Читать книгу Making Beats - Joseph G. Schloss - Страница 7

New Foreword

Jeff Chang

When, at the turn of the millennium, Joe Schloss completed the dissertation that would become this groundbreaking book, the biggest question facing the field of hip-hop studies was, “So what?”

Rap music was at the very peak of its commercial impact, and hip-hop’s global cultural influence was inescapable. Those facts only gave that question its weight. The academy, having grudgingly granted that hip-hop was not a fad, resisted the idea that the kinds of knowledges it preserved and produced were worthy of study. What, they asked, could hip-hop teach us in the academy?

But perhaps the strongest skeptics of hip-hop studies came from within the movement. What, they asked, can the academy teach me about hip-hop that someone in hip-hop couldn’t teach me better? What could intellectuals offer my movement but patronization and mummification?

These skeptics were people like Schloss himself—committed hip-hop heads concerned they might be pimping their own culture, engaged scholars questioning the relevance of their careers to the communities from which they had come. For Schloss, choosing to write critically about hip-hop meant confronting “So what?” every day he woke up. And if he and his peers—and I count myself alongside him as part of what might be called the second generation of hip-hop scholars—could not find satisfactory answers, the field of hip-hop studies certainly would fade out like a fad.

By now, there was a foundational canon of works by people like Nelson George, David Toop, Steven Hager, Sally Banes, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Jim Prigoff, Bill Adler, Craig Castleman, and Jack Stewart. Members of the second generation had devoured the works of the pioneers of hip-hop studies like Tricia Rose, Mark Anthony Neal, Harry Allen, Robin D. G. Kelley, James Spady, and Brian Cross. We checked for elders who got it—people like Houston Baker, Juan Flores, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. And we were handing each other new books by Billy Wimsatt, Michael Eric Dyson, Cheryl Keyes, Raquel Z. Rivera, and S. Craig Watkins.

There were also lots of “scholarly” pieces about hip-hop that were garbage. (In truth, the number might be smaller than I recall—I can’t and won’t spend much time in the dustbin of that particular history.) What I do remember is having a classically hip-hop chip-on-the-shoulder ambivalence about imminent institutionalization. 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.