A public library archive

Using materials in the Schomburg's collection is a bit different from the Cornell archives. One needs a library card with the New York Public Library system, which I now am happily the proud owner of. One also needs, once again, to really know what they're looking for. One needs patience, and one needs to make a commitment to make return visits, and one needs to be prepared to fill out a lot of forms.

            I spent five hours at the library. Most of it was efficient and well-spent. When I arrived, I realized that I wasn't sure where the archives was stored, and it also was clear that the receptionist at the information desk was unsure, too. I also was not sure what kinds of materials would be allowed in the reading room so I asked at the coat check. The receptionist at that counter was not even aware that the Schomburg housed a hip-hop archives, but she told me I could take all of my things to the Rare Manuscripts Collection reading room. I had already taken off my coat so I left it with the coat check, and decided to take a guess that the Rare Manuscripts Collection space was the proper site for the collection.

            I guessed right. When I arrived, there was an archivist at the front desk. I had done a little bit of searching of the New York Public Library system a month earlier and had decided that it would be good to focus my time on a collection donated by Steven Hager, a journalist who had helped develop the film Beat Street and had written what seems like an awesome history of hip-hop. When I requested that particular collection, the archivist knew what I was talking about and handed me a series of forms. Upon learning that I did not have a library card, she sent me to the ground level to apply for one. That was a quick process and I was very happy to discover that the card would be good for three years. It would make several return trips to the Schomburg and the collection possible.

            I went back upstairs, filled out the paperwork, and got a drill down on the reading room policies. As at Cornell, notebooks and pens were not allowed. I could take photographs, but I had to fill out an additional form detailing what I wanted to photograph. I also could take notes on my laptop, but I could not let folders or documents within the folders touch my laptop. I also needed to keep the folders positioned in a way that they would be visible to the front desk.

            Hager's collection consisted of one box with two folders. Both were absolutely joyful gold mines of new information. The first thing that I discovered was a stack of index cards on which was handwritten what appeared to be more or less a book synopsis. The stack of 28 cards, three by five inches, read like a storyboard, which I immediately realized could be a valuable teaching tool for Digital Storytelling.

            I went through the folders quickly, taking a lot of notes and noting a lot of "notes to self." The bulk of the material was the proposal for the book. Its title changed several times, but it ultimately was published as Hip-Hop, with a subtitle that integrated the arts of break-dancing, graffiti, and rapping. It included a couple rough cuts for the proposal, the actual proposal, a sample chapter, and several articles written between 1981 and 1983 on the rise of hip-hop. I marveled at the ways that these stories, written in a particular time period, helped bring figures like Afrika Bambaataa to life. I also felt as if I gained a deeper on-the-ground understanding of what was occurring in the Bronx in terms of gang warfare, drugs, and white flight than I had had previously. It also seemed that the rhetorical questions that Hager presented in his pitch about the meaning and impact of hip-hop remain alive and well today.

            For instance, the formal book proposal stated: “How did hip hop originate? Who are its principle innovators? What has its impact been on American culture? These are some of the questions that will be answered by ‘Bronx Beat’. It is the story of teenagers in the ghetto who have struggled to create something meaningful, artistic and exciting with their lives.”

            I typed this quote into my computer and underneath it typed a "note to self": I think these three questions continue to inform research project on hip-hop, including mine. "Teenagers in the ghetto" … translates now to "young people everywhere who are struggling to create something meaningful, artistic, and exciting with their lives."

            Hager was born in 1951. He began worked as a reporter for The New York Daily News in about 1978, and was laid off around mid-1981. At that point, he embarked on a freelance career and became more deeply involved in chronicling hip-hop's early roots. I began working in journalism in 1985, about a year or so after Hager's book was released. Reading through his stories, I recognized many conventions of journalistic writing that seemed particular to the "new journalism" forms of narrative of that time. I wondered why I hadn't known about Hager earlier or why his stories hadn't been used in the classes and writing workshops I attended through the 1980s and 1990s. As the afternoon wore on, I also started to detect in Hager's writings a narrative voice that tends to turn me off. It's hard to define that voice: male, a bit arrogant and authoritative, tough, boisterous.

            But I do look forward to digging out and finding the book.