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Four decades removed from Hip Hop's emergence in 1970s urban African America, the cultural movement is now the subject of innumerable academic studies, university courses, and library and museum collection efforts, while also representing a global multi-billion dollar industry. The academy has produced substantial work on aspects of Hip Hop's cultural politics (Dyson, 1993; Rose, 1994; Kelley, 1994; Potter, 1995; Dyson, 1996; Forman, 2002; Quinn, 2005; Ogbar, 2007, among others), linguistic features and innovations (Alim, 2002; Alim, 2004a; Alim, 2004b; Alim, 2006, among others), literary lineage and merits (Baker, 1993; Gladney, 1995; Alim, 2000; among others), and global impact (Mitchell, 2001; Basu and Lemelle, 2006; among others). As the field currently stands, however, history has been the last discipline to take up Hip Hop as an area of serious intellectual inquiry. This is, in part, a reflection of the discipline's insistence on (temporal) distance from one's object of study, but also speaks to a certain hesitance to engage in the complicated, often difficult work of writing about people and communities lacking a vast written historical record. As historian Benjamin Quarles (1988) once perceptively noted, Many historians have a built in skepticism concerning innovation, particularly when it comes to a new field of inquiry or a new viewpoint about a low-status minority (p. 185). He added, Some historians almost unconsciously believe that society was and is characterized by a high culture and a low culture, and the less said about the latter the better (p. 185). As historians are now beginning to make sense of the 1970s (Carroll, 1982; Schulman, 2001; Berkowitz, 2006; Stein, 2010; Cowie, 2010), 1980s (Ehrman, 2005; Collins, 2007; Troy, 2007; Borstelmann, 2011; Rodgers, 2011), and 1990s, Hip Hop will be increasingly unable to ignore since it forms a key part of the cultural, political, and economic histories of these various periods. Already by the time of Houston Baker's Black Studies, Rap, and the. Academy (1993) and Tricia Rose's seminal Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), a well-worn narrative of Hip Hop's history had begun to take hold: a cultural movement born amidst the rubble of a burnt out, postindustrial 1970s South Bronx, fusing African American and Caribbean cultural traditions, that ultimately transformed the rampant gang violence into vibrant creative expression. This narrative--although with varying degrees of accuracy, and also rife with myths and unexamined assumptions--has only hardened over time, becoming a continually recycled and well-established archetype. In ways that resonate deeply with the body of scholarship on Hip Hop, Scott Deveaux (1998) once remarked that jazz historiography had become overly simplistic and one-dimensional, resulting in a stultified narrative: To judge from textbooks aimed at the college market, something like an official history of jazz has taken hold in recent years. On these pages, for all its chaotic diversity of style and expression and for all the complexity of its social origins, jazz is presented as a coherent whole, and its history as a skillfully contrived and easily comprehended narrative (p. 485). This now holds for Hip Hop historiography as well, which like Jazz, is guided by a conventional narrative [that] is a simplification that begs as many questions as it answers (Deveaux, 1998, p. 486). Spanning more than two decades, James G. Spady's body of work represents one of the most important sources for the rethinking and rewriting of Hip Hop history. As the largest published body of oral history interviews with Hip Hop artists (Spady, 1991; Spady, 1995; Spady, 1999; Spady, 2006), Spady's work offers historians an unparalleled documentary source base, which has proven (and will continue to be) indispensible in a field where much scholarly work has relied on secondary and tertiary sources. Moreover, Spady's work draws on a range of rich intellectual and cultural traditions in proposing a methodological paradigm, hiphopography (Spady 1991; Spady 1995; Spady 1999; Alim 2006), that empowers researchers to systematically study Hip Hop's everyday, contemporary cultural dynamics and deep historical roots. …
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