Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future

by Roy Christopher

This book is about is the many ways that the foundations of hip-hop appropriation--allusions and creative language use, as well as technology and self-reference--inform the new millennium.

In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century.

Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop - allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound - would come to define the culture of the new millennium.

Taking in the groundbreaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Burroughs, Dick and Gibson, as well as post-punk and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-culture history of the twentieth century, showcasing hip-hop's role in the creation of the world we now live in.

Dead Precedents uses the means and methods of cyberpunk and hauntology to thoughtfully remap hip-hop's spread from around the way to around the world. Its central argument is that the cultural practices of hip-hop culture are the blueprint to 21st century culture, and that an understanding of the appropriation of language and technology is an understanding of the now. Memories once firmly rooted in places in the past now float free of historical context. We all share memories courtesy of the mass media, and its rampant reproduction of artifacts.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Hip Hop, Theory, Art

238 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 2019

About the author

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan. I’m an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. I have since written about music, media, and culture for everything from magazines to blogs and journals to books. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. As a child, I solved the Rubik’s Cube competitively.

[from http://roychristopher.com]

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books whose headline argument doesn't hold, but so many fascinating mini-arguments and facts and ideas feed into it that are of huge value in themselves.

Hip-Hop as Gothic, Cyberpunk & Afrofurutist...

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly amazing study of hip hop as that which defines the future and the present, often drawing parallels to cyberpunk. Great enthusiasm for old and new hip hop and hip hop culture. The only complaint would be that this book is a little like an academic paper, filled with a lot of quotes and citations, but honestly, it fits into the message of sampling.

[Duarte Cabral · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Taking what's there yet making something new is the current creative impulse. Sampling, stealing, borrowing, disrupting -- anything for art and resistance. You can break the law, just don't break the rules."

Há argumento a ser feito que se calhar a tese de Christopher não tem um nó que a unifique num todo coeso, mas é impossível eu estar minimamente incomodado com isso quando o quase-todo está tão bem escrito e apresentado. Elucidativo apesar de extremamente breve, cheio de boas referências, alusões e vetores a apontar na direção de um horizonte que sempre esteve à nossa vista. Como na boa música do amanhã, Christopher empurra-nos para uma "frankensteinização" do passado, recusando a sua fossilização e assumindo o seu carácter de espetro vivo, e todo a história do hip-hop serve de arquitetura para este futuro (im)possível. O Mark Fisher teria ficado orgulhoso deste texto.

[Tele_well · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of history, theory and hip-hop fiction. The stated aim of the book “to illustrate how hip-hop culture defines 21st century culture” is achieved only to a limited extent, the main points of the book sometimes read as a “montage of loosely assembled parts” (to quote a McLuhan quoted in the book), jumnping in between cyberpunk bits and hip-hop futurisms. Despite that, this is a thought provoking book, at it’s best when browsing in the history of both genres, curating lyrics and writings on hip-hop, cyberpunk characters and scenes, taking cues from media theory, free-flowing in between Tupac Shakur hologram at Coachella, Frankenstein, Electronic Voice Phenomena. If you’ve been following Christophers interviews on frontwheeldrive more than a decade ago (many of them quoted in the book - media theorists, hip hop artists, internet pioneers), you’ll enjoy this though hopping piece.

[Bunny & Mr. K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like a seven course meal. Sit down and chew on the salad known as music. Then you are treated to a soup of Cyberpunk with Sci-Fi dressing. Then it’s a feast of meat made up of Hip-Hop. Ending with a desert menu that you can choose at will and Jesus Christ is the menu fantastic and plentiful.
Roy Christopher takes his love for Hip-Hop and dissects it and shows you all the moving pieces at a monocular level. You learn to appreciate the genera even more.
The correlation he makes between hackers,cyberpunk and the lot is a fantastic look at this subject that’s so overwhelming and immense at times any one could drown in it.
So I beg you, relax, get a pad and a pen and follow the path. It may be windy as all hell but it’s worth every single turn.
By the end of it you should have constructed a playlist of a thousand songs and a TBR list of around fifty books.

[Ricardo Motti · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a fun theory, and it has insightful analysis, but it feels too smart for it's own good. It reads less like a book and more like an academic thesis — to the point it has 100 pages of notes vs 150 pages of actual reading.

[Chase Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blessed be the oncoming unrecognizable era. And blessed be the blueprinters mappers rappers engineers soothsayers hackers turntablists and Roy Christopherz for the sight, sound, and signal of the future.