The scene is always the same. My feet are planted far too close to a tower of speakers, my head nodding with near-injurious enjoyment to some now-obscure track selected by the DJ, as he tests how many real hip hop heads are in the audience, to see who not only recognizes the song, but feels its deep power and moves their bodies accordingly, who has enough personal history with it that they can rap along with Mic Geronimo’s “Masta I.C.,” or Black Moon’s “Slave,” or the Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka.” I’m always surprised by how many others find the same songs as compelling as I did and still do. After listening to many of these songs for over twenty years, and seeing, on so many nights, the effects they produce, I became convinced that there is an essence to hip hop, that there is a pure hip hop sound, and I wanted to understand precisely why I, and so many others, find it to be so powerful.
Pure hip hop sound has three key elements: the use of organically sampled drums, “Pete Rock-style” horn samples, and the use of low-pass filters. I’ve not known anyone to disagree with this definition, whether in casual conversation or in writings by aficionados, such as the Crate Kings. The definition, however, is merely descriptive and thus fails to explain why these particular sounds became so dominant in hip hop’s sonic aesthetics in the early to mid-90s. Why did producers, who selected samples from millions of records and billions of sampling possibilities, and rappers, who selected beats from hundreds or even thousands of offerings from producers, why did they find these sounds so compelling? Why did they resonate so deeply with hip hop listeners in the 1990s, so much so that many hip hop aficionados came to see these sounds as reflecting pure hip hop sound?
The most haunting, the most pure hip hop sound from the Golden Age is the low-pass filtered sample (one could argue for Marley Marl’s drums, but that’s a topic for another post). A low-pass filter attenuates all sound above a certain frequency. If you take a piano sample and run it through a low pass filter, you are left with the low-end, hence A Tribe Called Quest naming their production style, as well as their sophomore album, the “low end theory.” One way to describe a low pass filter’s effect is to say that it makes a sample sound like it’s being played underwater, because the low-pass filter is the same used in film sound to signify a point of view from underwater.
A quintessential example appears on Smif-N-Wessun’s masterpiece debut album Dah Shinin, produced by perhaps the greatest utilizers of the low-pass filter, Da Beatminerz. Sampled from a section of Minnie Ripperton’s “Only When I’m Dreaming,” Smif n Wessun’s “Hellucination” contains a vocal part where Ripperton sings in the “whisper register,” which are some of the highest notes possible for humans to sing. The paradox of this choice is poetic—filtering out the highest frequencies of the highest vocal notes–and the effect is eerie, irresistible, as the her flowing tones are made to sound more like lines from a deformed organ, their otherworldly quality resonating with the actual fact of Ripperton’s tragically early death at age 31.
Up to this point, no one has really been able to explain why the low-pass filter appealed so frequently to producers choosing samples, rappers selecting beats, and fans alike. My theory is that the low pass filter was so compelling to hip hop makers and listeners in the early 90s because it approximates the sound of music filtered through the material conditions of New York City itself. For instance, a low pass filtered sample produces a sound similar to music coming through the wall of a project apartment. In fact, a common nickname for the low-pass filter is a “brick wall filter.” While this nickname derives more from the way they sharply cut off frequencies above a certain point, I am citing it to suggest that low-pass filters mimic the kind of sounds that pass through walls, from a parent or older sibling listening to music in the living room, to children in a bedroom on the other side of the wall. In Jay-Z’s autobiography, Decoded, he writes about how his parents had a great record collection, that his high rise apartment in the Marcy Projects was “the party house.” He must have heard music filtered through walls all the time. Likewise, Nas, whose father is jazz musician Olu Dara, grew up in a project apartment suffused with music. Phife from A Tribe Called Quest, Pete Rock, and many other architects of the pure hip hop sound in the early to mid 90s recall these archetypal memories of a living room with a record player. I imagine Jay-Z, Nas, and others, growing up in the 70s, lying in their bedrooms and falling asleep at night to the sounds coming through the wall from the living room, as their parents listen to music and relax, or party with their friends past bedtime. What would jazz and soul music have sounded like to these children? It would have sounded as if it was coming through a low-pass filter.
The accumulation of many acoustic memories, whether conscious or unconscious, must create some lasting affective linkages between certain qualities of sound and a certain time in one’s life. This is not to say that childhood is necessarily a time of perfection and innocence, but it is certainly a time when deep affective connections are formed between specific stimuli and one’s oldest, most dense memories, between specific types of environments, ambiences, scents, flavors, tactile experiences and the core of one’s being. Thus the low pass filter taps into deep reservoirs of affect not absolutely unique to kids growing up in the projects—I, for one, heard a lot of music coming through the wall between my brother’s room and mine in our suburban split-level—but the population density of the hip hop generation in high-rise public housing created an especially thick concentration of people with such memories, people with a common set of materially-conditioned affective predispositions that made the low-pass filtered sample such a compelling thing to hear.
In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke explained that the memories of childhood are so rich and dense, so fathomless in their affective depth, that they can provide source material for the remainder of an artist’s life, no matter how long they live. In Rilke’s words: “Even if you were in a prison house whose walls allowed none of the sounds of the world to reach your sense—would you not still have always your childhood, that precious, royal richness, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention there. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that distant past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will extend itself and will become a twilit dwelling which the noise of others passes by in the distance. And if from this turning inwards, from this sinking into your private world, there come verses, you will not think to ask anyone whether they are good verses.” I love that Rilke explains childhood memories in overtly sonic terms, even referring to the memories being submerged, as if they are sounds coming from below the surface of water, like the humming horns, mud-slathered basslines, or guitar riffs shorn of attack and made warm, dark, familiar, in a low pass filtered sample.