When the Brooklyn Museum mounted an exhibition in 2000 entitled Hip-Hop: Roots, Rhymes, and Rage, I was more outraged at seeing The Notorious B.I.G.’s stage wear and childhood 45 singles collection behind glass than I was by the fact that it had taken so long for a major museum to take hip-hop seriously. I chalk it up now to youth, but I can still remember that silent scream in my head—Here we are a mile straight shot from Biggie’s home, him just three years in the grave, and they’ve turned this shit into a mausoleum. We all ain’t dead yet.
But behind the (misdirected) attitude was a fear that our native knowledges might never be honored, much less documented or advanced. At that moment, hip-hop scholarship mostly focused on rap, forget music or any other forms of hip-hop art. Framed by the urgency of the ongoing culture wars, the ever-present concern over Black invisibility and erasure, and a cultural-studies-styled bow to timeliness, this scholarship often utilized narrow textual and/or sociological approaches. Inevitably the writings were sorely—sometimes pathetically—dated by the time they reached publication.
It is true that the academic publishing enterprise is not built for real-time relevance. It also discourages “community review” in favor of “peer review.” But we would often joke bitterly that you could rate a “scholarly” hip-hop article or book by the average number of factual errors per page, the same kinds of mistakes that might end our careers if we had published them in the then-booming hip-hop media. For us there were stakes to advancing hip-hop knowledge that many scholars could afford to ignore. They didn’t even know what they didn’t know.
Many of us were also mad that few scholars saw fit to interview actual hip-hop practitioners. If they did, we chuckled, it would become quickly clear who the real scholar was. They were watching videos, buying albums, and going to shows just so that they could speak to each other. Armchair hip-hop writing, we called it. We didn’t want to have our movement translated for the academy. We wanted our movement to transform the academy.
Paradoxically, that meant taking up a position that pulled us closer to our community. “‘Hip-hop writers’ are often accused of being ‘too close’ to the music and to the scene. Hell yes, we’re close to it,” the journalist Danyel Smith once wrote of hip-hop journalism, whose late-2000s collapse would accelerate the development of hip-hop studies.1 “Where else to be but close to the truth? Close to art and mystery and metaphor. To the singularity of voice. The magnificence of ingenious sampling.”
And so we all struggled with the question, “So what?” Making Beats was Joe Schloss’s amazingly inspired, deeply personal answer.
He had also asked himself: What research approach might help push the discussion around hip-hop ethics and aesthetics further? How can I write something that adds to hip-hop knowledge, and does not reduce it?
Thinking about these questions led him to make some important choices—to decenter hip-hop scholarship from the Great Men model of history; to get close to his “consultants,” his more respectful name for his interviewees; to respect their knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics, sometimes at the expense of that held by those validated by the academy; and to establish a critical position that still allows a loud and proud kind of advocacy.
In short, he took a side. He did so gracefully—with none of the angst or edge of people like, say, me—and absolutely without apology. In doing so, he offered a model for an engaged intellectual inquiry that yielded as much for the hip-hop community as it might for the academy.
He wrote, “The producer embodies hip-hop history through the use of deejaying, in whatever way he sees fit: scratching, looping, digging for rare records, philosophizing. The producer chooses to become part of the collective history every time he makes a beat.”
It’s not hard to read this now—knowing that, while hip-hop music has continued to evolve and the hip-hop movement continued to grow, Making Beats has become a classic of second-generation hip-hop scholarship as well as a fixture on the bookshelves of new generations of emerging beatmakers—as the perfect description of his own achievement.
Note
1. A decade-long plunge in ad pages led to a sharp narrowing of mass print outlets in hip-hop journalism, marked by the sudden—if temporary—closure of the largest title, Vibe magazine, in 2009. Four years later, when SpinMedia bought a revived Vibe, its circulation had plunged to 301,000, less than a third of its peak number.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to thank the producers, deejays, MCs, and others who worked with me on this project. The term “consultant” is sometimes used as a semantic gambit to avoid the negative implications of the word “informant,” but in this case those who worked with me were consultants in the fullest sense of the word. They not only informed me of things but also sent me magazine articles and useful phone numbers, critiqued (and in one case pretty much copyedited) early drafts of this work, and introduced me to people, situations, and ideas I would never have found on my own.
The Seattle stage of my research was facilitated by consultants DJ B-Mello, Jake One, King Otto, Kylea, Mr. Supreme, Negus I, Samson S., Strath Shepard, Specs, DJ Topspin, Vitamin D, and Wordsayer. In various combinations, many of them also constitute crews that have worked for years to keep Seattle’s independent hip-hop scene vital. Particularly helpful to my project were Conception Records, Tribal Productions, the True Believers Crew, and Jasiri Media Group. A debt of gratitude is owed also to all the others who collectively keep hip-hop in Seattle (aka the Wetlands, the H206, Seatown, and the Two-O-Sickness) moving.
A number of people who work for hip-hop in various capacities across the United States served as consultants on this work as well: Harry Allen, the Angel, Beni B., Karen Dere, Domino, DJ Kool Akiem Allah Elisra, DJ Mixx Messiah, Prince Paul, Steve “Steinski” Stein, and Phill “The Soulman” Stroman.
As a relative latecomer to this culture (“golden era” 1987), I must also honor and thank the pioneers of hip-hop itself (far too numerous to mention), particularly those who have labored to create and maintain a positive vision and path for us to follow, who are our living connection to a time when, as Fabel says, “hip-hop was free.”
I would also like to thank the first generation of hip-hop writers and scholars, who have been an incalculably deep influence not only on this work but also on the fact that it is even possible to do scholarship on hip-hop in the first place: Tricia Rose, Stephen Hager, David Toop, Craig Castleman, Cheryl Keyes, Rob Walser, Michael Eric Dyson, Nelson George, Greg Tate, William Eric Perkins, Russell Potter, and many others.
I have been lucky enough to amass a peerless group of academic advisors—some official, some not—all of whom have affected my work profoundly: Howard Becker, Sue Darlington, Shannon Dudley, Ter Ellingson, Bernard Z. Friedlander, David Reck, Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, David Sanjek, Cynthia Schmidt, and Chris Waterman.
My contemporaries in the academic world, especially those who have one foot in the hip-hop community, have also guided and abetted me. They are the Dynamic 2 + 3 (Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Lizz Mendez-Berry, Jeff “DJ Zen” Chang, and Adrian Gaskins), Jon Caramanica, Kyra Gaunt, Meta DuEwa Jones, Felicia Miyakawa, Dawn Norfleet, Guy Ramsey, Ryan Snyder, and Oliver Wang.
In various capacities, my work has been supported by a number of institutions, including the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Department; the Tufts University Music Department; the University of Virginia Music Department; the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program at New School University; the Performance Studies Department at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; Bob George and the ARChive of Contemporary Music; and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies. An early foray
