Adhoc Rap Groups in Bogota
“Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song;
sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist
perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.” ― David Graeber
Introduction
In the last chapter, I explored rule driven models that developed complex systems of what I referred to as a corporate rap model. In this chapter, I present the opposite type of rap groups that I was introduced to during my field work. I call them the adhoc polity of rappers. Both of these models are the two extreme opposites of the types of rap polities that one could find in Bogota, Colombia. However, not many groups fell in the middle of these extremes within this particular rap scene. Most of the rap groups were either aligned with the corporate model or they were not. That was the result of the highly competitive nature of rap within the city that was based on rap beefs that the groups have with one another. In this chapter, I present political anthropology and actor network theory based model of how the adhoc rap model operated. I lay out the prizes and values that the group espouses, their structure, the groups’ internal working dynamics and the external political contests that the groups encountered from outsiders.
Prizes and Values
While the model that I described in the previous chapter, was a model that organized itself around clear cut goals and principles, for other groups that I worked with, their ideals, their vision and their means of achieving those ends were much more spurious. The rappers that I worked with in Bogota, could almost be evenly divided between these two types of groups.
Either, they had a strong bond or they did not. There was not a lot of in between. The prize then,
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for the rappers that did not think of themselves as being united by strong kinship or corporate ties, and was divergent. For this model, the prizes they sought in the rap scene varied. When I asked the rappers in the corporate network, what they wanted to achieve through being involved in the rap scene, they would inform me about their creation narrative and they would tell me it was their job to revolutionize the culture and make money. When I asked this group of rappers why they were a part of these groups, their answers looked something like this:
[Rapper 1]: “I make hip-hop music for the devil. He came to me and told me that he would give me great rewards if I would make music for regular people. I believe that he gave me this talent for making beats and that’s why I do it. I want to see what’s going to happen.”
[Rapper 2]: “I do it for the weed, money and hoes nigga….shit…what you think?”
[Producer 1]: “We rappin bout how we live, you know? Everything that we rap about is real, it’s how we livin. We ‘bout that life, you heard?”
[Producer 2]: “Well in Colombia, everyone is onto this old school 90s style hip-hop, but me and mine are trying to update their musical repertoire. We are trying to make new, innovative, Colombian trap style beats.”
The rappers involved with less centralized groups, were after many different end goals such as, fame, money, women, using rap music as a way to talk about their lifestyle, and making new, innovative sounds for people to listen to in Bogota, Colombia. In this way, the goals and prizes that the group were vying for, were constantly moving shifting, changing in importance and altering the focus for the group, depending upon the situation. This meant that group membership was also constantly changing. Whereas, in the previous model, each group could identify a core group membership, this model, the adhoc polity, did not revolve around that principle of
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organization. Anyone interested in making the type of music that this polity produced, was invited to join in. The composition of the groups changed frequently, sometimes within the hour.
The different types of rappers involved in the adhoc model varied too. While the corporate model was based on rappers that had come from hardships, the adhoc model was much less concerned about the rapper’s past. The rappers that joined these groups came from a variety of social stratas in Bogota. Whereas, the corporate model was much more discriminating against people they viewed as ‘gomelos’ or what we might refer to as ‘yuppies’ in the United States, the adhoc model was much less concerned about the ‘authenticity’ of where its rappers came from, as long as they were into making rap music right now. ‘Authenticity’ in rap music has been viewed as a large part of trying to keep hip-hop connected to its original roots (Rickford and Rickford 2000, Cutler 2009). ‘Authentic rap’ then, is defined as rap music that is made by people from marginal communities who are expressing a desire for societal change (Keyes 1994, Perry 2008, Alim 2009, Cutler 2009). Cutler (2009) chronicles how authenticity plays a role in rap battles that take place in Detroit to determine who is a ‘real’ rapper versus who is ‘fake’.
Similarly, in the rap scene in Bogota, many people believe that some of the big-name rappers from the adhoc model are fake rappers.
[Rapper 1]: “Yah, I mean, [Name of a Rapper], his parents [are musicians] and he was sent to private school all of his life. Then, he heard rap music, and decided he wanted to be a gangster, so he makes rap music. But he’s not in our scene. He’s not a real rapper. He’s just a crackhead wanna be.”
[Rapper 2]: “Yah, I mean a lot of them are just lame. They live at home with their parents, sell small amounts of drugs, don’t have real jobs and just make shitty rap music. It’s pretty stupid. Then, obviously, we have real gansgta rappers down here. I mean, you know, you’ve worked with them and you can probably see a big difference, right?”
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People cannot help the circumstances that they are born into. While many of the rappers in the corporate model, were born into poverty, this was actually seen as a blessing for them in terms of establishing themselves as authentic rappers. In the reverse, many of the members of the adhoc model who were born into wealthy ‘gomelo’ families, were embarrassed of their well-to-do upbringings and consequently, they would try to get into trouble to prove their authenticity in the scene. This role reversal, of having wealthy kids act ‘low class’ to try to fit into the world of rap music is exactly the type of cultural-reversal some people would say rap music tries to create.
Rap wants to turn the world upside down, creating cultural confusion so that it becomes more difficult to point out, who is poor, who is rich and how these groups of people are supposed to act. Ironically then, the glamorization of ‘street life’, hanging out on the sidewalks, being seen in the ‘ollas’ and hanging out with people that could be identified as being from the popular classes was an important part of life for the rap musicians in Bogota. Regardless of original hereditary class status then, establishing oneself in the streets became a goal for the members of the adhoc polity. For some of the rappers born into the middle class, becoming downwardly mobile was something they had to do, to be thought of as authentic members of the rap scene. This type of attitude in action seems contradictory, to many of the values of rap music, and may have been one of the reasons previous scholarship into this scene was confused by many of the actors within it. Instead of people trying to hustle their way out of poverty, as much of rap music advocates for, many of the members of the adhoc rap models tried to downgrade their class status, to fit in.
Structure and Roles
The rappers that found themselves in the adhoc model, came into the scene by way of their desire to make rap music. The most common way that this group would hang out, was at
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record studios. The studio became the locus or the focal meeting point for the group. Differently from the corporate model, where the rappers were the entrepreneurs that united the group, the adhoc model was bound together around the meeting place of musical production. While the rappers from the other model would hang out together throughout the week, the rappers in the adhoc model were brought together much more infrequently and spontaneously. As the studio was the spot where the members of this team converged, whenever they would get together, they always needed producers to make and record the beats. The rappers would then lay down the tracks. The producers were responsible for securing the location of the record studio and gathering the technological resources that it would take to put together beats. Similarly, the producers were responsible for allocating the time and resources to the rappers to let them know when, where and for how long they could utilize those resources to make a song. That is why they acted as the entrepreneurs.
The technological resources available in the studio as well as the rappers, acted as mediating bodies. The technological components were used for assembling a musical track and the rappers introduced the linguistic content. Then, the technological components captured the recording of the beats and rhymes together to produce the rap song. Other actors that were usually present at the record studio were promoters, managers, graphic arts designers, tattoo artists, photographers, cinematographers and of course, the groupies, the fans, or the friends brought along to help lend support to the artists. This adhoc model made itself available to the possibility of ‘experimentation’, as well. Unlike in the corporate model, the roles in this model were much more flexible and fluid. A groupie who showed up to the studio, just to hang out, was perfectly able to volunteer themselves to hop up on the mic and help record a verse or a chorus
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of one of the songs. Play, and flexibility of roles or rules was much more encouraged in this type of rap ensemble, than in the other model.
Sometimes, there were also transnational components of these groups. However, due to the erratic nature of the relationships that this group had with its members, these parts of the group did not have a permanent place within the assemblage. The transnational actors that were involved with the adhoc models, tended to be on the periphery of the group, in a far more distant sense then in the corporate model. They would come in occasionally and help out with different types of inversions into the rap groups. The transnational actors would buy the adhoc groups equipment cheaper on second hand markets in the United States or in Europe, then send it to the rap groups. These rap groups like the corporate network also had access to equipment from overseas but in a different way. The manner that I saw these precarious networks operate is that their connections overseas were not able or willing to permanently offer stable technical assistance. Their involvement was much more precarious. Anna Tsing (2015) might consider these to be like polyphonic assemblages, where actors, material resources, and technologies are subject to shifting moments, spaces or transient mishaps. They would give the adhoc models equipment like computers, keyboards, mixers, microphones and other equipment, at their leisure.
Additionally, they also provided talent to the groups by way of traveling to Colombia and recording with the artists or they would fly the artists to other countries to do concert tours with them and to give them media exposure. There was a lot of transnational interexchange that took place for these groups. The adhoc rap groups would often meet their international affiliates over the internet. However, because they did not have a strong bond with them, these relationships were for short term goals, like a song, a concert or a couple of interviews. The rap groups would communicate via Facebook and Skype. The adhoc rap groups worked with their compatriots
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within the continent heavily too. Many people involved in the adhoc rap model had friends in Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru. They also had friends in the US and in Europe as well. But again, these relationships were unstable. For example, rappers might do a track with a group with the hopes of going on tour with them, but then, could not follow though. The rap groups would likely keep in touch and one day in the future, they might perform that song together or not. But the relationships that the adhoc groups had, particularly with peripheral members of the production of their rap music, were much more spurious and heterogeneous then in the corporate model.
Internal Disorder and Group Dynamics
Interesting works in anthropology reveal that social networks of groups that are connected purely for the production of a very specific purpose tend to have a group formation type that we might call a ‘heterogeneous collective’ (Graeber 2009). Thomas Ward (2011) may have also labeled this group as an ‘anarchic democracy’. This is an organization that is highly decentralized and does not have very many unifying principles in comparison with the contrasting corporate model that I presented in the previous chapter. They also had a more liberal economic organization, characterized by much variety in structure. In this section, we can analyze the internal organization of the adhoc model. What kind of organizational strategies were employed for them to locate resources and record music? What type of rules existed, if any in comparison to the corporate model?
Unlike the corporate model, the adhoc model did not support the whole livelihood characteristic of the collective. Therefore, the economic or transactional relationships of the group are looser in these groups. The rap artists usually bought or sold contraband with one another, but this was less systematic. Some of the members of these types of models lived at
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home and sold enough drugs or contraband to pay for their day to day living expenses. They would combine that with making a living from selling their beats, their raps, tattoos or random other types of entrepreneurial activities that were sometimes associated with hip-hop but often were not. Some worked in retail, others worked for their family’s small businesses and still others worked in telemarketing, or other types of formal and informal employment.
The groups in the adhoc model only really came together to make music. The producers would figure out who they were going to privilege with studio time and how much. For their favorite clients, the producers would make their studios available to them as much as the artists desired. As producers and their favorite rappers are generally friends, they would often chill together in their off time and then when the rappers had to go to work or home to visit their families, the producers would work with their other clients. Most producers, in this model as well as in the corporate model treated making beats like an addiction. They took very little time off and when there were not any rap artists present, they practiced their craft and perfected techniques or learned new ones through experimenting with music or listening to other artists that they liked. Their craft was also an obsession. They could not help but make music all the time. Similarly, with rappers, while they were driving to their job or running errands, they were also trying to invent new rhymes, to come up with new lyrics, new songs, listening to new artists that they heard about to get innovative ideas. The producers in the adhoc model however, also took on the role of the entrepreneurs. They decided when and how the rappers would lay down their tracks because most rappers did not have their own studios. The producers, also decided how they were going to work with the rappers. In the adhoc model, I saw a couple of different types of interactions with this relationship.
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There were many different economic arrangements that rappers and various producers would have together. Producers were constantly vying for the popularity of the best rappers. If they knew a rapper who had a lot of talent, they would allow the rapper to use the studio whenever they wanted. The producer and the rapper would create beats for songs and album ideas together. In these cases too, the producers would front rappers the cost of producing the album and would recuperate the money off the album sales. What made this possible was the scarcity of capable rap artists in comparison with the amount of skilled producers that existed, in the music market in Bogota.
Other rap artists had to pay the producers to work with them for the hours that they put in creating their beats and the time it took to record the songs as well. This was what most rap artists who were trying to enter the rap game had to do. They had to get enough money together to make a song and then pay to get it mastered and mounted on an internet platform so they could gain popularity. The hope was, that at some point in the future, they could get recognized enough to have producers start making albums for them for free. And yet, still, other groups would have arrangements where the producers would make them free beats, or let them use their studio for free or both. One might consider the rappers and the production assistants to be the mediators of the group. The relationships were highly interchangeable and could result in varying forms from day to day. Along with the producers and rappers, there were production assistants. The producers in this model lacked formal training in their craft. To compensate for this fact, they needed to have assistants who could lend them a hand in the process of making songs. While Chapter 8 deals much more specifically with this topic, it will suffice to mention this role here. Additionally, on occasion, the public relations coordinators who booked concerts, scouted for talent and updated the social media accounts would help with music production, as
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would cinematographers and musicians. Below is a prototypical model of an adhoc group’s
would cinematographers and musicians. Below is a prototypical model of an adhoc group’s