Pynchon & rap

[Doug Millison]

"I would imagine that the free form jazz of McClintic Sphere (and those
actual artists upon whom the character is based: Coleman, Monk, Parker &c)
is also very much a precursor of contemporary rap music."

How so?  Rap , with its sampled or synthetically created musical settings,
does not appear to call upon the sort of virtuoso musical performance
technique that forms the heart of jazz.  There are jazz-era spoken-word
experiments that might be viewed as part of rap music's lineage -- I heard
something from one of the Mingus groups on the radio recently that might be
seen in such a light.

"Otto pointed to the
section in _M&D_ which seems to speak to various contemporary musical
styles, "South Philadelphia Ballad-singers" amongst those. (pp. 261-265)
That's surely a direct reference to modern rap music, isn't it?"

If Pynchon doesn't explicitly mention modern rap music, it's difficult to
see how it might be called a "direct reference" -- of course there's no end
to the number of new signifiers that a reader might create based on
Pynchon's actual text, perhaps that's what's meant here. Moving from
Pynchon's text to specific historical, political, and artistic works that
Pynchon mentions or otherwise refers to has often been hotly contested on
Pynchon-L -- I recall the insults from some corners that have greeted
Hollander's work here on Pynchon-L in particular, although he is published
in Pynchon Notes and other respected journals -- and what counts as a
"direct reference" seems to shift depending on who's making claims about a
particular Pynchon passage.

Pynchon has written, rather derisively it seems to me, of rock and roll acts
in the 60s (The Paranoids in COL49) and the 80s (Billy Barf and the
Vomitones in Vineland); comparing the ways he writes about them with the
ways he writes about Sphere's music might be an interesting exercise.  At
the same time, Pynchon has written lyrics for songs in a broad spectrum of
musical styles and periods, and elsewhere seems to demonstrate a real
fondness for folk and rock and roll music.