Hip-Hop Is Going Places

From Smithsonian Magazine, March 18, 2019:

Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor

The creation of good cheese involves a complex dance between milk and bacteria. In a quite literal sense, playing the right tune while this dance unfolds changes the final product's taste, a new study shows. Denis Balibouse and Cecile Mantovani at Reuters report that hip-hop, for example, gave the cheese an especially funky flavor, while cheese that rocked out to Led Zeppelin or relaxed with Mozart had milder zests.

Last September, Swiss cheesemaker Beat Wampfler and a team of researchers from the Bern University of Arts placed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese in individual wooden crates in Wampfler's cheese cellar. Then, for the next six months each cheese was exposed to an endless, 24-hour loop of one song using a mini-transducer, which directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels.

May work better for bacteria than for people. Sounds remarkably like some torture techniques.

"The bacteria did a good job," Wampfler tells SwissInfo. The experts said A Tribe Called Quest's cheese was "remarkably fruity, both in smell and taste, and significantly different from the other samples." . .

It turns out that Wampfler was rooting for the hip-hop cheese to win all along. Now, reports Reuters, he and his collaborators want to expose cheese to five to ten different types of hip-hop to see if it has similar effects.

Wampfler also tells the AFP that he can see marketing cheeses based on the music they matured too. Already, he says people have called requesting cheese that has listened to the blues, Balkan music and ACDC.

Further tests were planned, including sonochemistry and biomedicine. Hip-Hop is going to the university lab! If COVID doesn't delay its study too much.

The musical secret to great Emmental cheese in the study above is revealed below. You can imagine how bacteria would like it. (Don't mention cultural appropriation here, Emmentalers.)

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure that music departments at universities are really up to definitive studies of the effects of various types of music on cheese. Too many variables.

Hip-Hop at Disney moves toward slam poetry

Disney has featured a lot of hip-hop for a long time. Carnegie Hall defines this genre of "music" this way:

Rap is original poetry recited in rhythm and rhyme over prerecorded instrumental tracks. Rap music (also referred to as rap or hip-hop music) evolved in conjunction with the cultural movement called hip-hop. Rap emerged as a minimalist street sound against the backdrop of the heavily orchestrated and formulaic music coming from the local house parties to dance clubs in the early 1970s. Its earliest performers comprise MCs (derived from master of ceremonies but referring to the actual rapper) and DJs (who use and often manipulate pre-recorded tracks as a backdrop to the rap), break dancers and graffiti writers.

You may recall learning about a clip from a Disney cartoon re-make called "The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder" in which young teens declare repeatedly that descendants of slaves deserve reparations. AllHipHop calls it a "rap song".

Love to see those scowling children on Disney Plus, don't you? In fact, in the clips I have seen from this series, people seem to be scowling most of the time.

It's a good thing that the words come from several characters in a rapid-fire manner, because they are pretty vapid in print:

This country was built on slavery -- which means slaves built this country . .

We the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering . . . and continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.

Wenyuan Wu of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation wrote:

Does anyone find this Disney show "The Proud Family" obnoxious? Not to mention the terrible music for the Reparations song , it plagiarizes The 1619 Project. . .

She received a response from one of today's New Segregationists:

It's not music it's slam poetry, and the show wasn't made for you or your audience.

Well, of course the show was intended to be disgusting to her and her audience. Wouldn't want them discovering the content Disney is teaching young kids: reparations; Lincoln didn't want to free the slaves; slaves built the entire nation; etc.

It doesn't seem so long ago that Juneteenth was being hyped as the Actual Independence Day of America, and now kids are being taught to scowl about the holiday and tear down statues of Lincoln instead. At least the Daily Mail says the kids in the cartoon wanted to tear down Lincoln's statue. Whether it's the statue of Lincoln or the town's founder, they are met by jack-booted riot police. You can maybe guess part of the rest.

Last March, this series got an 11% approval rating from audiences at Rotten Tomatoes. Recently it was 24%. But critics gave it a 100% rating both times. Hollywood loves this stuff. Neo picks up a piece from Heather MacDonald describing how the idea of permanent enslavement of black people by white people, even abolitionists, has infected the world of fine art.

Time to cancel Disney and maybe ABC. Sgt. Mom has some thoughts.

On the rap vs. slam poetry question, the video might be categorized as either, I guess. Slam poetry appears to have been invented by a white construction worker in Chicago. It invites audience participation in judging.

The influence of rap on this type of poetry over the years seems pretty clear, and sometimes they may cross over. Slam poetry now sometimes allows a drumbeat in the background, as was used in the Disney video.

Conspiracy Theories in Hip-Hop

One unusual feature in the Disney "Proud Family" clip described above showed a character describing "the Illuminati" and "New World Order" as ongoing beneficiaries of slavery in America. Another character puts a hand over the first character's mouth.

This seemed a little odd to me.

But there is a reference to the hip-hop world in the wiki on the Illuminati and conspiracy theories:

The growing dissemination and popularity of conspiracy theories has also created an alliance between right-wing agitators and hip hop music's left-wing rappers (such as KRS-One, Professor Griff of Public Enemy and Immortal Technique), illustrating how anti-elitist conspiracism can create unlikely political allies in efforts to oppose a political system.

Hmmm. The hand over the mouth in a Disney cartoon . . .

This article traces the discourses that shape and influence hip hop including popular culture, prison culture, Black Muslim ("Five Percenter") religion, and black books subculture. It reveals how hip hop resembles the "cultic milieu," a space where disparate countercultural ideas propagate and create unlikely political alliances. Overall, the article seeks to demonstrate that conspiratorial thinking serves multiple purposes, including addressing legitimate but complex political grievances in contemporary society.

Glenn Loury does rap (sort of)

Compare and contrast to the Disney rap:

"I am a descendant of slaves...I was a beneficiary of the civil rights revolution...I am a product of the Enlightenment, and I am an inheritor of its great traditions: Tolstoy is mine. Dickens is mine. Newton and Maxwell and Einstein are mine." @GlennLoury pic.twitter.com/SlYTKiOpPv

— Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) (@fairforall_org) January 6, 2023

Music

The Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute was linked in the opening article. Doesn't seem real relaxing to me. Don't know why it would be relaxing to bacteria in a wheel of cheese. Then again, I'm not sure that this is the part of Magic Flute those bacteria were exposed to.

Another piece played to a wheel of cheese continuously for months:

Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin

There was also a Techno-exposed cheese and an ambient cheese. In addition to control cheeses.

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend. Something that does not involve continuous loops of a single piece of music.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread was, FBI's Jersey Hustle saved the credibility of the U.S. government. Which explains why the U.S. government is so credible today.

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:01 AM

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