Beyond the dense childhood memories of musical sound sieved through cinder block, another archetypal memory carried by a number of hip hop producers and artists—including KRS-ONE, the RZA, as well as Da Beatminerz—is the memory of walking through New York streets to the block party. As you walked to the block party, you would hear the sounds filtered through the concrete surroundings of the city. The hardness of the environment shears off the attack from guitar and piano lines, dampens and attenuates horn breaks, makes even slap bass sound muddy, or watery—as low pass filter basslines are often described.
In the 1970s, the children of postindustrial New York, with their community centers and music programs shut down, used the music technology available to them to find beauty in sounds that formally trained audio engineers sought to edit out of their recordings. As Tricia Rose highlighted in Black Noise, pioneering producers like Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad deliberately “worked in the red,” pushing equipment past its limits to make muddy, fuzzy, noisy sounds, literally destroying their machines in order to compose, or rather decompose, as they discovered a new realm of the sublime in this sonic detritus, the same way b-boys invented windmills and backspins atop cardboard and linoleum scraps. Q-Tip, who produced The Low End Theory, has said that with that album he sought to expand and explore the hitherto uncharted territories of the low-end, of the bottom. He came up with this term “low end theory,” he said, basically due to his difficulty in articulating his idea to his recording engineers.
The low end theory is difficult to articulate, just as low pass filtered bass removes or blurs the articulation between notes. The blending of all the sounds of a New York street, the car horns and bus brakes, barking dogs and sidewalk polyglossia, the “sounds boomin out a jeep” mixing with the echoes of the distant block party, all clash into an incessant, ineffable beauty, where each sound cannot be clearly separated from the other, and many of them cannot be traced back to a specific source. From a certain distance, and from within such sonic thickness, music becomes noise and noise can become music. Marley Marl was the first genius of hip hop to channel the environment and use noise in a way that now seems commonsensical. He was living in Queens when he reversed a sample from “Scratchin’” by The Magic Disco Machine for MC Shan’s “The Bridge.” According to Chuck D, the Bomb Squad first perceived the musical possibilities of noise when they heard “The Bridge,” and the rest, as they say, is hip hop history.
The low pass theory helps to explain not just why producers create certain kinds of samples, but also why rappers select certain beats. For all of the misogyny, gunplay, and overall sociopathy embodied in hip hop lyrics, a number of rappers select their beats based on what they call an “emotional” connection to a beat. These connections actually occur through affect, which is deeper than emotion. Affective connections are conditioned by both conscious and unconscious memories, by material conditions, and by the accumulations of resonances across a lifetime of intense listening. The prime example of a rapper who chooses tracks based on affective connections is Jay-Z, who is infamous for the way he will listen to a beat, mumble and nod his head to it for as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and then record a verse or a song in one take. He has stated over and over in interviews that he must find an emotional connection to a track, even on tracks where he narrates acts of murder, revenge, and rapacious greed. For example, on “Dead Presidents II,” one of the great examples of low-pass filtering, Jay-Z rhymes about the death of a friend who, in his final moments of life, closes his eyes and tells Jay to “Pray for me,” to which Jay responds, “I’ll do you one better and slay these niggas faithfully/ Murder is a tough thing to digest/ It’s a slow process/ And I ain’t got nothin but time.” The cold-blooded turn of phrase at the end of the line reminds us that the persona of the emcee before us is vicious—likeable and cool, but ultimately vicious. Such lyrics can make it easy to miss the fact that it was an affective resonance that led Jay to select this beat for the song. The track, made by Skibeatz, features a bassline created from a low pass filtered piano sample from Lonnie Liston Smith’s 1979 song, “A Garden of Peace.” Skibeatz explains that part of what made him, along with several colleagues like Lord Finesse, use a low pass filter was the fact that he did not know how to play bass at the time. Such a lack of instruments and traditional musical training was common amongst the earliest hip hop producers, and, as Hank Shocklee points out in Rose’s Black Noise, contributed to many of the sonic innovations hip hop artists spawned while using recording technologies against the grain.
So, the low pass filter captures expresses something essential about New York, about living and being and feeling in New York, but a question remains: why did low-pass filtered samples appeal to people outside of New York, on the West Coast, or in the midwestern suburbs? These samples carry an affective resonance that is, perhaps, more universal. Neuroscientists have measured the sounds that reach the ears of a fetus, and have found that a pregnant woman’s body acts like a low-pass filter—during the several months we spend in utero, everything we hear sounds like a Beatminerz sample. Again, this does not mean that all low pass filtered sounds appeal to us, for this is certainly not the case, but it does mean that deep affective connections to certain sonic qualities, such as low-pass filtered sound, are formed in ways that we cannot articulate fully—this is the low-pass theory, the analysis of how material conditions, music technology, and embodied memory produces predilections for specific sounds, how the low pass filtered sample, the echoing horn line, and the organically sampled drums solidified into an aesthetic that now characterizes pure hip hop sound.
The force of pure hip hop sound, apparently, travels through time to touch new generations, too. Last winter, I taught an intensive course on hip hop culture at Miami University. One day I played Souls of Mischief’s “93 ‘til Infinity” in class–all of my students were born in 1993, or later, and none of them had heard the song before. A week later one student told me he’d been listening to it over and over every day since I played for him it, and that he couldn’t describe why it gripped him, but it did nevertheless. I remember where I was when I first heard that song; I remember it riveting me to the floor in my living room, with my jaw and heart and head and everything else in me blown open. In a way, ’93 Til Infinity is a key origin point of pure hip hop sound for the current generation of artists who seek to revive an essential hip hop culture, from Joey Badass’s reprise of it entitled “95 till Infinity” to uses of the track for mixtapes by artists like J. Cole and Big K.R.I.T.
The track opens with and features prominently a low pass filtered vibraphone sample, and this may seem like a strange place for me to conclude, since Souls is a West Coast, Bay Area group, and I’ve been talking about the material conditions of New York shaping pure hip hop sound. But my point has also been that we might begin to explain hip hop’s near universal musical appeal during this period by unearthing its affective resonances with the nearly universal human experience of the low-pass filtered fetal sound environment. Furthermore, even in this Bay Area track, we still haven’t really left New York, since the low-pass filtered sample in the song comes from jazz drummer Billy Cobham’s 1974 recording “Heather.” Cobham, besides backing Miles Davis and other legends, had his own band that played gigs around St. Albans, Queens, where a young Jonathan Davis, now known as Q-Tip, would hear him play at Roy Wilkins Park, at outdoor jams, where the sound, the low end frequencies, filtered by the brick and asphalt of the city, came rushing down the street like the water walls of the Red Sea released, and children unwittingly born into society’s low end recognized something amniotic in this noise, something that was both their most ancient personal past, and, at the same time, the future of music.
(Thanks to Zero Star, DJ O Sharp, DJ Detox, and DJ Pos2 for feedback on Part 1. And, like so many others, my best thinking about music is indebted to Barry Shank, and Matt Murphy.)