Throw your motherfuckin fingers in the air and wave them motehrfuckers like you just don't care

Avid Hip-hop fans will have recognized Snoop - at the time still Doggy - Dogg's take on stock phrase of old school hip-hop. They will also recall that a stock of phrases that was constantly being reused and recombined was a crucial characteristic of old school hip- hop, a phenomena that survived well into the 90s: for example Jay-z's début album Reasonable doubt (released in 1996) features a lot of quotes from older hip-hop songs. For example 22 twos refers to Can I kick it by A tribe called quest, Dead presidents refers to one of the greatest verses in the history of poetry (from Nas' The world is yours):

I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for dead presidents to represent me

Just by the way: I use this verse to explain Habermas to my students (the two types of political representation characteristic for critical and manipulative publicity). Then there is a quote from Snoop dogg's Murder was the case from Doggystyle in the track D'evils, then there is some quoting of LL Cool J, ODB, and very prominently also Scarface. This is the interesting bit: When Nas recorded The world is yours the chorus was an allusion to the same movie (Tony Montana is inspired by an advertisement that reads "The world is yours" and has a globe made for his house featuring the same slogan) and in the music video a few scenes are taken over from Scarface. The fact that one moment we see Nas in the bathtub scene from the movie and the next moment a child watching this same scene on television shows us that montage here is used reflexively in the tradition of the historical avant-garde.

Intertextuality in hip-hop is not limited only to text, it is also a key stylistic element of the music. The break came with a technological innovation - namely sampling - towards the end of the 80s that enabled DJ's to cut a short part of another song (called a sample), loop it and use it in their music. This can be done very lavishly (like is the case with kitchsy MTV hip-hop of today) or minimalistically, a great example of the latter approach is Heute Nacht by the german rapper Torch:



Here montage is clearly audible, samples are not even looped, but follow one another successively.

To recapitulate: stylistic characteristics of Hip-hop involve use of a stock of material (phrases, samples from music), which are edited (an author was expected to add something innovative to the stock phrase to rise above mediocrity, today music samples are often digitally edited) and through the principle of montage composed into a new whole.

All that has been said has implications for the analysis of the impact of digital editing and distribution techniques (what is sometimes referred to as new media) on art. Walter Benjamin in his essay The work of art in the age of it's technical reproducibility (the translator mistakenly wrote "in the age of technical reproduction" - compare a recent book by Weber on Benjamin's abilities for a comprehensive explanation why the suffix -ibility matters) proposes that we must analyse the impact of new media on art with a view to tendencies in artistic circles that try to achieve with old technology what only the new one makes fully possible. If Benjamin had followed this suggestion himself more closely he would have not made himself vulnerable to justified accusations of technological determinism (among others by Adorno in their correspondence) and been proven wrong by the culture industry which reproduces aura effortlessly by marketing techniques such as branding even in an era of advanced technical reproducibility. Another major problem with Benjamin's essay is that it lumps all forms of art together under the heading of "the work of art"; technical reproducibility of written text was possible since Gutenberg as every technique of mass reproduction like radio, photography and cinema has a different history - it simply can not be justified to treat all art as homogeneous when talking about technical reproducibility of artefacts.

Hip-hop needed digital technology to fully realize the potential that lay dormant. Crucial stylistic elements are echoed in the logic of digital media: since digital media break up content into bits of data, these bits can easily be separated, filters can be used on them and they can be recombined into new units (the famous copy-paste operation familiar to all computer users). It is not true that this was not possible before, just that it was much harder to say apply a filter to analogue media (film sometimes had to be hand-edited one frame at a time, with music the absence of frames made even this luxury unattainable). This has lead to a brief efflorescence of hip-hop music during what is referred to as it's renaissance (roughly '89 to '91) and continued throughout the first part of the 90s; after 96 it stared to fall to pieces because the workings of the culture industry finally gained complete control of production. The main stylistic change has been that montage is no longer used as a reflexive technique in the tradition of the historical avant-garde, but as a latent mode of construction: just as with modern movies that use digital editing, modern hip-hop presents a shiny seamless façade (Roland Barthes once noted that the seamless façade of the Citroën DS was the essence of its mythical character), the affirmative nature of bourgeois culture walks again devoid of its soul, a limp and lifeless zombie, polished to a shine by the workings of the culture industry. If, as Adorno noted, in every artwork there is a vibration between its nature as a product and as something transcendental, the culture industry forcefully destroys this vibration by hiding the nature of the product and trying for complete transcendentality. And the illusion of complete transcendentality is, as it always was, ideological; it takes the form of myth as analysed by Barthes: a perpetual alibi in the service of the status quo.

This shows that a broader view on technology is needed - Benjamin's problem was that he treated technology too narrowly. Technology are not just the tools we use, it is also social organization of labour and the production and reproduction of systematic applicable knowledge (techne in greek). Artefacts do not have a life of their own outside of this tripartite constellation, and such a broader view can shed some light on the question why "technological reproducibility" has not led to the emancipation Benjamin had hoped for.