In “Up Jumps da Meme,” Sasha Frere-Jones traces the near ubiquitous presence of the “Timbaland sound” in the contemporary soundscape. This title signifies upon the title of the 1997 Timbaland hit “Up Jumps Da Boogie,” and it alludes to the almost viral quality of a good musical idea, the way that an instantly recognizable riff or texture can spread from one song to another, quickly saturating the cultural field, until it comes to define something of the texture of its time.Footnote ¹ As Timbaland, Virginia-based producer Tim Mosley has made a seismic impact on popular music since the late 1990s, redefining several aspects of musical production in R&B and hip-hop. In the years after he initially established himself with songs like Aaliyah's “One in a Million” and “Are You That Somebody?,” his stylistic approach was copied so frequently that he and his longtime collaborator, Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, came to assume a defensive posture in their songs, lashing out at the “beat-biters” who would emulate the nervously syncopated “boom-tee-boom” patterns underlying their hits.Footnote ²

The Timbaland sound has asserted itself as one of the crucial memes in our moment, somehow condensing several amorphous elements of contemporary culture into a tactile, densely charged immediacy. Mosley is part of a wave of artists for whom Wired magazine has coined the term “superproducers,” which aptly expresses something of the expansive, almost hegemonic quality of certain contemporary production sounds.Footnote ³ Alongside Mosley, other artists, such as Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, and Scott Storch, have established a new degree of visibility for the rap producer, earning star billings virtually equal in prominence to the artists that they produce. In this respect, their situation recalls figures such as Phil Spector, or Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, producers whose innovative sounds garnered them a degree of celebrity. At the same time, though, the prominence of rap's superproducers also reflects the central role of musical style in late capitalist culture, in the way that it adheres to the logic of branding: the artist who calls on the services of a Timbaland assumes that he will provide a readily identifiable sound, one inseparable from questions of marketing and promotion strategy.Footnote ⁴

For this reason, these figures engage in fierce contestation over the originality and derivation of their musical visions, staking vigorous claims to their ownership of the minutiae of rhythmic and timbral vocabulary. An artist who can come up with a new beat, or a new way of reconfiguring an old beat, can establish a musical platform that resonates throughout popular culture and transcends the normative boundaries of genre and style, linking a particular groove to a producer's name, no matter whose vocals are floating over the top.

In spite of the substantive differences between the current generation of producers, both in their stylistic approaches and in their personal antagonisms, their music shares a few basic features. Commenting upon his early works, Frere-Jones noted that Mosley's sound tended to draw upon everything except the straightforward sampling and looping of breakbeats from 1970s funk and soul recordings, the approach that characterized most hip-hop produced between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s.Footnote ⁵ In his wake, other producers have adopted this approach, replacing the old, unbroken sequences of breakbeats with drum samples used in isolation—a short snare hit, a hi-hat click, a bass drum kick—or with the sonic palette of drum machines such as the Roland TR-808, a staple in earlier genres such as electro, techno, and Miami bass. In particular, southern “krunk” producers such as Lil' Jon or Al Kapone have drawn extensively upon the Miami bass sound, with its stripped-down emphasis upon percussion, its singular combination of powerful bass, and the almost sterile precision of its trebly features. Many figures, such as Swizz Beatz, replaced the old samples of soulful 1970s chord progressions or funk vamps with harmonic textures created directly on synthesizers, often evoking a “dirty” sensibility constructed from the brittle, enervating sounds of Casio keyboards or cheap 8-bit technology.Footnote ⁶ These features of contemporary mainstream hip-hop production have lent it a texture and sense of sonic space that is fundamentally different from that of early 1990s hip-hop, with its evocation of the warmth of 1970s live music, and its frequent inclusion of the grit, crackle, and reverb of ribbon-microphone recordings and vinyl samples.

A pervasive move among hip-hop critics, or rock critics who review hip-hop, is to celebrate its sonic innovations while decrying the misogyny, celebration of materialism, and glorification of violence in its verbal content.Footnote ⁷ The problem, we are told, is that rappers and R&B singers pursue a regressive vision of social possibility that has not kept pace with the formal inventiveness of their own lyrical flow or the musical experimentation of their producers' textures and grooves. This critique can be patronizing, insofar as it ignores the less blatant and more insidious pervasiveness of misogyny, materialism, and narcissism in popular culture as a whole. Those who offer this position usually fail to note their complicity in a long-standing tradition of critics (often white) speaking from a position of assumed superiority about the supposed moral shortcomings of African American music. Moreover, we should dismiss this critique for a more fundamental reason. The dichotomy that many critics set up between mainstream rap's “regressive” verbal content and its “progressive” music is a false dichotomy, a dualism that fails to acknowledge the vital role that music plays in making the words compelling.

Music establishes the ontological conditions through which a song's words can be understood as more than words, underwriting and making tangible its claims to truth. From this perspective, we can and must take a more complex view of the role that rap production plays in rendering corporeal the vision of society that emerges from rap, narratives about rap, and representations of rap. In the case of post-Timbaland rap and R&B production, the beats and textures of this music do not contradict the lyrical worldview of mainstream rap in any straightforward way. Rather, they render audible dimensions of this worldview inaccessible to verbal language alone. In so doing, they demonstrate the extent to which the bleak perspective of mainstream rap serves not as a lamentable remainder of outmoded attitudes, but rather as a crucial canary in the coal mine, a warning about what might come to pass.

This study will begin with a close analysis of several tracks from different moments in the last decade and a half of rap, hip-hop, and R&B. My approach will focus less upon the lyrical content or rhetorical delivery of the rapping and singing, and more upon what the immediacy of the songs' vamps, the specific densities of their textures, can tell us about the kind of context in which such songs might become legible. In particular, I would like to demonstrate that the decisions these producers make at the level of the groove are crucial, for they foreground the ways in which certain kinds of broad, large-scale social developments might make themselves felt: the collapse of the public sphere; the radical change wrought by the collapsing of physical space in quotidian experience; and the reduction of human possibility to the immediate confines of the body.

My account of this post-Timbaland moment in contemporary rap production will proceed by way of a discussion of Paul Virilio's concept of “telepresence,” the radical realignment of social relations catalyzed by the widespread use of contemporary communication technologies.Footnote ⁸ The notion of telepresence invites us to think about the ramifications of a world in which the privatized virtual space of electronic communication comes to replace the face-to-face interactions that have historically constituted the public sphere. I will describe the ways in which telepresence might serve as a useful analogy for a production aesthetic that, in its evocation of a two-dimensional sonic environment, reinforces the retreat of R&B and rap lyrics from the domain of public interaction to a virtual non-place of private enjoyment.

Finally, I will demonstrate that this account of musical telepresence contributes to our understanding of Paul Gilroy's claims about the implications of contemporary “biopolitics” for black public culture, that is, a politics concerned with the regulation and control of the body. For Gilroy, the reduced political horizon of the black subject finds itself reflected and reinforced by a cultural sensibility that would sever the black body from broader romantic, civic, or political aspirations.Footnote ⁹ Whereas Gilroy's critique centers around the lyrics of contemporary rap and R&B, post-Timbaland music production provides evidence that this sensibility also makes its presence felt at the level of the groove.

The aesthetics of rap production are closely bound up with the stylistic dimensions of hip-hop culture as a whole. In her influential study Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, drawing upon terminology formulated by filmmaker Arthur Jafa, cites rap production as one of several interrelated stylistic practices that are bound together by a hip-hop aesthetic of “flow” and “rupture.” For Rose, the rhyming vocalizations of rap, the DJ's manipulation of the sound system, the breakdancer's jerky choreography and the guerrilla murals of graffiti art are all infused by this same set of aural and visual strategies. In the same way that rappers and breakdancers build their rhymes or moves by alternating between gestures of lucid flow and stark cuts or interruptions, DJs and producers build their soundscapes around funk or rock beats that alternate between seamless arcs of continuity and the sudden breaks that cut against them. They reinforce and extend these rhythmic gestures with practices such as scratching, in which the DJ manipulates the records on the turntables, breaking the flow of the music on the source recordings.Footnote ¹⁰

Rose conceives of this ubiquitous aesthetic of flow and rupture as the response of hip-hop's creators to the social conditions in which they lived. The visual and aural style of breakdancing, rapping, and DJing, with its normalization of unpredictability, might have served as a coping mechanism, a means of adapting to the structural violence wrought by deindustrialization and urban renewal in the South Bronx neighborhoods where the elements of hip-hop style initially took form. Rose also asserts that in hip-hop production, producers' early use—or “misuse”—of turntables as musical instruments, reflects this strategy of adapting to prevailing socioeconomic conditions in that they “make do” with the available resources, coaxing their “makeshift” devices to do things they were never made to do. By this reckoning, turntables, digital samplers, sound systems, and hip-hop's other technological appropriations primarily reflect the material situation in which this culture comes into being:

However, if the creators of hip-hop do use their materials “against themselves,” turning the detritus of postindustrialism into a critique of itself, there is a danger in ascribing too much of this phenomenon to socioeconomic determinism. Joseph Schloss, citing the commentary of hip-hop pioneer Prince Paul, notes that DJs and producers gravitated towards the equipment of rap production—turntables, drum machines, digital samplers—largely because of their aesthetic appeal, their ability to generate previously unknown sonic possibilities. To advance a strictly socioeconomic explanation for what were mostly artistic choices is to provide an inadequate account of the creativity behind hip-hop's galvanizing sonic impact.Footnote ¹²

If the material conditions in which hip-hop took shape do not predetermine its aesthetic in any straightforward way, there nevertheless remains an important social dimension to the sound of hip-hop and R&B, as with all musical genres. Aesthetically pleasing musical decisions are compelling because they resonate with our most fundamental, unspoken assumptions about the moment we live in. Turntablism and its successor, digital sampling, have allowed producers to use fragments of prerecorded sound in ways that signify upon intuitions about memory, cultural knowledge, and subjectivity that are peculiar to their time and place. The more recent shift in production style in contemporary black popular music that I address here, what I am referring to as a “post-Timbaland” sound, has come to feel just as intuitive to current listeners, because of its own unusual and powerful access to post-millennial sensibilities.

The process of building loops from digital sampling has been the focus of much of the existing scholarly literature on hip-hop production.Footnote ¹³ In the early 1980s, producer Marley Marl famously stumbled upon the process of sampling breakbeats, the sections in rock, funk, and soul tunes in which a drum “break” is isolated from the rest of the surrounding musical texture.Footnote ¹⁴ The process ensured that the producer would be able to draw upon the suppleness of the drummer's sound, the intricacy of timing and accent specific to live, acoustic drumming. Moreover, the sampling of breakbeats also captured the grittiness of hiss and crackle, a grittiness derived from the noise produced through sampling vinyl recordings, and from the different sound quality of the original recordings, which often used ribbon microphones or other technologies specific to their time.

In “Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Recent Music,” Joseph Auner reminds us of the ways that these audible traces of old technologies signify upon our culture's relation to memory and nostalgia.Footnote ¹⁵ If the looping of samples tends to emphasize the artifice of a song's construction, the ragged stitches holding it together, it also maintains a connection to the sense of acoustic space generated in the source recordings. The live drumming on 1960s and 1970s soul recordings frequently uses copious amounts of reverb, evoking a sense of spatiality within the sound world of the recording, and some element of this was brought into the music that sampled it.Footnote ¹⁶ Beyond this, though, the use of twenty-year-old samples, the characteristic tunes of an earlier era, allows hip-hop producers to signify upon a different kind of space and distance, the long perspective of passing time. Moreover, the materiality of these recorded samples, their saturation with buzz and crackle, intensified their demarcation of a distance between past and present.

Auner's argument on behalf of the British trip-hop textures of Portishead holds true, I believe, for American hardcore rap production as well. Adrian Utley's use (in his Portishead instrumental backdrops) of the crackle of vinyl, the boom and hiss of earlier recording technologies, the tinny, “AM radio” quality in his processing of Beth Gibbons's vocals—all of this tends to encourage a fetishistic privileging of old technology, and perhaps the absent, bygone worlds to which that alludes. Portishead is a white production team supporting a white torch singer, singing introspective songs focusing upon personal anxiety, regret, and disillusionment, and, as a consequence, Utley's gritty production here winds up channeling this fetishism of the past through the lens of individual loss.

The same formal lens, though, placed in the hands of hardcore rap producers such as the RZA (Robert Diggs) on the Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) can be used to signify upon an entirely different set of social meanings. In contrast to the warm, soulful samples that Utley puts to work in Portishead's recordings, the RZA saturates the atmosphere of Enter the Wu-Tang with samples of martial-arts B-movie soundtracks and gritty, subterranean breakbeats, alluding to an urban context of social antagonism and street menace.Footnote ¹⁷ Where Utley's sound is preoccupied with interiority, the RZA's sound channels its emotional energy outward, training its eyes (or ears) upon public space.

Sean Combs's production team, which programmed the underlying textures for Notorious B.I.G.'s influential album Ready to Die, also harness sampling technology in a way that focuses upon the public resonances of these older musical references, particularly their evocation of history, nostalgia, and the anxieties of social change.Footnote ¹⁸ On “Things Done Changed,” Biggie Smalls ruminates upon the swift dissolution of public spaces in black neighborhoods, rapping,

Here, Small's opening track functions as an establishing shot, an epic backdrop for the more personal narratives of street jeopardy and sexual misadventure to follow. Smalls's producers take the long historical view on this track, building up a dense, lush layering using samples from such songs as the Main Ingredient's “Summer Breeze,” upbeat soul songs gesturing towards an earlier, more hopeful moment in African American social experience. There is a tremendous historical and emotional distance separating the tone of these sampled songs from that of the bleak scenarios depicted in Smalls's lyrics, an aching distance of wrenching change and reduced horizons. Here, the brooding unison strings that Smalls incorporates over the later verses further reinforces this sense of distance. The epic tone that Smalls sets in this track serves as an implicit conscience, an awareness of other moral possibilities that permeates the album and watches over the amoral violence wrought by his protagonist on tracks such as the ultraviolent “Gimme the Loot” and the sexually omnivorous “Friend of Mine.” The distance between past and present in “Things Done Changed” alludes to, while never making explicit, the structural violence wrought by postindustrialism within black communities, the rapid atrophying of civic potential within inner-city regions eviscerated by the flight of stable industrial employment and other kinds of social investment.

The looping of digital samples served as the dominant production style in hip-hop from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. It was pervasive across stylistic boundaries, as a common formal denominator in music ranging from the sonic bombast of Public Enemy and N.W.A., through the whimsical jazz references of Native Tongue crews, to the gritty realism of early 1990s hardcore rap. Loop-based production presided over a period encompassing economic recession, the intensification of the “war on drugs,” and heightened tensions in the wake of the beating of Rodney King. In this context, the tactile materiality of looped samples allowed many rap tracks to evoke an atmosphere consistent with Chuck D's description of rap as “black people's CNN”: that is, their invocation of the “real,” of a reality beyond the surface of the song, underwrote the street narratives of rappers as diverse as Ice Cube, Biggie Smalls, Nas, and Tupac Shakur.

The latter, more prosperous half of the decade of the 1990s witnessed a sea change in black musical aesthetics, catalyzed by changes in the immediacy of musical grooves, their constituent textures. Mosley is probably the most instrumental figure in this sonic shift. His production credits include artists ranging from Missy Elliott and Ginuwine to Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, and he developed his sound in a studio based in Virginia Beach, an area with a history of innovative production in hip-hop. Teddy Riley developed the “New Jack Swing” style there in the late 1980s, and the area later gave rise to the Neptunes, a production duo consisting of Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, named for their mutual fascination with water and sea.Footnote ¹⁹ The Neptunes have extended and added to the aesthetic Timbaland developed in the late 1990s, with an overtly “tech-y,” futuristic sound that, like Mosley's, makes use of an elaborate process of beat construction that builds its hooks from “scratch.”Footnote ²⁰

If songs such as Notorious B.I.G.'s “Things Done Changed” proceed by way of a rich, densely assembled sonic atmosphere, building up “strata” of memory by means of sampled loops, Timbaland's production on Aaliyah's 1997 hit “Are You That Somebody?” reflects a radically different approach.Footnote ²¹ Here, Mosley constructs a beat whose most striking feature is its “start-stop” quality, its alternation of skittish, syncopated beats with moments of dead space. In this vamp, everything from the staccato chord progressions to Aaliyah's vocal phrasing subordinates itself to the rhythm, a rhythm whose complexity betrays no trace of live acoustic space. The silence between beats is total: Mosley applies no reverb, no sonic filler, nothing to interfere with the sense of two-dimensional flatness that this groove evokes.Footnote ²²

Mosley's approach to production, also evident on tracks such as his tabla-funk Missy Elliott hit, “Get Ur Freak On” or his recent work for Justin Timberlake on songs such as “My Love,” also eschew the conventional means of creating sonic “fullness,” such as reverb, pan, delay, echo, or other effects that might construct a mental image of sonic space.Footnote ²³ They do not entirely avoid sampling: “Are You That Somebody?” makes particularly clever use of a giggling baby as a rhythmic device, and both the Aaliyah hit and “My Love,” recorded ten years afterward, draw upon a peculiar beatboxing sound Mosley obtains by jiggling his cheeks. However, these are not complete, unbroken loops, building textures out of four- to eight-bar segments, but instead consist of sonic fragments, building blocks isolated from their immediate musical contexts. Mosley is famously mute on the subject of his influences. In other artists' work, though, this strategy of sampling makes use of the potential, in devices such as the Akai MPC series of samplers, for breaking larger samples into “regions,” shorter segments often consisting of little more than a kick drum or snare sound from the original breakbeat.Footnote ²⁴ The fragmentation of sounds allows Mosley to harness the punctuating, percussive dimension of sounds without bringing along too much of their additional baggage: their evocation of sonic ambience, the gritty materiality of their source as vinyl samples, the historical connections and allusions they forge as part of longer, recognizable phrases.

One should be careful here, because samples inevitably do point outside themselves as simulacra of earlier recorded events. Timbaland is famously catholic in his musical references, building his sound through some unusual sources. However, samples in Timbaland's work usually take on an instrumental role, subordinating their referentiality to their sonic impact as discrete rhythmic and textural events. The baby's giggle in “Are You That Somebody?” is certainly evocative, but in the context of the Aaliyah groove, it is largely part of the polyrhythmic construction.

Even in those instances in which Mosley does use evocative melodies, timbres, or rhythmic patterns to gesture towards particular cultural references, he presents them in such a way that they rarely evoke the same meanings as similar gestures derived from sampled “live” sound sources. In “Get Ur Freak On,” he superimposes a tinny orientalist riff, seemingly generated by some kind of Japanese shamisen or koto synthesizer preset, over the top of an intricate tabla groove. In a context in which a producer had sampled these sounds from live performance, they would be inseparably linked to the ambience of the rooms in which they were performed, lending the music a sense (however illusory) of being grounded in a physical location. However, within the meticulously spare, reverbless sonic environment of Mosley's production, such references sound oddly abstracted, cut off from their broader resonances with the concrete dimensions of historical time and place.

Mosley builds up beats largely from scratch, generating all of the polyrhythmic intricacy of funk, yet mostly eschewing the things that ordinarily happen between the beats: sonic decay, reverberation, the ghostly traces of the past. In live music, such events occurring “between the beats” tend to bear witness to the forces producing the music, the bodily labor of the performers themselves. Their inclusion in sampled grooves not only participates in the music's citation of cultural referents but also suggests the possibility of its connection to a concrete time and place. The Mosley breakbeat, on the other hand, effaces such concrete connections, remaining as a minimal trace, alluding only in the most abstract fashion to the material circumstances in which other funk grooves have been created.

If Timbaland is cryptic about who has influenced him, many cite the impact of Miami “bass music,” or “Miami bass,” both in his music and throughout the entire panopoly of contemporary southern rap. Critic Roni Sarig locates the music's origins in the electro-funk of the 1980s, in tracks such as Afrika Bambaataa's “Planet Rock.” In their attempt to evoke the futuristic artifice of Kraftwerk, Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force used the Roland TR-808, a drum machine that Roland had stopped making because its drum samples were wholly unconvincing in their imitation of live drumming. It was precisely this anti-realism, this peculiarly tinny and sterile ambience of the 808's beats, that underwrote the aesthetic of electro, foregrounding a cybernetic funk entirely distinct from the sounds created by turntablist DJs in hip-hop's earliest years. With Marley Marl's introduction of sampled breakbeats as a new basis for hip-hop production, New York largely abandoned electro, but in Miami, figures such as erstwhile telephone technician James McCauley or DJ Pretty Tony wedded the 808-based beats of electro to the resonant bass that local sound-system DJs had brought out in their party sets.Footnote ²⁵

It is worth noting the peculiar association of the sterile, immaculately “clean” beats of Miami bass with the explicit, often misogynistic lyrics of the “booty music” that spread throughout the Miami scene after the release of 2 Live Crew's 1987 album Move Something.Footnote ²⁶ Because of their emphasis upon the rigid eighth-note groupings allowed by the device's sequencer, TR-808 beats often sound unfunky upon first hearing. That these antiseptic grooves could support such raunchily specific rap verses would seem like a contradiction in terms. However, the 808 textures of bass music do map out alongside the sexual lyrics of booty music in one important respect. The disembodiment at the core of bass music production, its heavy dependence upon the obviously synthetic sound of the drum machine, suggests a spatial two-dimensionality, a “foreground” of groove that thwarts our ability to envision live musicians in the “background” responsible for the performance. Such an aspatial, two-dimensional production serves as an appealing aural analogue to bass music's emphatically sexual lyrics, which refuse all emotional commitments beyond the immediate here and now of the dance floor or of the sexual act.

If my discussion thus far has focused upon the sparseness of production styles such as that of Timbaland, or that found in Miami bass, one final example here illuminates how even “fuller” musical textures might still evoke a more “flat,” two-dimensional quality of sonic space. On his production for the Reference King2006 hit “What You Know” by rapper T.I., Atlanta producer DJ Toomp centers the track around a repeated four-measure harmonic progression, played using an especially obnoxious synthesizer sound.Footnote ²⁷ He programs each note in the bass line to continue straight through to the end of each beat, with utterly no decay in the sound, or any space between the beats. Only the crisp percussion sounds of the 808 in any way punctuate this unrelenting tenuto texture. Praising the track in his review of T.I.'s album King for the All Music Guide, Andy Kellman describes it as follows:

Here, the unbroken, sustained texture of Toomp's production serves as the complementary opposite of the starkly minimal beats on songs such as “Are You That Somebody?” Toomp creates a sonic wall of radical opacity, a flat plane of unrelenting sound that denies depth, perspective, relief, with just as much insistence as the dead space and staccato beats of Aaliyah's hit.

Many scholars have noted this pervasiveness of a two-dimensionality elsewhere in contemporary aesthetics, an emphasis of shallow surface over spatial or temporal depth. Most famously, Frederic Jameson established more than two decades ago that postmodern aesthetics had largely abandoned the constructions of interior depth in earlier artwork in favor of a celebration of depthless surface, a laconic flatness severed from the dialectical turbulence of the grand narrative.Footnote ²⁹ One of the more disturbing dimensions of this flatness is its erasure of any notion of the spectral, of ghostly traces, of some remainder that might complicate the integrity of the images we consume, of the sounds we absorb. Avery Gordon in her Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination frames these ideas through the concept of “hypervisibility,” that condition of postmodern culture in which everything is understood as eminently accessible, offering itself to our gaze, evacuated of its historical tensions or antagonisms:

Hypervisibility (or, we might add, its aural counterpart, hyperaudibility) brooks no alternatives to total media saturation or uninflected, dead space. Every webpage can theoretically occupy the same flat plane as any other, can find its physical distance from the viewer radically truncated by search engines and hypertext links. Similarly, “reality” television and YouTube allow us an unseemly proximity to the private ruminations and unsolicited intimacies of total strangers.Footnote ³¹ In this way, our media-constituted reality comes to resemble the depressing contours of pornography, a filmic genre, Slavoj Žižek reminds us, that hides nothing, and thereby negates its own capacity for establishing the “minimal distance” that lends weight to representation, that fleeting, elusive element that exceeds the immediate grasp of representation.Footnote ³²

However, the quality of aspatial “flatness” that characterizes many of the production styles of early twenty-first-century mainstream rap and R&B comments upon an even more ominous dimension of contemporary reality, one frequently invoked by Virilio. One of his chief contributions to theoretical critique is his assessment of the cultural ramifications of instantaneous electronic communication. In Open Sky, he demonstrates how real-time electronic communication transforms the journey, the movement from one place to another that used to necessitate a physical displacement beginning with a departure, moving through a journey, to arrive at a destination. If new modes of transportation invented in the nineteenth and twentieth century had modified the journey, reducing its necessary delay, the development of real-time electronic communication in the late twentieth century eliminates departure, creating the situation of a “generalized arrival” where “everything arrives without having to leave,” the distance separating two points on a map reduced to an abstraction, easily neutralized by the opening of a channel between two nodes in a network.Footnote ³³

Virilio uses the concept of “telepresence” to designate this specific relation to the world brought into being by the possibility of real-time electronic communication and action. Telepresence, the ability to meet at a distance, results in a peculiar short-circuiting of conventional space and time, where electromagnetic communication radically collapses the distance separating subject from object, and eradicates the historical situatedness of the present, that of an event anchored in a concrete “here and now” bound to the past and to the future. Telepresence isolates the present in time and place, situating it within a “no-place,” an “atopia” separate from our spatial-temporal coordinates.Footnote ³⁴

For Virilio, this short circuit imposed by the temporal-spatial disconnect of telepresence presents us with a number of troubling considerations. On a broader scale, Virilio argues that a “tyranny of real time” has wrought structural violence at a socioeconomic level, as the speed of exchange permitted by the instantaneous transfer of electronic information has facilitated the automation of tasks formerly executed by workers (and, one might add, has facilitated the practice of outsourcing, in which local labor is made redundant by easier and less expensive modes of global capital flow). On a more regional scale, though, Virilio also decries the way in which telepresence, with its isolation of the event from the material context of physical space, has resulted in an inversion of “near” and “distant,” with calamitous repercussions for social ties and communities:

What Thomas de Zengotita describes as our “unseemly access,” our ability to truncate the distance between ourselves and even the most remote images or sounds, comes at a price: we must ignore all that lurks behind, or comes between us and the information we summon forth.Footnote ³⁶ The opacity of the flattened, severed image obscures our view, preventing us from understanding the material difficulties of what it represents, the way in which it stands in for the immediacy of human contact.

Some of the positive ramifications of the emergent information technology complicate any straightforward account of telepresence as an inherently negative social development. For example, in a study commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Challenges for the 21st Century, a group of new media scholars led by Henry Jenkins presents an assessment of emergent communications technology that centers around the idea of “participatory cultures.” Participatory cultures harness the social potential of contemporary interactive technologies, using what is frequently real-time communication to build communities that exceed the boundaries of the networks they emerge from. Such technologies as networked gaming, weblogs, video upload sites such as YouTube, or networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook allow new, previously unimagined possibilities for civic and political engagement, artistic expression, and other kinds of communal interaction.Footnote ³⁷

At the same time, though, Jenkins and his co-authors acknowledge some of the pitfalls and dangers associated with these new avenues for community. The “digital divide,” the gap between those with both material and social access to these participatory cultures, and those without, may actually function to exacerbate existing socioeconomic divisions.Footnote ³⁸ This digital divide operates in tandem with the “inversion of near and distant” that Virilio identifies within the phenomenon of telepresence, the marginalization of those who fall between the nodes of the network. Moreover, in the same way that participatory cultures have allowed the development of unprecedented possibilities for community building and interaction, they also have given rise to new, unprecedented ethical challenges. Those with unrestricted access to the instantaneous, widespread distribution of their ideas and thoughts may not feel the same social constraints that they do in an environment of local, face-to-face interaction and social ties.Footnote ³⁹ In this sense, the “no-place” of electronic communication involves an unstable and highly ambiguous, if not contradictory, set of social assumptions: media that creates new distances as it eradicates old ones; untrammeled communication via channels that also flatten the contours of social “depth,” those cues that have historically allowed us nuanced interactions and served as constraints upon those interactions.

Against this backdrop, then, the “two-dimensionality” that I have been attempting to locate in contemporary rap production bears a larger ethical dimension. The dead air surrounding Timbaland's stark percussion, the unyielding sonic proximity of DJ Toomp's production on “What You Know,” these textures emulate the no-place of Virilio's telepresence, the collapsed, ahistorical abstraction that has come to replace the ordinary dynamics of physical and temporal distance and proximity. In their impenetrable immediacy, their subordination of external reference to the internal dynamics of the groove, these sound worlds capture something of the radical redefinition of public space implicit in the widespread use of technologies of telepresence. In this way, they perform a crucial function: they bring to the ear's attention a dimension of contemporary experience that, by definition, negates absence, eschews permanence, and resides nowhere.

The spatial topography, or perhaps anti-spatial topography, that I am attempting to identify in southern production styles raises some crucial issues about the relationship between race, the body, and technology.Footnote ⁴⁰ One of the most powerful dimensions of the music's appeal derives from its establishment of an aesthetic that challenges conventional notions of the “human,” a category that has historically been denied to African-diasporic peoples, and one that has become increasingly problematic in light of postmodern interpretations of subjectivity. This aesthetic challenge to Eurocentric conceptions of the human, though, functions in concert with the music's aesthetic realization of telepresence, and as a consequence we will need to consider precisely how the new modes of subjectivity represented in this music relate to the broader social questions raised by the concept of telepresence.

In “‘Feenin‘: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music,” Alexander Weheliye positions black popular music in relation to the category of the “posthuman,” the cybernetic, hybrid construction of subjectivity explored by N. Katherine Hayles.Footnote ⁴¹ In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles's strategy is to demonstrate how a new category of the “posthuman” has come to displace the classical liberal construction of the “human,” that is, a subject with discrete boundaries, internal consistency, and unconditional agency. This posthuman, by contrast, assumes no fixed boundaries between human beings and the intelligent machines they operate, with prosthetic technologies extending and fundamentally conditioning “human” subjectivity.Footnote ⁴²

Weheliye argues that Hayles's racially unmarked construction of the posthuman is predicated upon a Eurocentric notion of the human, one that takes for granted a universal, undifferentiated model of post-Enlightenment subjectivity. For Weheliye, these assumptions fail to account for the contested and problematic relation of subjectivity to African-diasporic culture, given that those descended from slavery have never easily acquired unconditional access to full humanity. In this context, he asserts, it makes more sense to understand the specifically black posthuman in the terms set by Kodwo Eshun, who conceives of a posthumanism that has emerged from a conception of the subhuman, for the most part bypassing any unproblematic embrace of the white liberal subjectivity implicit in the term “human.”Footnote ⁴³

The black posthuman envisioned by Weheliye and Eshun challenges those narratives of black progress that might seek to measure progress in the terms of Eurocentric liberal subjectivity. Against a portrayal of black music that would decry the loss of the human, Weheliye posits a posthuman subject utterly at home in an environment of fragmentation and mediation, where the human stands in a complex relation to technology, the virtual, the machinic. The black posthuman presents a complex imbrication of the body within the virtual, where “because. . . black cultural practices do not have the illusion of disembodiment, they stage the body of information and technology as opposed to the lack thereof.”Footnote ⁴⁴

As I have argued, the “virtuality” of post-Timbaland rap production emerges from its evocation of a sonic no-place, where the dancing body resides as a starkly minimal, mechanical trace of the more “human” breakbeats that earlier rap production would sample from 1960s or 1970s soul. As such, it presents itself as an especially likely home for the type of posthuman subject that Weheliye invokes. Indeed, he specifically identifies the “hypersoul” of contemporary R&B as a locus for the posthuman, a site where the virtual and the concrete, body and soul, are caught up in intricate and paradoxical relationships. In particular, Weheliye focuses on the innovative use of musical technologies such as the vocoder in black music, which allows a contradictory virtualization of the embodied voice, in order to understand how such technologies underscore the intricate processes of mediation described in the lyrics. In the songs of Timbaland, Ginuwine, Missy Elliott, Destiny's Child, Aaliyah, and others, the cell phone, the chat room, and the pager figure as tools through which the concrete dimensions of desire can be negotiated in the virtual no-place of electronic communication.Footnote ⁴⁵

For Weheliye, one of the consequences of this profound immersion of the desiring subject within a machinic information network is that subjectivity becomes radically transformed by this encounter, with human desire beginning to take on the characteristics of the technologies it utilizes. In the same moment, though, the body does not disappear, but is amplified via the technological medium. Citing Jodeci's song “Feenin',” in which this vocoder-filtered word (implying “fiend,” or drug fiend) is used to imply a desire that resembles drug addiction, Weheliye notes the extent to which “feenin'” indexes an almost total erasure of humanistic elements from the song's expression of bodily desire. Desire here is not the province of spiritual longing or of romantic love, and yet it remains fundamentally embodied, with the “body” here understood as an extension of the technologies that possess it. Here, the song's protagonist ceases to be a “human” subject in any conventional sense, and is instead reconstituted as material desire, borne out of neurochemical addiction and channeled through the electronic medium of digital sound.Footnote ⁴⁶

If the black posthuman subject feels so at home in the “hypersoul” of contemporary R&B, this is because post-Timbaland production styles have provided us with sonic textures that resonate so powerfully with the eclipse of the human implicit in songs like “Feenin'.” The “two-dimensionality” of the post-Timbaland sound, with its frustration of interiority or emotional depth, speaks to the historical contingency of the human that Weheliye addresses in his discussion. However, the constructions of black subjectivity cited by Weheliye must also be understood within a larger context. My discussion of telepresence above foregrounds the unsettling political and ethical implications of a phenomenon that upends and rearranges ordinary concepts of near and far, substituting virtual presence for physical presence. As a model of subjectivity that resides within virtual space, the black posthuman of hypersoul is inseparable from these considerations. Moreover, the inescapable presence of the body within the collapsed space of post-Timbaland “musical telepresence” requires that we consider the ways that this music might offer us a window on more wide-ranging conversations about the political and juridical status of the body.

In The Black Atlantic and Against Race, Paul Gilroy devotes considerable attention to the ways that African-diasporic musics comment upon the politics of the black body.Footnote ⁴⁷ His critique of contemporary R&B and hip-hop reads its distinctive gender politics, with its preoccupation with bodies, as a microcosm of larger transformations within the black public sphere. In The Black Atlantic, he argues that music registers the dimension of race relations through its articulation of sexual or gender relations between its songs' protagonists:

By this reckoning, of course, the hypersexualized lyrics of a song such as Missy Elliott's “Pussy Don't Fail Me Now” dramatize the extent to which the invocation of romance in current R&B has receded to the contours of the body.Footnote ⁴⁹ For Gilroy, this replacement of an idealized romance with an unsentimental sexual candor always involves an erosion of the human, of those dimensions of human interactions that “go beyond” the immediate gratification of desire. Writ large, this erosion of romantic possibility translates into an erosion of the very possibility of political community, of emancipation.Footnote ⁵⁰

Gilroy argues that the rise of an increasingly explicit sexuality in rap, alongside its ongoing celebration of violence, maps out along a broader terrain demarcated by the concept of “biopolitics.”Footnote ⁵¹ As Giorgio Agamben outlines in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, biopolitics is the term that Michel Foucault gives to a politics that centers around the control, administration, and management of the simple, living body. In the context of Foucault's late research, the idea of biopolitics informed two primary avenues of inquiry: on the one hand, those techniques of state power that allow the state to corral, administer, and discipline the individual body, and on the other hand, those “technologies of the self” that enable the subject to police his or her own identity and connection to external power.Footnote ⁵²

Agamben's interest in biopolitics centers around the relationship between the biopolitical body and the power of the state. This relationship finds its extreme endpoint in the “state of exception,” the situation in which civil discourses and social relations of ordinary life are suspended.Footnote ⁵³ In the state of exception, the broader political proclivities of the human are stripped away and the body is left naked before state power, no longer protected by the due process or the rule of law.Footnote ⁵⁴ We might imagine that an absolute point of demarcation separates those domains of the state where the rule of law is in force, on the one hand, from those under the state of exception, on the other. However, Agamben notes that in the present era, the state of exception in contemporary Western societies has come to coexist with the quotidian application of law, creating a zone of indistinction between the state's application of juridical authority and its simultaneous application of unrestrained force.Footnote ⁵⁵

In many respects, this peculiar situation of suspension describes the conditions that have faced many African American communities during the rise of the postindustrial state. In instances such as the 1985 bombing of the MOVE collective in Philadelphia or the indiscriminate police raids of “Operation Hammer” in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, the police forces in large metropolitan centers have frequently applied a broad-scale, disproportionate use of force that blurs the lines between law enforcement and low-intensity combat. The unrestrained brutality involved in such incidents as the assault of Haitian New Yorker Abner Louima by New York police in 1997 indicates how black men continue to be subject to a selective application of the rule of law. At the same time, we need to be cognizant that there can be no straightforward celebration of the “rule of law” in an era that has witnessed the introduction of many wholly legal mechanisms that have intensified the draconian “war on drugs” and that have brought about the current unprecedented rates of black male incarceration.

The biopolitical consists of a reduction of the boundaries of the subject to its body, and for this reason, Gilroy sees it as having an immense explanatory power for understanding the shrinking confines of the black public sphere, the reduced horizons of intimate love, and the precariousness of the black body before the law in postindustrial society. These three social developments are intricately wedded to one another:

For Gilroy, the retreat of the R&B song's horizons from black public spaces to the privacy of the domestic sphere is concomitant with a similar imagining of what transpires within the domestic sphere itself. If, as Gilroy asserts, the family often serves in R&B songs as the only acceptable remaining site for the envisioning of social change, it can find its own boundaries further curtailed to the vicissitudes of sexual pleasure, to the gratification of the desiring body. In this way, even the most intimate depictions of sexuality in R&B link back to the biopolitics of the state of exception, insofar as they, too, envision a black body that is stripped of everything beyond its capacity for pleasure or suffering.

As I have discussed above, the flat, uninflected sonic space of post-Timbaland rap and R&B provides an agreeable home for the posthuman black subject described by Weheliye. However, this hospitality comes at a cost, for this aesthetic of anti-humanism, this refusal of interior depth or emotional transcendence, also unwittingly colludes with a biopolitics in which the socially engaged black subject of the public sphere is reduced to the confines of a desiring, suffering body. As Virilio argues with respect to telepresence, virtuality fundamentally reorders the relationship between near and distant, bringing together private nodes of communication in the same moment that it severs its ties from the local and the public. It intensifies the hold of biopolitics through its erasure of the context that gives bodies historical weight and political relevance. We must be wary of a posthuman that is so eager to celebrate virtual space that it neglects the accelerating deterioration of concrete space and the bodies that occupy it.

In this account of the music of Timbaland, the Neptunes, and bass music, I hope I have demonstrated that the “purely musical” constructions of rap and R&B production, with their powerful depictions of sonic space, are capable of signifying upon the larger environment in which they are situated. My discussion might seem to present an unduly bleak conception of what this music represents. However, my analysis of its capacity for signifying upon the experience of telepresence and biopolitics, is not intended as some kind of indictment of its ostensibly “regressive” qualities. Rather, I hope to have demonstrated this music's singular prescience, its powerful insights into the nature of social and spatial relations in the early twenty-first century. Lawrence Kramer has argued that music itself is a form of criticism, a criticism that has access to modes of commentary that are unavailable to language or visual representation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Contemporary black music has done much to demonstrate the validity of this statement, and it is therefore crucial that we attend to what is “said” in its nonverbal mutations and transformations.