of tonal harmony, are rarely conceived of as such and even then are rarely worked with individually; rather, entire phrases are sampled and arranged. Choosing a melody to sample (after considering its rhythm, pitch, timbre, contour, and potential relationship to other samples) is very different from composing a melody to be performed later.
The use of ethnography also raises questions about the subjectivity of the researcher. For white people writing about African American music, of course, this is an age-old question. Unfortunately it is often answered with guilty soul-searching, a confident recitation of one’s credentials, or somewhat perfunctory admissions of outsiderness, all of which tend to be so particular to the individual in question as to be of little value to readers. One begins to move beyond the constraints of these strategies when one senses the underlying issues implicit in William “Upski” Wimsatt’s rhetorical question (which arose when he reflected on his own experiences in hip-hop culture), “Hadn’t I just been a special white boy?” (Wimsatt 1994: 30). In other words, when a white person does manage to forge a relationship with African American culture, there is a temptation to attribute this to some exemplary aspect of our own personality. While there may be some truth to this, it would be foolhardy—as Wimsatt convincingly argues—to ignore the larger forces at play. The difficulty lies in the fact that these forces manifest themselves primarily through our daily activities and interactions; it is often quite difficult to distinguish between one’s own impulses and the imperatives of the larger society.
I believe that the most productive approach to this issue is for scholars to create a framework in which their particular paths may be interpreted as case studies of individuals from similar backgrounds pursuing similar goals. In other words, reflexivity is not enough: one must generalize from one’s own experience, a pursuit which requires researchers not only to examine their relationships to the phenomena being studied, but also to speculate on the larger social forces to which they themselves are subject, a process that I would term “self-ethnography.” I have found the work of Charles Keil (particularly his new afterword to Urban Blues [1991]) and William Upski Wimsatt (1994) to be particularly valuable as models for such endeavors.11 To that end, I wish to discuss several aspects of my own life that may contribute to a broader understanding not only of my own project, but also of other such works created by researchers from similar backgrounds. In making this choice, I am intentionally avoiding the impulse to give a comprehensive explanation of my approach in favor of focusing of a few specific factors that I believe have been less exhaustively discussed elsewhere. These aspects include my ethnic and cultural background, social approach to scholarship, and age.
I was born in 1968 and raised in a predominantly white, Christian suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. I was introduced to participant observation at the age of five, when, according to my parents, I browbeat them into taking me to see Santa Claus at a large downtown department store. After a long wait, I made it to Santa’s lap and was asked what I wanted for Christmas. “Oh, nothing,” I replied, “We’re Jewish.”
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
