Unmoored from the Flow of Time: Roy Christopher’s Dead Precedents

Roy Christopher’s study of how hip-hop defines the future for Repeater Books is intellectually daring crate digging and a fresh take on the genre

I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren

You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop

A Tribe Called Quest, “Excursions”

“Cyberpunk”, writes Roy Christopher, “might be assimilated, co-opted, and unseen, but its spirit lives on in hip-hop.” Dead Precedents: How Hip-hop Defines the Future is a fascinating study of how hip-hop’s forward-thinking engagement with the past throws nostalgia out the window and advances beyond the present. Sampling is core to this – and not only the technological practice of lifting elements of existing music, but the allusion-rich nature of rap lyrics too. Christopher is an erudite crate digger, with an academic’s attention to sources and details, but writing that is never dry or impenetrable. He communicates his ideas precisely, and a love of hip-hop comes through loud and clear. There’s an immediacy to Christopher’s prose in keeping with how open he is to unearthing fresh angles. Dead Precedents is very much an alive text, that interestingly sits alongside the hauntological explorations of Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds’s Retromania, exploring a more direct dialogue with hip-hop.

Repetition With a Difference

Christopher views hip-hop’s “emcees, DJs, poets, artists, writers” as architects of “futures without pasts” due to the music’s “infinitely recombinant and revisable history”. So while hip-hop constantly engages with its past, the results of those engagements are propulsive instead of stuck in reverse. Although even some who recognise this have tried to displace hip-hop’s innovations by attributing them to other sources, argues Christopher. They reject hip-hop’s deep roots in favour of tracing “its cultural practices of appropriation, sampling, and remixing back to the collages of the Dadaists, the détournements of the Situationists, or the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.”

Burroughs at least remains a valid point of reference, with Christopher citing cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, who discusses the shock-of-the-new practice of scratching as akin to, yet not developed from, the experiments of Burroughs: “Scratch music, whose ghetto innovators turn the phonograph into an instrument, producing an archetypal Eighties music where funk meets Burroughs’ cut-up method.” But the deep roots? It is the African-American tradition of signifyin’ – ‘repetition with a difference’ – that lies at the heart of hip-hop and which perfectly sums up the practice of sampling.

Sonic Tapestries

The major cyberpunk analogy that Christopher draws equates hip-hop with hacking. Indeed, he points out that it is no small coincidence that the crackdown on sampling coincided with the crackdown on hackers. He asserts that more than ever we need hackers of all sorts (including hip-hop practitioners of course) to “unhide the hidden transcripts”, “subvert the accepted narratives” and “sample, manipulate and remix the stories we’re given”. But that is no easy ask. Records like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys would be almost inconceivable today because of having to clear the multitude of samples. It had already become prohibitively expensive by 1991, post-crackdown, with each and every sample having to be cleared. The fact that such pieces were “multi-layered sonic tapestries” – works of art – is lost upon those who only see it in narrow legal terms.

Christopher highlights the absurdity that sampling and looping elements from a single song remains feasible. Only one artist needs to be paid and it is therefore cost effective, yet results in what is basically a cover version. “It’s the difference between creating something new and curating something old.” Music has always lifted from the past, but rarely has it been so punished for it. Rock is mired in reconstructing its own history, yet what is viewed by rockists as authenticity is actually a dearth of original thought and the worst kind of copying. Innovative sample-based hip-hop, on the other hand, has been punished for daring to be futuristic.

The mistrust of the technology may be a factor, however misplaced. There’s a conservative view that someone playing a traditional instrument by hand is keeping it real and they are taking part in an activity that requires ‘talent’. Compared with the person manipulating sounds via technology, where it is the machine doing the work. It’s as if the warning inherent in Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” has been misinterpreted and allowed to bleed into the public consciousness, turning artists into lawyers along the way.

The Haunting of Hip-hop

In Retromania, Simon Reynolds brings up the hauntedness of sampling using the example of Ghost Box label co-founder Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly project and the track “Caermaen”. Jupp sampled a folk singer originally recorded on cylinder in 1908, but manipulated and reconstructed the voice and melody to the point where it became something completely other than it was, along with purposefully unintelligible lyrics. “Effectively, he made a dead man sing a brand-new song”, writes Reynolds. “Someone with a superstitious streak might well have hesitated before taking such a liberty.”

Christopher talks about the (un)dead populating hip-hop, from lyrical allusions to other songs in the canon, through the sampling of music and indeed voices from the past, concluding in the morbid appearance of Tupac on stage at Coachella 2012 as a hologram. “Recordings are of the past but are saved for the future”, explains Christopher. “Sampling, whether by scratching a record or searching an archive, reanimates the past into new futures.” When Reynolds encountered “Caermaen” he was reminded of hearing sample-based hip-hop records for the first time. Reynolds had been struck by the “uncanny friction of the grooves”, that “different studio auras and different eras were being placed in ‘ghostly adjacence'”. It’s a section of Retromania that I often return to and wished could be built upon further. Roy Christopher has done that and more here.

Bear Witness

Christopher trusts his instincts and chases his interests throughout Dead Precedents, pulling in ideas that others wouldn’t even think to bring into a discussion of hip-hop. Which really sets his work apart and makes for some revelatory reading. One of my favourite examples relates to Chuck D and his use of the term ‘witness’. Christopher links this to a witness in occult practices, which he explains is an object “that can link people across times, just as musical samples do”. This activates a portal between ideas that once traversed seems like the most natural thing in the world.

Christopher’s positioning of hip-hop’s timelessness beautifully sums up his argument and recalls Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five where Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time: “Being made up of past bits of recorded music, hip-hop is willfully unmoored from the flow of time.” Roy Christopher explores this unmooring with concentrated passion and intellectual delight. Dead Precedents is an essential read and future reference text for beat heads, hauntologists and recovering cyberpunks everywhere.  

Dead Precedents: How Hip-hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher is published by Repeater Books.