Hip-hop’s relation to The Archive has always been fraught and asymmetrical. While hip-hop’s musical practices have always been inherently archive-engaging (sampling, turntablism, lyrical intertextuality), the ubiquity of unsanctioned archive-raiding (uncleared samples, unlicensed mixtapes, etc.) has helped render the culture illegible (or illegitimate) to officially sanctioned Archive-arbiters. By choice or by necessity, hip-hop culture (at least in its less corporately sanctioned forms) has tended to ephemerality. The unrecorded street or club performance, the home-dubbed cassette, the privately pressed vinyl sold person-to-person or via independent retailers, the digital music distributed via unstable online platforms, the illegal graffiti artwork in urban space prone to defacement or erasure; all of these forms are resistant to neat archival assimilation.
Nonetheless, since the turn of the millennium, there has been an explosion of archival practice within and regarding hip-hop culture. Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production both documents a multiplicity of these efforts (primarily from the perspective of the archivists themselves) and explores the theoretical and ethical contexts and implications of such work. The key connective tissue established between hip-hop culture and the academic archive is the concept of Knowledge, with ‘knowledge production’ being the oft-stated intended outcome of research practice and ‘knowledge of self/culture’ being KRS-One’s fifth ‘pillar’ of hip-hop. This framing lends itself to a generative rather than extractive view of archive-making, which is borne out in the community-engaged productive pedagogies outlined by Kulsoom Anwer Shaikh and Khalid El-Hakim in their respective chapters.
The most striking chapters are those in which the priorities and methodologies of hip-hop culture are permitted (or demand permission) to disrupt and mutate the methodologies of archive production. Giuseppe ‘u.net’ Pipitone’s ‘Oral History and the Accidental Archive’ relates how his series of on-location interviews with early hip-hop participants frequently converged on certain events and performances (for example, the battle between KRS-One and Grandmaster Melle Mel at the Latin Quarter in 1987) that had hitherto been overlooked by standard document-driven histories of hip-hop. Pipitone also charts the emergence of his own ‘accidental archive’, with the value of his interview tapes and transcripts growing over time and the refinement of his artistic practice. Here we have in microcosm the emergence of hip-hop as an archival form itself, with ephemeral or undervalued knowledge-objects acquiring (historical, cultural, financial) value both within and beyond their originating culture.
James Gabrillo’s ‘The Ballad of “Grandmaster PH”: Contesting Narratives and Lost Archives in Philippine Hip-Hop’ is both a fascinating story in its own right (Winston ‘Grandmaster PH’ Bustamente, an octogenarian music teacher from a small provincial city who claims to have recorded now-lost hip-hop cassettes as early as 1978) and a fascinating example of how phenomena present in hip-hop’s African-American core manifest in its most geographically far-flung articulations. The claim to both originality and originator-status is highly prized in US hip-hop culture, perhaps most fiercely manifested in the ‘Bridge Wars’ of the mid-to-late 1980s, in which claims and counterclaims between the Bronx and Queens as to which borough was the true ‘birthplace of hip-hop’ led to a flurry of musical production and launched the career of KRS-One himself. Grandmaster PH, however, remains a far less insistent and more mysterious figure, himself becoming something of a figure of ‘secret knowledge’ within Philippine hip-hop culture. Gabrillo describes Bustamente’s indifference and refusal to participate in mainstream culture and commercial recording. Bustamante’s near-invisibility to The Archive, then, cannot be read simply as tragedy or loss, and traces of his composition ‘Ano Ba ‘To?’ are found within oral tradition as far away as Los Angeles. Such wilful illegibility, despite its distance from hip-hop’s originating African American context, richly recalls the ‘fugitivity’ described by Fred Moten in In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
The book’s geographical remit is global, with Europe particularly well represented (presumably for material and institutional reasons), and several North American localities being featured (although nothing on the region-specific cultures of the South) along with Cuba and the Philippines. Africa is a notable absence, both for its long-established presence in hip-hop’s (actual and mythological) prehistory and the vast panoply of local articulations and (re-)appropriations of hip-hop culture across the continent. The editors should not be blamed for this omission, as it is reflective of the global unevenness of the emergence of hip-hop’s ‘archival turn’ and the relative lack of scholarship in this area. However, it serves as a stark reminder that even in the restorative processes facilitated by the emergent hip-hop archive, asymmetries remain.
The final section consists of three substantial interviews with curators who have worked with presenting and incorporating hip-hop archives at institutions such as Cornell University and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We are given invaluable first-hand insight into the challenges and practicalities of such endeavours, but the interviewees’ personal narratives of embeddedness within hip-hop culture and approach to the archival vocation are just as interesting.
A particularly captivating moment in the interview section is when Ben Ortiz observes that relatively few students at Cornell have any interest in hip-hop, and even fewer have significant knowledge of its 20th century history. This of course may be more strongly reflective of the racial and class make-up of an Ivy League student body than a strictly generational divide, but it does hint at an uncomfortable concern. While hip-hop is still largely dominant in youth culture (particularly musically), the ‘4/5 elements’ model has somewhat broken down, with turntablism, breakdancing, and graffiti now almost entirely absent at both the underground and mainstream levels (if such a distinction even holds).
However, The Archive and the archival inherently operate on a time-lag, and whether or not such a conception of hip-hop as a unified culture persists in the coming decades (or at least, the same unified culture), Hip-Hop Archives serves as a vital document of early 21st century attempts to contend with the archive of late 20th century hip-hop culture. Beyond this, it sets out a multitude of productive provocations to researchers who would continue such practices, and its varied methodological insights in particular merit serious consideration.
