Topica Email List Directory 1. Tick, Tock and ya don't stop

Rap's beginnings were in an open space -- the "commons," if you will.
It arose out of seemingly nothing -- a network of sound that was
cobbled together. It did not cost anything. It was not owned by
anyone. It had tools associated with it -- with inventors behind those
tools -- sure. But "rap" was the interconnectedness of old and new,
audience and emcee, vinyl and the needle. Micro-communities, or as
non-anthropological types might call them, "block parties," were
forming around a music that was unlike other music. It jumped and
skipped -- dependent upon the spinning wheels of steel. It hipped and
hopped -- bringing joy to an unheard community, if only because
suddenly they were creating their own voices, their own celebrity,
their own media. All of this via a medium, the turntable, which had
been looked at from a slightly different angle: what if we didn't just
play the records, but manipulated them? The libraries of music opened
in a cacophonous chorus of linking. James Brown and Steely Dan --
united in the mist of a party. Gone forever when the booze ran out.

So too, blogging.