Landmark Hip Hop and Rap Digital Collection Nearing Completion

On September 29 of last year, I announced the birth of Hip-Hop and Rap, NA Publishing’s new project to digitize hip hop and rap music magazines from the eighties to the present. To begin, I had before me a long wish list of titles whose publishers were going to receive invitations to participate.

How It Came Together

Over the next year, I sent invitations to as many publishers as I could locate. Some responded; others didn’t. Many of the titles were now nearly forgotten or known only to a limited readership. Unlike with the underground newspapers of the Civil Rights and Vietnam era, librarians did not actively collect hip hop and rap zines. Publishers often didn’t preserve their own archives. If I couldn’t locate a rights holder to request permission, I had to pass on that title.

But through an evolving social networking campaign that included email, text, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and the phone, as well as the background research of NA Publishing’s Connie Harrison, I discovered other titles that weren’t on the project’s original wish list and was able to locate rights holders and contributors. I developed warm relationships with long-time members of the hip hop and rap community—like Cherryl Aldave, publisher of Headz, the first hip hop zine in North Carolina; and Kevin Beacham, co-publisher of Caught in the Middle, out of Chicago—who gave permission for their zines to come on board and then introduced me to friends and fellow publishers of other zines past and present. Brian Lassiter, producer, writer, and legendary archivist whose hip hop roots in Atlanta, Georgia, go back to the mid-eighties, gave freely of his time and connections over the phone and through emails. I expect my team to scan many issues from his collection.

One more friend I have to add: the legendary DJ Stef who gave permission for me to include Vinyl Exchange, out of San Francisco, and then provided my team with a complete run of issues to scan. A week after we received her package of past issues, Stef died suddenly. One of her last acts before dying was to write a testimonial letter about the project to Annabelle Udo-O’Malley, publisher of Rewind, who then joined the project. When I received the news of Stef’s passing, I contacted Annabelle. She said she was in the process of answering Stef when she received my message.

All of them understood the mission of this project: to preserve hip hop and rap magazines going back to the founding years and to make them accessible to a new, wider audience.

Just in Time

And just in time because many early hip hop and rap zines are hard to find and are nearing extinction. To date, the collection is slated to include the following titles:

4080, The Bomb, Caught in the Middle, Chicago Rocks, Clout, Da Industry Insider Magazine, DJ Times, Elemental, The Flavor, The Flypaper, Ground Level, Headz, Hype, Lava, Murder Dog, Ozone, Philly Street Buzz/Street Buzz/Da Buzz!, PROP$ Magazine, Rap Fanatic, Rap Guide, Rewind, Scribble, Straight From The Lip, Street Flava, Thick Magazine, Urban Ground, Urban Ink, Vinyl Exchange, and Wax Poetics.

But we have so far been unable to locate any copies of some of them. With others, we have located and identified only incomplete runs.

Your Help Is Needed

If we can’t find originals, the titles won’t make it into the collection. I need your help.

• Do you have copies of any of the above titles in your library collection or personal archives that you could loan us? We will cover all costs for shipping and handling and return them, still in good shape, when we are finished.
• Did you publish a zine yourself that should be in the collection? Although we are close to completion, we still have room for a few short-run titles or one long-run title. Let it be yours.

Hip-Hop and Rap is the third digital collection in NA Publishing’s Music Magazine Archive Series. The first two, Rock and Folk (still in production themselves but much further along), can be viewed at

http://mma.napubcoonline.com/

username: sales@napubco.com

password: Hendrix

Last year, Hip-Hop and Rap was a vision. Today it is about to become a reality. Kate Ferguson, former editor in chief of Word Up! and Rap Masters, has called it

… an invaluable resource to historians, educators, researchers, and other aficionados of music, entertainment, and pop culture….

You can help make it better. Write to me at ken@azenphonypress.com.