Okayplayer: Minting Master's Degrees Since 2002 (Waxing Academic Post #2)

hastings | 11/03/2006 12:17 pm | Emcees Without Voices

In this previous post re: Wayne Marshall's appearance in Da Capo's Best Music Writing '06, I mentioned that he did his graduate work in ethnomusicology at UW, but failed to mentioned that his impassioned defense of Fruity Loops piece re: the rise of reggaeton inspired me to track down his master's thesis in the bowels of Memorial Library, which I was unfortunately unable to remove from the premises.

In the introductory pages, he includes the following paragraph, presumably to assuage dubious faculty reviewers:

One final note here regards my many Internet sources. These are crucial though often ephemeral texts. It is possible that many of these sources are no longer accessible. I retain hard copies of everything I cite, and I provide each citation the date of the posting/publication as well as the date I accessed it. Regarding the actual presentation of these texts, except where explicitly noted, I have preserved the original (mis)spellings, grammatical constructions, and visual styles of people's internet discourse. Such writing is, as most probably know, rife with idiosyncracies, if not outright errors. Rather than riddle these quotations with [sic]s, however, I am opting to make a disclaimer here. In many cases, it is unclear in such writings what is a mistake and what is intentional. Rather than impose my own ideas about other people's intentions on these texts, I prefer to leave them as is, in all their original, expressive glory.

Why was this necessary? Because--at least over the latter third of the paper--Roots' records and quotes culled from Okayplayer forum posts comprise the most significant source material. Was this the ivory tower equivalent of a clever middle-schooler explaining away geocities and wikipedia citations to a luddite teacher? Well no--there's plenty of other texts cited*--and ?uestlove is hardly an anon-a-nerd toiling in internets obscurity (people actually read his MySpace blog). Clearly, the Okayplayer people aren't joking about academic hustling:writing college survival guides, plugging Kidz in the Hall, and ?uestlove co-writing master's theses**. F*ck Juilliard, class is in session.

I looked for evidence of Marshall on the OKP forums, but the most obvious google site-specific searches of for combinations of "Wayne and Wax", "Boston Jerk" and "Wayne Marshall" didn't turn up anything beyond references to a Temple University baller and a lone recommendation to check out his blog among others--back in the heady days of music/mp3 blogs.

It's worth noting that Marshall spun off the Roots-centric portion of his thesis into a paper that has been published in Callaloo's "Hip-Hop Music and Culture" special issue. You can read "Giving up Hip-Hop's Firstborn: A Quest For the Real After the Death of Sampling" in its entirety, right here [pdf doc].

If you're too lazy to read a 25 page pdf, then you probably don't have an okayplayer handle, but the paper includes some schematic/annotated renderings of the Roots' "Concerto of the Desperado" (which has a nice, faux-classical title for skeptical higher ed peoples) that you can check out below. [Marshall's master's thesis also include a disclaimer re: such annotations, noting that they couldn't account for timbral variation and whatnot, but...] This may be useful for those of you interested in starting Roots' cover bands***

(Click images to load full page pdfs)

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