Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 19, Issue 4, Pages 311341

ESSAY

What Chew Know About Down the Hill?: Baltimore Club Music, Subgenre Crossover, and the New Subcultural Capital of Race and Space
Andrew Devereaux

Independent Scholar

Subcultures are just neighborhoods you dont live in. Scott Seward (Seward 2003) Right now theres a lot of futuristic kid shit thats happening on the regional level all across the country. Fools are really dancing, like dancing super hardthere are these new dances all over the place, and you know that when a fourteen-year-old has invented a brandnew dance, the music must be incredibly vital and is going to last another ten or twenty years. Jeff Chang (emphasis added, Chang and Davis 2006)
Neither Here nor There: A Quick Sketch of Where Baltimores At

The HBO crime drama The Wire, created by former Baltimore Sun reporter and author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon, debuted in 2002 to immediate praise for its multifaceted and critical look at the drug war and the gritty realism of its depiction of Baltimores ghettos. Despite never receiving what would be considered excellent ratings, it has attracted a major cult following and tremendous critical success throughout its four seasons, winning numerous Emmy, Edgar, and NAACP Image awards. Simon and his team of writers have moved beyond the usual topics of a crime drama to explore the politics, education system, and economics of contemporary Baltimore. Some of the best writing and analysis of The Wire appears on the blog Heaven and Here, which features several writers posting commentaries on various aspects of the show. In November of 2006, frequent Heaven and Here writer Bethlehem Shoals posted an article entitled The Language Problem, which dealt with

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the dialect and slang of two of the main Season Four drug dealing characters, Chris and Snoop.1 One of the many things The Wire is praised for is the great attention paid to the Baltimore accent by the actors, writers, and speech coaches on the show. Despite agreeing with this praise of the linguistic subtleties achieved by The Wire, Shoals wonders whether in Season Four, specifically with regards to the characters of Snoop and Chris, the slang has become too obscure and the dialect too heavy, rendering Snoop and Chris incoherent at numerous times, and if the viewer is in frequent need of subtitles or closed caption to follow the speech. Shoals uses this as a jumping off point to speculate about the relationship between the spoken language on the show and its increasingly gloomy outlook on Baltimore as the series has progressed: Maybe thats because we know how the story goes; maybe things are really getting worse. Either way, the fact that were presented with any number of characters who are impenetrable, alien, or otherworldly . . . only heightens the sense that these neighborhoods are drifting further and further away. Perhaps were supposed to reach forth and understand them, but this is markedly different from learning the workplace rhythms of life in The Pit, or coming to understand Omars code. This isnt just a ghetto, where things are different from what we know; I honestly at times think that were supposed to be peering into the pale of society, where vacants, mutant drug gangs, [and] child soldiers dominate the landscape and the parallel world is fast deteriorating. If this is the case, then the linguistic gulf is a necessary effect, one that should perhaps be making us think theres a lot else we barely grasp. No matter how well we knew the Barksdale crew (Shoals 2006). There is a remarkable amount of material in this quotation that speaks not only to the current conditions of Baltimore ghettos, but how people outside Baltimore might come to interpret depictions of these ghettos in popular culture, and most importantly, whether these spaces, both real and imagined, even fit the loose definition of what a ghetto is supposed to be. Is Shoals correct in speculating that Simon is creating a vision for the viewer not just of Baltimore ghetto life, but the very pale of society or a parallel world [that] is fast deteriorating? If so, and if this is indeed a thematic goal of the series, then Shoals would be right to wonder if the linguistic gulf that is created between character and viewer renders this Baltimore world untranslatable.

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This idea of the Baltimore ghetto as a parallel world beyond the viewers grasp, existing outside of the possibility for translation, is supported by Shoals description of the Season Four drug dealers as alien and otherworldly. It is as if the Baltimore ghetto the viewer sees is not on earth at all, neither here nor there, or in any spatial area the audience could conceive of. In 2002, the same year as the debut of The Wire, a very real (or surreal) thing occurred in Baltimore that also signaled to many the otherworldly nature of Baltimores drug, crime, and poverty problems. The city was given a simple solution:

Believe

The Believe Baltimore campaign was launched in 2002 by Mayor Martin OMalley in partnership with the Baltimore Community Foundation, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, various business leaders, health care organizations and, of course, the Baltimore Police Department. One cannot fault city leadership for searching for a creative solution to Baltimores mounting problems in the late 1990s/early 2000s. As a report on the campaign notes, when the Believe message was conceived Baltimore was at the top of all the wrong lists for US cities: first in homicides, first in violent crime, first in property crime, first in heroin deaths and addicts, and near the top in instances of sexually transmitted diseases.2 The report also points to the huge negative demographic and economic shifts that occurred in the 1990s, with a population drop of 12% (the most of any major US city for that decade) and a job decline of 17%. Baltimore is no stranger to interesting slogans. Previous ones whose remnants are still visible in scratched-up stickers and torn posters throughout the city include The City That Reads and The Greatest City in America. The newest one which is about to be unveiled in a mega ad campaign announced recently is Baltimore: Get In On It, aimed at attracting new residents and tourists from outside the city limits. Although the Believe slogan was aimed directly at residents, it was at times just as vague to Baltimoreans as it was to out-of-towners. Increasingly seen as a public relations campaign that was heavy on advertising costs and light on drug treatment and public works projects, the campaign was mocked by many (parody stickers and posters that appeared were Behave, beLIEve, and Beehive), and with the recent Maryland gubernatorial election victory by OMalley, the campaign seems to have been dropped completely in early 2007 by interim mayor Sheila Dixon (Fricke 2007).

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While reading the article on the language of The Wire, with reference to the alien nature of its characters, I could not help but connect the increasingly distant depiction of the drug culture on the series and the vague solution offered in the Believe campaign. Believe? Believe in what? Are we past the point of specifics; are we beyond solutions? Is there nothing to believe in but belief, the kind of pure faith that believers in UFOs and aliens have? The campaign in its vague optimism ironically endorsed a defeatist position: we are past the point of no return in Baltimore. The phrase this isnt just a ghetto in the Heaven and Here article speaks not only to The Wires portrayal of Baltimore, but City Halls own view of the city. Recent popular culture depictions of Baltimore explicitly illustrate what the Believe campaign implied: welcome to another universe. I would argue that the dilapidated, abandoned, drug-addled depressed neighborhoods of Baltimore are not depicted in popular culture as ghettos (remember, that is not enough) but as hyperghettos: areas of extreme danger and mayhem that seem to signify a post-apocalyptic/post-Reaganism. This really does raise a problem of translation, for as Shoals points out, should we really need the subtitles to follow along, or are we not supposed to be getting it? This problem of translation emerges when we try to understand the recent crossover of the subgenre of dance music that dominates Baltimores urban music scene, Baltimore Club music. Now a more white, more middle class, more hip, and definitely more out-of-town set of DJs, producers, and club-goers from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York are beginning to embrace the minimal, proto-break beat, early-House influenced music. I began to ask myself not only why the music has gained an outside audience, but what does this say about the look and feel of Baltimore to that audience, what is its cultural capital among the hip, and how does its imagery of hyperghettos translate to a packed dance floor in Manhattan? One should begin the Baltimore Club story with the rise of House music, where disco had gone to both hide from mainstream backlash and to expand its sound. The original House audience was black and queer, and the clubs were mostly underground. House music by the late 1980s had found its way outside of its birthplace of Chicago and was becoming popular in the dance clubs of most US cities, along with the House-like sounds of Techno from Detroit and Garage from New York City. Specifically, the subgenre of hip-house, which fused house music with rap vocals or rap-like chanted vocals, became popular in Baltimore. While most US cities had a subculture of House music in its dance clubs, for Baltimore, House music was the culture for clubgoers in the 1980s.

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DJ Frank Ski, who had worked with Miami Bass pioneers 2Live Crew, began DJing black dance clubs in Baltimore like Paradox and Godfreys (what DJ Technics in his account terms ghetto clubs.) Frank Ski would play just the break in popular hip-house tracks, particularly songs that sampled the hit soul song Think by Lyn Collins, a James Brown affiliated singer. Sampling of the drums from Think had been made popular in the now legendary hip-house song It Takes Two by Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock (1988) which made the popular music charts and received mainstream hip-hop radio play. The other drum break that was cropping up in a lot of tracks was from disco group Gazs popular 1978 track Sing Sing. DJs in the ghetto clubs began to imitate Frank Skis playlist, as he was becoming popular in clubs and on local hip hop radio stations. These DJs, such as Scottie B., Shawn Caesar, DJ Booman, and DJ Technics, to name a few, began producing their own tracks by sampling the breaks used in the popular hip-house tracks (such as Frank Skis Doo Doo Brown or Cajmeres Percolator) and imitating their stripped down, 130 BPM speed, non-bassline format. These early tracks created a style and a blueprint that has lasted in the black dance clubs to this day, with not much variation in production.3 Baltimore Club did not fall from the sky into the club scene. It is important to note that it was a long established history of DJs in Baltimore favoring certain sub-styles of House music that made the stylistic evolution of the Baltimore Club sound possible. Since these first Baltimore-produced tracks received play in the clubs in 19901991, the Baltimore Club scene existed in relative obscurity from the rest of the country. It even existed in its own bubble at home; the Baltimore Club scene stayed separate from the rise of rave culture made up of mostly white middle class youth, which hit the United States in the early 1990s and began to become popular among white youth in Baltimore and its surrounding suburbs. The Baltimore Club scene was not ripped away from House overnight, and there was still much interplay between the two. Unruly Records owners Scottie B. and Shawn Caesar, in the early 1990s when Baltimore Club was gaining its own identity, promoted drag-queen Miss Tony (a.k.a. Anthony Boston) as the first major star of the scene, and Miss Tonys popularity in the clubs and on local radio helped bring both House and Baltimore Club fans together. While the rave scene declined in popularity with the white middle class music subculture in Baltimore in the late 1990s, the Baltimore Club culture remained steady among the black dance culture.4 Then in 2002, the isolation of the scene ended, not from the efforts of Baltimore DJs, but

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because of a white DJ duo from Philadelphia. Hollertronix, comprised of DJs Diplo (Wes Pentz) and Low Budget (Mike McGuire), began a party by renting out a Ukrainian social club at night in North Philadelphia (nicknamed by party attendees the Ukie Club).5 The Ukie Club parties started small with just a few friends, but eventually turned into a major hot spot for both hipsters and hip-hop fans. Diplo and Low Budget combined numerous genres in their DJ sets at the Ukie Club Hollertronix parties. What unified their choices of genres was their identification with regional urban club styles. In other words, Hollertronix were playing local styles of music that were largely not popular outside of the cities they developed in: Grime from East London, Screw from Houston, Bhangra from Punjab, Baile Funk from Rio de Janeiro, and Baltimore Club, among others. The popular retail (and trend setting) Web site for DJs, TurntableLab.com, heard a Hollertronix mix tape and decided to release it in 2003 through an independent label Turntable Lab was starting, Money Studios. The mix tape, title Never Scared, soon garnered a buzz with New York DJs, and the popularity surprised both Turntable Lab and Diplo: It was way bigger than I imaginedwe were just selling it out of the back of our car with little Kinkos cut-outs, then Turntable Lab was really into it. It was something to help them start their label off too. Then people just got into it, the right people bought it. It seemed like nobody could find it, but all the press people got a copy so it spread through New York really quick. People were into it (Drake 2004). Besides the Never Scared mix tape, several other factors in 20032004 led to a rise in popularity among the indie subculture with Hollertronix. In general, the mash-up style of DJing was gaining media attention, as Danger Mouses infamous Grey Album mix of Jay-Z vocals from The Black Album over music from The Beatles White Album made contrasting genres within the same mix a talked about new DJ style. Also, Diplo released another mix tape that got a lot of attention, featuring Sri Lankan-British vocalist M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam, daughter of Tamil Tiger rebel leader Arul Pragasam) titled Piracy Funds Terrorism in 2004. Once again, the tape mixed an enormous breadth of genres. It also used the Baltimore Club technique of making crude remixes of popular songs without proper copyright; Diplo mixed M.I.A.s vocals over Madonna, Prince and Jay-Z as well as Baile Funk and Bhangra tracks.

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After fifteen years of isolation, new media attention among the indie subculture, as well as some more mainstream media outlets, revealed Baltimore club to the rest of the world. Diplo has brought black Baltimore Club pioneer DJ Technics to New York to DJ at hip Manhattan clubs, and other Baltimore DJs for the first time are receiving offers to DJ at hip East Coast clubs. Hollertronix has moved into the spotlight in the DJ subculture, and has moved beyond the Ukie Club to DJ at the hippest dance clubs in Philadelphia and New York, and has also booked around the world on several tours. The mash-up multigenre style of Hollertronix has mushroomed and several other key players since 2003 have embraced Baltimore Club music in Philadelphia and New York. Baltimore Club has not only crossed the Mason-Dixon line, but has also crossed racial and class lines. To locate the possible reasons for this crossover, I will need to explore the spatial elements of Baltimore Club, the cultural geography of Baltimore and the relationship it has to the Baltimore Club scene, the issues surrounding its possible subcultural capital and sub-genre spin-offs, and the arguments within the scene over authenticity.
Where My Peoples from Up the Hill?: Spatial Theory, Hip Hop, and Baltimore Club

Before looking intensely at the crossover phenomenon, one must first understand the spatial/geographical elements of Baltimore Club that cross borders. What kind of cultural work does this music do with space in the first place? How does it translate its geography to its own homegrown audience even before these signs and symbols are translated up Interstate 95? The spatial dimensions of hip-hop are explored extensively in Murray Formans The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and HipHop. Forman analyzes hip-hop from its earliest roots through its rise in popularity and its eventual crossover and mainstream success, all with a close eye on the construction of the hood as a spatial signifier in hip-hop whose meaning has been contested and altered over time. The inroad for Forman to the spatial dimensions of hip-hop is the use of spatial signifiers in raps lyrics. In the introduction, Forman argues: Raps lyrical constructions commonly display a pronounced emphasis on place and locality. Whereas blues, rock and R&B have traditionally cited regions or cities, contemporary rap is even more specific, with explicit references to particular streets, boulevards

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and neighborhoods, telephone area codes, postal zip codes or other sociospatial information. Rap artists draw information from their regional affiliations as well as from a keen sense of what I call the extreme local, upon which they base their constructions of spatial imagery (Forman 2002: xvii). The concept of the extreme local neatly articulates the shared dimensions that all of hip-hops lyrical uses of space have. It also differentiates hip-hops use of space from other genres; the local is not just a city or neighborhood, as the extreme emphasizes that they mark the spaces with as much information as possible (area codes, block numbers, etc.). The relation between space and hip-hop lyrics is not just one way, as in the naming of spaces; geography can shape the lyrical content as well. In a chapter titled Space Matters, Forman talks about the limitations of discussing space only as a container for our actions. Forman sees space as not just a background to experience, but as an active force in shaping our experience. In Formans opinion, hip-hop lyricists articulate this well: In hip-hops physical and localized expressions and in raps narratives, the authority of individual experience is generally built upon what is conceived as the self-evident truth of natural or material spaces, where events occur and experience is registered. To reduce the myriad of experiential testimonies . . . to a basic formula, the statement this happened to me is often and increasingly reinforced by the spatial qualifier here (23). Of course, the this happened to me here lyrical equation is just one of many ways hip-hop has been able to illustrate geographical concerns. Song titles, album titles, album artwork, MC/DJ/group names, and video settings all can convey a specific extreme local to the audience. Although I will touch on all of these aspects in Baltimore Club music, for the moment I want to look specifically at Formans lyrical equation, as it represents the biggest break between hip-hop and Baltimore Club, and how they each illustrate space in the music. With a few exceptions, most of these coming from hybrid Baltimore Club styles, the majority of Baltimore Club tracks do not contain verse or raps, but are lyrically constructed around one or two chanted refrains. The refrains are chanted ad infinitum, and many times are the titles of the tracks (examples: I Just Wanna Fuck contains its title as the refrain, as does

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Watch Out for the Big Girl). Although there are a variety of categories that would denote what types of phrases become the chanted refrains in Baltimore Club tracks, there are a few major categories that catch a large number of tracks under their umbrella. One type of category of refrains would be sexual phrases (I Just Wanna Fuck, Yo Yo Where the Hos At), another includes boastful challenges (Dont Make, Tote It), and a third could be called hood refrains, which contain multiple spatial signifiers and shout-outs to various neighborhoods. The hood tracks, best exemplified in What Chew Know About Down the Hill, Down the Hill Remix, Oh My God, and the crossover tracks Murdaland/Bring Walls Down, simplify Formans hip-hop lyrical equation in a fascinating way. Due to the lack of lyrical narrative, given that there are no verses, the this happened to me identifier is often absent from Baltimore Club refrains. In a version of a DJ Manny track What Chew Know About Down the Hill by black DJ and Baltimore Club legend Rod Lee, Lee creates a loop of fourteen-year-old rapper Lil Jay reciting the title over a classic stripped-down Baltimore Club beat. With the absence of a narrative verse in the track, the spatial equation of the chanted refrain in What Chew Know About Down the Hill is not hip-hops usual this happened to me here. Baltimore Club offers instead a relentless here/here/here/here, as persistent as the kick drum. Instead of the extreme local modifying the described event of the lyricist, the extreme local is the entire focus of the vocal track in the Baltimore Club hood songs. What makes What Chew Know About Down the Hill (and a few other hood tracks I will look at in a moment) even more important to a spatial analysis of Baltimore Club is that Rod Lee adds a second extreme local, switching the refrain in the second half of the track to where my peoples from up the hill? before switching back one last time at the end to the down the hill chant. Where is down the hill exactly? This is still up for argument. Although it could generally refer to any hill in Baltimore, or the overall northwest to southeast slope of the city, one East Baltimore neighborhood is often times referred to as down the hill. In his Baltimore hip-hop/Club blog Government Names (which will be discussed at length in section four), Baltimore City Paper writer Al Shipley, while reviewing a remix of Down the Hill by DJ Verb, states: [there are] various tracks about being from down the hill or up the hill, and I have to admit, I still have no idea what it really means. I mean, Baltimore is full of hills and neighborhoods named after hills (Cherry Hill, Druid Hill, Butchers Hill, Federal Hill), but I dont know

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if down the hill refers to a specific part of town (Shipley, Government Names 2006). In the comments section for this post, two readers post that it refers to East Baltimore when the phrase is specifically down the hill. This theory of the meaning of down the hill seems to fit perfectly into the extreme local concept, with the song representing (or repping) one particular hood. The extreme local is problematized, however, with the second refrain. Lil Jay switches from representing down the hill to calling out up the hill. With no exact neighborhood corresponding to up the hill, he seems to be acknowledging the rest of the city. Instead of the song referencing a few extreme local particulars, Lil Jay in only two chanted phrases is able to construct the entire city. The remix of What Chew Know About Down the Hill, called Down the Hill Remix, takes the city construction model even further. Rod Lee cuts up Lil Jays voice at the opening so the phrase becomes down the hill, down the hill, down the-down the hill, etc. Then, after another vocalist (possibly Rod Lee himself) asks Lil Jay to break it down, Lil Jay begins shouting out housing project and hood names, followed by the second vocalist announcing what area of Baltimore they are in (examples: Westside! Eastside! or Essex!). The effect of the remix is that although the extreme locals become more extreme, i.e., more particular, the listener is painted an even fuller picture of Baltimore, with Lil Jay even venturing into the extreme southern neighborhood of Cherry Hill and the eastern bordering Baltimore County area known as Essex. This effect appears in all of what I have named the hood tracks in Baltimore Club. In Oh My God, a club classic that has been remixed endlessly, the vocalist says a particular neighborhood is in the house, followed by a sampled vocal snippet of someone saying oh my god. Oh My God has an even more extensive list of neighborhoods than Down the Hill Remix. Due to the fact that Baltimore Club music (usually) lacks narratives and therefore the this happened to me of hip-hop lyrics, there is much more room and play for the here function. The local represents Baltimore Clubs ability to map whole sections of Baltimore in a track, lending the weight of an entire city behind an already heavy driving beat. Without using grandiose narratives like other musical genres, Baltimore Club can invoke a place with just a simple phrase. Although this could be seen as just a clever linguistic device in the music, I would argue that the spatial meanings of Baltimore Club, with regards to the extreme local, go beyond simple clever comparisons to hip-hop lyrical tropes. The idea of piecing together a city in words, and then using that soundtrack to invite that

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citys residents to dance, has a larger significance once we view this idea in light of Baltimores cultural geography in the era of Baltimore Club. To understand Baltimores cultural geography during this era, we can turn to the work of David Harvey. Harvey helped introduce the concept of cultural geography, and even more specifically has published a number of works that could be labeled as Marxist cultural geography. In books such as The Condition of Postmodernity in 1989, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference in 1996, and Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development in 2006, Harvey sought to analyze how neoliberal global economic frameworks were using spaces differently; over-developing some areas while systematically tearing others down. Harvey taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for several decades stretching from the early 1970s until the early twenty-first century and witnessed firsthand the collapse of Baltimores shipping and steel industries as well as the rise in drug use and the violence and gang culture that came with it. He references Baltimore frequently in his work, as an obvious victim of neoliberal global capitalism. In his 2000 book Spaces of Hope, Harvey lays out the devastating facts of Baltimores economic decline since he moved there in 1969, deeming contemporary Baltimore an awful mess (Harvey 2000: 133). Harvey cites the population decline and job loss due to deindustrialization as the major factors in Baltimores extreme rise in poverty, crime, and neighborhood dilapidation. Although this is the usual story told about Baltimores late twentieth century decline, Harveys attention to the geography of difference allows him to notice the other side to the story, or what he calls feeding the downtown monster (141). Feeding the downtown monster is Harveys term for the over development of the downtown area in an attempt to jumpstart the economy. What really occurs is huge corporations exploit the tax breaks of developing in this area without providing any substantial job markets, and the rest of Baltimore is subsequently ignored for development projects. Downtown development projects have left areas of the city completely gutted, fractured, and abandoned: In 1970 there were circa 7,000 abandoned houses in Baltimore City. By 1998 that number had grown to 40,000 out of a total housing stock of just over 300,000 units. The effect on whole neighborhoods has been catastrophic. City policy is now oriented to large scale demolition. . .The official hope is that this will drive the poor and the underclass from the city. The idea of reclaiming older

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neighborhoods particularly those with a high quality of housing stock for impoverished populations has been abandoned even though it could make much economic and environmental sense (135). Harvey depicts a city that is torn apart, one in which entire neighborhoods lay vacant. He also indicts a government and business community that makes no attempt to reinvest in these communities.6 If neoliberal economics and government dispassion has ripped apart Baltimores neighborhoods, creating a disjointed outline of a city, then Baltimore Club is putting it back together on a symbolic level through musical constructions. Instead of drawing borders and boundaries by just giving shout-outs to certain hoods, Baltimore Club creates inclusive songs that allow anyone on the dance floor to feel like a part of a collective scene. It is as if the Baltimore Club dance clubsthe Paradox, Club Choices, Club Fantasysare loci for the reconstruction of a ruptured city, and the hood refrains are calls to the crowd letting them know that they belong. Baltimore Club is an instance of modern black urban music that would serve as an interesting counter to the concerns of Paul Gilroy from The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness about the relationship between hood and nation (or here and there). According to Forman, Gilroy doubts the ability of the hood in hip-hop to connect across space to other hoods: [Gilroy believes]. . .so much territorial antagonism is evident in the strands of rap that privilege the spatialities of gang culture and turf affiliations. Gilroy expresses his perplexity at the closed counters that the hood represents, suggesting that its centripetal spatial perspectives inhibit dialogue across divided social territories and cultural zones (Forman 2002: 186). In a city where divided spatial territories are a new reality of a carvedup geography, Baltimore Club has been able to bridge spatial gaps to connect black communities through a shared musical vocabulary and performance experience in the club. I will argue in the next section that regionality and place are important markers of authenticity in black dance music, and regionality can be a useful tool to market a new subgenre of black dance music. The opening of this article quotes hip-hop journalist and scholar Jeff Chang, in conversation with DJ Shadow (a.k.a. Josh Davis), commenting on the rebirth of the regional in new hybrid dance and hip-hop styles across the

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country. Shadow answers Chang with a description of the subgenre scene in his area, the San Francisco Bay areas Hyphy movement: I also think its nice that rap has been around long enough to where its sort of OK to say that New York has its history, Atlanta has its history, Houston has its history, the Bay Area has its history, and its no longer the case where one region is being looked at as better or worse than the next. I was just overseas and everybody wanted to hear me talk about Hyphy and I would say, Right off the bat, Im not the Hyphy spokesperson. I dont go to showsI hardly even go to clubsIm a good ten years older than most of the people in the scene, if not more. But what I do tell them is, Look, in the same way that you can be over here and listen to and understand bounce music but it really helps to go to New Orleans, and you can have all your Chopped and Screwed CDs but it really helps to go to Houston to understand, its the same with Hyphy. From Sly Stone to Digital Underground to now, Hyphy is a witty, quirky take on things. And you have to be in the Bay and know the diversity of the Bay and its weird geographic shape, with its pockets of extreme poverty right next to pockets of extreme wealth, and all that weird interplay that creates the Bay as a whole (Chang and Davis 2006). In this quote, DJ Shadow acknowledges several subgeneric music scenes that are beginning to crossover into the mainstream hip-hop market, but also points to the fact that to really understand these scenes you have to understand the geography of where they come from and the circumstances of the people who create them. The mutually experienced collective energy of a city can fuel a whole club scene. However, he also notes that this can lead to unending arguments over authenticity in the music. The links between a style of music and where it is from are becoming extremely important, and those trying to claim a little more authenticity can manipulate the contours of its origin.

Ooh I Like That Music, That Get-up Gutter Music: The Subcultural Capital of Baltimore Club or Why Would White Dudes From Philly and NYC Rock Baltimore Beats?

In Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Sarah Thornton discusses Pierre Bourdieus concept of cultural capital, or

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knowledge that is accumulated through upbringing and education which confers social status (Thornton 1996: 10). Building off of his schema of cultural capital, economic capital and social capital (including the many subcategories that branch off of these), Thornton adds the concept of subcultural capital. In order to study the culture of underground dance clubs and raves in Great Britain, Thornton uses the concept of subcultural capital to study how the youth involved in this subculture use the media, style, genre formation, and taste hierarchies to create a status system not unlike a high culture status system. Thornton sees a major problem with cultural studies that strictly define high culture as vertically ordered and popular culture or subculture as horizontally ordered (8). In other words, the aesthetic order of high culture is studied, while popular cultures are studied without regard to rankings or hierarchies. Thornton wants to study underground dance club culture taking into account these vertical distinctions, the hierarchies that form within the culture, and the strategies and techniques used to alter the culture in order to gain more subcultural capital. She seeks an analysis explicitly concerned with cultural change (9). Thornton looks at common differences between white dance music and black dance music, and what they signify: Black dance music is said to maintain a rhetoric of body and soul despite its use of sampling and technology. . .whereas white or European dance music is about a futuristic celebration and revelation of technology to the extent that it minimizes the human among its sonic signifiers. . . Although both bear witness to Trans Atlantic influences, black dance musics are more likely to be rooted in local urban scenes and neighbor hoods. Even gestures to the black diaspora point to local subcultures and city placesNew York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington. These specific places anchor and authenticate music, render it tangible and real. White dance musics, by contrast, are more likely to be global, nationless, or vaguely pan-European (7274). For Thornton, body and place give black dance music a large cache of subcultural capital among white consumers. The black body signifies the authentic act of dancing/performing: the grain of the voice, the thumping and grinding bass, the perceived honesty of the performance (73). The trouble lies in needing to tie this body to a particular place to anchor the authenticity, while still trying to play into the rootlessness of white European dance

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aesthetics. Thornton finds that this tension never completely resolves itself; thus the infatuation with certain black dance subgenres or performers can only be short-lived in the rave scene. This means subcultural capital must be continually exchanged for a newer, hipper style whose contradictions have not been fully exposed. The most important purveyor of subcultural capital in music for young white consumers in America in the past twenty years has undoubtedly been hip-hop. These consumers have successfully defined the authenticity of the black body through the increasingly powerful medium of the music video, and have anchored this authenticity in the various hoods of each major city. Hip-hop in the late 1980s early 1990s was creating a shared culture among black youth and those white youths who were in the know. However, in the late 1990s, something happened to hip-hop. It became mainstream. Bakari Kitwanas new book, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America analyzes the crossover of hip-hop into mainstream white America. Others have studied white peoples involvement in hip-hop, but Kitwana is interested in the current climate where hip-hop is mainstream youth culture. Kitwana parallels the crossover of hip-hop from a black urban counterculture to the best selling mainstream music with the death of what he calls the old racial politics. An example is provided in Kitwanas analysis of Billy Wimsatts (a.k.a. Upski) concentric attitudinal circles of white kids involvement in hip-hop that Wimsatt used in his 1994 revolutionary book Bomb the Suburbs. In short, these four circles were: 1) at the center, those involved with the actual art of hip-hop and who do the art with black hip-hop fans, 2) those with peripheral contact with real hip-hop, 3) free-floating fans who listen to other forms of music, and 4) pure consumers or wiggers who harbor resentment of black hip-hoppers while consuming their culture (Kitwana 2005: 54). Kitwana believes that mainstream cultures embrace of hip-hop has made the divisions between these circles less rigid. Now it seems almost all white youth could be grouped in category 2, as it is difficult to avoid contact with the art of hip-hop in America no matter what race or class you are. Also, Kitwana points out that the neoliberal politics of the last thirty years has caused a new underclass of poor whites, both urban and suburban, who have embraced hip-hop, rather than rock and roll, as the culture with which to voice their discontent. Murray Forman echoes Kitwanas point, arguing that today, many top rap acts like their audiences hail from middle-class or more affluent suburban enclaves, complicating the commonly held impressions about the

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music, the artists who produce it, and its origins (Forman 2002: xix). The expansion of hip-hop into a mainstream pop market has, in Formans view, render[ed] its lingering status as ghetto music increasingly problematic (xix). I argue that the mainstreaming of hip-hop has pushed the subcultural elite, the tastemakers of youth culture, to find more authentic and ghetto musics to replace the now pop hip-hop. How do white youths go about discovering new musical movements, which ones do they pick, and how do they use the music once it is identified as desirable? Kembrew McLeod has offered an excellent study of how subgenre formation can reveal how subcultural communities are built around certain consumer needs as well as racial appropriation of music. McLeod identifies five reasons for the proliferation of subgenres in electronic/dance music. New technologies and growing interest in electronic music has created subgenres that sound different from one another. Naming new subgenres is a good marketing strategy for record labels, whether to boost a slowing market for an old subgenre or to introduce a new sound that is unfamiliar to consumers. The larger economic/cultural force of what McLeod refers to as accelerated consumer culture constantly seeks novelty. Just as Thornton argued, subgenres can lose authenticity quickly, especially if they are embraced by the mainstream, which accelerates changes in taste. Cultural appropriation occurs when a white subculture renames a subgenre in order to make it less black; two examples are hip-hop to trip-hop, and jungle to drum and bass. Creating names for subgenres is also a useful way to hoard cultural capital. If subgenre names change at a rapid pace, it is a way to keep people who are not completely immersed in the culture of a scene from entering that scene. McLeods theory works not only to help us understand how Baltimore Club as a subgenre name functions once it crosses over, but it also helps us to understand why it remained isolated for so long. McLeod describes the economics of subgenres and the relationship between the industry and the media (which I will explore in depth in the next section). McLeod makes it clear that just because it is a subculture, that does not make it economically pure: The music media are highly dependent on the music industry, for obvious reasons. In much the same way new artists and genres are constantly being thrown against the wall by record companies that hope to make their investment stick, music magazines similarly rely on hot new artists and sounds to sell their magazines. The same is true

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of more underground networks of distribution, where small, independent record companies and fanzines dominate the scene. Whether the music is distributed by multinational corporations or grassroots indie labels, the importance of selling their products is a concrete reality (McLeod 2001: 68). Perhaps one of the reasons Baltimore Club has remained isolated and out of reach from appropriation by the music industry is its resistance to normal economic and business models in its production. In the 1990s, many DJs did not feel the need to look outside of Baltimore for DJ gigs due to the popularity of the ghetto clubs in Baltimore. Also, the music was always primarily a performance-oriented music, and not many people bought the music besides DJs. Although many of the track producers could have sold records in the House market in other cities like Chicago or Detroit, the popular producers had always been successful selling records to other DJs in local stores like Sound of Baltimore and Music Liberated that specialized in hip hop and dance music. Arguably the most successful producer in Baltimore Club, Rod Lee, gives an account of his business model: Heres the thing, when I first did club music, I never got paid for it, until I met Bernie [Bernie Rabinowitz is the former and deceased owner of Music Liberated, a legendary local store that sold almost exclusively vinyl, and was the source for Baltimore club music]. Bernie was like, why put out the tracks, Ill buy them from you. We worked out a price: six tracks for $1,500. I was like, shit, I dont have to put out no more records. . . . I wanted to see how strong my name was. Cats would come in and ask, Rod Lee have new records out? Bernie would say, no, and theyd leave. Okay. I called Bernie and said I got three EPs; Im not making any more; I gave him a whole hustle. I told Bernie to put up a poster in the back of the store, and take the rest of the club records off the wall. . . the poster said Rod Lee Coming Soon. I told Bernie not to make any labels for the records, cause a DJ wants to feel important. The record had colored labels: sky blue, orange, and black. One, two, and three. So when we put it up on the wall, everything that Rod Lee was playing was up there. When they come to the store, the DJs would say, oh shit, how much are these? Bernie said ten, and the DJS would say, ten. . . shit, Ill take two. Thats how the whole price thing started (Janis).

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Lee was able to market his music directly to DJs through Music Liberated, and with Bernies ability to sell them at high prices, Lee did not need to expand into a more traditional CD market for music listeners. Lees account explains an important and not completely obvious point: Baltimore Club is a music that for the first ten years or so of its existence was seldom created in CD or cassette form, except in the mix tape format, but never in true album form. It is a music that was created to listen to in a live setting, in the club. This is one of the biggest reasons it never crossed over or was rarely heard outside of Baltimore; without proper albums to market, and without touring DJs, no one would hear the music unless they came to Baltimore, and therefore the media had nothing to sell to the public. McLeods analysis also helps to explain why the market for this music seems to be changing. Although Diplo and Hollertronix brought Baltimore Club to a larger audience, a New York-based white DJ/hip-hop fashion designer by the name of Aaron LaCrate would market it and split it into further subgenres, cleverly relying on the image of the Baltimore hyperghetto. Releasing some of the most accessible and widely distributed crossover Baltimore Club compilations in the past two years, LaCrate has aimed at making the subgenre into a marketable scene that could become hip-hops next big thing. In the opening to an interview with LaCrate, an interviewer at Allhiphop.com comes right out and announces this bluntly: As Hyphy, Crunk, and Screw have given cities and regions a sonic identity, LaCrate hopes that Baltimore Club music will be hip-hops next embraced sub-genre (Paine 2006). LaCrates strategy seems to incorporate all the elements of McLeods theory of subgenre creation as he tries to successfully introduce new variations Bmore Gutter Music and Club Crack into the musical subcultures of hip-hop and dance. Bmore Gutter Music sometimes can sound exactly like Baltimore Club, although with traditional rap verses and more electrosounding beats with less House influence. Club Crack is slowed down Bmore Gutter Music with rap lyrics in what seems to be nothing but the hiphopification of Club music. LaCrate is originally from Baltimore although he has lived in New York City since he was a teenager and owns the trendy street wear clothing line Milkcrate Athletics, and his in-house producer for Gutter music is Debonair Samir, a black Baltimore Club DJ and producer. This lends LaCrate an air of authenticity for some consumers even while he is altering the music to make it more mainstream accessible. In an attempt to make Baltimore Club the new breakthrough hip-hop subgenre, LaCrate is using the authenticity markers Thornton established as

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crucial to black dance music: body and place. He always makes sure that consumers understand how black and ghetto the music is. The problem LaCrate faces is that many young hip-hop consumers, both black and white, did not come of age when there was a strong uptempo black dance club scene like House or Miami Bass, so many of these hip-hop fans can only relate to faster Club styles with white rave music like drum and bass and contemporary techno. In a lengthy interview with The Boston Phoenix in August 2006, LaCrate was adamant about setting Gutter music apart from other white dance music: LaCrate: What Samir and I bring to the table is that we were both coming from a real street hip-hop sentiment, and thats where club in its origin came from. As much as it may have been comprised of rave breaks, there was nothing raveI always say there was nothing white-boy about it. Interviewer: Right. So it wasnt really a dance music once it got off and running, it was more of a hip-hop-based crowd. LaCrate: It was like the next level of hip-hop. You know what I mean? It was a very black, street, club, urban dance music (McKay 2006). And in this exchange in the Allhiphop.com interview, he makes the same point: LaCrate: Theres clubs that play the uptempo, 120 beats-per-minute, bassd out hybrid of Hip-Hop/Crunk/House, but theres some places that now play Hip-Hop. Were doing a slowed-down version of it. Club music is just faster, and its not based around an MC. Its more chopped-up lyrics that are about neighborhoods, or p y, or drugs the same content. AllHipHop.com: Bmore Gutter Music combined those worlds. . . Aaron LaCrate: Definitely. You have a song like DJ Class Stop Snitchin at 120 beats-per-minute, but its a f kin hard-assed record. Its definitely a different sounding record. . . Some Hip-Hop fans cant wrap their heads around it cause they think its Dance music or House music, but if you saw the clubs that this was gettin played in, this is no white boy s t. People think its for raves or

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somethin, it really isnt. This music did not come from white kids (Paine 2006). LaCrate, in order to reach a larger audience, wants to disassociate his new subgenres from House music, cutting Baltimore Club off from its origins of hybridity in the House music scene. Particularly dangerous is LaCrates outward disdain for House music, and the obvious homophobia that accompanies this: Now basically what Club Crack is, we just decided to slow down the club beats to hip-hop tempo because theres only gonna be so many kids that can get with 120 beats-per-minute dance music. Theres just always gonna be that hard-headed hip-hop kid thats like, This shit is gay (emphasis added, McKay 2006). LaCrate aims to cast off House music traces that could be found in Gutter; it is troubling that LaCrate does not even want to try to bridge the gap between hip-hip and House, even though fifteen years ago Baltimore Club did it with tremendous success! The connections between how black Gutter music is and how ghetto it is are strong in LaCrates marketing strategy. LaCrate has ghettoized Baltimore Club through the music, the album artwork and titles of his mix CDs, and through interviews and press releases. In no way is LaCrate the only person doing this in the crossover of Baltimore Club, as we will see in the next section, but the emphasis on the hyperghetto elements of Baltimore Club in LaCrates new subgenres is a good place to start. Whereas McLeods cultural appropriation argument for subgenre naming suggests that a white middle class audience will water down a black dance style and give it a more universally appealing name, LaCrate goes the other way, trying to make the subgenre name even more dangerous sounding with the obvious ghetto signifiers gutter and crack as the roots of his two subgenre names. In the actual music LaCrate either produces or compiles in his mix CDs, he tries to attach Gutter music to the hyperghetto construction of Baltimores hoods. On B-More Gutter Music, his first and most popular mix CD, in addition to the common sexual and party-themed tracks, LaCrate (with Hollertronix member and co-producer Low Budget) chose tracks that signified violence and crime: Gangsta Shit, Stop Snitchin, BodyMore Murdaland, Grit City, Dropping Bows and Gutter Music. Also, the music contains more indexical signifiers of ghetto crime than most classic Baltimore Club music, several tracks feature gunshots in the background, or gunshot samples as percussion in the beat. In a strange mix of fantasymeets-reality, the opening to the Allhiphop.com interview with LaCrate references a character from The Wire (drug kingpin Avon Barksdale) as proof

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that LaCrates music is not white rave dance music: If the 120 beats-perminute feels like a Moby-minded fad, LaCrate wants to walk you through the clubs where the music comes from, where possibly Avon Barksdale tucks his chain (Paine 2006). Drugs and crime are not only inevitable for Baltimores hyperghettos, but apparently for the music that comes from there as well: AllHipHop.com: The I-95 hustling mentality, along with The Wire has made Baltimore very big all of a sudden. As a true caretaker of Hip-Hop, how does that feel? Aaron Lacrate: Praise God. Halleluiah. Unfortunately. . . the average Joe says, Oh no, drugs. . . but thats a part of Hip-Hop. The drug culture is sadly the sixth element of Hip-Hop. [laughs] Its street culture and its always gonna be there. Its no different than action movies. Its unfortunate that thats what put Baltimore on, but its true. Bodymore, Murderland. Its a fact (Paine 2006). Bodymore, Murderland. To people in the crossover scene, it is capital of the hyperghetto fantasy, home of Gutter and Club Crack. Although Baltimore is a very real place, Bodymore seems oddly part construction, part reality. The media reactions to the crossover, and also the complicated positions DJs and producers (both new and old, black and white) find themselves in, hoping to reach an audience yet trying hard to preserve a classic style, can help illustrate the tensions surrounding the hyperghetto fantasy. These struggles over racial authenticity in the midst of a crossover should be familiar to anyone who has studied the rise and fall of genres in modern American popular music. The depictions of Baltimore Club in the alternative music media oftentimes refer to the otherness inherent in both the music and Baltimore itself, while at the same time championing it as the next big thing in either hiphop, dance, or indie music in general. While the press coverage has largely repeated LaCrates construction of Baltimore Club as hyperghetto music, there has been ample critique of this phenomenon through interviews with DJs and producers, interactive blogs that allow conversation to occur, and local Baltimore music media figures responding to the crossover. One of the most visible and mainstream articles on Baltimore Club so far was Spin Magazines December 2005 feature. Although the actual title of the article is Dance My Pain Away (taken from the name of a Rod

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Lee track), the cover advertises the article with the title Booty & the Beat: Baltimores X-Rated Club Scene (Fernando 2005: cover, 80). The feature has a spread of photographs catching club goers in sexualized dance poses, and the article emphasizes the wildness and aggression in the music and the dancing. Spin introduces its article in the table of contents with the sentence: When Baltimore wants to forget about homicides and heroin, the city has its own soundtrack of hard beats and filthy lyrics to turn to (11). Although the article gives a good concise history of Baltimore Club, and interviews Club legends Scottie B., Shawn Caesar, and Rod Lee, it spends a significant portion on an underground event black female DJ KSwift (known as the Club Queen) DJed at a Baltimore warehouse organized by white promoter Jason Urick, where 350 people, mostly white, came to dance to Baltimore Club. K-Swift says she was treated like a rock star, and although hesitant to play the party at first, given the punk-rock look of the venue and crowd, she described it as the best crowd Ive ever DJd for in my life! (84). Party organizer Urick describes the appeal of the music to the white Baltimore crowd: Its raw, just raw and heavy, and I wouldnt say primitive, but it kinda is. When you hear that beat, its hard to not dance to it (84). The Urick events (subsequent Baltimore Club parties have been thrown at the Warehouse) bring up two interesting points. One is that in order for hip white kids in Baltimore to like Baltimore Club en masse, it first had to emerge in the white hipster scenes in Philadelphia and New York, and then be reintroduced to Baltimore. This says a lot about taste making and geography: it does not matter how close a musical subgenre is to you (or even if its in your backyard); in order for it to have an appeal, it must go through the proper channels and testing grounds for cool first. The other point concerns the coverage of the Urick parties. Besides the Spin article, it was also covered in two other major stories on Baltimore Club in XLR8R Magazine and Urb Magazine, both extremely important periodicals for trend setting in indie hip-hop and dance music scenes. Although obviously the people at the Urick party would be the same type of music consumer to read XLR8R and Urb, and therefore these magazines would want to cover it to let its readership in on the new subgenre (the gate keeping strategy described by McLeod), it is noteworthy that they did not even try in the articles to present the majority black Baltimore Club audience or clubs (although the Spin article did make an effort). Even when depictions of Baltimore Club in the media equally depict the original scene and the crossover scene, or even are completely black and

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original scene-oriented, the economics of the crossover have to be kept in mind, with special attention to which DJs have the ability to reach consumers. In MTVs 2006 You Hear It First feature on Baltimore Club (focusing on K-Swift) and Baltimore hip-hop (focusing on MC Young Leek), the MTV audience was given a more balanced representation of the scene in Baltimore. However, if the viewer then went to a local big-box music store or logged on to I-Tunes to find Baltimore Club, they have a better chance of purchasing a LaCrate compilation than they do an original producers CD. As the Baltimore City Paper reported, LaCrates forthcoming Club Crack record will be released by Koch Entertainment, giving it great distribution: Club Crack will also be the first release to put a huge cross-section of Baltimore hip-hop under the national spotlight, with Kochs long arms reaching into the nations Best Buys (Shipley, Baltimore City Paper 2006). The cross-section is not any of the DJs/producers of Club, but the hip-hop MCs LaCrate and Samir enlist to rhyme over their tracks. There has been more local media coverage of Baltimore Club world since 2006. Jess Harvell, the new music editor of Baltimore City Paper, has started an online blog-like column called Noise to document Baltimore music, and Club has been getting its fair share of entries from him and Al Shipley. Shipley, who writes for Baltimore City Paper and various music magazines, maintains a blog entitled Government Names. This blog is a clearinghouse for not only Club but also Baltimore hip-hop news, reviews, and show announcements. Shipleys voice is welcome to the Noise column, as he is a scene insider and is quite suspicious of the crossover of Club music, and his reporting will be necessary as new rumblings of bad vibes are occurring in the scene over the crossover, the hyperghettoization, and the marketing of Club by Baltimore outsiders. Leading this charge is selfdescribed gatekeeper Labtekwon. Labtekwon is a black Baltimore hip-hop MC who at first seems like an unlikely spokesman for the protection of Baltimore Club from outsiders. He is best known for indie backpacker style hip-hop, releasing a slew of albums independently and a few on indie hip-hop label Mush Records. On his new 2006 album, Ghetto Dai Lai Lama, is the Baltimore Club track Sex Machine, produced by Club legend DJ Booman. In the introduction to the song before the full beat kicks in, Labtekwon articulates this insult: all these out of town fake DJs, fake producers wanna act like they makin Baltimore Club tracks, yall not makin Baltimore Club, yall making fake club! This song has already caused quite a stir and is brought up in every interview with Labtekwon. In Fader

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Magazine, he speaks to his problem with the fake DJs he calls out on Sex Machine: Bmore is just being noticed by outsiders in the last couple of years. But this style has roots that go way beyond the Think loop. The bigger picture is more important than everybody trying to extrapolate and graft parts of what they think is dope. I am a gate keeper. Its cool, but every cat that claims to be down aint down and the real pioneers are responsible to call out the fakes. Imitation is flattery, but plagiarism is illegal. If people feel the music, the people who make it should benefit before someone from the outside profits (Fader Magazine 2006). While LaCrate is quick to refer to drug culture as the sixth element of hip-hop, or at least of his Gutter music, Labtekwon emphasizes a different purpose of Club music in the Baltimore hoods; one that echoes Rod Lees huge Club hit Dance My Pain Away. In this song, Rod Lee breaks with Baltimore Club tradition and sings a melody complete with verses. The storylines of the song follow one male clubgoer as he loses his job and realizes he cannot pay his bills. The narrator escapes to the club to dance. Labtekwon describes the cathartic experience of going to clubs: Club Music is not just get high, wild out music. People use the music to dance and purge all the demons in their normal lives. We sweat our pain and sorrow out on the dancefloor to the tracks that now outsiders are just starting to notice. We use this music as a point of refuge and cleansing. This is the same purpose for music and dance in Traditional African culture. The culture around Baltimore Club Music is one that involves the quest for joy in the midst of urban plight (Fader Magazine 2006). Although those who are familiar with Labtekwons career as a hiphop MC might question his authority to speak for Baltimore Club, he actually was around during the origins of the scene. In fact, his historical take on Baltimore Club is like the inverse of LaCrates; where LaCrate tries to divorce Baltimore Club from the earlier House music scene, Labtekwon traces the scene back to the mid-1980s and proto- Baltimore Club tracks that were more House than Club. Labtekwon was starting to learn hip-hop production

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and was at the same time hanging out in the emerging Baltimore Club scene, which was still part of a larger House movement. While it is true that many original DJs and producers have benefited from the crossover by getting new out-of-town DJ gigs and better sales on mix tapes and CDs, and possibly even record deals, Labtekwon seems to be pointing out the problems when outsiders distort the meanings and messages of the music, and market it as just get high wild out music (in my word, they hyperghettoize it). His criticisms are catching on among some, and stirring controversy with others. Music critic Tom Breihan, a former Baltimorean who moved to New York (like LaCrate) writes an online column/blog for the Village Voice called Status Aint Hood. Breihan has written about Baltimore Club, and has specifically criticized key members of the crossover scene, in articles from July 2006. The comments sections to these two articles online, as well as the comments section to a Labtekwon interview and a Diplo interview from October 2006 and April 2007 respectively, contain spirited debate about the crossover scene, contesting the authenticity of Baltimore Club among fans as well as key DJs, producers and promoters. In his first article on Baltimore Club, Zidane Headbutt Caused by Baltimore Club Music, Breihan goes after the crossover producers right away: Pretty soon, a lot of the out-of-town press attention for Baltimore club music started going to stuff like Low Budget and Aaron LaCrates Bmore Gutter Music mix, a collection of fake club music from outof-town DJs and producers who pretty much just imitated a local phenomenon and changed it enough so they could sell it without getting sued. I havent heard Bmore Gutter Music, but its mere existence is pretty offensive, and its the closest thing to Baltimore club that you can buy at the Tower Records a couple of blocks from the office where Im writing this. If national attention on Baltimore was going to result in more stuff like that, I was pretty happy when the internet hype-cycle moved on to other stuff (Breihan 2006). Breihans articles have attracted numerous posters in the comments section of his blog including Labtekwon, and pioneer Scottie B. The readers of Breihan who posted in the comments sections of his articles on Baltimore Club debate the geographical origins of numerous artists, lending support to the claim that the authenticity of the music must be anchored by real places. The poster a-wood in the Zidane Headbutt Caused by Baltimore

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Club Music comments argues for the authenticity of crossover group Spank Rock. He wonders how are Spank Rock interlopers? Naeem (Mc Spank Rock) and XXXchange, the two members of the group, were born and raised in Baltimore. its not their fault that they were ten years old in the early 1990s when the scene was getting off the ground.7 When Breihan counters that its more a question of how they present themselves given that they are more involved in the Philly scene, a-wood responds by reiterating their geographic roots and even their connection to well established producer Rod Lee. Labtekwon jumps in at this point to say, I cant name 3 people from Baltimore City that actually grew up with the kidz from Spank Rock in Baltimore City. there is a difference between the city and the county you know. Labtekwon is insinuating that many interlopers who want to claim Baltimore roots for the sake of authenticity may bend the truth a little about the exact area they grew up in, crossing the city/county border in their invented life story. The poster Eddie Sparks commiserates with Labtekwon, and understands his point but ensures him that Spank Rocks Baltimore roots are legit: Lab, the guys in Spankrock are from Baltimore. Maybe not whitelock or mondawmin..from what I know Naeem is from sandtown or lived there for a bit. . .the rest of the guys do have CITY zip codes, if you know what I mean (Breihan 2006). Several posters to the comments section also attack Jason Uricks warehouse parties, which are mentioned by Breihan in the first article. Uricks defense of his parties is very revealing of the complexities of playing Baltimore Club in Baltimore in a post-crossover era. Although Urick seems a little na ve as to how his parties would be received from people in the original scene once the media took off and ran with the story as a banner for Baltimore Club crossover, he makes the point that even suburban kids in the county could hear Baltimore Club on the radio. Although LaCrate, Spank Rock and others are questioned repeatedly as to their Baltimore heritage, it is sometimes forgotten that 92 Qs Club radio shows was broadcast to the entire Baltimore metro area and depending on reception, listeners in Pennsylvania or Delaware could have possibly heard it.8 The poster Mr Set makes a similar point: Regardless, do you all forget that club music has been on the radio every week since all of us can remember? Which means that even kids in Southern PA and Frederick [MD] with a strong antenna have been exposed to club music since the start too (Breihan 2006). These discussions and exchanges, along with countless others from Breihans articles, point to the various geographical and spatial complexities

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of the Baltimore Club crossover. Is the music representing Baltimore or the Baltimore metro area? What area or zip codes are legit to have if you want to DJ? Can you move away from Baltimore, and if so for how many years to still keep your credibility? None of the issues raised in these arguments is ever completely resolved, but it is a sign of cultural health for these matters to be discussed, and for there to be explicit criticism of the potential costs of the crossover.
Conclusion: Gutter vs. Supastarr: New Hybridity Questions the Hyperghetto or Baltimore Club vs. the World

While some original pioneers of the Baltimore Club seem ambivalent to the crossover, it is true at least that they recognize the hyperghetto construction in the crossover scene. Scottie B. was recently seen wearing a shirt at the Ottobar in Baltimore which read Support Baltimore Club and had an image from LaCrates album cover crossed out with the word fake superimposed on it. As Al Shipley puts it: To the extent that people in Baltimore are even aware of Hollertronix or Bmore Gutter Music, I dont think people around here are real thrilled with out-of-towners calling Bmore club gutter music and club crack and playing up the whole Bodymore, Murdaland thing or putting drawings of vials of crack on record covers. For one thing, club music is seen as fun escapism around here, and is dismissed by a lot of hip hop fans as corny or the province of chickenheads, but everywhere else people seem to think its the grimiest, hardest shit ever just because theres some sexual lyrics. Whatever. A lot of those Lacrate/Low Budget releases have been co-signed by hometown DJs like Scottie B. and Debonair Samir, but I dont think that means its above criticism, and I told Samir about my reservations about that stuff myself recently (Shipley, Village Voice 2006). Perhaps Shipley would just like the outsiders to have some distance metaphorically from Baltimore since they have it geographically. Shipley and others who are critical of the crossover bring to mind the paradox of The Wire. How much are we supposed to understand? The attempted verisimilitude of the crossover music will always fall flat given the nature of its signifiers of the hyperghetto: they are always constructions, never quite real. To approach the artistic representation of the reality with more perspective and

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distance could be a means for paying attention to the social issues that surround the state of Baltimores hoods at the same time as simply appreciating the music created there. As I mentioned earlier, absent from many of the alternative medias depiction of the Baltimore Club scene is the scene itself; the crossover scene often stands in as a replacement, or simple terms like raw, gritty and dirty suffice. If the crossover just fizzles and dies, the pioneers of Baltimore Club still cannot go on forever; there will need to be new young DJs who take over the scene. The crossover scene was never intended as a farm league for future Club major leaguers in the first place. With this in my mind I want to acknowledge the new voices coming from within Baltimores black communities. DJ Blaqstarr, a twenty-two-year-old DJ/producer, is perhaps the hottest new voice. He has a loyal following not only in Baltimores original scene, but the crossover scene as well. He releases records with both scenes as well, being backed by Diplos label Mad Decent, Rod Lees Club Kingz and Scottie B.s Unruly Records. Blaqstarrs sound is at once both familiar and strange. His percussions choices can be extremely minimal and almost proto-club, yet he sings hooks on top of these beats in a Prince-like style. In a recent interview, Diplo points to the fact that Blaqstarr and the small scene he is creating are something new to the Club world: He plays for this new kind of crowd in Baltimore. Its totally a whole different scene, what he does there . . . The music he makes is really weird. Its pretty uncommercial stuff. Those kids all wear All-Stars and listen to Nirvana and stuff. Its real grassroots. I really like whats happening there. Theres kids like him who work really hard at creating this image of being rock stars and having this pride in what they do, being really proud and really arrogant and at the same time making something really progressive. Like, this dude has the craziest falsetto voice, and I think hes a real prodigy, but he works hard. Theyre not into promoting how gutter they are and how ghetto and drug-oriented Baltimore is. Theyre really proud of who they are as musicians, and I think it shows. I think theres a lot of emotion because it is kind of weird that this kind of music has become popular so instantly and no one knows where the credit is due (Breihan 2007). Blaqstarr is difficult to define on the usual terms of Club, his hit single Supastarr celebrates women more than it sexualizes them, he has uplifting tracks about the power of Club music, yet at the same time has

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several gunshot-driven tracks of hyperviolence like Tote It and Im A Get My Gun. Blaqstarr speaks to just one of the many new and exciting directions Club could take in the future, regardless of the long-term effects of the crossover scene. It is only because of Blaqstarrs ability to interact with the crossover scene that his more measured take on Baltimore might have the opportunity to rub off on some of the out-of-towners. Recently the Southern collective BamaBounce, lead by drag queen/producer DJ Taz, have had several releases through Baltimore Club producers Ayres and Tittsworth. This crossover could rekindle missing connections Baltimore Club used to have: to the Southern booty-bass styles of Alabama, Georgia and Florida, and to the Queer House scene that co-existed with Baltimore Club in the beginning. In a short feature on Blaqstarr, the Boston Phoenix wonders whether Baltimore Club is going to be a viable new subgenre and whether it might be ready to leave the city limits. Or maybe not. Remember when reggaeton was going to change the face of music as we knew it? (Beck 2007). Maybe we dont, but I think Puerto Rico does. Subcultures may come and go, but not as quickly as crossovers move in and recede. As Scott Seward reminds us in one of his Lester Bangs-esque screeds on Baltimore Club: Subcultures are just neighborhoods you dont live in. What might we learn from going to these neighborhoods, from listening to their music? Hopefully music fans and critics are willing to try to find out. Notes
1. Bethlehem Shoals is an acknowledged pseudonym, but Shoals has never revealed his true name. He also is a frequent contributor to the popular basketball/culture blog Free Darko. 2. Report can be accessed at: Baltimore Believe: Progress Report Phase 1. Issued by Linder and Associates Inc. http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/believe/ images/BelieveReport.pdf. 3. Although there is no authoritative history of the beginnings of Baltimore Club, these were helpful sources in my account: Fernando, Janis, and DJ Technics, The Influences of Baltimore Club Music, www.baltimoreclubtracks. com/history.htm. 4. Of course Baltimore Club was never completely isolated, but I use the term isolation since the music never had any significant impact on a music scene outside of Baltimore. Baltimore Club records were occasionally played in clubs

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and college radio stations in Washington D.C. and Boston for instance, but this was extremely rare. 5. Information on the origins of Hollertronix mainly gathered from the following interviews: DJ Low Budget: Beats straight out the gutter, http://www. prefixmag.com/features/D/DJ-Low-Budget/287; Diplo: the Stylus interview http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1269; Interview: Diplo http:// www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/d/diplo-05/. 6. The Wire has dealt with the abandoned neighborhoods in interesting ways, even having one function as a legal drug market during an experiment by a disgruntled police commander in Season 3. 7. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/07/ zidane headbutt.php. In the comments section of the Status Aint Hood blog, many of the readers leave comments without proper capitalization or punctuation, as is common on Internet discussion boards and blogs. I have quoted them in my article, as they appear online. 8. Authors note: This is how I first heard Club before I was old enough to travel into the city to the actual record stores. Growing up about 30 miles outside of the city, I remember hearing the Friday night Club DJ sets on 92 Q around the age of 1213. This would have been around 19921993.

Works Cited
Beck, Richard. Download. The Boston Phoenix, 23 March, 2007, p. 16. Breihan, Tom. Zidane Headbutt Caused by Baltimore Club. Village Voice, 10 July, 2006. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/ archives/2006/07/zidane headbutt.php. . Status Aint Hood Interviews Diplo. Village Voice, 3 April, 2007. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2007/04/status aint hoo 23.php. Chang, Jeff, and Davis, Josh. Jeff Chang Talks with DJ Shadow. The Believer, November 2006. Drake, David. Diplo: The Stylus Interview http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=1269. October 2004

Fader Magazine Online, no author cited. Club Science. Fader Magazine, June 2006. http://thefader.com/blog/articles/2006/06/22/club-science. Fernando Jr., S.H. Dance the Pain Away. Spin Magazine, December 2005. pp. 8084.

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Forman, Murray. The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002. Fricke, John. End Could Be Near for Believe Drive. Baltimore Sun, 12 February, 2007. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Janis, Stephen. Labtekwon and Rod Lee Interview Link , issue 9, pp. 57 64, http://advanced.jhu.edu/media/files/labtekwon-and-rod-lee-interview janis.pdf. Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Books, 2005. McKay, Mike. Tear the Club Up: How Baltimore and Aaron LaCrate are Going to Save Club Music. The Boston Phoenix, 22 August, 2006. http://thephoenix.com/Article.aspx?id=20638&page=1. McLeod, Kembrew. Genres, Sub-Genres, Sub-Sub-Genres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic-Dance Music Communities. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13: 5975, 2001. Paine. Aaron Lacrate: In Da Club. 12 June, 2006. http://allhiphop.com/ blogs/features/archive/2006/06/12/18133570.aspx. Seward, Scott. Do Dew the Crabtown Clam: Baltimore Breakbeat House Trax Are the New Everything. Village Voice, 9 April, 2003. http://www. villagevoice.com/music/0315,seward,43195,22.html. Shipley, Al. Government Names, 1 July, 2006. http://governmentnames.blogspot. com/search/label/Dirty%20Hartz. . In comments to: Breihan, Tom. Friends of Diplo: A Report Card. Village Voice, 11 July, 2006. http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/ statusainthood/archives/2006/07/the friends of 1.php. . The Best of Both Worlds. Baltimore City Paper, 19 July, 2006. http://www.citypaper.com/special/story.asp?id=12048. Shoals, Bethlehem. The Language Problem. Heaven and Here, 8 November, 2006. http://heavenandhere.wordpress.com/2006/11/08/the-languageproblem/#comments. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996.