Live-Instrumentation Hip-Hop: Audio-Racial Hierarchies, Haunthenticity, and Remembering J Dilla

Over the last fifty years, hip-hop music and culture has perpetually negotiated Western epistemological frameworks in the global popular music industry and, more recently, in music academia. These frameworks, including conceptions of authorship in intellectual property law, conceptions of the past and loss, and conceptions of sounds and their relationships to racial identity, systematically and hierarchically marginalise artists working outside of a Western frame of reference. Despite many of these issues receiving academic attention since the late 1980s, I argue that an investigation of live instrumentation, an aspect of hip-hop performance practice underrepresented in musicological and other scholarly discourse, can open new avenues through which these negotiations with Western epistemological frameworks can be examined. This thesis explores how live instrumentation can be used in tributes to iconic figures in hip-hop to negotiate notions of authenticity, neoliberal societal norms, the racialisation of sound, and fears of uncertainty and loss. This thesis works through these ideas via their application to a selection of case studies: three analyses of live-instrumentation tributes to iconic hip-hop producer J Dilla (1974-2006), and an ethnographic study of a live-instrumentation hip-hop / jazz big band collaborative project in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington). The discussions from each case study combine to display how Western epistemological frameworks, in the construction of the global popular music industry and music academia, consciously and subconsciously influence the performance and reception of Black musical art forms. Furthermore, this research displays how the performance of Black musical art forms in the context of Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) can both reinforce and subvert Western epistemological frameworks in Aotearoa’s music performance culture. Ethnography informs a significant portion of this thesis as I draw on observations of performances and conversations with performers working in Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) to describe their navigation of prominent issues.