As I will demonstrate, traditional African American aesthetic preferences, social assumptions, and cultural norms inform producers’ activities on many levels.
Geographic diversity is another significant factor affecting the producers’ sense of community. I interviewed individuals from Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Seattle for this study. Virtually all of them knew each other, either directly or indirectly. This is a small community held together by phone, the Internet, and regular travel. Although such abstract communities have always existed to some degree, the increasingly global nature of communication and the international flow of labor and capital has made the nonlocal community an increasingly common affair (see Clifford 1992, Appadurai 1990, Slobin 1992). Benedict Anderson (1983), in fact, convincingly argues that even such an accepted political formation as the nation-state constitutes an “imagined” community. While this may have its practical difficulties for the ethnographer, it means that relationships are driven by the needs and sensibilities of the individuals in question more than by their proximity to centers of traditional power.
The ease with which such relationships can be maintained still surprises me. When I travel, I am regularly asked by hip-hop artists to deliver records and gossip to individuals in other cities. And as I write this, the Rock Steady Crew, a legendary b-boy/b-girl collective, is preparing to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary with a weekend of parties and performances here in New York City; two of my Seattle-based consultants will be deejaying there. And, of course, the Internet is probably the most powerful tool for communication between individuals and dissemination of general information; new Web sites appear every day.
In order to reflect this state of affairs, my research took a path that was unusual but entirely organic to the processes that I was studying. I began by interviewing hip-hop artists in Seattle, Washington, because I had preexisting ties to that community and because I believe that Seattle is exemplary as a node of the national network I am trying to portray. It is both large enough to support a substantial community of musicians and small enough to be constantly aware of its place within the greater social context. My consultants in Seattle introduced me to producers in other cities, allowing me to explore the network in a fashion similar to that of any other community participant, moving from the local to the universal. This is a practical example of the way the process of performing fieldwork can have a very abstract influence on the way a study is structured.2
In other words, my fieldwork was very similar to the educational process that a hip-hop producer would undergo, the primary difference being that I was producing a book rather than music. But the experience of meeting producers, convincing them of my sincerity, going digging and trading records with them, communally criticizing other producers’ beats, learning about production techniques and ethical violations through discussion and experimentation, and eventually being introduced to nationally known artists parallels the common pedagogical experience of hip-hop producers themselves in many important ways. I would argue that the shape of the knowledge expressed in this book—what I know and don’t know—is largely the result of this approach, and thus reflects the epistemological orientation of hip-hop production—or at least my own experience of it. A researcher setting out to interview the “great producers of hip-hop” or to produce a formal history of hip-hop production may well produce a different picture.
Finally, most of my consultants share a somewhat purist attitude toward the use of digital sampling for hip-hop production. While digital sampling has historically been the primary technology used for making beats, it is not the only one; some forms of hip-hop use synthesizers or live instrumentation as their foundations. One of the major premises of this project is that the distinction between sample-based and non-sample-based hip-hop is a distinction of genre, more than of individual technique.3 Hip-hop producers who use sampling place great importance on that fact, and—as I will show—find it difficult to countenance other approaches without compromising many of their foundational assumptions about the musical form.4
In fact, as I complete this book, sample-based production—once the central approach used in hip-hop—is becoming increasingly marginalized. This, in turn, has led some producers to become more open to other approaches, while others, in response, have become even more purist than they were when I began my research. There are two major reasons for these intertwined developments. First, due to the growing expense of sample clearance (i.e., securing permission from the owner of a copyrighted recording) as well as a general aesthetic sea change, many major-label hip-hop artists are increasingly rejecting the use of samples in favor of other sound sources. While many producers have embraced this change, it is seen by others as a threat to their aesthetic ideals and has caused them to redouble their efforts to emphasize sampling in their work. Second, the increased availability of PC- and Macintosh-based sampling programs has allowed large numbers of individuals who have not been socialized into hip-hop’s community or aesthetic to become involved in its production. This, too, has led those who already used sampling to articulate the previously unstated social values of the community, a trend which can be seen, for example, in the founding of Wax Poetics, a journal devoted entirely to various aspects of the search for rare records to sample (a pursuit known as “digging in the crates”—see chapter 4). Ultimately, then, this work—like all ethnographies—reflects the way a particular community defined itself and its art at a particular time.
Ethnography is well suited to address these and many other issues in popular music. It can ground general theoretical claims in the specific experience of individuals, lead the scholar to interesting questions that may not have arisen through observation alone, and call attention to aspects of the researcher’s relationship to the phenomenon being studied that may not be immediately apparent. This can deeply affect the work that is produced. And, perhaps most importantly, it can help the researcher to develop analyses that are relevant to the community being studied. This is especially valuable in the case of hip-hop, as the culture’s participants have invested a great deal of intellectual energy in the development of elaborate theoretical frameworks to guide its interpretation. This is a tremendous—and, in my opinion, grievously underutilized—resource for scholars. Engaging with the conceptual world of hip-hop via participant observation has been one of the most rewarding aspects of this project, and I have tried to reflect that in the pages that follow.
Another benefit of using participant observation to study popular music is that it allows the researcher to exploit the huge body of critical work on scholarly subjectivity that has emerged from the discipline of anthropology over the last thirty years. Critiques of reflexivity, the abstraction of human activity, and the idea of a discrete and bounded “field” are largely absent from writings on popular music because they are simply not relevant to the theoretical approach of most popular music scholars. Ethnography can bring these issues into the discourse.
I am particularly indebted to a recent piece entitled “You Can’t Take the Subway to the Field” (Passaro 1997), which discusses the definitional problems that arose when a researcher chose to do fieldwork among New York City’s homeless population. As Passaro suggests, the primary difficulty in this endeavor was maintaining a distinction between the subject of one’s study and the other aspects of one’s life, including the analysis of one’s data. The origins of this distinction, its nature, and its use as an instrument of postcolonial power have been discussed at length in the anthropological literature (most notably Said 1978, Fabian 1983, Marcus and Fischer 1986, Gupta and Ferguson 1997) As Johannes Fabian (1983) in particular has convincingly argued, the idea of an objective and distinct “field” removes the culture of the researcher from the study’s purview, despite the fact that it is often a deep and abiding influence on the processes being studied.5 One of the aims of this work is to use the particular nature of my own experience, particularly moments of social discomfort or awkwardness, to implicitly question the value of the distinction between “home/academia” and “the field.” In short, I feel that a researcher’s self-conscious confusion over the nature of social boundaries can help to highlight the extent to which the researcher imposed those boundaries in the first place. With that in mind,
