Good News

My book, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, has won the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s 2005 Book Award. They announced it at the annual meeting in Rome last week, which somehow makes it seem even cooler. They announced it in Rome, yo! Beyond personal ego issues, which are not insignificant, this really makes me happy for at least two other reasons:

1. In my work, I am arguing that we need to at least understand – and hopefully respect - what hip-hoppers do on their own terms. Not only because what they’re doing has interesting symbolic or political or social implications (although that is important), but because the way they think about the world is itself a legitimate and consistent and fascinating intellectual system. So I definitely see this award as a sign that popular music scholars from all over the world respect my consultants – and hip-hop producers in general – as creative human beings. Knowing these dudes (and dudettes!), I doubt whether they would openly admit that they care about getting that kind of acclaim, but it’s good to know it’s out there for them if they want it. Thanks and congratulations to everyone who has taught me about sample-based hip-hop production.

2. This is a thumbs-up for ethnographic (participant/observation) studies of popular music in general and hip-hop in particular. There are a lot of us who have been saying, "Hey wait a minute – it’s really important to know what hip-hop is before we start talking about what hip-hop means." And the only way to do that is to be in the community and talk to people about exactly what they’re doing and why. And to do it ourselves, too. Because when you do that, you learn what’s important to people - and it’s almost never what you thought it was. And it’s almost always much more interesting than whatever you thought it was.

For example, I interviewed Ken Swift on Tuesday, and he told me that one of the main reasons he got into b-boying was because it was the only activity he had ever encountered where, if you made up a move, you could call it whatever you wanted and from then on everybody had to call it by that name. For a 13-year-old kid, that’s an incredible kind of power. It’s like, from that day forward, everybody that does that move is honoring your creativity. To this day, b-boys all over the world still call moves by names that New York teenagers made up in the seventies. My point is this: the social significance of being able to name a move is something that would never ever have occurred to me – or probably anyone – just by watching videos of people b-boying. You have to get out there and talk to folks.

There is a dedicated core of people, both inside the academy and out, who have been doing this kind of hip-hop scholarship for awhile now. And we’ve had to kind of mutually keep each other’s spirits up, because our style is so different from the prevailing way of doing things. I know for me personally, there have definitely been times that I’ve doubted whether our approach would ever be accepted. In fact, to be honest, I actually had a long talk with Jeff Chang about this the day before I found out about this award. So things like this award and seeing Jeff’s book being so well received give me hope because I honestly believe that this is a really valuable and important way to study these things. I believe individual human beings’ articulated perspectives and values and aspirations and attitudes are interesting and intelligent and valuable. And, most importantly, maybe this will encourage more people to study things this way and write books about it, so I can read them and learn about other stuff that people in different social, cultural and economic environments are creating. That would be cool.