This anecdote suggests to me that the experience of fieldwork was known to me at an early age and that it was used to define my own identity as a Jew in America. In other words, I was trying to understand what I was by engaging with what I was not. I knew Santa Claus wasn’t for me, yet I wanted to experience and understand him anyway. And I would suggest that for American Jews in general, day-to-day living in an ideologically Christian society (not to mention conscious self-definition) is always, to some degree, a process of participant observation. I believe that this social impulse combined with a general Jewish predisposition toward scholarship as a mode of social interaction (see Boyarin 1997) may help to account for the disproportionate Jewish representation in fields that make use of ethnography, such as anthropology and ethnomusicology.
A more specific social aspect of this particular project and its value to me personally is the scholarly approach that hip-hop producers themselves take toward collecting old records for sampling purposes. This dovetails nicely with my own tendencies as an ethnomusicologist, insofar as I enjoy collecting records, talking about the minutiae of popular music, and making distinctions between things that are so fine as to be meaningless to the vast majority of people who encounter them. To put it another way, I am a nerd. In a surprising number of cases, this was common ground upon which my consultants and I could stand.
Another useful approach may be to see my attraction to hip-hop production as a delayed effect of the cultural environment in which I was raised—particularly that of 1970s television. As David Serlin (1998) has pointed out, children’s shows of that era (especially Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Schoolhouse Rock), presented multicultural utopias held together by what was, in retrospect, extraordinarily funky music.12 While hip-hop samples from a variety of sources, there is a particular focus on music that was originally recorded in the early 1970s, an era that corresponds to early childhood both for me and for many of the most influential hip-hop producers. I imagine that at least some of the pleasure we derive from hearing a vibrato-laden electric piano or a tight snare drum comes from the (often subconscious) visions they conjure up of childhood and the mass-mediated friendships of Maria, Gordon, Rudy, and Mushmouth, who smiled at us through our TV screens.
In addition to its sociohistorical context, this book also exists with the academic tradition of scholarship on hip-hop. The development of a cohesive body of literature on hip-hop music, though still in its early stages, has already been characterized by a number of discernable trends. These trends have been extensively documented by Murray Forman (2002b). I would like to focus on a specific aspect of the academic literature that has influenced this study: the dispersal of the literature on hip-hop’s precursors among a variety of academic disciplines, a situation that has unintentionally created an inappropriately fragmented portrait of hip-hop’s origins.
Hip-hop’s ancestors, when they have been studied at all, have been studied in ways that are not particularly related to music or to each other. I would distinguish five primary factors that contributed to the birth of hip-hop music: the African-American tradition of oral poetry; various kinesthetic rhythm activities, such as step shows, children’s clapping games, hambone, and double Dutch; developments in technology for the recording and reproduction of music, culminating in the use of digital sampling; attitudes in African American cultures regarding the value and use of recorded music; and general societal (i.e., social, political, and economic) conditions that made hip-hop an attractive proposition for inner-city youth. Any useful scholarship on hip-hop that wishes to be grounded in the literature is therefore necessarily interdisciplinary because it must begin by integrating the literature on these diverse subjects. Of the five areas I have delineated, only one—societal conditions—had been extensively investigated prior to the birth of hip-hop. This, I believe, is one of the reasons that its significance relative to the other four factors is frequently overstated in many discussions of hip-hop culture.
Scholarship that ties the remaining four areas to the birth of hip-hop is sparse, a state of affairs I would attribute to two factors: first, for various social reasons (particularly race, class, and gender), precursors to hip-hop, such as toasts, double Dutch rhymes, and so on, have not until recently been seen as warranting academic attention, and second, because this material was inconsistent in many ways with academic ideas of “music,” the literature that does exist is scattered among a variety of other disciplines, such as folklore and sociology. The literary tradition relating to hip-hop’s precursors, then, seems to encompass the literature of every discipline but music, from African American oral poetry (folklore) to the rhythms of double Dutch (developmental psychology and sociology) to the technological developments of South Bronx deejays (history, sociology, and postmodern literary theory). Hip-hop—as music—becomes literally unprecedented. This may create an unbalanced environment for hip-hop scholarship because the scholar must explain how a musical form such as hip-hop could appear instantly from nowhere.
While few address this question directly, it does emerge in the literature in the form of a striking ahistoricality. As Keyes has noted, “Postmodern criticism tends to define rap music in modernity, thereby distancing it as both as a verbal and musical form anchored in a cultural history, detaching it as a cultural process over time, and lessening the importance of rap music and its culture as a dynamic tradition” (1996: 224). When I refer to the ahistoricality of much of the contemporary literature on hip-hop, I am referring to the difficulties of putting hip-hop music into the context of a larger musical history and the resulting implication that hip-hop as a musical form is sui generis. There have been several excellent works that strictly concern the development of the broader culture (see Castleman 1982, George 1998, Hager 1984, Toop 1991). Craig Castleman’s work—essentially an ethnography of the graffiti-writing community in New York City (including police officers who try to stop graffiti writing)—has been a particular influence on this study. But most works on the musical facets of hip-hop present it as a discrete moment in time, and the few that do take a larger historical view almost universally follow the development of rapping, to the exclusion of other hip-hop arts. This has its benefits as well as its liabilities.
The primary benefit of such ahistoricality is that it implicitly presents history (i.e., a developmental paradigm based in linear time) as only one of a variety of possible settings for analytical work on hip-hop. Many of the works cited above primarily emphasize economic, social, and cultural contexts, all of which are valuable approaches. The liabilities emerge, however, when history is summarily excluded as a paradigm due to the paucity of source material or the requirements of a theory. While some scholars find that historical context is not relevant to their particular arguments, many imply that historical context cannot be relevant because hip-hop’s use of previous recordings from different eras automatically voids the paradigm of historical development. This, I believe, is a mistake. As Keyes notes above, hip-hop’s aesthetic is deeply beholden to the music of other eras, and an understanding of these sensibilities can only enrich our understanding of contemporary practice.
Furthermore, the boundary between hip-hop insiders and outsiders can be rather porous, a state of affairs that may be obscured when hip-hop is removed from its larger context. As I will show, the nature of the producers’ art requires them more than other hip-hop artists to explore beyond the genre boundaries of hip-hop. The producer Mr. Supreme, for instance, rejects the notion that a “true hip-hopper” should listen only to hip-hop music: “If you’re a real true hip-hopper—and I think a lot of hip-hoppers aren’t—like I always say, ‘It’s all music.’ So if you really are truly into hip-hop, how can you not listen to anything else? Because it comes from everything else. So you are listening to everything else. So how can you say ‘I only listen to hip-hop, and I don’t listen to this.’ It doesn’t make sense to me” (Mr. Supreme 1998a).
In fact, every producer I interviewed cited older musical forms as direct influences. An extreme example of this phenomenon arose in an interview with Steinski, who was a heavily influential