‘You never been on a ride like this befo’
Los Angeles, automotive listening, and Dr. Dre’s ‘G-Funk’*
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.160Keywords:
Dr. Dre, Los Angeles, music production, rap music, urban spaceAbstract
Since the 1920s, multiple historically specific factors led to the automobile-saturated environment of Los Angeles, contributing to a car-dependent lifestyle for most of its inhabitants. With car travel as its primary mode of mobility, and as a hub of numerous cultural industries throughout the twentieth century, the city has been the breeding ground for a number of car cultures, including hot rods, custom cars, and lowriders in addition to the large output of films and music recordings produced. In rap music of the early 1990s, producer/rapper Dr. Dre’s (Andre Romelle Young) creation of a style labelled ‘G-funk’, according to him, was created and mixed specifically for listening in car stereo systems. This article provides one case study of music’s intersections with geography, both the influence of urban geography on music production and the geography of particular listening spaces. As borrowing is central to hip-hop’s ethos, Dr. Dre’s production reflects how musical materials become re-used for a new space, updated and customized for the automotive listening experience.
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Baber, Brendan. 1997. ‘The Incredible Shrinking Sound System’. Interview, September.
Banham, Reyner. 2001. Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Basham, Frances, and Bob Ughetti. 1984. Car Culture. London: Plexus.
Belasco, Warren. 1980. ‘Motivatin’ with Chuck Berry and Fredrick Jackson Turner’. In The Automobile and American Culture, ed. David C. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, 262–79. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Bottles, Scott L. 1987. Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Brilliant, Ashleigh. 1989. The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided with the Automobile in the 1920s. Santa Barbara, CA: Woodbridge Press.
Brodsly, David. 2002. ‘L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay’. In Autopia: Cars and Culture, ed. Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr, 277–80. London: Reaktion Books.
Bruegmann, Robert. 2005. Sprawl: A Compact History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Bull, Michael. 2003. ‘Soundscapes of the Car: A Critical Study of Automobile Habitation’. In The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, 357–74. Oxford: Berg.
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Caughey, John. 1977. Los Angeles: Biography of a City. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. London: Ebury Press.
Cohen, Sara. 2007. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Coker, Cheo Hodari. 2003. Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Coleman, Brian. 2007. Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-hop Junkies. New York: Random House.
Cross, Brian. 1993. It’s Not About a Salary… Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles. London: Verso.
Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Demers, Joanna. 2003. ‘Sampling the 1970s in Hip-hop’. Popular Music 22, no. 1: 41–56. doi:10.1017/S0261143003003039
Diehl, Matt. 1999. ‘Pop Rap’. In The Vibe History of Hip Hop, ed. Alan Light, 121–33. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Dyson, Michael Eric. 2004. ‘We Never Were What We Used to Be: Black Youth, Pop Culture, and the Politics of Nostalgia’. In The Michael Eric Dyson Reader, 418–40. New York: Basic Civitas Books.
Fleming, E. J. 2009. Paul Bern: The Life and Famous Death of the MGM Director and Husband of Harlow. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.
Forman, Murray. 2002. The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. 2004. That’s the Joint! A Hip-hop Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
George, Lynell. 1992. No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels. London: Verso.
Gilroy, Paul. 2001. ‘Driving While Black’. In Car Cultures, ed. Daniel Miller, 81–104. Oxford: Berg.
Gold, Jonathan. 1993. ‘Day of Dre’. Rolling Stone, September 30: 38–41.
Hoffmann, Frank W., and William G. Bailey. 1991. ‘Boom Cars’. In Sports and Recreation Fads, 71–2. Philadelphia: Haworth Press.
Kajikawa, Loren. 2009. ‘Producing G-Funk in Post-Riot Los Angeles’. Paper presented at annual IASPM (U.S. Branch) meeting. University of California, San Diego, May 30.
Katz, Mark. 2004. Capturing Sound. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Keil, Roger. 1998. Los Angeles: Globalization, Urbanization and Social Struggles. Chichester: John Wiley.
Keyes, Cheryl. 1996. ‘At the Crossroads: Rap Music and its African Nexus’. Ethnomusicology 40, no. 2: 223–48. doi:10.2307/852060
Klein, Norman M. 1997. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. London: Verso.
Krims, Adam. 2007. Music and Urban Geography. London: Routledge.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. 1994. Economies of Sign and Space. London: Sage.
Levine, Robert. 2007. ‘The Death of High Fidelity’, Rolling Stone, December 27. http://www.electriccity.be/Images/The%20Death%20of%20High%20Fidelity%20_%20 Rolling%20Stone.pdf
Marsh, Peter, and Peter Collett. 1986. Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car. London: Jonathan Cape.
Massey, Howard. 2000. Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell Us How They Craft the Hits. San Francisco: Backbeat Books.
Nicholson, Stuart. 2005. Is Jazz Dead? (or has it moved to a new address). London: Routledge.
Pareles, Jon. 1999. ‘Still Tough, Still Authentic. Still Relevant?’ The New York Times, November 14. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E6DF103AF937A25752C 1A96F958260.
Pettitt, Joe. 2003. How to Design and Install High-Performance Car Stereo. North Branch, MN: Car Tech.
Pond, Steven. 2005. Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Quinn, Eithne. 2005. Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rickels, Laurence A. 2001. The Case of California. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Sanneh, Kelefa. 2004. ‘Rapping about Rapping: The Rise and Fall of a Hip-hop Tradition’. In This is Pop, ed. Eric Weisbard, 223–32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sarig, Roni. 2007. Third Coast: OutKast, Timbaland and How Hip-Hop Became a Southern Thing. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.
Schloss, Joseph G. 2004. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-based Hip-hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Scott, Allen J., and Edward W. Soja, eds. 1996. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, eds. 2005. L.A. Noir: The City as Character. Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press.
Sitton, Tom, and William Deverell. 2001. Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell.
Soron, Dennis. 2009. ‘Driven to Drive: Cars and the Problem of “Compulsory Consumption” ’. In Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility, ed. Jim Conley and Arlene Tigar McLaren, 181–98. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Swenson, Kylee. 2006. ‘Captain Contagious’. Remix Magazine, June 1. http://emusician.com/ remixmag/artists_interviews/musicians/remix_captain_contagious/
Tagg, Philip. 1999. Introductory Notes to the Semiotics of Music. http://www.tagg.org/xpdfs/ semiotug.pdf.
Tyrangiel, Josh. 2001. ‘In the Doctor’s House’. Time, September 15. http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000775,00.html.
Urry, John. 2005. ‘The “System” of Automobility’. In Automobilities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift and John Urry, 25–39. London: Sage.
Published
2010-11-16
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Williams, J. (2010). ‘You never been on a ride like this befo’: Los Angeles, automotive listening, and Dr. Dre’s ‘G-Funk’*. Popular Music History, 4(2), 160-176. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.160
