How vinyl editions of mixtapes reveal the conflict at the heart of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary

This year has been filled with countless tributes to rap history, from live concerts with legacy acts to block parties hosted by New York City cop-in-chief Eric Adams (complete with a drone light show). But more than a celebration of history, “HipHop50” is very much a marketing campaign. Case and point: the many splashy limited-edition vinyl releases tied into the anniversary. Sony Music announced a partnership with labels like Get On Down and Vinyl Me, Please, as well as retailers like Target and Urban Outfitters, to press over 50 rap albums from their catalog to vinyl. That campaign included the compilation “Raised By Rap: 50 Years of Hip Hop,” a motley and somewhat chaotic assortment of rap singles from Da Brat to Dead Prez to Doja Cat. Def Jam reissued classics like Method Man’s Tical and Warren G’s Regulate G… Funk Era on a special limited-edition maroon-colored vinyl — an homage to early Def Jam releases, which sported an iconic maroon label. In December, Tommy Boy Records drops a whopping 6-LP box set, spanning the label’s early electro releases up to boundary-pushing work by De La Soul and Prince Paul.

Most recently, Epic Records looked back at Future’s career, with limited-edition vinyl pressings of nine of his albums. While studio records like DS2 have been available on vinyl previously, this marks the first time that several of Future’s projects have been pressed to wax: most notably, the legendary run of mixtapes like Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights that reintroduced Future as a poet of heartbroken depravity. There’s something particularly uncanny about listening to a vinyl pressing of a project that was originally a free download on DatPiff and LiveMixtapez, and in many ways, it’s a telling sign of how much the rap industry has changed over the last decade. While hip-hop originated as a vinyl medium, now vinyl is mostly just an expensive gimmick to entice collectors, more like merch than actual music.

Of course, it’s not actually the first time that these mixtapes have been available physically: in late 2014, purchased Monster as a CD at the Disc Exchange in Knoxville, Tennessee, a record store that was pretty much the only place in town where you could go to purchase actual physical mixtapes. Other than the obvious physical and sonic differences between a 180-gram LP, a cheap CD, and a digital download, the differing versions of Monster I have now owned aren’t even the same record: like the 2019 streaming release, the new vinyl edition of Monster excludes the tracks “Intro,” “Abu’s Boomin,” and “Fuck Up Some Commas.” In some ways, it feels almost wrong to listen to a version of 56 Nights without DJ Esco’s ice-cold drops — especially considering the mixtape was named after his hellish imprisonment in Abu Dhabi — though thankfully the vinyl version of Purple Reign retains some of them. Sure, it’s fun to get to hear “March Madness” on vinyl, but it’s also a fundamentally different artifact, retconning a free mixtape into something more like a studio album. When you’ve removed the DJ drops, the skits, and the uncleared samples — all elemental parts of the mixtape as a form — can you even really call it a mixtape anymore?

Given the precarity of platforms like DatPiff, it’s vital to ensure that mixtapes aren’t lost in the digital shuffle. While formally licensing mixtapes for streaming or releasing them on vinyl does function on some level as preservation, it also underlines the contradictions of archival work in a capital-driven industry. Major rappers like Lil Wayne have been making a concerted effort to make sure their mixtapes remain accessible, but it almost always comes at a cost: when No Ceilings arrived on streaming services in 2020, a whopping 7 tracks were omitted because of sample clearance issues. Those songs still might exist on YouTube, or on the hard drives of hardcore heads, but given the dominance of streaming, the truncated version of No Ceilings is likely going to be the version that future generations are familiar with.

If artists like Future and Lil Wayne still face challenges in properly reissuing their old mixtapes, then it's even more impossible for anyone without major label resources. For independent artists, navigating the supply chain of vinyl production is a daunting prospect, and an easy way to get in over your head. Beyond more respected labels like Get On Down, the rap reissue market isn’t always on the up-and-up. ‘90s Memphis rap has a devoted cult following, with collectors paying high prices for underground tapes and bootlegs from artists like Tommy Wright III and DJ Spanish Fly, and multiple reissue labels have sprung up in recent years devoted to the haunting Memphis sound. Bandcamp is filled with labels like TapehouseUSA and Hole in One, who have released new versions of old tapes by underground producers like Blackout, DJ Zirk, and Playa Posse—including on vinyl. Dig through the r/MemphisRap subreddit, and you’ll find countless complaints from fans about these kinds of labels. Hole in One, who just released Blackout’s 1995 tape Dreamworld on vinyl, operates through a company called SunCity Publishing, which controls the publishing rights for dozens of underground rappers. SunCity then licenses that music to other labels, who produce limited-edition pressings. But there may not be any actual remastering going on — fans claim that most of these reissues are just ripped directly from YouTube uploads of the original cassette tapes.

Legally, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with this kind of practice — SunCity Publishing owns the rights to this music and therefore has the right to license it to other distributors. But it’s an obviously ethical quagmire when the artists who actually made the music that’s being reissued are completely cut out of the process — a rapper like Blackout might have more fans thanks to these labels, but he probably doesn’t have much money to show for it. These shadier reissues not only shortchange the artists themselves, but the fans as well, by ripping off the work of amateur archivists who went to the effort of preserving underground tapes and uploading them to the Internet in the first place. Thankfully, there are a few legitimate Memphis rap reissue projects that have sprung up: Trill Hill Tapes works directly with Memphis artists to remaster their music from the original tapes, while Now-Again Records’ recently announced The Story of Memphis Rap brings together 9 albums from rappers like Shawty Pimp and MC Mack in the highest available quality.

In all of these cases, whether Future’s Monster or Memphis horrorcore, the complexity of the rap reissue market illustrates the tension between historical preservation and the music business. DatPiff announced a recent partnership with the Internet Archive to preserve their library, but the status of the project seems uncertain. While some university archives have taken hip-hop seriously as a historical artifact, like the University of Houston’s extensive Hip Hop Research Collection, elite academic institutions still don’t often treat the culture with the respect it deserves. But we also can’t fully entrust hip-hop’s legacy to major labels or businessmen either, who so often see a quick buck at the expense of the work itself. At the end of the day, it’s up to the fans, the kinds of folks who upload cassette rips to YouTube or stockpile mixtapes for the love of the game itself, to keep rap’s history alive.

Rap Column is a column about rap music by Vivian Medithi and Nadine Smith for The FADER.