Archiving Hip-hop

A piece of a Buddy Esquire event flyer that
illuminates the presence of locality in hip-
hop. (From Cornell University's Hip-Hop
Special Collection.)  

A portion of the Keep-Mills Research Grant that I received last year for my ongoing research on hip-hop was aimed at funding visits to a couple of the archival collections of hip-hop artifacts that some libraries are beginning to amass. I made the first of these visits this afternoon, traveling to Cornell University to visit its Hip-Hop Special Collection, which is housed in the university library's rare manuscripts collection.

            My visit was brief, and it hopefully will become the first of many. But before I describe the collection and my experience with it, I should offer a few qualifiers.

            The first is that even though my scholarly work does delve into history, library archives are not familiar places for me. The second qualifier is that I was unsure as to what I might find at Cornell that might be useful to me.

            I had met the collection's co-curators at NYU's Hip-Hop Education Center Think Tank in November 2012. We chatted briefly, and they both invited me to use the aspects of the archive that they had digitized via Internet and to follow up with them via e-mail if and when I decided to make a personal visit. I was impressed with the open-ness of the archive to researchers outside Cornell and did include a number of photographs of the 1970s Bronx and early hip-hop party flyers from the archive as visual materials in my course Hip-Hop America. Several months later, I met one of the curators at the Words Beats & Life teach-in in Washington DC, and re-introduced myself. By this point, I had figured out that I could combine a day trip to Ithaca, NY, with travel to the Imagining America conference in nearby Syracuse and mentioned that I would like to visit the archive and do some research in early October. She asked me what I was researching, and when I mentioned that I was hoping to develop a book based on the interviews I had done with b-girls in Seattle, she responded that she didn't know if the archive would be of any help to me because almost all of its materials had come from New York City. She mentioned the names of various individuals who had donated materials to the archive, and I said that I thought the material would be helpful anyway because it would deepen my understanding of hip-hop's roots. She invited me to follow-up with an e-mail, which I did after spending some time browsing their collections page to get a sense of what the archive held.

            Which bring me back to my first qualifier. The collections page indicated that the archive held hundreds of photographs, party flyers, video footage, record albums, tape cassettes, and images of graffiti. This seemed impressive, and a little overwhelming. My mind was going back to a presentation about archives that Dr. Kathy Ferguson, one of my doctoral committee members, had given at the Western Political Science Association in 2011 about her experiences of using archives in researching her wonderful biography of Emma Goldman. The archive, Ferguson said, was not a library. It was not an organized, catalogued experience. It was, in many cases, a mass of boxes, handwritten notes, and seemingly haphazard collections of personal materials and historic documents organized not with the research scholar in mind. Ferguson's description had rung through somewhat when I had first visited the Cornell hip-hop archive collection online. While I was careful to choose materials from the digitized resources for my course that I knew to be significant, I wondered what looking at scads of similar types of materials might accomplish. How much more could I learn from a party flyer that was circulated in the Bronx in the early 1980s, for instance?  These questions gained more currency as I wondered whether digging in archives was more useful for those with specific research questions or for those seeking a more general base of understanding.

            Cornell's Rare Manuscripts Collection asks that requests for specific boxes of items be made online at least a day in advance of a visit. Deciding that I would treat the visit as a sort of exploratory field trip, I filed requests for a half-dozen or so boxes, figuring that even if I only got through a couple of the items, I would be able to get a feel for what the archive held and how I might better understand it on return visits.

              At the collection's reading room itself, researchers are given access to one box of materials at a time. The first box that I opened was a box of flyers from the personal collection of Buddy Esquire, an artist who became known as "the flyer king" for the more than 300 flyers he produced between 1979 and 1984. At the top of the box lay an extra-large t-shirt, promoting one of the hip-hop events that Buddy Esquire created flyers for. I unfolded the shirt, and my eyes lit up. Immediately, I could see that this artifact itself illustrated the roles of locality, identity, and language in hip-hop. The shirt, like all of the flyers in the box, featured a black-and-white design. What stood out for me was Buddy Esquire's tag near the bottom of the design, illustrating his signature and thus his identity in hip-hop; and the fact that he included bus and subway directions to the event's venue, highlighting the sense of locality. The shirt would only make sense to someone familiar with the boroughs of New York City, and particularly the Bronx. It could not -- like so much of hip-hop's commodity products today -- hold market appeal (beyond perhaps historic or nostalgic interest) beyond that area. The flyers repeated this pattern as I went through them, photographing them with my iPhone. They called out the names of local DJs, high schools, and particular dates (like back-to-school, New Year's Day, and Christmas). I saw a link between these flyers and the materials that members of 206 Zulu had put together in a small hip-hop museum at Washington Hall in Seattle. Quickly, I could see how sitting with the flyers, sorting through them, and reflecting on the places, spaces, people, and specific events that they brought up filled an understanding of hip-hop that wasn't only global.

            The second box that I opened was a collection of magazines, brochures, postcards, and other materials donated by Jorge Fabon, who also is known as Popmaster Fabel. I had heard Fabon speak at the Words Beats & Life teach-in, and had attended a screening of his film-in-progress on his experiences as a gang member turned b-boy in Spanish Harlem. As a result, I was particularly interested in his collection.

            The first piece that I found in his box was, for me, a gem. It was not from Spanish Harlem but Seattle.

           "This is priceless!" I wrote in my notes. It was a Downtown Seattle Association brochure about the detrimental effects of graffiti. It contained a glossy picture of Seattle's downtown skyline and waterfront and a series of highly biased and distorted definitions of hip-hop, graffiti, crews, and tags. Not only did this brochure offer an insight into the relationship between the elite business sector and the grassroots arts movements in Seattle. It also offered a powerful teaching tool for students seeking an understanding of how corporate and commercial interests have co-opted and corrupted hip-hop.

            Much of Fabon's other materials dealt with the performance group GhettOriginal, which created a Broadway show Jam on the Groove that toured internationally. The box also held magazines that included features or interviews with him on hip-hop dance that were published in South Africa and on the West Coast in the 1990s. Holding these materials in my hands and thumbing through the pages in the quiet space of the reading room helped me see something that statements repeatedly made about hip-hop's power as an international movement could not: the real impact that recognition of talent had had on the men and women who as teenagers had pioneered the movement. The articles and accompanying photographs showed how widely known and revered these figures had become, and offered a sense of how much their messages of the often harsh conditions in which they lived resonated throughout the world.

            Dr. Ferguson had emphasized the importance of creating your own system of library cataloguing in using archives. What I found with this first trip to the Cornell hip-hop collection was that the cataloguing found its own order, based on what I knew previously about the history of hip-hop and what I had been told by others but had not fully understood for myself. My challenge now rests in making the knowledge that emerges from this experience translatable to others. I look forward to the next step.