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PHL Hip Hop Research Paper

Here are few things to keep in mind when writing your paper.

1) Introduction Central Idea and Thesis: The first paragraph should grab the reader’s attention. The thesis (i.e. what you will argue) is clearly stated. Show the reader why the topic matters.

2) Organization: The essay should be well-organized. One idea follows another in a logical sequence with clear transitions.

3) Understanding of Text: The essay should clearly lay out the main argument of the authors you are reading. Demonstrate a clear grasp of a difficult concept with a good example. Pay attention not simply to the content of the author’s argument but also the methods by which they address an issue.

4) Critical Evaluation of the Text: Critical evaluation is not always negative it can be positive. On the negative side you can briefly step outside a view and raise an objection to it from a different perspective. After raising an objection you may offer a response that tries to minimize the force of an objection. On the positive side you can try and extend someone’s view and apply it to a different situation or you could show why the argument is original or a good reminder or may point out various strengths in the author’s argument or approach. Whether you show limitations of a view or its strengths or both you must give reasons in support of your evaluations. Please try and give a sophisticated response to the text that is clear and demonstrates that you “got what he/she tried to say” and you critically thought about it.

5) Mechanics: Try and have few, if any, spelling, punctuation, organization, grammar or usage errors.

Grading Rubric

Problem Identification: Identify and thoroughly explore the issue and significant underlying issues. Capture the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of a complex issue.

Context and Assumptions: Considers integral contexts and background information, surfacing assumptions and address the ethical dimensions underlying the issue.

Data/Evidence: Demonstrate skill in search, selection, and source evaluation. Examine evidence and its source, question accuracy, relevance, and completeness. Demonstrate an understanding of how facts shape but may not confirm opinion.

Integration of Diverse Perspectives: Seek out, weigh and effectively integrate diverse, uncomfortable or contrary views. Analyze other positions in an accurate, nuanced, and respectful fashion.

Develops Own Perspective: Clearly present and justify your own position. Demonstrate ownership for constructing knowledge or framing original questions.

THaT’S THE

JOInt!

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ROUTLEDGE New York • London

THaT’S THE

JOInt! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

Murray Forman & Mark Anthony Neal E D I T O R S

Published in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxfordshire OX14 RN www.routledge.co.uk

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

© 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper. Typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

That's the joint! : the hip-hop studies reader / edited by Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96918-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-96919-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Rap (Music)—History and criticism. 2. Rap (Music)—Social aspects. 3. Hip-hop. I. Neal, Mark Anthony. II. Forman, Murray, 1959-

ML3531.T43 2004 782.421649'09—dc22

2004015140

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Dedicated to the memory of

Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizzel,

R.I.P.

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Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1 MURRAY FORMAN

Part I Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop: 9 Hip-Hop History and Historiography MURRAY FORMAN

1 Breaking 13 SALLY BANES

2 The Politics of Graffiti 21 CRAIG CASTLEMAN

3 Breaking: The History 31 MICHAEL HOLMAN

4 B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something 41 with Oldie R&B Disks ROBERT FORD, JR.

5 Jive Talking N.Y. DJs Rapping Away in Black Discos 43 ROBERT FORD, JR.

6 Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth 45 NELSON GEORGE

vii

Contents

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Part II No Time for Fake Niggas: Hip-Hop Culture 57 and the Authenticity Debates MARK ANTHONY NEAL

7 The Culture of Hip-Hop 61 MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

8 Puerto Rocks: Rap, Roots, and Amnesia 69 JUAN FLORES

9 It’s a Family Affair 87 PAUL GILROY

10 Hip-Hop Chicano: A Separate but Parallel Story 95 RAEGAN KELLY

11 On the Question of Nigga Authenticity 105 R.A.T. JUDY

12 Looking for the “Real” Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto 119 ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

13 About a Salary or Reality?—Rap’s Recurrent Conflict 137 ALAN LIGHT

14 The Rap on Rap: The “Black Music” that Isn’t Either 147 DAVID SAMUELS

Part III Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City: 155 Hip-Hop, Space, and Place MURRAY FORMAN

15 Black Empires, White Desires: 159 The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop DAVARIAN L. BALDWIN

16 Hip-Hop am Main, Rappin’ on the Tyne: Hip-Hop Culture as a 177 Local Construct in Two European Cities ANDY BENNETT

17 “Represent”: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music 201 MURRAY FORMAN

18 Rap and Hip-Hop: The New York Connection 223 DICK HEBDIGE

19 Uptown Throwdown 233 DAVID TOOP

viii • CONTENTS

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Part IV I’ll Be Nina Simone Defecating on Your Microphone: 247 Hip-Hop and Gender MARK ANTHONY NEAL

20 Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: 251 The Musical Vernacular of Black Girls’ Play KYRA D. GAUNT

21 Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: 265 Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance CHERYL L. KEYES

22 Hip-Hop Feminist 277 JOAN MORGAN

23 Seeds and Legacies: Tapping the Potential in Hip-Hop 283 GWENDOLYN D. POUGH

24 Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile 291 TRICIA ROSE

Part V The Message: Rap, Politics, and Resistance 307 MARK ANTHONY NEAL

25 Organizing the Hip-Hop Generation 311 ANGELA ARDS

26 Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self: 325 The Death of Politics in Rap Music and Popular Culture TODD BOYD

27 The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement 341 to Political Power BAKARI KITWANA

28 Rap, Race, and Politics 351 CLARENCE LUSANE

29 Postindustrial Soul: Black Popular Music at the Crossroads 363 MARK ANTHONY NEAL

Part VI Looking for the Perfect Beat: 389 Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Technologies of Production MURRAY FORMAN

30 Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: 393 Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics ANDREW BARTLETT

CONTENTS • ix

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31 Public Enemy Confrontation 407 MARK DERY

32 Hip-Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative 421 GREG DIMITRIADIS

33 Sample This 437 NELSON GEORGE

34 “This Is a Sampling Sport”: Digital Sampling, 443 Rap Music, and the Law in Cultural Production THOMAS G. SCHUMACHER

35 Challenging Conventions in the Fine Art of Rap 459 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

36 Hip-Hop and Black Noise: Raising Hell 481 RICKEY VINCENT

Part VII I Used to Love H.E.R.: 493 Hip-Hop in/and the Culture Industries MARK ANTHONY NEAL

37 Commercialization of the Rap Music Youth Subculture 497 M. ELIZABETH BLAIR

38 Dance in Hip-Hop Culture 505 KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD

39 Wendy Day, Advocate for Rappers 517 NORMAN KELLEY

40 The Business of Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite 525 KEITH NEGUS

41 Contracting Rap: An Interview with Carmen Ashhurst-Watson 541 TRICIA ROSE

42 Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism 557 S. CRAIG WATKINS

43 Homies in The ’Hood: Rap’s Commodification of Insubordination 579 TED SWEDENBURG

44 An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: 593 Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity ERIC K. WATTS

Permissions 611

Index 615

x • CONTENTS

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“Sir, please turn around and face me,” the airport security employee directed me. As I complied, he continued to methodically search me at the security checkpoint. He reminded me of my son, a tall taffy-faced figure who’d barely left his youth behind. As I caught his eyes when he frisked my outstretched arms, he whispered to me while keeping his professional demeanor.

“Man, I really feel your work on Pac,” he gently stated, referring to my book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. “Plus, I’ve seen Thug Angel and Tupac Vs.”—two documentaries on the slain rapper in which I’d participated—“and you be puttin’ it down.”

“May I please place my hands on your chest since my detector went off?” he quizzed me more formally without missing a beat. “Sure, no problem,” I replied. “That’s where my suspenders are. And I’m glad you like the work.” “Fo’ sho, fo’ sho’,” he said as he effortlessly slid back into his vernacular voice. “I’m just glad to know that somebody from your generation cares about Pac and hip-hop, and takes the time to listen to what we’re saying.”

“Alright, sir, I’m finished. You’re done. But could you do me a big favor?”“What’s that?” I asked. The young man retreated to a portable booth tucked away at the end of the security line

and fetched a dog-eared paperback copy of my book. “If you don’t mind, please sign this before you go.”

I was moved by his heartfelt compliments. I was even more touched by his eloquent rebuke of the view that his generation is illiterate and wholly fixed on destruction and mindless mate- rialism. We weren’t in school, and he wasn’t reading my book for a good grade or for extra credit. Like the best students, he read for passion, and for the pleasure and pursuit of critical stimulation. It seemed that he was hungry for a sign among intellectuals and older folk that the huge importance of hip-hop hadn’t been smothered by contempt, or just as bad, squandered by undiscriminating enthusiasm. And his delight in me taking Tupac seriously was an unspoken nod to the fierce crosswinds in which hip-hop is presently caught. There are some who dismiss hip-hop as the dead letter of brazen stereotype-mongering among the severely undereducated and their gaggle of learned and over-interpreting defenders. Other critics claim that the deficits of hip-hop are amplified because they blare beyond the borders of ugly art to inspire youth to even uglier behavior. And others protest that, stripped of politics, history, and racial conscience, hip-hop is little more than sonic pathology that blasts away all the achieve- ment of the civil rights struggle.

xi

Foreword

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The academic study of hip-hop— like hip-hop itself— has been the subject of complaints even from its earliest days. By now, many of the complaints are familiar, even tired. But that hasn’t stopped their being repackaged every so often to track the sensational headlines that trumpet the moral transgressions or violent deaths that rattle the rap world. John McWhorter, who’s made a career in the public arena by twisting anecdotes of perceived black misbehavior into a questionable analysis of contemporary race, eloquently weighs in with lopsided moral- izing in the summer 2003 issue of City Journal. “By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks,” McWhorter argues, “and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.” That’s an awfully big burden to carry—the fate of black success—especially for black youth (at least the ones who make a cameo in the anecdote that fronts McWhorter’s essay) who appear to McWhorter to embody the “antisocial behavior” encouraged by hardcore rap that preaches “bone-deep dislike of authority.”

Many critics, including McWhorter, don’t account for the complex ways that some hip-hop artists play with stereotypes to either subvert or reverse them. For instance, amidst all the pimp mythologies and metaphors that weigh heavily on branches of contemporary hip-hop, rappers like Common seize on pimpology’s prominence to poke fun at its pervasiveness. But its critics often fail to acknowledge that hip-hop is neither sociological commentary nor political criti- cism, though it may certainly function in these modes through its artists’ lyrics. Hip-hop is still fundamentally an art form that traffics in hyperbole, parody, kitsch, dramatic license, double entendres, signification, and other literary and artistic conventions to get its points across. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip-hop’s critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible affect it has on youth. There are few parallels to this heavy- handed wrong-headedness in the criticism of other art forms like films, plays, or visual art, especially when they are authored by non-blacks. These cultural products are often conceded as art—even bad art, useless art, banal art, but art nonetheless—while there is a far greater consensus about hip-hop’s essential artlessness. That cultural bias—and unapologetic igno- rance—informs many assaults on the genre that reinforce the racial gulfs that feed rap’s resent- ment of the status quo.

Of course, not all the barbs aimed at hip-hop are meant exclusively for its artists. Some are directed at the post-civil rights era generation of Black academics who have been prominent in practicing the academic study of hip-hop. Thus, revered intellectuals and writers like Martin Kilson react angrily when they think intellectuals who engage hip-hop don’t embrace the values and styles of the civil rights movement. In an online journal of opinion, The Black Commentator, Kilson points to several articles from the post-civil rights black intelligentsia to prove that they are “tossing poisoned darts at African Americans’ mainline civil rights tradi- tion and its courageous leadership figures.” Kilson’s criticism of the post-civil rights era black intelligentsia includes a section taking me to task for an op-ed piece I wrote for the New York Times about the controversy surrounding the movie Barbershop (in which a character jokes about such civil rights era figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks). Kilson was part of that chorus of voices decrying the movie for its perceived “irreverence toward African- American civil rights leadership.”

Kilson’s view that movies like Barbershop—as well as hip-hop more generally—“serve as anti-Black ammunition for conservative opponents of African-Americans’ civil rights agenda.” is not unrepresentative of many older—and truth to be told, younger—black folks’ beliefs about hip-hop and those scholars associated with its defense. Many agree with Kilson that “there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and

xii • FOREWORD

Au: “every so often” meant?

Au: Not sure what is meant by “engage hip hop”

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values.” Many support Kilson’s view that hip-hop is politically empty, and is little more “than an updated face on the old-hat, crude, anti-humanistic values of hedonism and materialism.”

Critics of hip-hop like Kilson make a point, of course—and it’s not a point that’s hard to make—that hip-hop is full of problematic expressions. It reeks of materialism; it gorges with stereotypes and offensive language; it spoils with retrogressive views; it is rife with hedonism; and it surely cannot always be said to side with humanistic values. But this argument demands little engagement with hip-hop; these views don’t require much beyond attending to surface symptoms of a culture that offers far more depth and color when it’s taken seriously and crit- icized in proper fashion. It is odd that gifted intellectuals should so resolutely stick to super- fluous observation, as if afraid of the intellectual credibility or complex truths they might find in a comprehensive study of hip-hop. It would be outlandish to comment on, say, metaphysical poetry without interacting critically with its most inspired poets. At least read Donne. And if one were to make hay over the virtues or deficits of nineteenth-century British poetry, or twen- tieth-century Irish poetry, then one should encounter the full range of Tennyson’s or Yeats’s work before jumping, or slouching, to conclusions.

Unfortunately, much of the source material for such a study of hip-hop is diffuse and hard to come by. Instead of meaningful critical inquiry we argue about op-eds—and not books. The major points in my New York Times op-ed on the brouhaha over Barbershop—stirred largely by civil rights leaders—were that films are not scholarly monographs; that folk have the right to express themselves, and if we don’t like it, we can criticize them or make our own films; that one film can’t possibly represent the entire black experience; that recent scholar- ship focused on mass movements in the civil rights era veered toward group dynamics being just as important as charismatic leadership; that civil rights organizations at their worst shut down free speech; that at their best barbershops offered politically incorrect black speech as a bonus of sheared hair; and that art is supposed to get in our faces and not simply soothe or reas- sure us. What critics of hip-hop miss by neglecting to make concrete engagement with hip- hop culture is the complexity of that culture. I’ve written a book on rapper Tupac Shakur and one on Dr. King. I don’t despise civil rights; I take it so seriously that I engage it at fair length, concluding that, despite his faults, King is the greatest American produced on our native soil!

Critics of hip-hop from an earlier generation, like Kilson, often work from an uniformed view of hip-hop culture and its critics—after all, those of us who study and write about hip-hop aren’t just fans. In fact, we sometimes make some of the same criticisms that Kilson and others make, but hopefully from a more informed perspective. What we need are more informed and extended analyses of hip-hop culture, and, for that matter, of civil rights leaders and move- ments. Unfortunately, there is little serious work from the critics of hip-hop that engages hip- hop with intellectual rigor, rather than knee-jerk negativism.

This opposition to the study of hip-hop is shared by other writers like Hugh Pearson, a Brown University graduate who is appalled by the fact that Ivy League schools would dare offer hip-hop courses. Writing in Newsday in the late summer of 2003, Pearson condemns Harvard for housing a hip-hop archive because its scholars deem the art form and culture on which it rests to be an important cultural phenomenon that is worthy of study. Pearson rails at rappers with “a tendency to compose ungrammatical lyrics flowing from the ungrammatical speech patterns that are standard for too many African-Americans.” Unlike earlier funk musicians, who “in those days no one considered . . . worthy of ‘study’ at a serious university,” Pearson is galled that the Ivy League “will now treat hip-hop as respectable.” Pearson has no sense of irony when he pinches a phrase from a man of manifest mediocrity—George W. Bush  who, in accepting the Republican nomination for the presidency at its 2000 convention, spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was an unintended autobiography in précis to be sure.

FOREWORD • xiii

Au: Personal attack appro- priate?

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Pearson samples the line to suggest that that’s what studying hip-hop in the academy amounts to, instead of a course of study that “extol[s] the positive elements of the African-American community,” and that, instead of “[raising] cultural standards . . . prefers to make chicken salad out of chicken necks.”

In putting down the study of hip-hop—and African-American Studies as well—critics like Pearson believe that it is simply unworthy of serious examination. But we should be willing to take a scholarly look at hip-hop for no other reason than the art form and culture has grabbed global attention and sparked emulation in countless different countries and among widely varied ethnicities. For example, when I was in Brazil recently and went to the “Black Six,” a hip-hop club in Rio, I might as well have been in Harlem or Philadelphia. We need to study the way that cultures of articulation and representation have traversed international boundaries and been adopted in fascinating manner in the languages and accents indigenous to their regions—this phenomenon alone is a cause of intellectual curiosity. Because they appear to be ashamed of hip-hop—a feeling shared by many blacks and others who decry the sordid images of hip-hop as the detritus of the culture that should be swept away with the garbage—critics of hip-hop culture are incapable of acknowledging just how interesting and insightful the study of rap has proven in various intellectual settings around the world. Pearson’s demand for an exemption from this trend in our nation’s most prestigious universities is an odd cry for remedial provincialism—a return to a climate of academic curiosity where only a narrow range of subjects could be legitimately pursued.

This brief genealogy of conflicts should show just why the book you hold in your hand is so critical. By taking the time to present a feverishly productive intellectual accounting of an equally fertile culture of expression, Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal have placed at our disposal some of the most intriguing engagements with hip-hop culture. The writers in this volume don’t shy away from probing the complex varieties of black identity, even those that skirt close to stereotype as they undress its mauling effects. The contributors to this volume dig deep into hip-hop’s rich traditions of expression to generate a criticism equal to the art that inspires it. And these writers have no shame in poring hard and long over hip-hop; assuming its intellectual value without being unduly defensive about its critical status is a shining virtue of the book.

Hip-hop is being studied all over the globe, and the methodologies of its examination are rightfully all over the map. They are multidisciplinary in edifying, exemplary fashion, borrowing from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, commu- nications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and many more disciplines besides. This book makes it plain that hip-hop is no fad, either culturally or intellectually, and that its best artists and intellectuals are as capable of stepping back and critiquing its flows and flaws as the most astute observers and participants in any other genre of musical or critical endeavor. As the academic study of hip-hop enters a new phase—as it matures and expands, as it deepens and opens up even broader avenues of investigation—it needs a summary text, one that captures the many sided features of a dynamic culture that demands rigorous criticism and considera- tion. That’s what you’ve got in your hands. This is an intellectual mix-tape that heads from all over can feel and learn from each time they take a listen and give a read. It has the same features of the best hip-hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting. So, like the hottest joints, sit down and savor the vibe of this heady and heartfelt compilation.

Michael Eric Dyson

xiv • FOREWORD

Au: “raff” cor- rect word?

Au: Most, not all?

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We are grateful to the numerous individuals who expressed their encouragement and offered their assistance in preparing the manuscript for That’s the Joint! In assembling the essays, we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible; our apologies to several authors who offered their permission to include previously published articles but whose work was ultimately excluded due to prohibitive reprint costs. Thanks are due to the authors who, when contacted, went out of their way to personally assist us, or helped in negotiations with their publishers: Andrew Bartlett, Todd Boyd, Mark Dery, Greg Dimitriadis, Juan Flores, Paul Gilroy, Michael Holman, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, Gwendolyn Pough, Tricia Rose, David Toop, and Rickey Vincent.

Shout outs to: Marcyliena Morgan of the Hip-Hop Archive at Harvard University (espe- cially for hosting the symposium “All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Folk Hero,” where several of the authors represented in these pages convened), Knut Aukrust (Oslo, Norway), Michael Eric Dyson (Philadelphia), Emmett Price III (Boston), and Tony Mitchell (holding fort Down Under). “Big Up” to the Northeastern University Hip-Hop Studies Collective: E. P. III, Paul K. Saucier, Geoff Ward, Alan West-Duran, and Nadine Yaver.

The Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, provided support in the book’s early stages, and we thank the department chair, P. David Marshall, and the admin- istrative staff and work study students for their assistance in the manuscript’s preparation. Thanks to Amy Rodriguez for editing assistance, and Matt Byrnie and Mark Henderson of Taylor and Francis for shepherding the project through. Special thanks to Zamawa Arenas for her enduring grace.

Murray Forman Boston

xv

Acknowledgments

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These words we say, we want y’all to hear We’re gonna make a lot of sense—we’re gonna make it clear . . .

. . . We’re gonna rock this record and don’t you forget Ah, that’s the joint

“That’s the Joint” by The Funky Four + One (1980, Sugar Hill Records)

In his 1995 paean “Old School” (1995, Interscope), Tupac Shakur pays tribute to hip-hop’s formative stages and its pioneers with detailed references to everyday teen practices, clothing styles, and a general attitude or way of being as the cultural underpinnings of hip-hop took shape almost twenty years prior. Calling out to New York City’s boroughs, he identifies the locus of hip-hop’s origins, proclaiming gratitude to rap music’s innovators and citing the essential contribution of local radio stations, DJs, or nightclubs. He also explicitly describes the urban perambulation and mobility of subway rides between Brooklyn and Harlem and the social cohesion of neighborhood block parties “in the projects,” noting in his lyrics that early hip-hop was the product of overlapping influences as teens from different neighborhoods moved across the city, mingling in formal and informal urban spaces—literally inhabiting both aboveground and underground environments.

When Shakur intones the phrase “Forget the TV, about to hit the streets and do graffiti / Be careful don’t let the transit cops see me,” he explains that early hip-hop was characterized by public actions that were, in many cases, simultaneously accompanied by risks of varying severity. From this vantage, hip-hop can be seen as a series of practices with an evolved history and the ongoing potential to challenge both social norms and legal stricture; in hip- hop, there are always stakes of crucial importance. The song’s hook, woven throughout the track in the sampled voice of MC Grand Puba of the rap group Brand Nubian from their recording “Dedication,” summarizes the debt and gratitude owed to hip-hop’s creative trailblazers and its early supporters: “What more can I say? I wouldn’t be here today if the old school didn’t pave the way.”

In ways similar to those uttered in Shakur’s “Old School,” contemporary scholars might recognize their own debt to hip-hop’s pioneering authors and cultural critics. Since hip-hop’s

1

Introduction

Murray Forman

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inception in the uptown boroughs of New York, there has emerged a considerable body of written work about the cultural practices and informing attitudes that comprise a hip-hop way of life. For example, in 1978, Billboard, the music industry’s main trade magazine, printed a short article about the localized phenomenon of DJ street parties and the growing prestige of pioneer DJ Kool Herc, whose music and performance innovations were generating excite- ment among uptown audiences at the time. Appearing under the title “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx,” Robert Ford, Jr.’s, auspicious article reported that, following Herc’s lead, “other Bronx DJs have picked up the practice and now B-Beats are the rage all over the borough and the practice is spreading rapidly” (1978: 65). Although it took a few more years for academics to catch on, journalists working the culture beat began following this underground music (even before it was known as “rap”) and the attendant cultural practices of break dancing (or B- boying) and graffiti. Attesting to the swift increase of mainstream media coverage, Judy McCoy’s library reference guide Rap Music in the 1980s (1992) provides a date-specific list graphically displaying the proliferation of rap reviews, artist interviews or profile pieces, and industry analysis.

In their writing, journalists charted the entrepreneurial and artistic personalities involved, the rise of a vital and ever-shifting club scene, and rap and hip-hop’s gradual expansion beyond the narrow enclaves of the Bronx and Harlem. The contributions of several of these pioneering authors, including Robert Ford, Jr., Nelson George, Sally Banes, and Michael Holman, are included in That’s the Joint! Today, this trend continues in the writing of, to name but a few, Jon Caramanica, Davey D, Kevin Powell, Kelefa Sanneh, and Toure who write about hip-hop for the daily press, specialty magazines, and dedicated Web sites. Benchmark films such as Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s Style Wars, both released in 1982, or The Show (1995), directed by Brian Robbins, and Peter Spirer’s Rhyme & Reason (1997), further circulated the images, sounds, and sensibilities of early hip-hop, providing important documentation of the era, as does Doug Pray’s more recent production, Scratch (2002), a documentary about early DJs and contemporary “turntablists.”

The emergence of academically oriented approaches to hip-hop culture is most often traced to the 1984 publication of David Toop’s Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop and Steven Hager’s Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. They, and others in rapid succession, presented a focused examination of the cultural contexts within which hip-hop evolved and flourished. Though there was often a limiting sense of analytic scope (with many early writers fixating on the culture’s marginal status, advancing disputable claims about hip-hop’s ostensibly organic roots in a ghetto poverty that were, some argued, disconnected from systems of commerce), these first scholarly forays remain valuable to the contemporary perspective on how hip-hop was viewed at the time and the prevailing sense of its impact and importance in that nascent era. Far from simply seeming outdated, this initial writing on hip-hop still offers historical information that is worth contemplating as today’s scholars and young hip-hop “heads” attempt to appraise the current cultural land- scape and, tentatively, predict hip-hop’s next phase of reinvention.

Paraphrasing Chuck D of Public Enemy, despite relative antagonism and constraint through the 1990s, hip-hop rapidly “bum rushed” the halls of higher education. When, in regard to rap recordings, Paul Gilroy admits, “I don’t think anyone actually knows what the totality of its hyperactivity looks like . . . I can’t keep up with the volume of hip-hop product anymore” (1992: 309), he could just as easily be addressing the contemporary outpouring of articles and books about rap and hip-hop that have circulated into the public sphere through scholarly journals and academic presses. In the eyes of some traditionalists and conservative intellectuals, this new area of study posed a challenge to the hegemony of prevailing academic standards and disrupted disciplinary norms, facilitating comparisons with the far earlier stance of critic Bernard Rosenberg (1957), who cautioned against the worrisome academic

2 • MURRAY FORMAN

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incursions of popular culture research in the 1950s, or Allan Bloom, whose 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind focused specifically on what he perceived were the erosive influ- ences of popular music among students. Today, having gained a certain respectability and reputation for analytic rigor—having paid its dues and earned its keep—scholarly work on hip-hop is considerably less marginalized within the university.

The “new black intelligentsia,” of which Todd Boyd, Michael Eric Dyson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mark Anthony Neal, and Tricia Rose are among the most conspicuous members, demonstrates a clear understanding of, and affinity with hip-hop. In the writing and lectures of a growing number of progressive black thinkers—not all of whom toil in the university system—there is general concurrence that hip-hop represents an extension of specifically African American cultural traditions but, importantly, it also poses challenges and introduces ruptures to prevailing notions of an unbroken cultural continuum; in this context, Boyd’s The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (2002) is a particularly compelling text. Displaying intellectual dexterity while holding hip-hop itself under a harsh critical light, contemporary scholars across the cultural spectrum frequently employ many of hip-hop’s inherent strategies that include appropriating and reincorporating academic theo- ries and elucidating the contemporary cultural condition in language that is simultaneously learned and hip. A further prominent indicator of the academic embrace of hip-hop may be witnessed in the establishment of various institutes and research centers, including the founding of the Hiphop Archive housed in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Drawing on the institution’s deep resource base to host hip-hop luminaries such as pioneering DJ Afrika Bambaataa and scholars from across the United States, the Harvard-based archive illustrates that hip-hop’s social impact and cultural contributions are far too important for teachers and students to ignore and, moreover, avoiding them would be irresponsible since literally millions of people world wide are influenced by hip-hop on a daily basis.

With That’s the Joint!, we assert that research and writing, whether in journalistic or academic contexts, is absolutely part of the wider hip-hop culture. Analyzing, theorizing, and writing about hip-hop are also forms of cultural labor and should accordingly be regarded as consequen- tial facets of hip-hop. Hip-hop’s first chroniclers were always more than dispassionate objec- tive observers. They were in many cases fully implicated in the emergent culture of hip-hop, circulating within the same social circles as the prime innovators and entrepreneurs, and they counted themselves among the earliest audience members who cohered at both formal and informal events. Many of today’s hip-hop scholars started as journalists, covering hip-hop in their local press, spinning records on campus–community radio stations, writing record reviews, or documenting the proliferating national hip-hop scenes, and many continue to navigate between the media and academia. As a generation of scholars steeped in hip-hop’s cultural influences graduated into tenure track positions, teaching students in their teens and twenties who have never known a world without hip-hop, the dynamic interrelations and productive overlay between academic and nonacademic spaces have become more obvious. That’s the Joint! ideally inhabits this liminal zone where the ’hood and the university converge.

A cursory search of the Internet reveals dozens of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars exclusively focused on hip-hop, and there are scores of single-class modules in a wide range of contexts addressing hip-hop themes and issues. The subtitled reference to “hip- hop studies” in That’s the Joint! is intentional, advanced with full awareness that, although there is not yet an institutionalized subdiscipline called “hip-hop studies,” there is a plethora of hip-hop research across the disciplines and the volume and sophistication of work in various university departments is consistently increasing. Although hip-hop is most frequently analyzed and discussed within the disciplinary contours of African-American studies or popular music studies, it also represents a growing area of research in American studies,

INTRODUCTION • 3

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cultural studies, communications and media studies, English, ethnic studies, performance studies, sociology, and women’s studies. Published writing on rap and hip-hop culture consti- tutes the new entrant in these fields, jostling against more conventional works. The majority of essays and articles in That’s the Joint! were selected by surveying references and citations in published hip-hop research in order to gauge the utility of specific essays. This approach was augmented by a review of roughly seventy-five course syllabi and an assessment of readings assigned to students across academic disciplines.

Still, despite its gains in the academy, hip-hop scholarship often remains a peripheral concern among those outside the university—the students enrolled in advanced seminars in “the school of hard knocks”—who tend to experience hip-hop most intensely and who most ardently reproduce the cultural practices and discourses “in the ’hood,” which remains the center of hip-hop’s production and its symbolic source of meaning and value. There is frequently a defensive attitude expressed among the youth of the extended and variegated hip- hop community that is articulated as skepticism for scholarly engagements with hip-hop. For youth who are most explicitly identified with hip-hop’s cultural forms, claims made for and about hip-hop by professors occupying academia’s “ivory towers” or “hallowed halls” are frequently met with suspicion, if not outright derision. It is not rare, for instance, to hear critiques among young constituents of “the hip-hop nation” who are convinced that profes- sors with little or no connection to “the ’hood” and, thus, lacking in “street credibility” in their view, are exploiting the culture in order to identify with something cool, exciting, “fresh,” or “phat.” This viewpoint, inscribed at its worst with a palpable anti-intellectual disdain, suggests that university and college teachers are often most interested in translating hip-hop’s cultural forms and practices into abstract theoretical jargon, building their academic careers on the backs of MCs, DJs, B-boys and graffiti artists who forge the objects of scholarly research.

These criticisms are not always without merit; the main criticism voiced among the self- appointed guardians of hip-hop is that scholars, whether consciously or not, often exert their relative authority when conducting research and publishing their findings, and they are eminently capable of appropriating dimensions of hip-hop according to personal or profes- sional agendas. As hip-hop has evolved as a significant—and lucrative—facet of the enter- tainment industry, emerging as a profoundly influential commercial and cultural force, it has been taken up as a topic of academic inquiry with greater enthusiasm. Yet just as a new gener- ation of artists capitalized on the enhanced value of, for example, rap music or ’hood films in the popular market, so, too, did hip-hop’s journalists and scholarly writers proliferate, attaining social status as hip-hop commentators, cultural critics, and professional experts. Mirroring patterns in the recording and film industries and the magazine publishing sector throughout the 1990s, scholarly research on hip-hop also constituted a growth sector among academic publishers and university presses. Hip-hop scholarship, then, is not simply an unin- vested or benign study of cultural formations and social practices; it cannot be excluded from the commercial corporate systems through which hip-hop has been constructed, projected, or amplified on the local, regional, national, or global scale. As Tupac Shakur’s “Old School” reminds us, hip-hop’s cultural practices are thoroughly traced with stakes of varying conse- quence, and the same holds true for hip-hop scholarship.

The university is surely (and thankfully) not the central site or driving force in contempo- rary hip-hop culture, yet the work that is taking place in its classrooms is not without stakes. As hip-hop evolves as a regular facet of university curricula it is essential to acknowledge and critique the role of academics in shaping public knowledge about hip-hop. Academics and journalists—in their own ways and in their own far-too-disconnected domains—function as gatekeepers of sorts; gatekeepers of knowledge certainly, but also gatekeepers of discourse. This is to concede that, whether aggressively or through more passive forms, boundaries of language and expression within which the world is made meaningful are being circumscribed.

4 • MURRAY FORMAN

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As hip-hop passes the first quarter century of existence, it is important to address the ways in which knowledge of the culture is constructed, how the character of hip-hop’s myriad prac- tices are framed and conveyed both to a general public and to a core of deeply invested partic- ipants who, for those working within the academy, are also our students. The articles selected for That’s the Joint! reflect the disparate discursive patterns through which hip-hop has been addressed, presenting ideas and terminology that may converge in a form of dialogue, but that may also collide and conflict.

Another outcome of hip-hop’s academic study is the formation of what might reasonably be termed a “hip-hop canon,” encompassing key written works and dominant research themes that are identified with influential scholars. Rap music is so sufficiently established that few hardcore defenders of hip-hop would dispute that, for example, Eric B and Rakim’s Paid in Full (1987, Island Records) or Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988, Def Jam) are hip-hop classics, essential listening, must-have cultural commodities, but it is unlikely that the same would be said of Tricia Rose’s go-to text Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994). The hip-hop “canon” is not a widely discussed topic, but it is emerging in much the same way that rock or jazz studies evolved, with several key texts becoming enshrined in various forms, not least of which includes course syllabi and academic reading lists. Just as the durability and tenacity of hip-hop and rap annoyed and impressed individuals in the culture industries, so, too, has hip-hop endured in relation to the academy. In this context, if hip-hop’s cultural producers and earnest constituents “bring the noise” in a maelstrom of beats and rhymes, then academic writers in corresponding fashion “bring the canons.” This notion of a hip-hop research canon isolates attention on the academic literature that attempts to explain, define, theorize, and culturally locate hip-hop in relation to myriad factors such as industry structures, policy and regula- tions, social practices, and collective and subjective identity formation.