Mike Ford, a lead architect for the Universal Hip Hop Museum, has studied and written about the relationship between disastrous urban planning/architecture and the rise of hip hop. Essentially, Ford's argument is that the ghettoization of African Americans in the 20th century via ill-conceived public housing projects created the conditions for the musical art form. As an article in VIBE puts it:
Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, Wutang Clan’s “S.O.S”, and Nas’s “Project Window” demonstrate the importance of understanding the role that these conditions created in influencing hip-hop. “Hip-hop lyrics are [filled] with first-hand accounts of living conditions in the projects,” Ford states. “The hip-hop MC used lyrics to create a dialogue, to give commentary and counterpoints to the modernist vision [that birthed towers like 1520 Sedgwick Ave]. The MCs served as a voice for disenfranchised communities and often un-consulted end users of public housing.”
More on the intersection between architecture and hip-hop:
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and (from wiki, remembered reading this once somewhere)
“Hip-hop, the dominant turn-of-the-century pop form, gives the most electrifying demonstration of technology's empowering effect [...] [T]he genre rose up from desperately impoverished high-rise ghettos, where families couldn't afford to buy instruments for their kids and even the most rudimentary music-making seemed out of reach. But music was made all the same: the phonograph itself became an instrument. In the South Bronx in the 1970s, DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. Later, studio-bound DJs and producers used digital sampling to assemble some of the most densely packed sonic assemblages in musical history: Eric B. and Rakim's Paid in Full, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, Dr. Dre's The Chronic.”
— Alex Ross, Listen to This (2010)
This isn't about jturntables.
This is also about the inadequacies of public housing (or the quality of the construction). Block parties arise because parties were limited to small public spaces in basements that were in high demand. Coffins (aka turntables) were designed because the systems had to be to be portable, moving between basements and block parties (public and open spaces). And as crews began to employ tactics used by Jamaican sound systems, forms of pop-up architecture appeared that were responsive to the needs of these underserved communities.
Marc, was trying to find something I thought Russell Simmons had said, and so far no luck, so maybe he did not say it - but the purpose of the turntables qoute with regard to architecture is quite simple, you touch on one item, but the main issue is lack of space for band equipment not to mention financing.....in trying to find what I thought was said by Russell Simmons i found this link which quickly describes some moves made by Robert Moses (not dance moves but urban planning moves) that tie into the history of Rap http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1993/4/93.04.04.x.html
All fine and valid, but if you read/listen to Herc, Bambaata and other old heads at the ground breaking ceremony (vs ground floor) production value wasn't a concern. It was community across a spectrum. Simmons does point to one later aspect of the musical form, its contribution to public and semi private space follows a different thread.
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