Elvis, Eat Your Heart Out

In the Sinnreich reading, I found the exploration of race in relation to mash-up culture to be particularly intriguing. A book called Other People's Property came out last year exploring the relationship between whiteness and hip-hop culture, which lends a very interesting counterpoint to the pure co-opting argument. Race and ethnicity are jumbled in our world today, so I think to say that the configurable music community is primarily white could be an oversight (especially because of the implicitly problematic black/white binary). The subject deserves a full exploration, but I think one example could shed light on apparent racial discrepancies: the turntablist community, as we saw in Scratch, is comprised primarily of Asians. Even Jay-Z, the world's biggest rap star, has an Asian DJ (Neil Armstrong). Why is this? I don't know. DJing began in the South Bronx (via the Carribean), in which you'll have trouble finding many people of Asian descent. I don't have a good explanation for any of this, and can't really posit any theories, but I think it is too easy to attribute the observed phenomena as Black > White culture co-opting.