Provincial Headz; British Hip Hop And Critical Regionalism; Adam de Paor-Evans

Adam de Paor-Evans [+–]

University of Central Lancashire

Adam de Paor-Evans is Reader in Ethnomusicology at the University of Central Lancashire. His hip hop scholarship is published widely, and he leads the project Hip Hop Obscura: Revealing Hidden Histories through Ethnomusicology and Cultural Theory. He is also a practicing hip hop artist as Project Cee.

Nominated for the 2021 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research

Provincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism draws upon spatial practice, material culture, human geography, ethnomusicology and cultural theory in order to present an interdisciplinary counter-narrative to that of hip hop as a strictly urban phenomenon; providing an insight into the relocation of hip hop culture from its inception in New York ghettos to its practices in provincial and rural Britain. Hip hop culture truly arrived in Britain in 1983, a decade after its origin in New York City, and although many important events, artists and recordings that evidence hip hop’s existence in 1980s Britain are well documented, these are almost exclusively urban. Additionally, the narratives embedded in these representations remain too convenient and unchallenged. This book reveals parallel and dialectical experiences of British hip hop pioneers and practitioners dwelling outside the metropolis, discussed under the recurring themes of relocation, territory, consumption, production and identity. These narratives are framed within a rich contextual discourse drawing upon Bhabha, Bourdieu, Foucault, DeLanda and contemporary hip hop scholarship. Shifting hip hop research from urbanism to rurality, the book serves as an introduction to the complexities of its historical narratives in Britain and reveals another hip hop history and how we understand it.

Series: Transcultural Music Studies

Preliminaries

Acknowledgements [+–] ix-x

Provincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism draws upon spatial practice, material culture, human geography, ethnomusicology and cultural theory in order to present an interdisciplinary counter-narrative to that of hip hop as a strictly urban phenomenon; providing an insight into the relocation of hip hop culture from its inception in New York ghettos to its practices in provincial and rural Britain. Hip hop culture truly arrived in Britain in 1983, a decade after its origin in New York City, and although many important events, artists and recordings that evidence hip hop’s existence in 1980s Britain are well documented, these are almost exclusively urban. Additionally, the narratives embedded in these representations remain too convenient and unchallenged. This book reveals parallel and dialectical experiences of British hip hop pioneers and practitioners dwelling outside the metropolis, discussed under the recurring themes of relocation, territory, consumption, production and identity. These narratives are framed within a rich contextual discourse drawing upon Bhabha, Bourdieu, Foucault, DeLanda and contemporary hip hop scholarship. Shifting hip hop research from urbanism to rurality, the book serves as an introduction to the complexities of its historical narratives in Britain and reveals another hip hop history and how we understand it.

Preface

I Owe Hip Hop [+–] xi-xvi

Introduction

Introduction [+–] 1-12

It is my intention in this book to detail the ways in which hip hop arrived in Britain from New York, and to argue that the provincial practitioners of British hip hop developed a critically regional and de-regional counter-culture that responded to both American hip hop and ideas of Britishness. By focusing on the provinces, I will also evidence the existence and importance of hip hop practice outside Britain’s megalopoleis, dispelling the myth that hip hop operates under purely urban conditions. Furthermore, I will attest that the practices in such non-urban places equipped headz with contextual frameworks with which to realise their potential for greater critical engagement in both hip hop practice and in everyday life. Why should the non-urban of British hip hop come under investigation now? What are the future benefits of a study situated in the margins of space and culture some thirty years ago? Why should it be distinct from its inner-city context? In fact, a complete survey of British hip hop is still to be done (and is very much necessary), but to answer these immediate questions, this study is crucial to the future practices of hip hop; to defend its position as a creative, flexible, and sustainable culture; one that can operate in contexts of permanence and transience, stability and instability, economic growth or depression. Hip hop is a rich form of creative practice that is not exclusively contained within the imagined silo of the city that urban epistemology would have us believe. This is a field which until now remains academically unchartered and unexplored, and as such the content of this book aims to change the way in which the spatio-cultural landscape of hip hop is considered, how hip hop history is constructed, and how we think about the humanity of hip hop culture through the everyday. Although the contexts for the analyses that follow are largely located in the geographies of the British provinces, it is my ultimate aim that the lines of inquiry explored throughout this book are of significant value to be of use within other geographical, demographical, political, cultural and environmental contexts.

Chapter 1

The Location of Hip Hop: The Provincial, Spatial, Sonic, Material and Non-material [+–] 13-33

Chapter 1 offers a historic contextualization of hip hop’s New York origins, located through its spatial, sonic, material and nonmaterial phenomena. Here, I pose the position that the origins of hip hop are rooted in provincialism where even the South Bronx may be considered a provincial site, after which I frame the provincial in terms of Britishness and regionalism. When one first considers hip hop, it is usual to conjure up images, sounds and tropes that represent certain moments in the evolution of hip hop culture. From its inception on August 11th, 1973 at Kool DJ Herc’s party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, The Bronx, New York City, through to the golden era revivalist sounds of Action Bronson in 2017, hip hop is laden with symbols and signs that have become normalized and accepted representations of the culture. Hip hop is the master culture of appropriation, re-framing and re-imagining; a result of lateral thinking and cultural history. Hip hop praxis “develop a negative into a positive picture”, (Lauryn Hill 1998), telling the stories which may otherwise be lost- about ourselves, others, and hip hop itself. It is essential at this point to support Rose’s position that “hip hop is propelled by Afrodiasporic traditions” (Rose 1994: 25), and “hip hop culture emerged as a source for youth of alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished…” (Rose 1994: 34). A truism is that the culture bore something out of nothing, as if that were possible (see Berman 2007; Evans 2014), and what that actually transcribes is that hip hop borrowed the most relevant and apposite parts of its pre-hip hop history, other cultures, subcultures and counterparts. Through organic, often subconscious appropriation and reimagining these parts mutated into the multi-tangential culture of hip hop. It is important also to state that although the birth of hip hop is widely attributed to Kool Herc’s party on 11th August 1973, the origins of the culture are not so simple to pinpoint. At its birth, the four main elements had paradoxical relationships and were evolving at dissimilar rates. The first graffiti writers were practicing rigorously several years before Kool Herc’s party, the most famous historical evidence of this can be seen in The New York Times on 21st July 1971 when Taki 183’s all-city bombing became front page news. The next physical elements to arrive were DJing and Bboying with rap being the last, and in the three subsections that follow I discuss the origins of these four elements- not independently from each other- but thematically by locating them through space, sound, material and the nonmaterial.

Chapter 2

The Relocation of Hip Hop: The Perfect Beat, Duck Rock and Cultural Acquisition [+–] 34-78

Location then turns to relocation, as chapter 2 discusses in depth the relocation of hip hop by focusing on the catalysts and mechanisms that brought the culture to Britain. These discussions are situated within a broader British cultural context before concentrating on the provincial hip hop experience, which is interrogated to understand how and why hip hop culture exploded in the way it did. In the first section ‘On Relocation’, regionalism and socio-cultural geographies are explored in order to situate two relative positions: the position of hip hop between New York and Britain, and the position of hip hop within Britain between the urban and the non-urban. I use this cultural positioning to begin to frame the question of identity and cultural acquisition. In the section ‘The Perfect Beat’, I explore the first transatlantic exchanges, cultural acquisition and production within hip hop to argue the value of various means of appropriation. In the next section I further this discussion by unpacking the ‘Buffalo Gals’ video and song as product and its relationship with the languages of hip hop, production and consumption, and continue to explore these themes through the album Duck Rock. Throughout this section and drawing on Gadamer and Ricœur’s approach to signs and hermeneutics, the signifiers embodied in Duck Rock are evaluated in order to define the signified, in terms of the commodification of hip hop culture to a British audience. At this point, the artefact-product discussion is deepened as I interpret the Street Sounds Electro series and other hip hop compilation albums specifically designed for a British marketplace, and this section is where I first introduce the idea that a critical regionalism in British hip hop was beginning to develop during the infancy of the culture’s consumption. Finally, I consider this type of artefact-product consumption alongside accounts of early British hip hop practice, theories of mimicry, cultural hybridity and style identity, and construct a contextual schism between hip hop and conventional British life, before defining the preliminary differences between urban and non-urban British hip hop culture.

Chapter 3

The Territories of Hip Hop: Domesticity, Occupation and Appropriation [+–] 79-123

Chapter 3 engages with territories, appropriation, occupation and space, and the idea that the terrain of British hip hop is crucially linked to the shifting landscapes between location and relocation, urban and rural. Here I continue to debate the urban versus non-urban via a spatio-cultural model that explores the relationships between non-urban life and urbanism as British hip hop began to take shape. The opening section ‘On Territory’ draws largely on Bhabha’s third space theory, Lefebvre’s spatial production and Soja’s thirdspace in order to ground the territory of non-urban graffiti, before directing attention to the domestic. Here, I maneuver the context from public and semi-public space to the private spaces of domesticity to make a case for the micro-scale engagements of hip hop as critical to the evolution of its broader, public representations. This inquiry is supported by Heidegger’s bridge and a detailed reading of the tools and materials (vernacular and global) of hip hop; turntables, microphones, other audio equipment, linoleum, sketchbooks, and pens- the appropriated small scale and everyday products and the two-way transfer of meanings between their appropriated use and their value within hip hop. This fuels a regional reframing of place and belonging by demonstrating the emergence of nonmaterial and territorial spatial practice, which transcends all elements of hip hop. In the closing section ‘Appropriation and Occupation’ I further this debate by analyzing some of the earliest informal and appropriated provincial spaces, and by comparison with those of its American predecessors I introduce the notion of acquired cultural heritage. I discuss the spatio-cultural power shifts that occurred between authority and headz, and propose that although temporal, these power shifts fostered a confidence and resilience to mainstream capitalist culture. It is my suggestion in this chapter that the perceived empowerment and ownership that developed during these counter-actions were paramount to the first cognitions of a hybrid British hip hop culture.

Chapter 4

The Consumption of Hip Hop: Commercialization, Distinction and the Subaltern [+–] 124-170

Chapter 4 investigates the consumption of hip hop in terms of the broader nation’s consumer culture, artefact/product and identity situated within the commercialization of hip hop and rap music in global terms. This is used to develop an argument which takes DeLanda’s presentation on assemblage and Bourdieu’s theories of habitus as points of departure to construct a provincial hip hop assemblage theory that I promote as distinctive from both American and British city-centric. This theory is demonstrated by comparing pirate radio shows and independent record shops of the city with mainstream radio shows and high street music shops (the latter often the only contact non-urbanites had to hip hop news), to explore how this assembled habitus of hip hop developed through divergent and limited exposure, connection, and distancing. This interrogation brings forth the questions of material representation, taste, class and society, and themes of distinction are pursued to illustrate that during the mid-1980s the provincial hip hop experience was somewhat at odds with both Britishness and the broader perception of British hip hop. The result was an awkward cultural existence which I argue impacted upon the first creations of lo-fi non-urban British hip hop music, where headz own interpretations of their demographic and cultural context were both suppressed and exploited in an attempt to produce hip hop. Here, I begin to layer the story of acquired cultural hybridity and anchor the formative cultural values of the established and the subaltern as drivers for knowledge and vision within non-urban hip hop. Establishment is discussed within the arenas of Thatcherism, football hooliganism and regional and local identity politics, whilst the subaltern engages with headz desire to dig deeper into underground hip hop as a counter-approach to commercial consumption. The concept to ‘dig’ is central to the idea of ‘knowledge’ of self, past, present and future in hip hop, and has become widely accepted as the fifth core element of hip hop culture, which I expand upon here in order to frame how this element supported the trajectory of the provincial British.

Chapter 5

The Production of Hip Hop: Process, Empowerment and Cultural Repositioning [+–] 171-222

In chapter 5, I turn from consumption to production and further the preliminary investigation of the primary forms of practice in the provinces. The aim of this chapter is to chart specific practices and productions of provincial British hip hop music which currently remain undiscussed, and also to evaluate the operations and modes of this production within the emerging cultural hybridity explored in the previous chapter. This discussion takes points of departure from Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, Foucault’s notions of heterotopia and Virilio’s theory of dromology, where I argue that the appropriated technologies, demographic and geographic positioning and limitations of exposure to broader hip hop culture were important conditions that affected the development of provincial hip hop practices. Here I explore several sites and processes of technological, social and cultural production that informed provincial hip hop practice. I then demonstrate the power shifts between conventional establishment structures and the structure of the provincial supercrew, their nodes, networks, practices, processes and outputs. The tangible outputs of recorded products and the more intangible and ephemeral processes of writing and language development, rehearsal, recording and performance. the evolution of regionalist and de-regionalist styles, critique and reflection are of concern here as I anchor a cultural positioning for provincial British hip hop. I also analyze the associated record sleeve designs from 1988-1993 (by urban artists such as Blade, Hijack and Gunshot, the period that is now known historically as the era of ‘britcore’) in comparison with the lo-fi cassette-only productions of the provinces.

Chapter 6

The Identity of Hip Hop: Reality, Image and a State of Mind [+–] 223-271

The penultimate chapter centres on themes of identity, which by drawing on many of the arguments previously presented, asks: what is the identity of provincial British hip hop, and how does it differ from the conceived, perceived, and lived hip hop identity of the British city? I tackle this question through a detailed examination of hip hop’s imagery and material expression and explore the embedded and suggested meanings within both non-urban and city-centric British hip hop music sonically and lyrically. In an attempt to unravel the story of britcore and its wider impact in Europe, the theme of reality is tackled within this broader context and by revisiting the notions of cultural diaspora discussed previously. The discussion of reality also draws on Hebdige’s discourse about forbidden identity and sources of value vis-à-vis a further examination of lesser known, lo-fi non-urban britcore recordings from this period. Taking issue with the commercialism of hip hop as rap music was a common theme in britcore, and the more hardcore the sound became, the more it was perceived as being real or staying true to British hip hop. To ‘keep it real’ one of the keenest tropes in hip hop globally, and here I further the investigation of reality, image and identity under the theme of ‘keeping it real’ and attempt to solidify the hip hop state of mind in terms of critical, non-urban British regionalism. This regionalist approach takes issue with the global realness continually referred to within mainstream hip hop culture, whilst concurrently presenting a theory of mind state which is rooted in hip hop’s origins. Rakim’s epitomic lyric in ‘I Know You Got Soul’ (1987) “It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”, is pivotal to the critique I offer of the ‘hip hop state of mind’ and ‘keeping it real’, which is presented in the final section of this chapter.

Conclusion

Conclusions: Critical De-regionalism, Dispelling the Myth and Revealing the Invisible [+–] 272-289

In my concluding chapter I consider the arguments presented in the book and discuss and confirm three critical discoveries that contribute to the growing field of knowledge related to critical regionalism, de-regionalism and the global. Firstly, I dispel the myth that hip hop is solely an urban culture, and charge that consumer-capitalists continual urbanization of hip hop culture is a parodic and heterotopian position within which the tired urban tropes of hip hop are constantly titivated for consumer-capitalist gain, in turn simplifying the rich and diverse cultural dynamics of hip hop. Secondly, I attest the position that an acquired critically regional hip hop culture existed and advanced in Britain evidenced through a set of hybrid practices and productions, and furthermore this hybrid culture was a counter-approach to the established, expected and normalized ways that one should conduct their life. Moreover, I verify that that there were clear contextual differences between the city-centric and provincial positions in British hip hop, which helps us consider the importance of regionalism and its role in the evolutionary practices of hip hop. Thirdly, I conclude that the cultural dynamics of non-urban British hip hop culture can act as a frame for its practitioners to realize the potential for greater critical engagement in both hip hop practice and everyday life. For many practitioners, hip hop and daily life are inseparable, and the final section of this concluding chapter makes proposals based on the findings of this book for future approaches and tactics to significantly enhance hip hop practice and life experience as a whole.

End Matter

Notes [+–] 290-314

Provincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism draws upon spatial practice, material culture, human geography, musicology and cultural theory in order to present an interdisciplinary counter-narrative to that of Hip Hop as a strictly urban phenomenon; providing insight into the relocation of Hip Hop culture from its inception in New York ghettos to its practices in provincial and rural Britain. Hip Hop culture truly arrived in Britain in 1983, a decade after its origin in New York City, and although many important events, artists and recordings that evidence Hip Hop’s existence in 1980s Britain are well documented, these are almost exclusively urban. Additionally, the narratives embedded in these representations remain too convenient and unchallenged. This book reveals parallel and dialectical experiences of British Hip Hop pioneers and practitioners dwelling outside the metropolis, discussed under the recurring themes of relocation, territory, consumption, production and identity. These narratives are framed within a rich contextual discourse drawing upon the theories of Bhabha, Lefebvre, Bourdieu, Ricœur, Foucault, and DeLanda among others. Projecting the focus of Hip Hop theory forward from urbanism to rurality, the book uncovers and challenges the conventions of a Hip Hop state of mind and how we understand it.

Bibliography [+–] 315-325

Glossary of Terms [+–] 326-330

A full glossary of terms is included at the beginning which defines and describes certain terms specific to Hip Hop culture. There are extended references and explanations for some terms which will help the reader best position how and why these terms are used throughout the book, particularly in excerpts from interviews and quotations. Three examples of such terms follow: DOPE: used by all Hip Hop heads, meaning ‘cool’. This word is metaphorical in origin and relates to the slang for street drugs, and so evolved as cool or good quality Hip Hop practice gets you high. Ice-T’s I’m Your Pusher (Sire, 1988) explicitly describes this metaphor and its usage in Hip Hop. HIP HOP: the culture, within which four key elements exist, which can act in relation or independent to one another. The words ‘Hip Hop’ are capitalized; it is a proper name and identifiable culture to which one can belong, and in the view of the author has no different or less value to positioning oneself within a race or aligning oneself to a country. HIP HOP HEADS or HEADS: a global term for follower, devotee, practitioner, activist or any person with a deep engagement in one or more element of Hip Hop culture. The term ‘head’ is used throughout this book.

Index [+–] 331-339

Reviews

We all know about hip-hop's urban origins, but how much do we know about hip-hop's reach into more rural regions of the world? Adam de Paor-Evans has provided us with an academic framework with which to do so--part (auto)ethnographic, part critical theory, he weaves an engaging story of bedroom graffiti, pause-button mixtapes and crew rivalries in 1980s provincial Britain. This book show us how far, and how early on, the sounds and materials of hip-hop cultures reached the other side of the Atlantic, and the idiosyncratic nature of those flows in particular. It's a must read for any UK hip-hop fan and for those looking to apply fresh ideas to their own studies of regional hip-hop.
Justin A. Williams, Department of Music, University of Bristol and author of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-hop

Whilst the story of hip hop's development in the big cities (particularly the U.S.A.) has been widely documented, its growth and osmosis into the fabric of those communities beyond has, until now, been seldom covered. ‘Provincial Headz’ provides a comprehensive study of how rural and other non-urban centres interpreted the culture and made it their own. Through personal accounts and a wealth of source material, Adam de Paor Evans challenges the assumption that hip hop is solely an urban culture, contrasting, comparing and making crucial links between the settings. This book is a breath of fresh air in its approach, and a very welcome addition to the existing literature on hip hop’s development.
Dudley Jaynes (Whirlwind D), writer for Record Collector Magazine and recording artist for B-Line Recordings

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Provincial Headz

British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism

Adam de Paor-Evans [+–]

University of Central Lancashire

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