style="font-size:15px;"> Perhaps the most obvious feature working against the researcher who wishes to maintain the separation between these two worlds is that they often occupy the same physical space. This alone cannot help but illuminate the extent to which the separation is an ideological one. Another reason for disorienting overlap is that the scholar is often not the only individual who moves back and forth, and the resulting malleability of social barriers tends to blur any strict distinctions. A number of individuals who had a professional interest in the hip-hop world (including S. K. Honda, DJ Topspin, DJ E-Rok, Jake One, and MC H-Bomb) attended the University of Washington while I was studying hip-hop as a graduate student there. Seven of the people I interviewed for this project (Wordsayer, Kylea, Strath Shepard, Mr. Supreme, DJ B-Mello, Harry Allen, and Steinski) have lectured to classes I taught.
Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon in action was a festival of African American music that I attended in Seattle in the spring of 1999. The chair of my doctoral committee, a visiting artist, and several graduate students from my department performed Trinidadian pan music; they were immediately followed on the same stage by a hip-hop show that featured a number of my consultants from an earlier investigation of this subject. In between sets, I found myself in a conversation with two members of my committee and two of the people I was “studying,” all of whom saw themselves simply as fellow participants in a musical event.
The inherently problematic nature of my relationship to the field served as an organic critique of the study itself at every stage of the process. Many of my consultants have approached me with new information or critiques that they wanted to share, sometimes years after I had initially interviewed them. At least one of the formal interviews as well as many informal discussions for this project were conducted in my home, a setting that in many ways reverses the power dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. Finally, I often unwound from a long day of writing by discussing my ideas with consultants in the backs of loud, smoky night-clubs in between their deejay sets. In other words, my fieldwork was itself a social process that interacted in manifold ways with the social processes that were the intended focus of this study. While this is of course true for anyone performing fieldwork, the difference in the case of Americans who study American popular music is that there is no formal beginning or end to our research; our participant observation (i.e., experiencing popular music within the context of American society) covers roughly our entire lives, as do the relationships that we rely on to situate ourselves socially.
I began to listen avidly to hip-hop in the mid-1980s and became actively involved in the Seattle hip-hop scene when I moved there to begin graduate school in 1992. Since then I have attended over five hundred hip-hop performances, club nights, or other events (an average of one per week for ten years). I began writing for Seattle’s now-defunct hip-hop magazine The Flavor in 1995, and I have subsequently written about hip-hop for the Seattle Weekly and the magazines Resonance, URB, and Vibe. After I began this book, I bought a sampler of my own and began to make rudimentary beats, sometimes playing them for my consultants. It is perhaps more significant at my beginner’s level of development that I have also found myself with an increasingly obsessive devotion to digging in the crates for rare records. In fact, when I attend academic conferences in different cities, my fellow hip-hop researchers (particularly Oliver Wang) and I often schedule an extra day to go record shopping. So when I’m digging through rare funk 45s on the floor of a tiny, dusty baseball-card store in Detroit with two people who were on my panel earlier in the day and a local hip-hop deejay, am I in the academic world or the field? I hope never to be able to answer that question. The use of participant observation and ethnography also means that the text that one produces is itself part of the social world one is studying. Its literary conceits often embody the relationship between the author and the context. I would therefore like to briefly discuss some of the choices I have made in transforming my research into a written text.
One decision that I have struggled with has been to refer to producers with masculine pronouns in most cases. This is not intended to be in any way prescriptive. I do not believe that producers “should” be male. But I do believe that most producers are male. Furthermore, it is clear (as I will discuss in chapter 2) that the abstract ideal of a producer is conceived in masculine terms and that this has a substantial effect on how individuals strive to live up to that ideal. I believe that the use of gender-neutral language would create a distorted picture of this process.
Similarly, I believe that specifying the ethnicity of particular producers who I quote in the following pages would also add distortions because the producers themselves did not make any such distinctions to me.6 I am not suggesting that ethnicity is never a concern for these individuals or that history and culture do not affect the musical choices that artists make. But I am saying that the producers themselves tend to de-emphasize its significance to their conduct as producers. As I argue throughout this study, there are no consistent stylistic differences between the practices of producers from different ethnic backgrounds. If there were a white or Latino style of hip-hop production, I think distinctions would be more justifiable. But, as I argue throughout this book, all producers—regardless of race—make African American hip-hop. And those who do it well are respected, largely without regard to their ethnicity. Given the charged nature of most multicultural interactions in American society, this facet of hip-hop culture is particularly remarkable. That fact became clear in my conversation with Steinski, a producer who is universally respected despite falling well outside of hip-hop’s presumed “black youth” demographic; he is white and, at the time of our interview, fifty-one years old.
Joe: Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but that’s something that I really like about … hip-hop. Which is like, “People liked it because it was good. End of story.”
Steinski: Totally. I mean, that’s been one of the best things about hip-hop. You know, that there’s a lot of room in it for new shit, for anomalous shit, for all kinds of stuff. You know, like, “Here we have some of the best deejays on Earth, and they are all Filipino American!” Well, you don’t see GrandWizzard Theodore sitting around going, “Those cats aren’t authentic—they’re not black!” It’s like, they’re hip-hop—that’s the only thing that matters, man….
Yeah, I think that part of it’s wonderful. That it’s kind of like, “OK, anyone who can drag themselves in over the windowsill—they’re in.” I mean, that’s really great—it was great then [in the 1980s], and it’s great now. That part’s really great. ’Cause otherwise, I’d be some asshole with a sampler, fifty-one years old, and who listens to me?7 (Steinski 2002)
Questions of what it means to “be hip-hop” and the relationship of that state of existence to African American culture in general are at the heart of this study and at the heart of hip-hop production itself. But it is clear that this is a deep connection that hinges on the aesthetic assumptions and implications of the work that any given artist produces, rather than, for example, on the espousal of Afrocentric beliefs. Cultural background, while influential, is not determinative. Stated in the most simplistic terms, the rules of hip-hop are African American, but one need not be African American to understand or follow them.
This openness is not simply a matter of largesse on the part of hip-hop arbiters. Rather, it is a result of social processes that are intrinsic to the act of making beats, particularly the complex set of ethical and aesthetic expectations that producers must follow in order to be taken seriously by others. To follow the rules, one must first learn them from people who already know. In order to learn them from people who already know, one must convince them that one is a worthy student.8 Thus the mere ability to follow the rules in the first place demonstrates that the individual in question has already undergone a complex vetting process, and the willingness to undergo that process demonstrates a commitment to the community and its ideals. This is presumably what Steinski is referring to when he mentions producers “drag[ging] themselves in over the windowsill”—there are dues to be paid, but once one is in, one is considered
