninth Wonder is highlighting is not just the music but also the culture. We're talking about television now and movies. A Different World was a classic.

Honestly, we talked about a Different World in our Black History Month episode with X and School Days too. Different World and School Days and about how it really showcased aside of black culture that wasn't necessarily always showcased on television.

Absolutely, I think one of the things that I loved about those shows is they were funny. They were giving me this glimpse into like, oh wow, this is what college is like. And I'm watching them years later, right and still they feel relevant. But they're also talking about issues like sexual assault, HIV and AIDS.

Yes, when Freddy was almost sexual assaulted and Dwyane Wade jumped to the roof of the car to beat up the guy, these are moments that you will never forget and it addresses those issues head on and gives you the tools as young people to know how to deal with those situations. So that's like mid to late eighties, and then we moved right at that cusp of like eighty eight to ninety two. I would say hip hop

Quitudes show always say you know NNBA put our straight out of Compton, Queen Latifa put out All Hell, The Queen Jungle Brothers done by the Fortress of Nature, Daylight, Soul, three feet High and Rising a Tribe call Quest People's exinctive travels in the past of Rhythm I'm fourteen years old, like I am in heaven, Like this is black black black black, black, black black black black. Not only it's black, but it's also Pan Africanism. Then you got Kara ris

This was an amazing time for me and my friends.

That's wild. I mean, imagine being able to be of the age where you can understand what's going on, you kind of understand what's going on in the world, and you can understand what's going on in the music and be able to absorb those political and social messages of the music as it was being released.

Man, you know, I can remember folks wearing like my older cousins wearing those like big necklaces that had the symbol of Africa and it was like red, black and green, and it makes me think about brands like cross colors. Even the clothes that people were wearing and things that had the fist on them. I mean, it was just pan Africanism was a global movement and hip hop was.

In it absolutely.

And you know, when you think about who's driving culture, who's saying this is what's in the musicians were doing that, and so it feels fitting that they have a place right there is some of the disseminators of political messaging.

So far, we've seen hip hop evolve from something that wasn't explicitly political to a genre that really had consciousness at its heart. But this period of consciousness and hip hop didn't last forever.

Sometimes we like to tell the young generation that, oh, we were just so political. The only problem is became a hard realization for me that the high point and consciousness in hip hop on a surface level, which means a level that wasn't considered underground, that you can find it, you didn't have to dig for it probably only lasted like three or four years eighty eight to like I'll say, by ninety two, because once Doctor Dre and Snoop, when the chronic came, it was over.

Like it was who you can forget it?

One, two, three and tough Folk, Snoop, Doggie Dog and Doctor Drake is at the dope and it not making it trench so Bad Go No.

This time period that Ninth Wonder is talking about falls within what many refer to as the Golden Age of hip hop, so from the mid eighties to their early to mid nineties. Ninth tells us that things kind of changed when Bad Boy Records came on the scene. Bad Boy was founded in nineteen ninety three by Sean P. Diddy Combs Well Diddy or Puff Daddy Brother Love.

Brother Love, Sean Love Combs, Puffy. So many names, so many names still save Puff.

When bad Boy came we was in the club, there was still a hint of having some type of consciousness, which means ten Crack Commandments is a conscious zone, right. It teaches you something. It might teach you the wrong thing, but it gives you some type of instruction.

I've been in this game. It may be your animals us to rule.

Ten Crack Commandments is a track from the Notorious Big from his album Life After Death. It was released in nineteen ninety seven, and it's biggs manual on how to succeed at dealing drugs like number one, never let them know how much dough you hold or number six that goddamn credit debt. It While this might not be a deep exploration of societal issues up front, biggest talking about the practical ways to make it in this business.

The hip hop at one point was instructional, whether it be about Safe six with Jimmy by Boogie Down Productions or the U N I T Y or I always say that one of the first versions of Beyonce's Lemonade and hip Hop from a Master Respectrum was looking at the front door by main source like he was really, you know, large professor was really going through it with his girl, and he was like, you treat me bad. I don't think I could take it anymore. I'm looking

We fight every night now that's not in that swift plus up when we was close sung and wake up to be rereadd.

But argument again.

I think we started to get into the instructions, but they're telling you left foot stomp and shuffled. But maybe one day we'll get back to it. Watch just watch Next.

Hip Hop, the Next Man some good instructions. The stallion does get instrung and say put your hands on your hips. I feel like the only thing we're missing now is like hip hop, that's like, this is how you start at LLC. Let's take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about community and music, the culture of streaming, and the future of hip hop and hip hop education. We're back and we've been celebrating Black Music Month with Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.

But before we jump back in with the two of them, let's talk about next week's lab. And next week's lab, we're talking all about linguistics with doctor John Bah the history accents, dialect, slang, and code switching that's done in the United States. All right, let's get back to the lab. Before the break, we were talking about messaging in hip hop. So we wanted to know what changed from the nineties to the two thousands to the twenty tens and why

One of the things is missing is intimacy. And I don't think we can mistake intimacy for sex, because there's lots of sex in the music, but not intimacy. And I mean that on a bunch of levels. Ninth is talked about this in class. There was a time where we had to listen to music in community. There was a stereo system in the house. Everybody listened to the music at the same time. Your kids are in the car. I mean when my daughters were young, they were trapped

I remember as a child being just glued to the radio. My parents, we begged them for, you know, one of the little portable radios that you could have in your bedroom, and me and my sisters we would just lay in front of it and listen to it all day, especially in the summer and on the weekends, just listening to music. And then you know, do you remember the box? What's the box You could call in and put in a

I used to teach just Michael Jackson class, and if we tend when we think about Michael Jackson and Prince, we don't talk about the ballads, right, you know, And I'm like, I'm a big ballad dude, right. So we're listening to Lady in My Life, which I think is Michael Jackson's best ballot, maybe Butterflies, you know, on a good day. We're listening to the song, and what struck me is that they had no relationship to the music.

Ie.

They didn't know what to do with it. So I asked someone to give a demonstration to do a slow jam or grind like what my parents used to call it. And they had no idea what I'm talking about because they'd never slow danced. Intimacy them and music is like twerking or that's actually one of the examples that someone use. But the idea of a slow, intimate dance. I'm old

When Mark Avanil says grind, it's not the grind that I think that y'all are talking about. The term grind has evolved over time to mean something a little bit different. But what he's talking about is just, you know, a slow song that couples would dance to. I just think it's really interesting how, you know, the way we consume music, and this is such a good point, how it affects the experience, the culture, you know, around music and music consumption.

Now there's no community when it comes to something that was created by the community. First of all, is not a turn on the factor. There's no let me let you hear this because you haven't heard it. It's not that because whether you know it or love it or not, every album in the world that comes out on streamings

Sharing music is a lot easier today. I think one way during the pandemic that we started sharing music with each other, having these communal experiences around music was versus versus was such a huge thing that happened during the pandemic.

That was the beauty about it, because now I went to an HBC Houston. When I go back to homecoming, every time I see somebody, I look in them by song. It's so crazy, like I see them by album. I'm like, hey man, we listen to Mob Deeper all the time. That's the first thing we say. Or when a party and I played the record and then somebody I went to school with thirty years ago would come up with that was our joint, Like you know what I mean, because either I heard it in his room or he

Yeah, I think there are some things if I was with somebody during a certain phase. You know, one of the musicians that I'm a big fan of, and we talk about it all the time. TT is the dream And I can't remember where I was when I heard I Love Your Girl for the first time and I was just getting an apartment, Like, oh my goodness, what a time, first apartment, what a time. Man. We're lucky, okay.

The album experience, right. The wonderful thing about this is it's tangible. We can hold it. That means we can collect it. It would kill us if somebody stole our album collection. Most kids with music is not a collection for them. It is an experience for us. It was a collection right when it comes to this tangible object, we had to play it from front to back.

You can't shuffle this. You have to consume the whole thing.

That's the thing I think this generation is missing out on, which is why they don't believe albums are important.

Some do, some don't.

Is because they have a chance to make their own playlist in a moment's notice or listen to somebody else's playlist, as opposed to me and you guys having to sit in front of the radio waiting for your song to come on and unpausing the tape, and then you might get some of the DJ talking, which you don't went on that at all. Is that kind of patience and waiting experience to hearing the song on the radio, so it's not out yet, you can't have it, and then a month later it comes out. But then it comes

I mean, I feel like, yes, there are some people who are album purists, you know, and streaming has some drawbacks, but I think it also has some benefits. There's something magical about playlists, I think, and really, if somebody's able to curate and really get the vibes right DJ D Nice D Nice starting club Quarantine yup during the pandemic, that was special. Yeah, you know, And so I think everybody was able to kind of join his ig live and listen to him play song after song and really

This is my winter playlist, and it's really special because you know, it's basically like, if you have access to Wi Fi, you have access to music. And like Ninth was saying, you know, if he didn't have the money, he wouldn't be able to listen to the album. Yes, that was part of the process, and you know how some of these ritualistic aspects of music consumption make you feel good. But some folks will never get that refund check and so they will never be able to listen

I asked my students all the time, how long do you consume an album? They say, ah, man, I'm done with it. I'm done with an artist in about four months. I'm moving on to somebody else. And I say, well, that's crazy, because I've been listening to The Day Losses

It's wild because folks give Rihanna a hard time. Rihanna, when's the next album? What's the next album? Meanwhile, she's given us makeup, a baby, a fashion line, everything, a lot of things. And she also gave us like seven albums in eight years. That's a lot of albums, okay. And what folks don't realize is that Lauren Hill only gave us one. And you know that's fine with me. Lauren, take your time if she comes out another album, suh, it's over okay, But I'm not trying to rush it.

I think what you're raising is a really good point because not only has the loyalty that people feel towards artists changed, but their expectations and standards have too. Sometimes people have these really high expectations or we see like the super fan.

I think we've always seen a lot of fans. I've seen people on Twitter talking about like, oh, I just listened to this album. It's top two, and I'm.

Like, the album came out thirty six hours ago. It came out midnight, it's Saturday afternoon. The album came out Friday morning. As soon as the clock went from eleven to fifty nine on Thursday to midnight, you were able to stream it. You know, I'm not sure you can see an album that high and it hasn't even had two full days, right, it's still raw.

Yeah, you know, it hasn't even cooked yet. Yeah, it might be hot for right now, but you might have to cut that album open and it's raw on the inside needs to be put back in the oven. You know, I think we've been taking a look back. We've been looking back so much at history and saying these are the roots, these are the people that built the musical

I would challenge in our hip hop curriculum and what we teach is hip hop would beat the life out of any university in the country. The guests that we get to have my classes did their presentations and one of the class group presentations is on Rhymes the Coming And I had my phone on IG Live and guess who was watching Bust the Rhymes and Buster the Rhymes got on Live with me and told the class how much he loved the presentation.

You really, can you imagine having bust to Rhymes sitting in on your lecture. We didn't have those guest speakers me either. Shoot, but doctor Neil also told us that the class can't be taught to the expectations of the students.

We have to push them beyond that. So when folks asked me, it's like, well, what is the class about, Well, it is a portal into post World War two black life in the United States through hip hop. Right, So we're going to start the conversation with the nineteen sixty five Immigration Act, because without that there is.

No hip hop. And so we spend two or three weeks on.

The Cross Bronze Expressway, the Immigration Act, what's happening structurally in New York and other kinds of cities before we touch even one song, and kids are sitting in the class going, well, when we're gonna talk about jay Z, when we gonna talk about Drake right, when we're gonna talk about Kanye And truth be told, we could do a whole fifteen or sixteen weeks and never even get to talk about that stuff.

So for a lot of these students, I guess what they're experiencing is that the classes and what they thought it was going to be, and learning the full context requires going back decades. Without these earlier historical milestones, There's no Drake, there is no Kanye, there is no jay Z, no Meg, no Eve, There's no Meg Meg, no City Girls, Okay,

Right, Yes, I just believe that the petitioners of this culture need to teach it. The longtime fans turned scholars of this culture, Mark Anthony Neil, needs to teach it. We are the ones to have hip hop and scholarship in the same sentence, and we've done it from HBCUs to Ivy Leagues period.

So hopefully that gave you something to think about when you're jamming to your playlist this summer, and maybe you'll listen out for references to other lyrics you've heard. Means that sound familiar. There's a lot to unpack in there, Yeah, especially in pop music.

Yes, I encourage everybody to do a little bit of digging on whosample dot com to find out some of the references in some of your favorite songs. Absolutely, we've talked about quite a few things here t T and it made me ask myself a question. And I want to ask our listeners what's your favorite style of like integrating old music and new.

Yes, we are super curious. So if you look into the Spotify app right now, you should the pole.

So, Yes, I want to know what's your favorite style of integrating old music with new Is it sampling like when somebody takes a beat from an old song and puts it in a new one. Is it remixing, like when somebody takes the entire song and remixes the whole thing. Or is it lyrical callbacks like when somebody uses a lyric from an old song and takes that lyric and puts it in their song.

The one thing we're sharing this week is an extensive playlist. Be sure to check it out. It'll be linked on our show notes page at Dope Labs podcast dot com. That's it for Lab sixty seven. I hope you learned something in this lab.

If you have a song that has a hidden hip hop or jazz influencer reference, tell us about it. Call us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight and tell us what you thought, or give us an idea for a lab we should do this semester. We really like from you, So you can call or text us at two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight.

And don't forget that there is so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap key for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter check it out at Dope labspodcast dot com. Special thanks to today's guest experts, Doctor Mark, Anthony Neil and Ninth Wonder.

You can find and follow them on Twitter at New black Man and at ninth Wonder. And you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Lab Podcast.

TT's on Twitter and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakia at z Said So. Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Owned Media Group. Our producers are Jenny Rattlet Mass Lydia Smith and Izzy Ross of Wave Runner Studios. Our associate producer from mega Owmedia is Brianna Garrett. Editing and sound design by Rob Smerciak, Mixing by Hannes Brown. Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify. Executive producer Corin