Love hip hop hollywood max11/11/2023 ![]() ![]() But what about the physical stuff? Much of Cornell’s archive, and a similar one at Harvard University, are available to the public, but often require appointments to view. Nearly everyone I spoke with for this piece spoke about the importance of keeping their own stash of CDs, tapes, party fliers, and MP3s in the face of disappearing digital archives. It is, she notes, a collaboration between, writers, b-boys, graffiti artists, scholars, and community members that is “not the definitive story of hip hop, but a story about hip hop.” The whole movement is too much for any collection, but the collection, Reece says, illustrates its cultural, political, and historical importance.Īmid all of this discussion about how to archive hip hop’s history loom larger questions about where those collections should exist. As we’re ending our call, Reece points me to the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, a 129-song collection and 300-page book that came out in 2021. ![]() ![]() Some of these efforts have already borne out. “We do cataloging, we do research, we do conservation, and once that’s all processed we digitize it to make it accessible,” she says. But, she stresses, the museum is looking to digitize as much of its archive as it can. There’s due diligence, licensing, and all manner of other procedures that must be done. Reece also notes that the legalities for collecting items like mixtapes and TikToks are tough, especially for an institution like the Smithsonian. These are definitely serious questions that all are wrestling with.” “How do you decide what to collect and how to collect it and how much of it to collect? The sheer volume is daunting. Everything now is on phones, in email, on social media. As culture, specifically music culture, has moved online, the things that used to be curatorial mainstays-handwritten song lyrics, letters, business records-are no longer physical objects. The associate director for the humanities at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, she’s one of the people charged with maintaining the organization’s hip hop archive. To that end, not everything can be saved. Before that, if you wanted to hear it, you had to find an illicit stream or have hung onto your record collection. The group’s catalog finally got cleared for a streaming release in March of this year. Even major releases, like De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, can get caught in the copyright weeds. Many early mixtapes and DJ mixes used unauthorized samples they may still float around on YouTube or SoundCloud, but they’ll never make it to Spotify. There are unofficial song leaks that eventually disappear. Its heroes may dominate the Billboard Hot 100, but it’s always been an outsider’s game, rendering many of its pillars nearly obsolete. Hip hop, Aku reminds me, is an art form based on improvisation. It’s pushed forward technology, culture, commerce-but also always been focused on the future, on what’s next. It’s terrible at documentation,” says writer and podcaster (and collector) Timmhotep Aku. “This is me paraphrasing someone whose name is escaping me right now, but hip hop is great at innovation. Eric disagrees with him on this point, but the fact remains that the generation of music fans who grew up online seem much more comfortable with things being of-the-moment, rather than lasting forever. But as Eric’s brother and fellow Blog Era creator, Jeff, notes, the current generation has gone through the “Snapchatification” of culture. Hip hop is, of course, its own oral history. Not everyone archives the way vinyl collectors or DJs do, but, Jenkins adds, those who do are being much more intentional about it. Now in his mid-thirties, he remembers his dad teaching him how to make mixtapes, but also sees the ease with which young people can now pull nearly anything up on Spotify or YouTube-repositories that seem infinite and everlasting, but also could disappear instantly if a business fails. But he’s telling the story now as a way of explaining the importance of preserving hip hop’s history.Įffort, the work put into archiving, is changing, Jenkins says, often in ways that are generational. As an adult, Jenkins would become a writer and TV host and tell Ludacris the story on the Mogul Mixtapes podcast. He got it he’s still got it, one of dozens of rap albums in his collection. When he got there, he had to convince the clerk to sell him the explicit version of the CD. It was 2000 and he was 13 years old, but he wanted Ludacris’ debut album, Back for the First Time. Brandon “Jinx” Jenkins rode his bike to Kmart after school. ![]()
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