Rap, 'punching in,' and the end of writing?

Last day of Media History class, and I threw ’em a one-two punch. First, we read some of Vilém Flusser’s intentionally provocative media philosophy — where he claims that the age of writing is ending. Then, per the 21C prof handbook, we pivoted to a YouTube video (above) about hip-hop writing practices. The class basically started with writing — what was it? what is it? what does it do? — so I wanted to bookend the semester by circling back. After spending the second half of the term immersed in mostly electronic media, indeed, what’s the status of this allegedly foundational linear-narrative form?

Flusser’s thinking can be challenging, especially in an undergrad class, but he writes to be read. Rambling with a purpose, rarely citing his sources, his Socratic monologues make bold claims in bold type. The basic sketch of his communicology: humans began putting down their ideas in traditional images (made by hand) and then started communicating in texts (in linear start-to-finish form, specifically in order to tame the holistic experience of imagery). But since the emergence of photography, a new mode of communication has been gathering itself together and asserting a dominance that eventually will rule all of human messaging: the technical image, as coded into the apparatuses of film, video, digital imagery, holograms, and more. For nearly a couple of centuries now, according to Flusser, we’ve been steering away from written texts and telling stories about our world much more through these technological media.
 
Not exactly startling stuff, sure, nor does it run perpendicular to a lot of foundational theory (from Foucault’s chronicle of modern power encodings to basic histories of socializing media in McLuhan or Eisenstein). But I’ve found that Flusser’s titular question, Does Writing Have a Future?, makes certain people squirm. (Don’t even bring it up in the English department.) This term, a student spoke up with a typical pushback: “As long as there are humans, there will be writing.” Me: “But we started this course looking at pre-writing media. What about the quipu we made in class?” I, myself, have made my lifelong living (in one way or another, journalism to academia) through writing. I shall not speak ill of the form. But (given the very reasons I’ve moved from journalism to academia) nor will I ignore how that form is waning, or at least changing, evolving, subsuming.
 
The Times video is a great example of this. But its own titular claim — “Why Rappers Stopped Writing” — is problematic, too, because (as became the consensus among class discussion) what’s being described is still writing, in a way.
 
The usual songwriting template is a familiar process of creation, from a writing practice to a production practice. The artist writes, then produces. The practices are separate (and some might say but equal, though not everyone) and temporally ordered: You write — in a writing space, perhaps isolated, crafting words and lines as an individual — and then you carry that text into a recording studio, where the words intersect with the music, the placement of equipment, the selection of instruments, the various choices about style and sound. Artists often record “live” in the studio, capturing creativity in the spur of a moment, though this is often seen as happenstance rather than intentional practice.
 
Many rappers today, however, create their tracks extemporaneously — on purpose. The Times video chronicles this developing media practice, featuring studio producers and hip-hop artists describing and discussing the process of “punching in.” Basically, this is where a rapper re-records specific parts of a track instead of redoing the entire song. It’s a foundational function of multi-track recording; Les Paul started this in the ’50s, and the Beatles defined their late-career sound by adding vocal and instrumental parts to the construction of an arrangement not on paper first but in the studio itself. Digital tracking, though, allows for even finer cuts and splices. A rapper can lay down basic tracks, start rapping, edit themselves at the mic in real time, then carve out and paste in whatever lines, words, or even smaller components they choose. Of course hip-hop is the genre pushing this further — not only because it’s always been an innovative and multi-dimensional artistic context but because the precise timing and delivery of words can be crucial to a rap track. Punching in allows an artist not just to fix mistakes but to perfect their flow, nurture various vocal techniques, and polish the arrangement on the fly. It's a return of cultural orality (paging Walter Ong), but is that necessarily a demotion of writing?
 
At the opening of the video, a recording engineer describes the previous, OK-boomer process of “writing it out, scratching it out” — the inscription of a surface with linear written text. Rapper Doechii then laughs: “Yeah, we stopped writing a long time ago.” But there’s the point of contention (and class discussion). Sure, Jay-Z claims he doesn’t write his lines down, but that very claim is made in the context of the previous practice. No, he’s not inscribing a piece of paper, but he is putting his lines down onto a medium — a technical one, either magnetic tape or digital stream. “That’s writing,” one student insisted, “just a more, I don’t know, dimensional form of it?” Gold star there for the choice of word: punching in allows for a multi-dimensional approach to creation. You can go back, callback, skip ahead, dip in and out of various points in the piece. It makes for dialogic creation, certainly, even if the resulting playback for us is still rather discursive. But the rub: just because we can’t see the words in this medium doesn’t mean they’re not written down. In fact, that very assumption is triggered by technical media’s frequent built-in intention to veil its production processes from us, to black-box its functions, to make the medium invisible. That same engineer, though, later adds that the dominant recording software, ProTools, “is basically the pen and paper.”
 
So let’s punch in some Flusser here — his full-barrel opening salvo from Does Writing Have a Future?:

Writing, in the sense of placing letters and other marks one after another, appears to have little or no future. Information is now more effectively transmitted by codes other than those of written signs. What was once written can now be conveyed more effectively on tapes, records, films, videotapes, videodisks, or computer disks, and a great deal that could not be written until now can be noted down in these new codes. Information coded by these means is easier to produce, to transmit, to receive, and to store than written texts. Future correspondence, science, politics, poetry, and philosophy will be pursued more effectively through the use of these codes than through the alphabet or Arabic numerals. It really looks as though written codes will be set aside, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Indian knots. Only historians and other specialists will be obliged to learn reading and writing in the future. (3)

This speaks to the centuries of media history we sprinted through in this class, referencing earlier communication codes like hieroglyphics and knotted cords, and it acknowledges much of the transformation human communication has experienced across the ages — largely about what makes a medium emerge and dominate another: it’s easier to use, easier to store, carry, and the specific ways it fits itself to the social needs of the current historical moment. And he trumpets that often unspoken heresy: Writing is dead, long live writing! (It’s as if he’s Tom Cruise badgering Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men: “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want [writing] on that wall — you need [writing] on that wall!”) Because, as he acknowledges and as I mentioned above, a lot of people don’t want to talk about this, maybe can’t even conceive of a way to communicate the idea of a world without writing. In some of this text, Flusser tries to evoke the concept of that, which itself is hard to imagine precisely because writing controls not only so much of our everyday communication but our very individual and social thought.
 
And that’s his next question for us:

The question is, What is distinctive about writing? What sets it apart from comparable gestures of the past and future — from painting, from pressing on computer keys? Is there anything specific at all that is shared by all kinds of gestures of writing — from the chiseling of Latin letters in marble to the brushing of Chinese ideograms on silk, the scratching of equations on boards, or the pounding on the keys of typewriters? What sort of life did people have before they began to write? And how would their lives look if they abandoned writing? All these and many more questions would obviously concern not only writing itself but also the reading of what is written. (4)

To imagine life before writing, Flusser says in one of the book’s later essays, he tries to get us to imagine our mindset in kindergarten. Which is not to suggest that humans who don’t write are childlike and less intelligent. Any parents of young children may attest to the fact that rugrats are damn smart in their own ways; they just haven’t been fully taught yet to communicate using this code — thinking in linear terms, framing the world entirely as cause-and-effect, ordered progression. That earlier, pre-writing mindset, back when the primary medium was drawing on cave walls — before, as Flusser would say, texts explicated images — that was a perfectly intelligent mode of conveying everyday experience; it was just a different mode, a more circular, holistic one, a way of ordering experience differently from starting at the beginning (of a text) and proceeding to a pre-ordained ending.
 
To be sure, the end of writing for Flusser is not a negative change — and, to my own surprise, my students this term largely fell in with this optimism. His view of the emerging technical image is hopeful, parallel to a lot of internet utopianism: “… if such a web was actually constructed and images installed according to such a pattern, one could no longer speak of isolation and political coordination. For then people of the future would truly be in dialogue, in a global conversation” (64). Another student in conversation after class took up both Flusser’s wackiness and hip-hop’s new practices and ran with them, describing some digital narrative experiments and art practices that challenge the linear template of writing and adding: “Maybe it’ll be possible someday to listen to music in a non-linear way — like how a rapper punches in to add things, maybe we can punch into the song to experience it in different orders!”

(Cue more than a student wanted to hear from a professor about just such experiments that already have gone before us, from Bach on up through the Flaming Lips, and from Eno's "generative music" right up to, hey, the new "generative documentary" about him!)