LI-RAP · The Long Island Rap Renaissance: hip-hop’s suburban turn and America’s changing Black middle class, 1986-1993
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-04 → 2023-10-03
- EU contribution
- €196,591
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The Long Island Rap Renaissance: hip-hop’s suburban turn and America’s changing Black middle class, 1986-1993
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.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The Long Island Rap Renaissance: hip-hop’s suburban turn and America’s changing Black middle class, 1986-1993 is the first scholarship to bring together a neglected strand of hip-hop history – that of the major role played by artists from New York’s Black outer suburbs in the international explosion of hip-hop as a cultural and aesthetic force from 1986 – with an account of the history of race, class and Black suburbanization that frames it. Not only does this research mark an important revision in hip-hop studies – which thus far has tended to view hip-hop as quintessentially urban ghetto music, focusing its social analysis on extreme inner-city social/economic marginalization, and occluding the socially and geographically complex reality of hip-hop’s development in the 1980-1990s. It also provides an invaluable youthful lens on the major conjunctural shifts, and losses, experienced by African Americans in post-Civil Rights America. This will bring new insights to debates explored by sociologists like Omi and Winant (1986), Landry (1988), Marable (2002) and Wiese (2004) regarding the increasingly ambivalent experience of race, class and suburbia for middle-class Blacks in the 1980s.Looking both to the history of hip-hop’s presence in Long Island, to the developments created there and how its music sounded the suburban Black experience, the study will entwine aspects of cultural and aesthetic history, accounting these globally impactful developments in popular music, with a profound social and political history that is particularly pertinent in today’s political climate. The aim will be to achieve a more nuanced generational understanding of race and class at this pivotal moment in history as it fed into hip-hop, its politics and aesthetics. The study will revise these received histories and make legible the true diversity of African American and Afrodiasporic culture(s) in hip hop.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK - NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK · CorkCoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union