Note: The following represents an evolution of ideas I’ve been thinking about for some time,
and there probably is some overlap with things I’ve written about before. I’m thinking there is
some potential for a dissertation topic here. As I read more & become increasingly
comfortable with developing pedagogies, some of the ideas presented here might become
more developed in future iterations.
Abstract: As new media has altered the distinctions between user & producer in popular
culture, pedagogies and writing techniques must eventually change along with it. The
technical qualities of the database require the user to supply or invent narrative to make some
order out of the contents, more so than the age of old media, where narrative was often tightly
controlled or shaped by the producer. The culture & process of collecting can resemble how
we interact with databases, and could potentially be applied as a pedagogical tool.
Crate Digging: Theory, Practice and Collecting
Hey yo, how many know about crate diggin'?
What does crate diggin' mean to me?
Diggin' for them unordinary soundin' loops
Even if it's not clean to thee
Diggin' in these crates for a phat remix
Diggin' in these crates for a phat remix1
Introduction
Beatles vs. Rolling Stones, Stax vs. Motown, acoustic folk vs. electric folk, DIY vs.
corporate rock, indie vs. major label – arguments over authenticity have been an
ongoing phenomenon in popular music, pre-dating the digital era. What compounds
the debate in the present age is the nature of new media itself – it can be easily
copied without degrading quality and it can be randomly accessed – two factors
which have severely threatened the traditional record production & consumption
model. As Lev Manovich, Lawrence Lessig and others have pointed out, in the digital
age the roles of user and producer have certainly blurred - or perhaps even more
radically, the boundaries and distinctions between the two have nearly been erased
altogether.
So, what does it mean to “authentically” create today? Such a substantial and
philosophical question is probably too troublesome to be explored in detail here.
What I intend focus on is the process which inspires invention; the initial connection
making and collecting of resources that produce new cultural objects, whether they
1
Lootpack, Soundpieces: Da Antidote (Stones Throw Records), CD.
are of high or dubious quality. Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool introduces the digital
sampler (or MPC) as “an important tool for writers” who intend to use
appropriation or “cut and paste” as a method of composition or pedagogy.2 Rice’s
sampler is more metaphorical than a tangible classroom technology, but he hints at
the collection of resources that will become eventually become samples –
mentioning the record collections amassed by hip-hop pioneers.
Early hip-hop artists were still working within analog culture, where popular
music was widely consumed and distributed on LP. Inadvertently, they created a
standard for authenticity of their own. Even now, samples from LP (rather than CD
or digital file) are widely considered to be more in keeping with the do-it-yourself
ethos of hip-hop. Would-be samplers once sifted through the bargain-bins at retail
shops, but in the age of the CD and with the increasing reduction of retail space for
physical music, their modern counterparts must be more enterprising and
resourceful – whether it is finding lost treasure & artifacts in independent retail
shops, yard sales, estate sales, junk stores, or used record stores.
This act is known as “crate digging” in hip-hop lexicon, and it’s a term I intend to
introduce here as a broader concept for making connections and compiling a
physical or virtual library for appropriating or creating narrative out of the
discarded objects of old media or with new media itself. I’m concerned with what
happens immediately prior to the acts of invention & composition, before the
database or collection becomes narrative, and in turn, how the process of arranging
a collection can develop narrative.
As Manovich has observed, the Internet has given “millions of people a new hobby
or profession – data indexing.”3 Everyday we’re tagging, sorting and organizing our
own or other’s databases, assigning order. If the DJ represents the master
manipulator of new media, then the crate-digger represents the aspirant remixer,
student, hobbyist or would-be new media auteur. In writing collecting or crate
digging, I want to evoke the spirit of the 2008 movie Be Kind, Rewind in which
analog media, technique and culture meld with the collaborative nature of new
media and the Internet to create new cultural objects.
Why Collecting?
Many new media objects (as defined by Manovich) offer no organizing narrative,
lack sequence and favor the database form that can be accessed randomly. He
observes that “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of
images, texts and other data records” – a reality that favors the organizing
possibilities of the database.4 However, the experience of navigating a database is
far different than reading a novel or listening to a record from beginning to end.
Thus, the inherent qualities of the database require us to supply our own narrative
more than ever.
Jeff Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2007), 67.
3 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 225.
4 Manovich, 219.
2
Like the database, collections seek to impose order. Indeed, the collector craves
sequence and organization. Often, such organization mirrors the database –
alphabetical order or other logical orientations. The arrangement is our own
however, and the collector supplies the narrative. As such, we can “write our own
biography” as Rob Fleming, the record collecting character of the Nick Hornby novel
High Fidelity observes. Of his collection, Fleming comments:
It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique
thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful,
more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in;
there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have
studied at school, including music.5
Beyond the narratives of the artists or the creation of the music, sorting by
alphabetical order or other more traditional or logical categories, there can also be
more esoteric personal arrangement:
I have a couple thousand records, and you have to be me – or at least, a doctor of
Flemingology – to know how to find any of them. If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni
Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the autumn of 1983,
and thought better of giving it to her for reasons I don’t really want to go into. 6
Fleming’s sentiment echoes Walter Benjamin’s ordering the “chaos of memories” by
rearranging his books on a shelf. In the essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin
writes “for what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has
accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order.”7 Our objects (or
data) need order to make sense and construct meaning, even if the order is apparent
only to the collector.
Colin Brooke has observed that Benjamin’s boxed books resemble Manovich’s
database in “the construction of narrative, of narratives plural, from the raw
syntagmatic materials of the database.”8 He adds that the more a collection looses is
peculiar personal or nostalgic qualities, the more it resembles the database. Like the
fictional Fleming and the very real Benjamin, he finds that logical patterns are
arguably not the only narrative to be found in the ordering of objects. Beyond
records or books, Brooke has found practical classroom application in approaching
weblog software as a collection of sorts, in which academic conversations can be
traced by citations to specific articles or debates.9
As new media becomes more ubiquitous, the conflict between the logic of the
database and the need for narrative will become more apparent, just as the desire
for the physical object will increase as storage of data becomes simpler and more
microscopic. We see this already in the remediation and reproduction of album
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 83.
Ibid., 55.
7 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays & Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 60.
8 Colin Brooke, Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media (Creskill: Hampton Press, Inc., 2009),
109.
9 Ibid., 110.
5
6
cover art and liner notes on iTunes and other digital music vendors, reminding us of
a tangible object, something we long to hold in our hands.
While digitalization has made the physical object less immediate, our ability to seek
out, find, view and acquire these objects has been enhanced by new media and the
logic of the database. Much of our time is spent sifting through, polishing and
organizing data, sometimes for our benefit, sometimes for the benefit of
corporations like Amazon.com or online communities & social networks. While
Manovich notes indexing may be a “hobby” (a somewhat dismissive term) to some,
he appears to orient this as more of an act of labor than leisure. Brooke’s study
Lingua Fracta elevates this above a mere labor/leisure activity, into something that
may approach an art form by developing rhetorical or narrative skills.
With that in mind, the creation of playlists in iTunes or other music databases can
be viewed as a construction of narrative as well. A hard drive can store far more
music than our shelves can bear, but some skill must be applied to finding and
arranging the music in a way that makes sense to the listener. iTunes allows the
user to rate individual songs and albums, invent genres for classification, make
notes and other details which personalize the experience. The information entered
by the user allows Apple to make recommendations for purchase and aids in the
construction of “Genius” playlists in which other songs similar to the one selected
are compiled into a list for listening. This allows an increased familiarity with the
contents of one’s collection and enhances the ability to find connections within,
across and outside the database.
Writing Collecting: Justification & Ideas for Practice
Whether cognizant of the fact or not, we are engaging in collecting – be it tagging
photos, organizing wikis, social networking or downloading music. A number of
scholars have already written important works on how this reality might be applied
to pedagogy or community writing. In addition to the studies by Rice and Brooke
mentioned earlier, Marcel O’Gorman’s E-Crit also explores teaching practices that
draw on “modes of cognition.”10 These writings partly inform my focus on the
means of invention and the connection-making process that sparks that “aha”
moment.
My concept of crate digging owes much to Rice’s Rhetoric of Cool in particular, and
not only because he displays a deft knowledge of music history. Rice singles out the
year 1963 as a “supposed rebirth” in composition studies and frames his book
accordingly. Expanding outward, the early sixties saw a momentous shift in terms of
the “language” of popular culture. Rice identifies this as “cool,” but “hip” might be a
more appropriate term for the undercurrent that has long driven popular music and
culture in the United States, becoming mainstream in the 1960s. Indeed, hip and its
origin in the word “hipped,” imply being informed at another level.
The early sixties are where popular culture (with its language of hip) and
advertising converged for the first time. The post-WWII consumer society was
Marcel O’Gorman, E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007), 76.
10
initially driven by the mass production of household goods – ovens, refrigerators
and other domestic appliances, one of the reasons that the post-war 1940s and
1950s are often painted in the popular imagination as a time of conformity and easy
suburban life; women in the home and men in grey flannel suits, hats & briefcases.
Despite the mythology, the 1950s were probably more of an incubator for concepts
& ideas simmering slightly outside the mainstream that would eventually be
appropriated by advertising in the next decade, whether it was beat poetry & prose,
bohemian fashion, cool & hard-bop jazz or rock and roll. Up to the present,
advertising continues to be driven by cool & hip as concepts, whether its
appropriating youth culture (“cool hunting”), associating products with popular
music, or in a host of other ways. So, beyond it’s practical use in the classroom, The
Rhetoric of Cool contains a certain pedagogical logic in its decoding of the language
of late capitalism.
While the celebration of remixing, creativity, playfulness and nonsense for their
own sake are important, the writer William S. Burroughs (who’s enjoying a
increased scholarly appreciation & revival) among others was aware that language
was also a vehicle for capitalist or state ideology, and there was also a subversive
side to cutting & pasting.11 Writing “cool” or collecting shouldn’t strive to make
students better consumers, but more discerning ones, less susceptible to the
sophisticated techniques of modern advertising. If the Internet is an “ecosystem” as
Lessig writes, then good writing will at least ensure survival if not expert navigation
in RW (read/write) culture. 12
The music/cultural critic Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces follows in the vein of what I
mentioned above. He offers a “secret history” of the Twentieth Century, in which
seemingly unrelated phenomena like Dada, the Situationalists and punk rock are
juxtaposed, with Marcus finding a common thread in their subversion and critique
of Western culture and capitalism. While the book may fall short of convincing the
reader that these movements were closely related or directly inspired from one
another, it’s accessibility and style serve at the very least to introduce a reader to
obscure intellectual movements in an appealing manner. My desired approach to
writing collecting, as well as Marcus’ approach to his book, is apparent in the
following segments:
As algebra, one could as easily say that punk came from two lines in “Tale in Hard
Time,” a song Richard Thompson wrote in 1968 for Fairport Convention, a mostly
quiet, reflective British rock group: “Take the sun from my heart / Let me learn to
despise.” Whether or not a single punk ever heard those words is irrelevant, as
irrelevant as whether or not a single punk ever read a word by the writers whose
adventures make up most of the stories of this book.13
And more generally:
John Leland. Hip: A History. (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 144.
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art & Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin
Books, 2008), 63.
13 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20 th Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1989),78.
11
12
The question of ancestry in culture is spurious. Every new manifestation in culture
rewrites the past, changes old maudits into new heroes, old heroes into those who
should never been born. New actors scavenge the past for ancestors, because
ancestry is legitimacy and novelty is doubt – but in all times forgotten actors emerge
from the past not as ancestors but as familiars. 14
In these excerpts, I hear echoes of both Lessig’s conception of RW culture and the
practice of crate digging. Crate diggers scavenge through the discarded objects of
old media, trying to find both legitimacy in the past and the means with which to
rewrite it creatively. Marcus wrote those words before RW culture came into its
own, and we tend to think of new media as shaking the old order (Read Only or RO)
to its core (and in many ways it has). The way culture itself works largely hasn’t
changed, however. New media only make those connections and the rewriting of the
past more spontaneous and apparent.
An apocryphal, but well known rock meme concerns the Velvet Underground: the
story goes that very few people bought their first record, but every single one of
them started a band. In the writing of popular music, these connections and
branches have always been employed intuitively. When blogging about an up-andcoming band, a reviewer or fan would likely mention their influences (who they
sound like), what “scene” or subgenre they’re associated with (i.e. NYC punk,
Britpop) or if the members had been in other bands. These elements form the
beginning of a narrative (of that band), both oral and written. At the same time, that
narrative is situated within an ongoing, larger narrative of popular music. If that
band has any measure of success, they will likely go on to influence others, be
mentioned when discussing a “scene” or their members will form other bands. In
time, a crate digger may come across their long-forgotten recordings and make new
heroes out of them in a future age by remixing a track or inspiring them to start a
band of their own.
If there is an ongoing, larger narrative of music, then it is certainly not a linear one.
It is moving forward, sideways and backward, reveling in excess then getting back to
basics, looking toward the future, mindful of the present, but grounding itself in the
past, and gleefully employing technology while giddily renouncing it the name of
purity. Rice remarks that “nonlinearity and restricted theses do not work in
conjunction to with one another; the choice for the thesis is a choice against
nonlinearity.”15 Certainly one can write music in traditional essay form or as a
historical narrative, but I think this is why a lot of music writing falls flat. We’d much
rather just push play and plug into a more esoteric nonlinear narrative (the
alternate world that Fleming finds in his collection) that may never properly be
captured in writing. This should not stop us from trying to capture it, however.
Inventive pedagogies using new media should seek to push us in that direction; not
because we need an army of music critics, but because writing in general will come
to resemble more and more that mythical “meta-narrative” of music.
Continuum International Publishing’s 33 1/3rd book series provides a concrete
example of inventive ways to approach writing collecting or music. Each book in the
14
15
Ibid. 19.
Rice, 132.
series has one author writing about one album, with no other firm guideline beyond
that. Some of the books have taken the form of extended liner notes, some are oral
histories of the band, band members or of the recording of the albums, and others
are works of fiction. The series now numbers over 70 books, with more on the way.
Additionally, fiction like Hornby’s High Fidelity (mentioned earlier) and his thematic
essay collection Songbook mirror the 33 1/3rd series’ application of writing music.
Borrowing from premise of the 33 1/3rd series and Hornby’s writing, there are a
number of ways to approach a potential classroom assignment. The most obvious is
to have students write about a particular album, in any manner they wish. Keeping
with the idea of crate digging, the assignment could mandate that students find a
record or object that they’ve come across in a record store, thrift store, garage sale
etc. When the objects are acquired, they are presented to the class with a brief oral
description on how they were found and what drew them to it. Later, after the
writing assignment is complete, the final submissions are compiled to a database,
blog or other medium in which all them can be easily viewed as a whole. Now, with
the students working in groups, the submissions can be arranged or ordered in any
manner they chose, while noting possible connections between the objects or
albums. If “real” connections are difficult to establish, they can be manufactured or
invented. If acquiring or writing about “real” cultural objects or records proves too
difficult, the assignment could be modified by having the students invent completely
fictional albums, and create a meta-narrative of how those albums fit together. The
connections can be established via blog, wiki or other available technology.
This brief sketch of an assignment is inspired by Gregory Ulmer’s concept of
mystory, as I’m favoring heuretics over hermeneutics. This inspiration is derived via
O’Gorman’s notion of the hypericon, as I think the album cover is a logical “pictorial
node” or discursive “inlet/outlet” in which we access music, the meta-narrative of
music or information in general.16 A record cover might prompt a crate digger or
shopper to purchase an album without knowing anything about it. The listener
might stare at an album cover while experiencing the aural pleasures of the music.
More in keeping with O’Gorman’s idea, a user might double click the cover to read
about the album, view tracks, find out about the production methodology, or simply
listen to the music. The visual and aural have long been linked in the music business,
which is why databases like iTunes continue to remediate, replicate & supply album
artwork, liner notes and music videos respectively. It is also why the music industry
has increasingly focused its physical production on expensive box sets, video games
and deluxe reissues of popular albums. In short, the cultural connection of the visual
and aural makes music a useful (if not obvious) tool for teaching writing.
What Does Crate Diggin’ Mean to Me? (Conclusion)
This paper has briefly explored the personal and narrative elements present in the
culture of collecting and examined how it transcends its connotation as an activity of
leisure or a mere hobby. Amassing a collection of data, records, books or nearly any
cultural object requires discernment, patience and resourcefulness, which are
16
O’Gorman, 19.
certainly valuable skills in the classroom or workplace. Further contact with new
media inside or outside of the classroom will improve our ability to construct
meaning when it comes time to unpack our libraries or make sense of the world. In
our current RW culture, this onus has largely shifted to the user from the producer,
whether it’s simply in constructing a playlist, creating a remix or mashing-up songs.
Applying this reality to classroom learning isn’t gimmicky; it’s logical and
responsible.
My concept of crate digging isn’t radically new, as I’ve tried to build on ideas
presented by a broad range of scholars. Crate digging isn’t a blind search - even if
you don’t have a particular acquisition in mind, without some understanding of
connections, one might miss out on some buried treasure or useful resource. What
I’ve called the “meta-narrative” of music and the practice of collecting relied on an
intuitive connection making process, long before the age of hyperlinks and MP3
files. Using a hypericon, new media object or old media artifact as a point of entry
into a network of information seems like a sound approach to writing in the 21st
century, especially in pedagogies that elevate heuretics and non-linearity above
hermeneutics and the thesis. Crate digging looks to the past as well as to the future –
an approach best suited for the RO/RW hybrid economy that Lessig envisions for
the 21st century.