Hip‐Hop as Urban and Regional Research: Encountering an Insider's Ethnography of City Life

Abstract

This essay suggests that hip‐hop music may reasonably be thought of as a form of urban and regional research. The essay draws upon a recently published book by hip‐hop artist Jay‐Z, which provides biographical information alongside translations of the lyrical content of his works, to show that hip‐hop is full of insider ethnographic insights into urban life. This, it is argued, can be thought of as an answer to Daryl Martin's call for a more ‘poetic urbanism’, an urbanism that captures the material, sensory and emotional aspects of the city. The essay uses Jay‐Z's text to illustrate the type of insights and ideas that we might obtain from hip‐hop, giving some specific examples of these insights and concluding with some reflections upon this alternative insider account of city life — and how it might provide us with opportunities for expanding our repertoire.

‘Street Music’, Urban Ethnography and Ghettoized Communities

“…David Beer makes a provocative case for hip‐hop as urban research, as a poetic urbanism which ‘provides detailed accounts of place and region, enabling us to access worlds that are often obscured from our analytical gaze’ (: 677). If used sympathetically, Beer argues, hip‐hop ‘provides us with an imaginative insider's ethnographic account of these often lost or hard to see urban lifeworlds’ ( ibid .).…”

“…Clearly then, the contributions of David Beer (, this issue) and Martin Lamotte (, this issue) have found a sympathetic audience. According to hip‐hop's creation myth, the culture was born on 11 August 1973 in the recreation room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a South Bronx apartment complex, where a young Jamaican immigrant by the name of Clive Campbell (aka DJ Kool Herc) threw a house party that would make history.…”

Hip‐hop and Urban Studies

“…I want to focus first, and in most detail, on Beer's (: 677) suggestion that we understand hip‐hop lyrics as ‘an imaginative insider's ethnographic account of these often lost or hard to see urban lifeworlds’. Drawing on Jay‐Z's () volume of autobiography interspersed with annotated lyrics, he argues persuasively that these lyrics evince a sociological imagination, as Jay‐Z links his individual experiences and observations to larger social structures, collective norms and patterns of social change.…”

“…As Beer (: 679) points out, hip‐hop performers (and more broadly poets or lyrical artists) share traits with urban researchers: ‘Both wish to capture and communicate transcendent insights into the local realities of everyday life, to explore difference, inequalities, tensions, communities and the like’. Indeed, since the 1980s' literary turn in anthropology, many ethnographers have explored the commonalities between their academic texts and other forms of evocative writing, including fiction.…”

“…Rose, ; Forman, ; Forman and Neal, ). In their contributions to this ‘Debates and Developments’ section, David Beer (, this issue) and Martin Lamotte (, this issue) offer two fresh perspectives on the role of hip‐hop in understanding urban life, in particular in ghettoized communities. Beer focuses on the possibility of viewing hip‐hop performers as urban ethnographers, while Lamotte approaches hip‐hop as a social, cultural and political movement in which the appropriation of urban space figures as an important mode of negotiating citizenship.…”