Top Billin' and Hip-Hop as Folklore/Convergence Culture

• In Event: The Shape of Things to Come: Songs, Noise, and Spillover

Abstract

 "Milk is chillin', Giz is chillin', what more can I say?" To many raised on hip-hop, the answer is automatic: "Top billin'!" The mangled sample fueling Audio Two's late 1980s minor hit soon introduced Mary Blige as hip-hop R&B queen in "Real Love" and later celebrated 50 Cent's wealth in "I Get Money." A full minute of beat, billin'exchange, and locater "Brooklyn!" timelined the intro to Notorious B.I.G.'s first album Ready to Die. But mostly it's been the tag phrase, reworked, that registered, from Talib Kweli or Dr. Dre to Jay-Z and Kanye West's collab "Otis," which remade it as "Jay is chillin', Ye is chillin', What more can I say? We killin' 'em."
            This is a lore cycle; what seemed postmodern then comes back as an early meme. This is convergence culture, too, old (school) media meets new (school) media and hip-hop stays whole. The "Louie Louie" of rap evokes a garage band nugget, or Atlanta's Migos et al getting goofy today. We thought we heard the future when "Top Billin'" played repeatedly one magic night of a DJ Red Alert's NYC radio broadcast, that stripped-down, revved back sound. But we were mistaking crudeness for what you might call crewness.
            The tag phrase banter was not just catchy, it presented a sense of friendship, family (Milk and Giz were brothers, dad a record industry vet, MC Lyte claimed as a sister but that was hype, if telling hype), call-and-response community. And it did so against a barebone track, which in a different performance might have led to a posthuman presentation. This all persisted as "Top Billin'" got revamped. That original exchange, easily heard as just silliness, became a dialogic hedge against all the commodifications that hip-hop itself would be subject to. "Top Billin'" became totemic, like Brooklyn, for new stars and underground figures alike. It provided a form over time for humanizing incorporation, resisting reification.
            Audio Two's invocation of unity blurred Attali's categories of ritual and recording: he valued the first, distrusted the second, but here they fuse. "Top Billin'" lingered because, in Williams's terms, the still just emergent element it implanted in hip-hop was the formal method of enacting the residual -- rap rootsiness. To get in the spirit, Jacques is chillin', Ray is chillin', what more ASA?  Pop's willin'!

Author

• Eric Weisbard, The University of Alabama