Hip-Hop Scholars?

My "Hip-Hop Nation" class begins this week (Hooray!) One issue that really jumped out at me in the readings (from Know What I Mean and That's the Joint! especially) is the real anxiety that surrounds the whole concept of academic scholarship about hip-hop. On the hand, the very of act of having a scholarly discourse about hip-hop legitimates it and helps increase the cultural capital of participants. For these reasons, many folks support the increasing academic popularity of and interest in hip-hop. On the other hand, this increase in scholarship has the potential to undermine the authority of participants in hip-hop culture. Another downside has been that many academic folks with limited or partial knowledge about hip-hop have been able to voice their criticism and praise for hip-hop. Frequently, both popular and academic publications have accepted these scholarly pronouncements without carefully evaluating the data or scholarship upon which that commentary rested! I think that much recent work in hip-hop studies is pretty much eradicating this interloper problem.

I look forward to posing this question to students to see how they respond to the whole situation. In most academic fields, the debate about the relative authority of participants and observers is pretty settled. I am curious whether students will draw on analogies from other things that they have studied, such as history, literature, social science, art, or even biology and apply them here. What complicates this whole question is that race, class, and gender possess a much greater presence in this debate about the relation between the scholar and his/her subject-matter than in other fields. I don't have the answers but I really want to hear what students have to say about all this. I wonder if how students pre-existing knowledge about hip-hop will shape how they approach this debate!

My own take about this question is shaped by my own entry into hip-hop studies via being a lawyer. I came to hip-hop studies because lawyers and judges (mostly white) were making all sorts of judgments about sampling and the meaning of hip-hop culture vis-a-vis criminal law in the early to mid-1990s. Few of those judges, attorneys, legislators, or police officers had a detailed knowledge of hip-hop, but their views shaped how hip-hop has developed and been regulated by the state. For this reason, I have always been somewhat skeptical of the claim that ONLY hip-hop participants can and should discuss and analyze hip-hop. The challenge I have always struggled with is how to balance the two very different forms of knowledge being developed about hip-hop.

As I think about all this, my mind keeps coming back to the debate within American studies (the field where I received my Ph.D.) between those who viewed American culture as unique and exceptional and those who viewed American culture as following similar rules (regarding class, gender, ethnicity, capitalism, democracy, etc) as other countries. While the critics of American exceptionalism tend to rule the current day in the study of American culture, it appears that the exceptionalists tend to hold the dominant position in hip-hop studies. In other words, it seems that the consensus is that hip-hop is so unique that we cannot apply existing theories to understand it and we would be better off emphasizing the view of the actual participants. I am not confident enough to want to defend this position yet, but I am hoping my students will help me figure out if this analogy holds or if it simply an interesting but failed idea.