Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LI-RAP (The Long Island Rap Renaissance: hip-hop’s suburban turn and America’s changing Black middle class, 1986-1993)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-10-04 do 2023-10-03
The literature that tracks hip-hop’s first 20 years in New York has taught us to think of events through one social prism: the city’s inner-boroughs in the 1970s and 1980s. We think of the urban crisis and of spectacular post-industrial poverty. Yet, there is another history of hip-hop, race and place rarely featured in accounts, even though it produced rap music’s most impactful developments from the mid-1980s to early-1990s. In those years, a string of tiny suburban Black communities on Long Island – Roosevelt, Hempstead, Wyandanch, North Amityville, etc – ushered in a succession of hip-hop’s most deeply felt paradigm shifts. Performers like Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul and EPMD – the Mt. Rushmore of hip-hop’s ‘golden age’ – were children of this highly segregated suburban landscape and to varying degrees of the new Black middle class.
Researched by Dr. James McNally while affiliated to University College Cork’s ERC CIPHER (GA: 819143) hip hop initiative, The Long Island Rap Renaissance: hip-hop’s suburban turn and America’s changing Black middle class, 1986-1993 (LI-RAP) set out to provide the first dedicated history of Long Island hip-hop and its unique social/cultural contexts. It asks what contributions these acts made, what were the textures of life in the communities they came from, how those communities shaped the Long Island hip-hop movement, and what the music itself can tell us about their environments and experiences.
Researched by Dr. James McNally while affiliated to University College Cork’s ERC CIPHER (GA: 819143) hip hop initiative, The Long Island Rap Renaissance: hip-hop’s suburban turn and America’s changing Black middle class, 1986-1993 (LI-RAP) set out to provide the first dedicated history of Long Island hip-hop and its unique social/cultural contexts. It asks what contributions these acts made, what were the textures of life in the communities they came from, how those communities shaped the Long Island hip-hop movement, and what the music itself can tell us about their environments and experiences.
Using archival research, interviews, analysis of songs and visual imagery, the project's first task was to synthesize its interdisciplinary knowledge base from relevant disciplines. The research is grounded in four key areas: hip-hop historiography, the literature on post-War U.S. suburbanization, philosophical approaches to Black creativity, and post-Civil Rights Black experiences in the United States. It is also grounded in US political history in the post-Vietnam era.
The most intensive activity has been LI-RAP’s program of archival research. For the project’s cultural coverage and biographical dimensions, McNally built on research from an extensive personal archive of specialist music publications, music, and audio-visual material, with research from: Cornell University’s Hip-Hop Collection, Harvard’s Hip-Hop Archive, NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Universal Hip-Hop Museum. The research uncovered rare interviews, paper ephemera, photography, correspondence, material culture, and a wealth of contemporaneous music criticism. Using digital ethnography, it sourced unreleased recordings that were pivotal to understanding the early creative lives of hip-hop’s future pacesetters.
Looking to the social histories of Black suburbanization, the research engaged with archives for publications including the New York Times, Newsday, the Freeport Leader, and the New Amsterdam News. It drew on official reports and surveys, and materials at Freeport Public Library, Stony Brook University and Adelphi University for insights into everyday lives of Black Long Islanders. Valuable insights into obstacles faced by families on this new frontier of Black life came from the papers of civil rights activist Lincoln Lynch at the Schomburg Center in Harlem. The project draws rich ethnographic insights from oral history interviews, and from ethnographic walks conducted to the childhood homes of key protagonists.
Put simply, if hip-hop’s foundations were forged on the frontlines of the urban crisis, the Long Islanders that propelled hip-hop in its second generation typically grew up in places that contemporaneously resembled Black versions of Main Street, USA: ones where the economic and social diversity typical of white America nationally was lived out by Black families in small communities that were meaningfully connected; where poverty was a reality for a significant minority, but balanced at the community level by a full range of social, professional and economic life, with some mid-to-upper income bands outperforming white Americans nationally; and where Black cultural and political strategies were able to shape individual potential.
LI-RAP argues that these unique social environments, developing into the 1980s with the changing pressures on Black life, were key to the game-changing hip-hop acts Long Island produced. These were small towns within striking distance of hip-hop’s inner city heartlands, where hip-hop’s cultural influences permeated Black teenhood by the late-1970s. Yet, they had particular resources and experiences that helped shape developments -- not least, the space to experiment and reimagine, the futurity and expansiveness that came with communities thick with stories of striving, and an aliveness with Black music’s living histories. Far from being isolated from the manifold pressures of racism, however, they also had a unique suburban perspective on how the American Dream short-changed African Americans. From this starting point, LI-RAP builds its more conventional history aspects around the close analysis of ten sonic artefacts that illuminate themes in this history. Having completed archive research, McNally is now writing the book manuscript with expressions of interest from scholarly presses.
The most intensive activity has been LI-RAP’s program of archival research. For the project’s cultural coverage and biographical dimensions, McNally built on research from an extensive personal archive of specialist music publications, music, and audio-visual material, with research from: Cornell University’s Hip-Hop Collection, Harvard’s Hip-Hop Archive, NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Universal Hip-Hop Museum. The research uncovered rare interviews, paper ephemera, photography, correspondence, material culture, and a wealth of contemporaneous music criticism. Using digital ethnography, it sourced unreleased recordings that were pivotal to understanding the early creative lives of hip-hop’s future pacesetters.
Looking to the social histories of Black suburbanization, the research engaged with archives for publications including the New York Times, Newsday, the Freeport Leader, and the New Amsterdam News. It drew on official reports and surveys, and materials at Freeport Public Library, Stony Brook University and Adelphi University for insights into everyday lives of Black Long Islanders. Valuable insights into obstacles faced by families on this new frontier of Black life came from the papers of civil rights activist Lincoln Lynch at the Schomburg Center in Harlem. The project draws rich ethnographic insights from oral history interviews, and from ethnographic walks conducted to the childhood homes of key protagonists.
Put simply, if hip-hop’s foundations were forged on the frontlines of the urban crisis, the Long Islanders that propelled hip-hop in its second generation typically grew up in places that contemporaneously resembled Black versions of Main Street, USA: ones where the economic and social diversity typical of white America nationally was lived out by Black families in small communities that were meaningfully connected; where poverty was a reality for a significant minority, but balanced at the community level by a full range of social, professional and economic life, with some mid-to-upper income bands outperforming white Americans nationally; and where Black cultural and political strategies were able to shape individual potential.
LI-RAP argues that these unique social environments, developing into the 1980s with the changing pressures on Black life, were key to the game-changing hip-hop acts Long Island produced. These were small towns within striking distance of hip-hop’s inner city heartlands, where hip-hop’s cultural influences permeated Black teenhood by the late-1970s. Yet, they had particular resources and experiences that helped shape developments -- not least, the space to experiment and reimagine, the futurity and expansiveness that came with communities thick with stories of striving, and an aliveness with Black music’s living histories. Far from being isolated from the manifold pressures of racism, however, they also had a unique suburban perspective on how the American Dream short-changed African Americans. From this starting point, LI-RAP builds its more conventional history aspects around the close analysis of ten sonic artefacts that illuminate themes in this history. Having completed archive research, McNally is now writing the book manuscript with expressions of interest from scholarly presses.
LI-RAP will provide the first book to chart the cultural histories of these lodestar hip-hop acts as part of a collective territorial constellation, situating them in NY's complex history of post-Civil Rights Black suburbanization. It will broaden hip-hop studies’ social and geographic imaginary, challenge stereotypes of hip-hop Blackness, and make visible a wider range of Black New York stories than previously available. It is anticipated that the book will make a major impact on in hip-hop studies while expanding debates on late-Twentieth Century Black American life.
The intention of this Fellowship was also of career development. The project was devised as a way for McNally to reintegrate into an academic career; to build on his skills as a historian; and to develop a major work in African American studies with the aim to work in the US. This has been highly successful. The research, with its extensive archival work and expansive social themes, has been an effective means for McNally to refine his historical skills. He has consulted widely with experienced historians internationally, developing new insights on historiography, and developed new digital humanities workflows for archiving, organizing, and cross-referencing research objects and note-making. Presenting work at conferences in the US, he has networked widely with African American studies scholars, and been an invitee of the Long Island Archivists Association speaking on creating more inclusive archives. Ultimately, McNally terminated his MSCA Fellowship to take up the prestigious Nasir Jones HipHop Fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research – an objective his MSCA proposal cited as the ideal next step. It seems likely that this book will be the means to achieve his goal of becoming a leading voice in the historicization of hip-hop, race and place.
No website has been developed for the project.
The intention of this Fellowship was also of career development. The project was devised as a way for McNally to reintegrate into an academic career; to build on his skills as a historian; and to develop a major work in African American studies with the aim to work in the US. This has been highly successful. The research, with its extensive archival work and expansive social themes, has been an effective means for McNally to refine his historical skills. He has consulted widely with experienced historians internationally, developing new insights on historiography, and developed new digital humanities workflows for archiving, organizing, and cross-referencing research objects and note-making. Presenting work at conferences in the US, he has networked widely with African American studies scholars, and been an invitee of the Long Island Archivists Association speaking on creating more inclusive archives. Ultimately, McNally terminated his MSCA Fellowship to take up the prestigious Nasir Jones HipHop Fellowship at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research – an objective his MSCA proposal cited as the ideal next step. It seems likely that this book will be the means to achieve his goal of becoming a leading voice in the historicization of hip-hop, race and place.
No website has been developed for the project.