Check 2, 1, 2: Rhythm Assisted Poetry and the Art of the Studio

Since I embarked on my first ELI in the fall of 2013, about a year ago, I rapidly and irrevocably fell in love with rap music. The lyricism, storytelling ability, and manipulation of the language found in hip hop mesmerized me from the start, and I began an endless spiral down into the very depths of the music. I’ve analyzed, I’ve annotated, I’ve (in my mind) contributed my own thoughts to the genre, and now it is time to create my own music. As of this semester, I will be focusing on the actual recording process when creating an album and all the work that it entails. I spent the prior semester writing many songs for my album, and this semester I will be recording, mixing, editing, and mastering my first album with my fellow writer and performer Connor Gettings. In addition, I’ll be exploring the history of hip hop’s sonic landscape, and how it has changed from the almost exclusively James Brown-influenced days of the mid 1970’s, to the incredibly eclectic mix of material sampled in today’s hip hop.

While I cannot say that I have had much success with finding scholarly material, I feel that this is something that the hip hop community has done intentionally; there is no gain in skill without experimentation, especially in an art form so grounded in extemporaneous expression such as hip hop. I will have access to producer interviews, many of which I’ve used for my first goal, and they serve a vital purpose in understanding hip hop from the eyes of its movers and shakers. However, this would make for a rather poor Research Internship, and so, I have decided to balance this with a technical, highly scholarly look at my DAW of choice, Ableton Live 9, and an exploration of all the incredible editing tools that it offers me. I believe strongly that a love for art is necessary for an appreciation of life, and to me, poetry is of the highest art form. Through poetry, I fell in love with hip hop, and now I wish to explore the sonic aspects of the art form as opposed to the literary aspects. I’ll be studying primarily Ableton Live, Music Production, the various components of a hip hop style production over the years, and many different ways to “clean” a track to get it to its release-worthy potential. In addition, nearly anyone born after 1980 has probably grown up with hip hop in their lives at some point, especially today’s youth. Thus, I wish to break down the sound of what defines today. If I lived in the 1960’s, I would wish to do an ELI on the music of Hendrix, Dylan, and the like; summarily put, I wish to explore what defines the “now” in music, and how to create the zany, beautiful, and highly intricate sounds that define the soundtrack of my life.

~Amir