So first I want to apologize for my long absence…It’s a combination of having been caught up in a variety of small things and also – I must admit – some confusion in my own mind about what I was really trying to do with this blog. Specifically, it has become clear that a lot of what I had originally intended to do here (show the depth and sophistication of the b-boy/b-girl experience) is already being done by sites like Breakernyc and More Than A Stance.
As is often the case, it has taken me an absurdly long time to come to an obvious conclusion, which is that this blog would be more useful as a place for us all to discuss our experiences with, questions about, and approaches to doing research in hip-hop. As you can see by the previous posts, we have already kind of been doing that, but I guess I just want to make it official, and to publicly commit to doing my part.
Doing research on hip-hop raises a lot of compelling questions in a lot of interesting areas, from methodology to theory to the nature of the actual information. What I hope to do here is to bring together researchers from the academic world with researchers from the hip-hop world (as well as the growing number of folks who are really both), so that we may compare our experiences and interests.
Some of the issues I’ve been thinking about include:
- Writing style: how do you write in a way that is accessible both to people in the hip-hop community and also the academic world? And is that even something you should be concerned about?
- Role of scholars in the hip-hop community – what are we actually contributing and how important is it to ask that question?
- Is there such a thing as “hip-hop studies” and how does it fit in to pre-existing academic structures?
- Are there different sub-categories or schools of “hip-hop studies” and how do they relate to each other?
- What is the relationship of hip-hop studies to other related fields of study, especially African American studies?
Please hit me up in the comments section with questions, experiences, ideas for topics, manifestos or anything else you want to share. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to send food through the internet, but if you can figure out a way to do it, I'll accept food, too.
