Diplomats More Than Music Vol 1 [UPDATED]

In chronological order, here are our choices for mixtapes that need to be added to streaming services next. In the interest of keeping things concise, we have limited ourselves to selecting no more than one mixtape per artist.

Diplomats More Than Music Vol 1

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were a unifying moment for most of the United States. Hip-hop had a more complicated relationship: one part patriotic, one part provocative. No act better exemplified this than Harlem collective The Diplomats.

In the realm of the digital, the live and the archival exist on a continuum with one another. In an era of webcasting, the instantaneousness of live broadcast is wedded to its sedimentation in digital video archives: the transition from first performance and presentation to historical document can occur on a single webpage. Such technologies reconfigure the spatiality and temporality of both diplomatic performance and activist responses, opening new opportunities to artists even as they prove more perfect tools of biopolitical control for states. The emergence of a vibrant public cyberspace (televisual and mediated, but inherently interactive) can bring political leaders and global citizens closer than ever, even as it entrenches physical divisions between cultures, peoples, and nations. Webcasting rewrites web pages as live stages, and even when archived such presentations carry traces of that liveness. Digital technologies lend a new materiality to the performances of public officials, rendering those performances into manipulable raw materials for artists and activists. On the world stage of global politics, holding the live and archival in such close proximity opens seemingly the unassailable processes already decided by constituted powers to the risks and instabilities inherent in live performance.

For decades, the collection has served as a foundation set for research involving early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, and more. Series I. Evans is the definitive resource for information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable."