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 a full member of the community.
It is certainly possible that the apparent color-blindness of the producers’ community is an artifact of my own racial point of view (as a Jew, I would be considered white by most Americans). But given the nature of my personality and those of my consultants, it is difficult for me to imagine that they would downplay racial issues simply to avoid making me uncomfortable.9 In fact, I have discussed various racial questions with almost all of them in other contexts. Ultimately, though, this issue—whether I am underrepresenting the influence of race on individuals’ approach to hip-hop production—can only be answered satisfactorily by a nonwhite researcher. From a purely logical standpoint, I cannot assess my own blind spots—if I could, they wouldn’t be blind spots.
Another factor that particularly stands out in interview-based research is the disjuncture between the oral language of those who were interviewed and the written language of the author and secondary sources. In other words, my consultants’ comments were initially presented orally, improvisationally, and in response to questions that they had not seen beforehand, while scholars’ comments (both my own and quotations from other writers) were presented in written form, with (presumably) much forethought and revision. Moreover, many of my consultants speak African American English, even if they write Standard (i.e., European) American English. If one is not familiar with it, a written approximation of African American English—nonstandard by definition—may make the speaker appear to lack full linguistic competence. While such judgments are entirely the result of social prejudice, they may be reinforced by the textual juxtaposition of a quotation from a speaker of African American English and the broader text written in Standard American English. Generally speaking, I have followed Monson (1996) with regard to transcribing the speech of my consultants:
I have chosen to use nonstandard spellings very sparingly…. I include such spellings when they seem to be used purposefully to signal ethnicity and when failure to include them would detract from intelligibility. Since African Americans frequently switch from African American idioms to standard English and back in the same conversation … orthographic changes can represent linguistic changes that carry much cultural nuance. For the most part I have preserved lexicon, grammar, and emphasis in the transcription of aural speech.10 (Monson 1996: 23)
Beyond transcriptional choices, I have used three