TAG: HIP HOP

With so much talk of royalty in the air, it’s fitting that this week we salute another monarch: Afrika Bambaataa, the king of electro funk and godfather of hip-hop. In Looking at Music: 3.0 we feature “Planet Rock,” the influential 80’s disco hit he made with the Soulsonic Force. Although Kool DJ Herc is credited with creating hip-hop’s signature sound, specifically the “break,” or extended instrumental beat, it was Afrika Bambaataa who pushed hip-hop into new territory as both a musical style and a cultural movement. Read more

We caught up with Cey Adams, founding creative director of Def Jam Recordings, in MoMA’s Looking at Music 3.0 exhibition gallery, and he talked to us about his work, the emergence of hip-hop, and his unwavering allegiance to the possibilities of culture. Read more

As a grizzled hip-hop vet, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is that curator Barbara London’s Looking at Music series has burned past the 1960s and ’70s to arrive, in its third iteration, in the 1980s and ’90s. Finally, it’s time for my peoples to shine! Read more

An American friend recently introduced me to Sprockets, a fictional West German TV show created by actor and comedian Mike Myers. Myers, wearing round wire-rimmed glasses and a tight black outfit, plays Dieter, the finicky show host. Each show consists of Dieter interviewing different hosts and ends with a session of frantic robotic techno-dancing, an obvious allusion to the German band Kraftwerk, whose track “Electric Café” is the Sprockets theme music. Only when my friend told me how incredibly foreign this particular niche in German culture of the 1970s and 1980s was for him did I realize how very familiar it is to me, as well as to many other Germans. Read more

The idea of looking at music has percolated in my mind for decades. I followed how the violin prodigy Laurie Anderson successfully straddled the worlds of art and music. She cleverly harnessed media to merge visuals with lyrics. Her work unfolded in tandem with technology, as computers and software allowed her to move more fluidly between disciplines. Before long we all stopped seeing a distinction between art and music. Read more