A Hiphop Take on What is Going on in Egypt

Great new song about what is going on Egypt!

Check out http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/singles/id.13786/title.freeway-f-amir-sulaiman-ayah-the-narcicyst-and-omar-offendum-january-25th

That opening lyric is awesome!

Hiphop Journalism vs Hiphop Scholarship

I just finished Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback. The book offers a wonderfully rich account of how hiphop went from local party music to becoming a culture linked to music, fashion, movies, comedy, and even water. I would recommend it to any hiphop fan or anyone interested in American popular culture. It is great. Charnas has done a great job, especially all of his contacts to Rick Rubin, Russell Simons, and the editors at The Source. He weaves together dozens of stories of major figures behind the scenes who helped shape hiphop’s rise to popular culture prominence.

The book, however, also made me realize the very different stakes in academic and popular writing. Popular writing seems to offer a bevy of interesting facts and stories. What it does not provide is a review of the contemporary literature, a complete discussion of historical context, much analysis of meaning or philosophy, or a discussion of the political import of the subject. This kind of journalistic writing is mostly descriptive, not analytical, critical or even ethical. Put another way, I learned a lot of facts from The Big Payback but I am not sure if it changed how I viewed hiphop. It left existing narratives about hiphop pretty much intact.

None of this means that Charnas’s book is not good. It is excellent. It will be referenced and taught for a long time. And that is a good thing. However, scholars want to dig deeper and ask more probing questions about the political economy of the contemporary music industry and what that means for the actual content of hiphop we hear.

Popularity of "Rap" and "Hip Hop" as Words

Goolge has created a new tool that allows researchers and law people alike to chart the frequency of word usage in books. (Here is a NYT article describing it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html?hp)

Goofing around with it (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=hip+hop&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=0), I did searches for "rap" and "hip hop"


Here is some of what I learned about "Hip Hop"

• Hip Hop begins to enter books with a spike in 1984 (probably because of Run DMC).
• Hip Hop trails off as a term until 1987 (probably because of the birth of the Golden Age with PE, A Tribe Called Quest, Dr. Dre, etc).
• It trails off again until 1990 and then spikes higher than ever before in 1991 (when sampling and obscenity cases hit)
• Hip Hop slowly rises until 1994, plateaus through 1996.
• It dips in 1998, then rises to new heights in 1999.
• Dips in 2000-2004 and then shoots back up in 2005 and shoots higher in 2007.

Here is what I learned about "rap"

• Unlike Hip Hop, rap has regularly been employed in the English language
• The term increases in popularity (although at modest levels) between 1970 and 1975
• It slides in popularity until 1991 but with peaks in 1981, 1984
• It increases in popularity between 1991 and 1997, dips for a year and then plateaus until 2003.
• Rap spikes in popularity in 2004 and has been decreasing ever since.
• Rap, as a term, is much more popular than hip hop. The only problem with this comparision is that rap can be used in ways that don't reference the music or hip hop culture.

I am not sure what this all teaches us but I found it interesting. Can't wait to see what people do with it!

Good Books

The semester is killing me but I wanted to give a quick shout out to Christopher Weingarten's Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Million to Hold Us Back. It is nice to read a well-written book about hip-hop that is not "scholarly." Even though it frequently strays from Public Enemy, it, with all of its asides into James Brown and Parliament, is interesting. A good quick read!

Also, I am really enjoying Zadie Smith's WhiteTeeth. I cannot figure out why I did not pick it up when it come out!

Anthology of Rap

The (long-awaited) Anthology of Rap, published by Yale University Press, is finally out. As this slate article discusses (http://www.slate.com/id/2272926/), there is a controversy that a number of the lyrics contain errors and that those errors make it appear that the editors merely copied the lyrics from a number of websites.

Because I am still waiting to get my copy in the mail, I cannot quite speak to every aspect of the controversy. However, I do think the slate article and the many comments to it miss some key issues:

• The editors and scholars more generally are not simply printing the lyrics but "translating" them. Most rap songs are oral texts, not written ones. This means that there is not an authoritative text as in a poem or a short story. In addition, many rappers and emcees, such as Jay Z and Kanye, intentionally don't write things down.
• As I have argued elsewhere, hip-hop is full of irony and ambiguity. As some folks note in the comments, one of the pleasures of hip-hop is how it can be impossible to figure out exactly what the rapper's intended meaning was. Sometimes the meaning might be "both".
• Frequently, hip-hop is extremely local. This, combined with it being an oral form, means that many listeners - myself included - have only been hearing the "incorrect" lyrics because we miss the local context/meaning. While I agree that this kind of collection ought to be more precise, it does raise the question about a form that intends to create such interpretative barriers.
• It also seems like the problem with the transcriptions is overshadowing a more crucial question about whether the editors picked the right songs to include. Should this collection follow popular taste or embody a scholarly consensus of the most important hip-hop songs? What kind of rubric ought they have followed to determined either or both of these lists?

I am still excited to get my hands on the book and to use it (eventually) in my classes!

Mixed Tapes and the Law

Great editorial by Cedric Muhammed at allhiphop.com: http://www.allhiphop.com/stories/editorial/archive/2010/09/14/22386152.aspx.

His discussion about the demise of the mixed tape provides yet another angle to consider how standard intellectual property law and recording industry contracts failed to nourish hip-hop. Rather hip-hop artists have regularly been forced to operate outside of the typical industry practices and in the shadows of the law. This obviously has effected the growth of artists, the relationship between the underground and more commercial forms of hip-hop, distribution deals, etc. While most IP scholars (myself included) have focused on the controversies and cases around sampling, mix tapes suggest how copyright doctrines tended to work against new and up-coming artists. The interesting thing is that many artists not only had to challenge fair use challenges but also how the system for distributing music worked in concert with copyright to limit the market for their work. Muhammed also suggests how the interlocking of copyright law and music distribution networks were designed to hurt small African American record stores.

Sampling Lawsuits Continue

As reported in a number of places, Drive-In Music has been bringing copyright infringement suits related to songs produced and distributed in the early 1990s. Overviews of the situation can be found at http://www.allhiphop.com/stories/news/archive/2010/09/13/22385540.aspx.

For the suit against Leaders of the New School, the conplaint can be found at
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/09/07/HipHop.pdf.

The complaint in the case against Cypress Hill can be found at http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/09/13/Tunes.pdf.

What interests me in this case - and is probably interesting more generally - is Drive-In Music is claiming that they were not aware of the infringement for nearly 20 years. The statute of limitations in copyright infringement cases is three years from the date of the infringement. (See 17 U.S.C.A. sec 507). Recent cases about sampling disputes, such as Williams v. Curington 662 F. Supp 2d 33 (DDC 2009) have held that diligent copyright owners have a duty to protect their rights. Courts, however, have allowed copyright owners to re-coup damages from the previous three years before filing. I suspect that the court will eventually limit any damages to the last three years.

I do wonder if Apple or Amazon (co-defendants in these cases) will be able to find success in that they that had relied, in effect, on the "tolling" of the statute of limitations and should be protected against any lawsuits.

For hip-hop studies, these cases are reminders the extent to which hip-hop, and the role of deejays, was forced to change radically because of how copyright get applied to hip-hop.

For those interested in intellectual property law, it shows how the current IP regime actually harms innovation and rewards copyright trolling rather than creative activity.

Justin Bua

Justin Bua is featured at The Source this month. See the article and the slide show at http://www.thesource.com/articles/20250/Groundbreaking-and-Internationally-Known-Artist...Justin-Bua/.

It is great to see his work getting featured. I like how the article focuses on his work in design and advertising, in addition to his canvas work. Bua's work really brings a hip-hop sensibility to a wide range of visual arts. I hope that some art historians and other visual culture types begin looking at his work and considering how he blends realism and irony in his work. I think he fits within the post-soul aesthetic and he shares some traits with Kehinde Wiley, Kerry Marshall, and Ellen Gallagher.

Regional vs. National Tastes in Hip-hop

I have spent the summer reading a few books on Southern Hip-Hop, including Roni Sarig's Third Coast and Ali Neff's Let the World Listen Right. Last spring, I got a chance to read some books about West Coast style too. One thing that comes out in those books is the intense regionality of hip-hop and how local sounds shaped artists in particular places. None of this will be surprising to hip-hop fans. It is interesting to see how scholars and writers mimic this regional debate as Sarig and Neff spend considerable time defending Southern hip-hop to show that hip-hop has always been deeply connected to the South via rapping and other vernacular practices and how crunk has come to dominate hip-hop in the last decade.

My own journey in hip-hop started out pretty traditionally with an East Coast bias in the 1980s and 1990s (while living in Chicago) and then slowly shifting toward a more academic approach as my research into hip-hop required me to listen more broadly than ever before. While hip-hop itself has "always" been a way for folks to articulate regional/local identities, I realize that this has not been my situation or my interaction with hip-hop. Listening to hip-hop has never been a local or regional affair for me. As a result, I guess I am less interested in reading or arguing about the origins of hip-hop or deciding which region is more authentic or better. Rather, I am curious about how scholars can usefully approach these dividing lines. The first waves of hip-hop scholarship has been intensely local, defending regions, artists, and labels.

I am wondering if Jazz studies and the competing claims of New Orleans, KC, Oklahoma City, Harlem, Chicago, and later LA. in regards to jazz will prove a useful analogy for hip-hop studies. From my vantage point, it seems like Jazz has transcended some of its original regionality as the music became less popular and the audience aged. What happens to hip-hop and hip-hop studies when the historical, cultural, and socio-economic forces that shaped it no longer hold? What will happen to the regional lens we currently use to view hip-hop? By the end of Sarig's book, for example, the artists of some locations - particularly Virginia Beach - move around so much that I am not sure how regional the music remains. The same could be said for the journey began in Atlanta by Outkast, Goodie Mob, and other folks from the ATL. Is regionality an essential feature of hip-hop or something that will go the way of Adidas shoes and Kangol hats?

Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop?

There is a thought-provoking article at allhiphop.com (http://www.allhiphop.com/stories/features/archive/2010/07/22/22306569.aspx) about the rise of "Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop." I like it as I think it speaks to how hip-hop and its audience is evolving. Even if the early days of hip-hop were not how people like to imagine them, they are quite different than today. For one, folks like Jay Z and Eminem have way too much market power and too much of a built-in audience to simply fade away as did earlier generations of hip-hop artists. Plus, they can spend some of their millions to record and distribute albums even if they tank. Same thing with the Roots, now that they have their perch on the Jimmy Fallon show, they are simply too well-known and too commercial to be anything other than adult contemporary hip-hop (and I really like the Roots). Even groups like A Tribe Called Quest and/or Q-tip can count a pretty hard-core nostalgic following (I know I bought Tip's latest cd). It also doesn't hurt that a large number of their audience are now in the late 20s and early 30s (if not older) and likely have more disposable cash (even with the recent recession) than those same people did 20 years ago. All the recent retrospectives on hip-hop at Vibe, VH1, BET, and other places certainly help create/solidify a middle-aged audience.

While article does not mention it, the fact that the second wave of hip-hop stars have turned 40 also matches with how a number of hip-hop icons, from Chuck D and Harry Allen to KRS One and Ice-T have been talking at college campuses for over a decade. I remember seeing Ice-T in the late 1990s and noting how his ground-breaking moment has past. Similarly, hip-hop has completely infiltrated the academy with lots of books and courses about it. Certainly, hip-hop or anything changes once that happens.

Given my own argument that much in hip-hop is ironic, I hope that the growing recognition of hip-hop's adult contemporary audience (of which I am probably a member) produces a shift of sorts about how scholars, journalists, and even the stars themselves talk about the music and the culture. It's a good piece, check it out!

Random Music Suggestions

Now that my Spring Break is here, I am getting a chance to re-acquaint myself with my Ipod and music. I highly recommend the following "new" tunes (or at least they are relatively new to me):

Blitz the Ambassador "Ghetto Plantation"
Blitz the Ambassador "Dying to Live"
K'naan "Waving Flag"
Sollilaquists of Sound "Property and Malt Liquor"
Sollilaquists of Sound "Mark It Place"
Kid Cudi "Up, Up Away"
Immortal Technique "Mood Music"
Sene & Blue "Press Pause"
Aceyalone & RJD2 "All for You"
Viktor Vaughn (aka MF Doom) "Saliva"
Boycott Blues "Got Beef"
Aesop Rock "Daylight"
Atmosphere "Yesterday"
Q-Tip "Won't Trade"
"Moving at the Speed of Day"


Two bonus recommendations are "Hurt Me Soul" by Lupe Fiasco and "Dynamite" by the Roots. I have long loved these tracks and I am surprised that they have not gotten more attention.

And what is up with Mos Def's "Quiet Dog" on that commercial?

Avatar and Authenticity

My wife and I were probably the last people in the United States to watch Avator when we got a chance to catch the film last night. I had read that the movie relied pretty heavily on metaphors of colonialism and that seemed all-too accurate to me. Building on this theme, what struck me was how the main character, Jake Sully, learned how to become one of the indigenous people. My father-in-law compared it Dances With Wolves and again I would heartily agree. It definitely seems odd to me that this film, which seems to offer a major critique of the European and American conquests of the "new world," would be so popular. When academics raise the very critiques developed in the film, we are generally castigated for our "weird" ideas.


The only spin that I would want to add to all this commentary is that Avatar has a pretty interesting representation of authenticity. In the field of hip-hop studies (one thing I write about), artists, critics, listeners, and scholars endlessly debate the authenticity of artists. In the film, Sully was able to shed his human skin and become like one of the "natives." So much so, that he manages to become their leader. I could not help to think of white folks like Eminem, Beastie Boys, Brother Ali or even socially conscious rappers like dead prez or Arrested Development. All these acts, even if they attain significant popularity, must engage the authenticity question. I do wonder how Avatar comments on this situation. It seems like a lot of Americans enjoyed watching Jake Sully gain entry into the indigenous society and become an "authentic" member of the community.

On the other hand, it seems like white audiences in hip-hop tend to prefer more "authentic" (i.e. gangsta) forms of rap. I wonder why the film found commerical success but that same kind of success eludes many middle-class and/or white rappers. Obviously, Eminem is the exception here but perhaps his own career might help explain the popularity of Avatar. Eminem and Jake Sully perhaps make whites feel that they could cross-over this seemingly impossible racial/species barriers and be on the "right" or "moral " side of history. Their ability to cross these boundaries suggest that we too might be exception who can escape the rigid nature of racial divides. Perhaps, it is that fantasy that helps catapault both Avatar and Eminem to their stratospheric commerical success.

Politics and the Commodification of Hip-Hop

In his 1993 essay "Rap, Race, and Politics," Clarence Lusane argues:

On the one hand, rap is the voice of alienated, frustrated and rebellious black youth, who recognize their vulnerabiliy and marginality in post-industrial America. On the other hand, rap is the packaging and marketing of social discontent by some of the most skilled ad agencies and largest record producers in the world (351)

While Lusane made this observation nearly twenty years ago in the last days of Hip-Hop's golden age, it still seems remarkably accurate for today. The growth of the "underground" clearly reveals the latent tension between corporate hip-hop and independent record companies. Ironically, it is frequently the artists signed on the most major label who appear the most authentic and connected to the street, while independent label rappers can seem more intellectual and political but not really grounded in contemporary urban realities.

While there is a lot of desire for hip-hop to be political, I wonder if that hope places a greater burden on hip-hop than other musical forms. (E.g. When was the last time someone criticized country or classical for lacking political consciousness or not representing the interests of its listeners?)

Certainly, African American musical history is filled with musicians and songs that carried strong political messages inside their music. The sorrow songs and 1950s-1960s jazz certainly qualify as overtly political forms of music, but what about other greats, such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Lester Young, or Charlie Parker? Some of these musicians possessed considerable personal criticisms of how racism in American culture, yet that is not the primary way how they are remembered today.

This has left me wondering whether having a healthy dynamic or debate between socially conscious musicians and those who are more commercial is enough. Or should we ask more of our musicians and, in turn, their corporate sponsors? While I tend to listen mostly to the underground and socially conscious rappers and would love for them to get greater distribution and radio-play, I guess I am skeptical that the major record labels would be successful in putting out socially conscious rap. In addition, I somehow think that it is precisely the marginal status of many underground rappers that give their music power. What troubles me about these very tentative conclusions is that it dooms socially conscious rap to a more marginal place. But, perhaps that is just how culture works: those working for social reform and change become part of the status quo once they gain access to dominant institutions (in this case, the major labels).



(You can find the Lusane essay in That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004), edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal and published by Routledge.)

Hip-Hop Olympics

Like many folks, my attention has been focused on the Olympics but especially all the snowboarding events. They have been fun to watch and help break down some of the traditional stodginess of the Olympics.

I could not help but notice, though, that these new sports seem to cater to middle/upper class white Americans and Europeans. (BTW - has anyone else noticed how various tribes are on display at these Olympic Games but relatively few native peoples appear to be participating in the actual events?) This got me thinking that hip-hop might be as old as snowboard and mogul skiing. Why not include some hip-hop related events? Certainly, b-boying is athletic and could be incorporated. A turntablist competition would probably draw some real interest as well. With all that new construction in Vancouver, there would be a lot of opportunities for graffitti as well.

Tupac, Biggie and the Academic Library

I am beginning to prepare for my next session of my "Hip-Hop Nation" class. I was hoping to talk about Tupac and Biggie among other things. Because their image is a key element of their connection the hip-hop nation, I tried to find a video or documentary about either in my university's library, especially something discussed their respective legacies and how their deaths affected hip-hop.

So, I searched the electronic library and found that the library did not have any sources no books or videos, related to the pair. I had to admit that this stunned me, even if it is not completely surprising. Tupac and Biggie are among the most significant figures from hip-hop and African American culture over the past fifteen to twenty years. Their absence from the library reveals the potential disconnect between academic knowledge and how cultural operates, circulates, and signifies. Over the past decace, I have participated in more conversations than I can count about the relative merits and value of Tupac and Biggie. However, my library does not provide evidence of that spirited debate. Certainly, many libraries do contain books, films, and articles about the pair. Nonetheless it did make me wonder about how libraries represent contemporary cultural debates and how libraries fail to record them.

"Never Drank the Kool-Aid"?

In reading Toure's numerous interviews and bio pieces, I am struck by the tension between his claim to being a skeptic of hip-hop's public face ("I never bought into the philosophy of the rappers, singers, and celebrities I wrote about") and his many articles that appear to sell his subjects and help them move records.

For me, "Never Drank the Kool Aid" presents the challenge of sources and evidence in the burgeoning field of hip-hop studies. Toure certainly has possessed an access to hip-hop artists that I (and my students) could only dream about. He literally has experienced the hip-hop lifestyle in a way that most academics who write about hip-hop never will. And I love his writing, especially his fiction (Check out his website: http://www.toure.com/). He is one of the best hip-hop journalists (but don't forget Nelson George, Joan Morgan, and dream hampton) All that being said, journalism and interviews still seem to rely heavily on the public image that the artists, producers, etc. are trying to sell. The hip-hop artists and producers are not objective sources as they want consumers to purchase their records and to view them as the most innovative or original artists in the genre.

It should also probably be noted that the very publications where these articles appeared (Rolling Stone, Playboy, The Village Voice, and The New York Times) are in the business of marketing themselves (and their own images) as well.

So, what role does someone like Toure have in the budding world of hip-hop studies? Is he a primary source? If so, what kind of source is he? Does he provide insight into audience response or the marketing approaches for hip-hop? On the other hand, is he a valuable resource for looking at the creative process behind hip-hop?

At a slightly different level, what do we make of the fact that Toure's book only occasionally references the "Golden Age of Hip-Hop"? Toure clearly knows this history, but is there something about the form that causes minimizes the history and context of hip-hop? Does the emphsis on contemporary hip-hop stars elide our understanding of the hip-hop nation? Also, hip-hop pretty much gets reduced to music here. Why has hip-hop journalism focused so much on rap, rap lyrics, and politics? What has happened to deejaying, b-boying, and graffiti?

I really like Never Drank the Kool-Aid, but I get the sinking feeling it is getting me to drink the very Kool-Aid Toure has supposedly refused.

Origin Myths in Hip-Hop?

Last week during class, one of my students asked a question that has been sticking with me (and I am paraphrasing): "Was hip-hop a revolutionary art form or something that evolved from earlier movements?" I loved the question and it has been bouncing around my brain for the past week. How much does hip-hop owe to James Brown, George Clinton, Sly & and the Family Stone etc.? Are these guys the inspirations for or co-inventors of hip-hop? This question certainly provides a nice transition to evaluating how the reigning origin myths of hip-hop explain the messy reality of the movement's beginning.

This week's readings (from That's the Joint! and Can't Stop, Won't Stop) underlined this question about the powerful need for origin myths in hip-hop, whether they revolve around 1520 Sedgewick Ave, TAKI 183, or Grandmaster Theodore's accidental "invention" of scratching. What purpose do these stories hold? Why do these stories continue to get told and circulated? (FYI - a recent episode of PBS's "The History Detectives" examined the 1520 Sedgewick story). Hip-hop needs an origin myth perhaps to validate or legitimate its status, suggesting that despite a 30 year plus history and billions of units sold, it still lacks institutional recognition. The language of "revolution," "invention," and "origin" help create cultural capital and thus make it "worthy" of social recognition. Perhaps, this teaches us about the "life-course" of cultural movements.

The specific origin myth, however, is revealing. Regardless of the involvement of Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans in the earliest days of deejaying, graffiti, and b-boying, hip-hop gets coded as "Black." It seems like both the hip-hop nation and the general American public (and perhaps the global audience of hip-hop) have a deep desire to code or frame hip-hop as authentically "Black" as part of the origin myth. Another aspect of this myth is that is intimately rooted to urban street life even if some of its most successful acts (i.e. Public Enemy, Run DMC, etc) have pretty solid middle-class roots. It seems like the hip-hop nation is deeply invested in positing itself as oppositional (against dominant culture?) and this stance relies on the figure or metaphor of urban Black males. There is some irony in labeling hip-hop as "street" as hip-hop has become deeply commodified, making billions for record companies and millions for some artists. Certainly, hip-hop is bigger and more complex than this origin myth, but the myth has an enduring power. It probably is even growing as the hip-hop nation becomes even more heterogeneous!

I don't mean to suggest that hip-hop has not been profoundly influenced by African American cultural sensibilities and the historical debates within African American culture. Of course, it has. Rather, the question is how do American cultural assumptions about race shape our understanding of hip-hop and its history. Not to be too melodramatic but the stakes of framing the "origin" of hip-hop may very well be a key to shaping future understandings of race in American culture. Do we want to continue to view American history through a simplistic black-white binary or do we want to understand the complex and paradoxical ways that race, ethnicity, class, gender, and national origin intermingle and operate in American culture and society?

So, what is the origin of hip-hop? Is it the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, was it Clyde Stubblefield and the "Funky Drummer," was it when Kool Herc first became a DJ, or when taggers became writers? I don't know, but I do know that we need an origin myth for hip-hop (and just about everything else too) to help ground our understanding. But sometimes that origin myth hides as much as it reveals. It also can tell us as much about "our" fears and hopes as it does about the actual thing itself.

(FYI - I just realized that K'Naan's "Does it Really Matter" was playing on I-tunes when I finished my blog entry!)

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.

"Jay Z's Obsession with Warhol and Basquiat"

In a recent article at slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2241208/pagenum/all/#p2), Jonah Weiner examines why Jay Z seems obsessed with Warhol, Basquiat and Damien Hirst. Weiner concludes:

In the early '00s, thanks respectively to a broadening global market for rap and the hedge-fund-era rise of the superrich collector, both the hip-hop and art worlds were more flush with cash than ever before, and Jay-Z, Murakami, and Hirst were among the biggest beneficiaries, poster boys—and narrators—of the boom times. "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man," Jay-Z famously rapped. It could make a nice title for the next Hirst exhibit.

I found this argument fairly familiar, given I discuss Basquiat and the relationship between hip-hop culture and materialism in my book, Parodies of Ownership. I think that Weiner is generally right that hip-hop (not just Jay Z) is deeply concerned with ownership and the indices of ownership. However, I would disagree that the roots of this can be found in the early 2000s. As my book outlines, this has been a central issue since the founding moments of hip-hop. Perhaps, of more significance, I argue that it is they very aesthetic structure of hip-hop culture - not just the lyrics - where we can see this anxiety over ownership.

It also would have been nice if he would have looked at the history of appropriation in both hip-hop and contemporary art and how they seem to both rely on materialism and criticize it at the same time. I also think the article could have referenced the long-standing tradition within African American culture of arguing that only through economic success will social and political equality (i.e. power) follow.

I guess his article might be read to imply that knowledge, but the general tenor seems to be that Jay Z is unusually materialistic while lacking any self-consciousness about it. Again, I think the history of hip-hop offers too many counter examples (think all of the conscious and message rappers from Grandmaster Flash and Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy to Mos Def, Immortal Technique, Dead Pres, and Solliliquies of Sound) to seriously suggest that Jay Z is somehow unaware of this ongoing critique of hip-hop's materialism or this longstanding debate within African American culture.

OK - I just had to get that off my chest!