How can LODLAM be used to help preserve recent music history?

J Dilla in Detroit 2003

This LODLAM (Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums) project explores part of the life and death of James Dewitt Yancey, a producer and musician from Detroit, Michigan, best known as Jay Dee and J Dilla.

Yancey officially began his music career in 1995 at age 21 and was active professionally until 2006 when he died of complications from lupus and TTP. He was a prolific artist, accumulating hundreds of production credits and releasing multiple albums both on his own and within various collaborative formations. Following his untimely death, Yancey was recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in hip-hop culture a fitting testament to his unique creativity and versatility, yet somewhat bitter sweet in its cost. His passing also triggered a prolonged fight between the controllers of his estate and his family, marring what should have been a vibrant legacy for close to a decade and forcing his mother to sell and monetize what music or items she could.

With this in mind, I felt it interesting to use Yancey as a subject for this project, which asked us to move between different levels of data conceptualisation, creation, and modelling by studying a domain to which a variety of cultural heritage items could be linked.

Here are some of the questions I asked myself:

  • What items could be related to Yancey's life and death?
  • What could be learnt from the state of these items? Both in terms of access but also documentation
  • From this what could be inferred about issues surrounding the archiving of modern music history?

From my experience as a journalist over the past 20 years, modern music history – by which I mean music-related cultures from around the mid-20th century to the present – is in a particularly precarious situation:

  • It is relatively “young” to be a subject of pressing interest to cultural heritage institutions. In Italy, there is a general rule that items must be more than 70 years to be declared of cultural interest.
  • Its cultural value is often dismissed, ignored, or misunderstood by institutions and the public. In the United States, there is a pervasive collective ignorance about the origins, wealth, and importance of musical movements birthed in the country in the last 40 years.
  • The switch from physical to digital music consumption at the turn of the century had a profound impact on a lot of music cultures from the previous decades, leaving vast swathes of releases unavailable outside the secondary market and in turn affecting the memories, stories, and artifacts related to them.
  • Many protagonists are dying with their archives in various states of disarray and little in place to help preserve their work and history. In light of the devastation that COVID-19 has wrought in the past year (as well as the creeping privatisation of health care around the world), this particular problem is becoming all the more pressing.

There is obviously much more to be said about each of these points but this project isn’t it. They are not intended as sweeping generalizations, but rather as inspiration for this project and touch points for further discussion and action.

If, as Eric Lease Morgan put it, LODLAM projects have the potential to "improve your ability to participate in the discussion of the human condition on a world wide scale,[1]" then it is my hope that in doing this and learning to use the theories and tools of Linked Open Data and Knowledge Organisation I can contribute to potential solutions and efforts to attend to the archiving of modern music history.

"There’s something profoundly emotional that Dilla managed to put into his music that has earned him his place in the pantheon of people who changed the music. And he changed the music more than once, that’s the thing. And that’s very fucking rare."

Brian Cross

[1] Eric Lease Morgan and LiAM, Linked Archival Metadata: A Guidebook, version 0.99. April 23 2014