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.
