Reconciling Geppetto: Collaboration, (Re-)Creation, and Deception in the Practice of Hip Hop Music...

Reconciling GeppettoCollaboration, (Re-) Creation, and Deception in the

Practice of Hip Hop Music Ethnography

anthony kwame harrison, Virginia Tech

Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story of wood coming to life.1 Certainly all wood is at some point alive, but Pinocchio’s story is about the resilient life- force of “a regular woodpile log” (Collodi [1883] 2009: 3). The log fi rst announces its animation through voice. “Don’t hit me too hard!” (3) it pleads to an old carpenter looking to make a table leg. When the carpenter’s neighbor, the spry and hot- tempered Geppetto, acquires the log, he fi rst names it Pinocchio (after a fami-ly he once knew) and then carves it into a marionette— both acts that further anthropomorphize the wood. As the story unfolds, Pinocchio walks out on Geppetto, journeying into a world full of talking animals and zoomorphic humans.2

One overriding theme in Pinocchio’s adventure is transgression— described by Charles Klopp as “the testing if not the breaking of . . . so-cial norms” (2006: 28). The rebellious Pinocchio refuses to conform. Rather than being “obedient” and “going to school,” which is what proper boys do (91), Pinocchio the scamp wants to pursue the trade of “eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and wandering wherever [he likes] from sunup to sundown” (14). That such characteristics are typi-cally associated with the lives of entertainers should not be lost here. Indeed Pinocchio, who is most concerned with satisfying his imme-diate wants, is initially lured from his path to school by “the music of fi fes and the beats of a big drum” (27) and goes on to spend a short stint as a stage- performing jackass.

In his introduction to Geoffrey Brock’s 2009 English language

Harrison: Reconciling Geppetto • 39

translation of the Italian classic, Umberto Eco insists that though “simple in its prose— and musical in its simplicity . . . Pinocchio is not a simple book” (2009: x). Surpassing the protagonist’s propensity to tell falsehoods— a quality responsible for engendering the puppet’s most memorable physical attribute— Pinocchio’s greatest character fl aw is his insatiable wanderlust, which encourages an astonishing gullibility that makes him easy prey for swindlers like the Fox and the Cat. Yet by the end of the book, or the key sequence that Dennis Looney describes as “the beginning of the story’s end” (2006: 38), Pinocchio’s seem-ingly tragic shortcomings come back to save the day. After he reunites with Geppetto in the belly of a monstrous Shark, it is Pinocchio’s re-fusal to accept his fate that prompts him, against his father’s “better” judgment, to lead their escape— and when the initial effort fails, to “try again” (150). It is this deep desire to explore, discover, and above all else, survive that carries Collodi’s hero from the stacks of a woodpile along the circuitous road to full humanity.

The following essay consists of three sections. In the fi rst— the Ad-ventures of Mad Squirrel— I narrate the development of my scholar- practitioner identity as both an ethnographer and a member of a Bay Area underground hip hop collective.3 This includes an elaboration on the network of interpersonal relations and tensions I entered into as a result of my decision to follow such a research path. I also refl ect on the nature of collaborative ethnography and discuss how several issues surrounding it apply to both popular music studies in general and the context of my research in particular. In the second section, Forest Fires Collaborations, I outline several registers through which my collab-orative ethnographic research and relationships resound. By consider-ing key dynamics and moments in these ethnographic partnerships, I underscore the different ways in which knowledge emerges through complex and shifting negotiations of power. More specifi cally, I argue that participatory participant observation renders a different epistemo-logical basis of inquiry, which recasts the ethnographic “fi eld” as a dy-namic and conceptually bounded space of knowledge acquisition and production. In the fi nal section, I problematize the notion of research collaboration by discussing the multiple and ambiguous tensions be-tween trust and deception that saturate these in- the- fi eld relationships. My overall aim is to direct attention to the chorus of possibilities that

collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013 40 •

collaborative ethnographic engagements in music co- creation open up, while simultaneously suggesting some of the limitations of this approach. Inspired by James Clifford’s (1986a) important insights re-garding ethnographic allegory, I frame my own story within the extend-ed metaphor of Pinocchio as a means of artfully referencing (among other things) the blurred relationship between truth and deception, work and play, conformity and heterodoxy, and above all else, the mat-uration of a fi eld of study.

The Adventures of Mad Squirrel

Not unlike Collodi’s Story of a Puppet, the music of the Bay Area hip hop group Forest Fires Collective (ffc) is deceptively simple and sim-ply complex.4 The origins of the ffc date back to summer 2000, when two overqualifi ed cashiers (both hip hop enthusiasts) came together behind the cash registers of Amoeba Music’s San Francisco store. One was a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Syracuse University, working on his dissertation and poised to pursue a career in academia. The second was an aspiring hip hop musician who, despite having a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, seemed resolved to pur-sue the chief vocation of eating, drinking, sleeping, playing music, and wandering around the city from dusk till dawn.

Both the Forest Fires Collective name and the character of our mu-sic sprouted from a seed of ethnographic immersion. When it became clear that the trajectory of my research among underground hip hop artists was leading me toward a role of “truly participatory participant- observation” (Shelemay 1997: 191), which included opportunities to rhyme alongside some of the artists I knew from open microphone events and to record songs with others, I remembered a statement I had once made about taking the emcee name “Mad Squirrel” for the occasion, should I ever release an album (see Harrison 2009).5 For me the decision to take an animal name— not unheard of in hip hop (think Snoop Dog, Danger Mouse, Ladybug Mecca, and Tyga) but uncommon enough— immediately set my (imagined) zone of narrative interaction within the forest.6 Indeed, quite serendipitously, the choice of Mad Squirrel as a performance identity performed two important authenti-cating functions:


1. The liminal state between what, in strict hip hop authenticity terms (McLeod 1999), would be the fakeness of forest- life and the real-ness of city- life allowed for a broad range of situational depictions. Early on, I frequently described Mad Squirrel’s subject matter as encompassing “things squirrels do and things squirrels don’t do” (Grimm 2002) which can conceivably include anything. Similarly, in several public exhibitions of freestyle rhyming and at least once on record, I declared my maxim as “living in the city but keeping it rural.”7

2. Through the combination of my scholarly knowledge of hip hop’s African- diasporic foundations and academic training in graduate courses entitled “Language and Power,” “Culture and Folklore,” and “African Orature,” I could legitimize my own hip hop voice as “taking it back” to the West African tradition of animal stories— a tradition my Ashanti mother imparted to me at an early age.8

Somewhat surprisingly, my Pinocchiotic co- worker, Feller Quentin, was more than happy to partner with me in co- creating a forest- based hip hop Eldorado and immediately started coming up with song ideas.

The terms of my transition, from a participant- observer of hip hop performances to a scholar- practitioner who collaborated with the art-ists among whom I conducted research, have been described elsewhere as resulting from a particular instance of misrecognition— an evening in Golden Gate Park when an aspiring hip hop producer mistook me for a real emcee (see Harrison 2009). Feller Quentin, who at the time had already recorded and released two independent cd- rs as a mem-ber of the hip hop duo The Latter, has always maintained that his con-stant cajoling— after several weeks of working together and hanging out— preempted this shift.9

Upon fi rst making my interest in recording known to Feller— citing the incident in the park— he reminded me that he had initially suggest-ed doing an ep together weeks earlier.10 He also alluded to a late night conversation between us when he had suggested that rather than re-turning to school to write my dissertation, I stay in the Bay Area and make music with him. He went on to say that he had observed several changes in me from when I fi rst arrived in San Francisco. For instance, that in our all- day, behind- the- cash- register, passing- the- time banter I had become more enthusiastic about coming up with hypothetical em-


cee names and conceptual ideas for hip hop songs. He also reminded me of how on one evening, after drinking a few beers and watching a video of an emcee battle, I had obliged him in the customary hip hop practice of tossing a few freestyle rhymes back and forth while stand-ing around his kitchen.

In the traditions of ethnographic representation that pre- date anthro-pology’s crisis— that is, prior to the postmodern, poststructuralist, and self- refl exive turns that many see as ushering in an era of “new (criti-cal) ethnography” (see, e.g., Denzin 1998; Madison 2012)— the terms through which research subjects came to understand and make sense of the presence and purpose of researchers were typically suppressed or bracketed as anecdotal fi eldwork misadventures.11 That the subjects of anthropological inquiry were observing and attempting to apprehend the actions, motivations, and changing dispositions of anthropologists was an ethnographic nonfi ction that complicated researchers’ claims to empirical accuracy and compromised the authority of their voices. Today, at a historical moment when notions of ethnographic collabora-tion increasingly hold sway, anthropologists would be wise to scruti-nize the conditions under which such partnerships occur, who initiates them, and what presumptions are held regarding their outcomes.12

My decision to collaborate in making music with Feller Quentin ush-ered me into a network of hip hop recording artists organized around his Alamo Square apartment recording studio, hereafter referred to as “the Cabin.” Two of these artists were already familiar to me and with me from all the time I had spent hanging around with Feller over the previous four months. One was Feller’s roommate, Eddie Vic, a hip hop producer and deejay who teamed up with him in forming The Lat-ter; the other was an emcee named Just One, who lived just up the block and appeared as a guest emcee on several Latter songs. For reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, Feller did not invite me to appear as a guest on any Latter tracks. He wanted us to have our own project.

Peter McLaren’s concept of reception formations references the “differ-ent historically and culturally located subjectivities that . . . shape how the researcher’s presence in the fi eld is both perceived and received” (1991: 153). McLaren situates these understandings within complex net-works of race, class, and gender relations. Of course the notion of be-ing “received” is not unique to fi eldwork; however, the ethnographic


project— especially as classically conceived— places such receptions along potentially volatile political and ethical terrain. As a mode of ne-gotiation McLaren advocates for an understanding of “lived discourses,” which to him means “feeling the everyday experiences” (1991: 154, em-phasis in original) that occur along these relational landscapes. In this process, sociological classifi cations of collective identity gradually give way to “personal dimension[s] consisting of other socially and morally important features” (Appiah 1994: 151) of individuals’ identities.

Feller and I met in mid- April 2000, at the start of my fi rst full day working at Amoeba, and immediately connected around our mutual interests in hip hop. By midsummer I was more than simply an Afri-can American male anthropologist studying hip hop; and he was more than a white guy in a hip hop group, who had a few industry connec-tions and hoped to be “selling units” within a year. Yet for Eddie Vic, Just One, and others within The Latter’s circle— those who did not spend their forty- hour work weeks behind the cash registers with me— it might as well have been May Day.

As an ethnographer, being thrust into the role of a key player in The Latter’s network of recording artists created immediate tensions. Fore-most were concerns over economies of production that surrounded both the use of technologies and time— namely, questions surround-ing who controlled the means of production or had the requisite know- how to make use of it, and how much time they were willing to dedicate to the Forest Fires Collective project. All the recording equipment be-longed to Eddie Vic; in fact, the actual recording space was in his bed-room. He also had specifi c knowledges about beat- making, recording, and mixing that Feller and I would need to rely on. Thus his endorse-ment and involvement were essential. Initially, I could not help but dwell on the possibility that for Eddie Vic, my partnership with Feller encroached on The Latter’s space, time, creative energies, and vision.13

Takeyuki Tsuda (1998: 118) observes the “psychic tension” resulting from a researcher’s constant presentation of self through the course of ethnographic fi eldwork. Such stresses result from contemporary eth-nographers’ profound awareness of the impacts researchers’ identities have on information access and overall research possibilities. That such identities are not fi xed but rather require constant impression manage-ment (Goffman 1959)– what Brackette Williams describes as doing the homework of “continually try[ing] to fi gure out the power implications


of . . . how [one is] being construed and by whom” (1996: 73)— only protracts the potential for such arrangements to become embrangled. Early in the ethnographic encounter, when there is still considerable latitude in research subjects’ “translations of the translator” (Williams 1996; see also Pouwer 1973) and vice versa, the prospective consequenc-es of misimpressions may be particularly concerning. Incongruities be-tween who we say we are and how we behave have implications for our moral character as both researchers and human beings.

On the evening when I fi rst met Just One, he, not unlike many em-cees with whom I crossed paths, mistook my fi eld notebook for a book of rhymes. When I explained to him that I was not an emcee, and even threw in a word or two about not being good at it— a strategic maneu-ver to curry favor by dissociating myself from the hordes of novice em-cees crowding the scene (see Harrison 2009)— his response was ap-proving: “It’s good you acknowledge that; too many people don’t.” A week later, when he happened to stop by the Cabin at the exact moment when Feller had coaxed me into freestyling with him (see above), I felt like a scamp and could feel my nose growing. The next time my turn to rhyme came around, I declined.

on ethnographic collaborations

Collaborative research between ethnographers and ethnographic sub-jects and the issues that surround it, according to Luke Eric Lassiter, are among “the most important ethical, theoretical, and methodologi-cal” developments in anthropology (2005: x). Rooted in the insights of “second wave” feminist epistemologies and methods, as well as post-modern anthropology’s attention to dialogic research principles and the constructed nature of ethnographic accounts, collaboration has been hailed as “better research because its methodology emphasizes multiple, polyphonic perspectives, which leave a richer heritage of eth-nography to subsequent generations of ethically conscious researchers” (Fluehr- Lobban 2008: 175). Yet as Sam Cook (2009) correctly notes, col-laboration, in terms of its current usage in anthropology, is a loaded term referencing what is still a largely experimental and yet- to- be re-alized research process. Whereas, in one of the more defi nitive state-ments on the subject, Lassiter maps its parameters around research in-volving a deliberate and explicit emphasis on partnership throughout the ethnographic enterprise (2005: 16), Carolyn Fluehr- Lobban (2008) pon-


ders whether it is enough simply to work with research communities or if true collaboration should mandate that researchers work for them as well. Joanne Rappaport answers affi rmatively, stating that collabora-tion only becomes “a charged and fruitful methodology” when we move from “complicity in an ethnographic dialogue” to “complicity in achiev-ing the goals of the subject,” which “can occur only when we shift con-trol of the research process out of the ethnographer’s hands” (2008: 8).

Such dictates may be straightforward enough in subfi elds like ap-plied anthropology— where team- based models of collaboration (White 2012) have gained signifi cant traction— but what does collaboration in the ethnographic study of popular music look like?14 The fi eld is pre-mised on holistic understandings of music as a product and producer of human activities, embedded in social relationships and local contexts, and actualized through social practice and process (Cohen 1993; DeNo-ra 2000). In projects such as these, what are the “goals of the subject” and how do the processes and products of “shifting control out of re-searchers’ hands” manifest? More specifi c to my own work, what does collaboration look and sound like in a project aimed at exploring how music has been enlisted in the construction and reifi cation of notions of racial difference and, furthermore, discovering the “on the ground” ways in which the performance and reception of hip hop within local, multiracial scenes both challenge and continue this legacy?

Rather than locating this research outside the purview of collab-orative anthropology, I argue that cooperative ethnographic projects surrounding the co- creation of music products— frequently involving researchers with backgrounds in music partnering with musicians in spaces of mutual, polyphonic articulation— offer zestful occasions to audition the complexities of ethnographic collaboration. Kay Kaufman Shelemay describes such reciprocal relations and grounded actions as “surprisingly frequent outgrowth[s]” of music- based ethnography (1997: 189). Several of the imperatives that follow from anthropol-ogy’s postmodern turn and collaborative coming of age (Cook 2009: 109)— such as collapsing the distance between observer and observed, conducting research alongside and with rather than on members of the communities we study, and prioritizing community interests— in the context of music- based communities compel music researchers to join their subjects in doing music.


Whereas Mad Squirrel’s name and disposition unquestionably inspired the forest milieu as a setting for our musical narratives, the specifi c Forest Fires Collective name was Feller Quentin’s idea.15 Feller’s Forest Fires emcee persona, Smif Carnivorous, came directly from one of our behind- the- register hip hop banter sessions. Not long after deciding to rap as emcee Mad Squirrel, I mentioned to Feller that I thought Car-nivorous Smith would be a great emcee name. There was no particular injunction here; coming up with emcee names was simply one of the things we did to pass the eight- hour workday. Feller immediately took to the name, fl ipping- its- script to Smith Carnivorous and then Smif, which following the tradition of hip hop acronyms stood for Straight Mack Ingesting Fat. From there— perhaps over the course of the work-day or the next few— he emplotted what became the overarching sto-ryline for our fi rst cd: that his carnivorous nature and insatiable ap-petite drove him to burn down the forest in an effort to make a colossal barbecue out of all the animals— including Mad Squirrel; meanwhile, I was free to write verses and songs about running around the forest, things squirrels do and don’t do, or whatever else I was interested in rhyming about.

This straightforward, laissez- faire dynamic between the two of us symbolized an important philosophy underlying most Forest Fires col-laborations: although there was a concerted effort among emcees to situate most of our song narratives and metaphors within the forest, we basically traveled our own paths and rarely critiqued each other’s rhyming styles or lyrical content.16 This became particularly signifi cant when others— including Just One, who changed his name to “Prego w/ Zest,” an emcee named “Sim(ile) the Drunken Owl,” and a dj/producer named Dr. Lester— came on board. As a zoomorphic emcee/anthropo-morphized squirrel, who didn’t own or know how to operate any of the featured technologies of music production, I could live with this musi-cal contract.17

McLaren asks researchers to consider the conditions and ends to which we “enter into relations of cooperation, mutuality, and reciproc-ity with those whom we research” (1991: 150). My welcome into the Forest Fires Collective was curiously seamless. In refl ecting on how this happened I appropriate Williams’s question “Who are you and what are you to me?” (1996: 79) as a two- way inquiry imbricating re-


searcher and subject alike. For Feller and me the second part of the question might be revised into “What do you want with/from me?” An inquiry of partnership.

Forest Fires Collaborations

The second section of this essay, which focuses more specifi cally on research, is predicated on Douglas Holmes and George Marcus’s (2008) astute observations regarding contemporary ethnographic collaborations as “para- ethnographic” projects involving a series of intellectual and epistemic partnerships. Holmes and Marcus see an-thropology’s recent attendance to collaboration as a product of an his-torical juncture marked by changing demands and dynamics of fi eld-work relations. They characterize today’s ethnography as “emerg[ing] out of a series of infi eldwork collaborative articulations” (Holmes and Marcus 2008: 83– 84), several of which I acknowledge in detail in relation to my own work:

1. That ethnography as a method is no longer the exclusive province of anthropology or even academics but has “been assimilated as [a] key intellectual modalit[y] of our time” (Holmes and Marcus 2008: 84). The questions we— as ethnographers— have tradition-ally asked and ways of understanding we have traditionally en-gaged in are now the practices of business managers, policy mak-ers, poets, and high school principals.

2. That today’s ethnographic subjects are “fully capable of doing su-perb ethnography in their own idioms” (Holmes and Marcus 2008: 84). To make their point, the authors call attention to the appear-ance of books and memoirs— describing them as ethnographic ar-tifacts “emerg[ing] . . . from within”— “that explain, with a strong edge of critique, how the most complex and strategic contempo-rary processes, institutions, and organizations operate” (84). This is not to say that the work of anthropologists is no longer relevant or important but rather that it is not necessarily so in the ways we have classically imagined.

3. That we can, and indeed should, “relearn our method from our subjects as epistemic partners” (Holmes and Marcus 2008: 84). This means moving beyond classic models of fi eldwork relations


that stress the powerlessness of research subjects. In today’s eth-nographic encounters it is important to recognize the “motivation, intent, purpose, [and] curiosity . . . on the part of subjects who agree to become part of, or cooperate with, ethnographic inquiry” 84), and even to consider how subjects’ complicity with our proj-ects may be part of their own intellectual appropriations.

4. That the ethnographic subject is “back and fully in our poststructuralist faces”(Holmes and Marcus 2008: 84): “This renego-tiation of the rules . . . opens the intellectual space for a rethinking of collaboration beyond the older understanding of it as the sub-ject responding to, cooperating with, and tolerating the ethnogra-pher’s more or less overt agendas” (85).

These recognitions are all relevant to the ethnographic experienc-es and outcomes of my Forest Fires Collective collaborations. The in-sights generated in concert with hip hop recording artists provided me with ample understandings and realizations that have been dis-seminated through conventional ethnographic research outlets. Our collaborations have also resulted in alternative modes and mediums of knowledge production and distribution— what Holmes and Mar-cus call “indigenous ethnographic idioms”— most notably ffc musi-cal texts, which are remarkable in featuring the researcher as subject, and, I suggest, can be viewed as acts of intellectual appropriation on the part of the artists with whom I worked. Finally, moving beyond the realm of tangible research products, I consider the processual implica-tions of this pairing of music and scholarship for unsettling well- worn ethnographic assumptions and methodologies and for opening up new pathways for thinking about popular music studies praxis. Here the extracurricular wisdom and spirited inclinations of stringless mari-onettes might potentially rescue pedantic modes of inquiry and repre-sentation from the fi gurative belly of the beast. I argue that the ability of practice- based music research to evolve in method and form around productive collaboration signals an important horizon of popular mu-sic scholarship.

collaboration and regulated scholarship

The decision to collaborate with a circle of hip hop recording artists in composing and recording music certainly enhanced the depth and


character of what I am calling my principal research— that is, the “reg-ulated” and often discipline- bounded scholarship upon which as aca-demics we build our careers. The fruits of this work appear in various peer- reviewed and edited publications (including Harrison 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011). In this section I elaborate on three ways my schol-arly research benefi ted from such collaborations.

First, performing and recording music unquestionably raised the level of rapport and, in a very conventional sense, trust I had with vari-ous members of the community.18 This involved not only my Forest Fires Collective collaborators but other hip hop artists within the scene as well. Both my emerging identity as a recording artists and my par-ticipation freestyling at open microphone events were seen as a will-ingness to show vulnerability (see Behar 1996; Lassiter 2005) and “put myself out there” that hip hop performance artists respected. Further-more, these experiences opened avenues of discussion that enabled me to steer interviews and everyday inquiries toward more dialogic terrain covering some of the aspects of creativity and musicianship that were most important to the people among whom I conducted research (Har-rison 2009). For example, in the following interview exchange with emcee Kirby Dominant of the group Kemetic Suns, sharing my own ex-periences with recording helped stimulate a more complicated and nu-anced commentary:

kd: I think people like us, Kemetic Suns, because we’re sincere. And our shit we put out is few and far between. . . . We put our best foot for-ward every time.

akh: I feel everything you’re sayin’. I can’t say I’ve done the same in my brief career out here as an emcee but I appreciate it. . . . So is it important to you to ultimately be in full control? . . . The guys I record with, they rush things more than I would but it’s their equipment, and they know how to use it. . . . I would like to spend two days . . . make a song, listen to it, and go in and do it again after I’ve become really familiar with how I did it the fi rst time and know what I like. . . . [But] they’re like, two takes, three takes. “You got it! No mistakes. That was good. . . . Move on.”

kd: Yeah, and like I said, I’m not opposed to that cause certain cats can do that. . . . And I’ve done it too. Sometimes I hit, sometimes I miss, but . . . with puttin’ this shit out you gotta hit everytime. Cause don’t no-


body care how long it took you to make that as long as it’s dope. . . . It took us a long time to make Savage [Intelligence, the album], then with the Mammals [album], we made it, wrote everything in four days.19 But they both better be up to snuff. You see what I’m sayin’? Don’t nobody give a fuck when you last came out as long as when you do come out it’s tight.

Second, my efforts at recording generated an “integrity of experi-ence” (Kuper 2000: 215) that enriched my appreciation of several of the practical dynamics involved with music production. By this I mean that having similar experiences to the hip hop artists around me nurtured my ability to recognize and empathize with their subjective under-standings. Of course the classic articulation of this comes from Rena-to Rosaldo (1989), who found a revelatory empathy for Ilongot head-hunters’ rage following his wife’s death. My own fi eld revelations were not this profound; however, my experience creating music— involving composing, recording, and postproduction decision making— entailed signifi cant emotional, intellectual, and psychic investments, which were inextricably tied to parallel expenditures on the parts of my fellow ffc members.

In an important revision to the preoccupation in hip hop studies with models of disenfranchisement and resistance, Robin D. G. Kel-ley reminds us that hip hop’s sonic force comes from “the deep vis-ceral pleasures black youth derive from making and consuming culture [and] the stylistic and aesthetic conventions that render the form and performance more attractive than the message” (1997: 37). I can read Kelley’s words, much like I can understand hip hop producer Kegs One telling me that the song “Intake,” from the compilation cd Strictly Indee (2000), is about an emcee battling the rhythm of the beat through the delivery of his lyrics. However, the salience of both these points gets amplifi ed through the fi rsthand experience of music making. One as-pect of ffc studio sessions, on which several people have commented after hearing our music, is the level of exuberance we aspire to while the tape is running; paradoxically, the fi eld note passages from my ear-ly recording efforts dwell on my discomfort with sounding and feeling perpetually off- beat while performing my lyrics. In these two seeming-ly contradictory observations, the integrity of my music- making experi-ences serves as a vortex through which the aforementioned statements by Kelley and Kegs One get channeled. The result is a subjectively co-


herent realization materialized via the process and in the product of ffc recordings. Participatory knowledges gained through the practices of collaborative music creation are more than just aesthetically satisfy-ing and fun; their complex connotations and frequent lack of resolu-tion play an important role in furthering our epistemological modes of understanding music as a dynamic force in orchestrating social life.

Last, through collaborating in music production as a member of the ffc, I gained an acute awareness of what might crudely be called “the culture of the Cabin.” That is, an understanding of the meanings and corresponding implications surrounding the practice of making music in The Latter’s home studio apartment. Our activities in the Cabin, as a shared space of creative production, were coordinated through a sys-tem of organizing practices, acquired through the process of recording together, that manifest as collective dispositions, inclinations, and aes-thetic sensibilities rather than as consciously deliberated choices. I re-turn to this topic— enlisting Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus to make sense of it— in the “Knowledge Production in Practice” section later in this essay. For now, it should suffi ce to say that beyond simply providing a model for explaining how things were done, this concep-tion of the Cabin as having a distinct set of organizing and orientating practices became the paradigmatic foundation for an alternative mode of knowledge production to which I now turn.

collaborating in indigenous idioms

My intimate involvement with recording changed the dynamics of agency and subject- position in my— our— research in several ways. By beckoning and accepting me into their recording circle, Feller Quen-tin and the rest of our Forest Fires Collective cadre, invariably became my partners in research. Their understandings of ethnography and re-fl ections on why I had traveled to San Francisco, whether conscious or subconscious, impacted how they received me and the kinds of ethno-graphic interventions they made. Two preliminary examples are worth mentioning; coincidentally both involve video.

The fi rst occurred on an occasion when I borrowed a video camera to document the physical studio space where we recorded— somewhat like a mobile snapshot of the studio apartment. I got inspired to make the video one afternoon while waiting for Smif Carnivorous and Eddie Vic to fi nish making a beat. As I walked though the apartment video-


taping, I unexpectedly entered the recording room at precisely the mo-ment Smif decided the beat (for what eventually became the song “mc Tree”) was fi nished and he was ready to record his verse.20 He literally had the studio headphones on and was speaking into the microphone doing his “mic checks” when the following exchange, recorded on vid-eo, took place:

akh: I don’t want to . . . We don’t need to [video]tape- record this session.

sc: Why not?akh: If you want to?sc (addressing the camera): All you folks in Syracuse. I was born in

Syracuse. I was born in Syracuse.

From there he proceeded to record his verse.Erica Brady (1999) discusses the dual nature of recording

technologies— in her case focusing on early ethnographic uses of the phonograph— in allowing for precise documentation yet simultane-ously spotlighting the data- accumulation- based, mercenary aspects of the ethnographic project. At this point in my ffc collaborations, I was very aware of the video camera’s role in magnifying the researcher- subject dichotomy. Although I was comfortable video recording the in-animate studio space, I was reluctant to introduce the camera into the more sacred context of studio performance. Through the introduction of a video recording device, social actors subconsciously, and in some cases quite self- consciously, impose caricatures of themselves onto their social, or in this example musical, performances (also see later discussion). Documenting a caricature of the character Smif Carnivo-rous was neither a research priority nor a strategy for making sincere music, as far as I was concerned. Yet choosing a scholar- practitioner mode of ethnographic inquiry meant any activities that foregrounded my researcher- identity would risk doing exactly that.

The second intervention comes from a video that was given to me by Prego w/Zest of our fi rst show performing together. Prego was one of several people who passed along videotapes to me knowing that I would have both a personal and research interest in them. In this video, prior to the actual performance, Prego is walking around holding the camera asking various emcees and producers— both ffc members and others who came out to support us— about such things as beat mak-


ing practices, the cars they drive, sexual preferences, and drug use. Throughout this he is jokingly, yet unmistakably, playing up the power of surveillance that comes with being the guy holding the camera. At one point, when an emcee calls him out on asking too many potentially compromising questions— “this ain’t the National Inquirer, nigga”— he refers to himself as the “Ghetto Source” (magazine).21 Even more perti-nent than these preshow shenanigans, the fi nal minutes of the tape feature various scenes and snippets from a house party that took place the following week in the Cabin. On the last two minutes of the tape are a series of edited clips taken of me at the party. Seven months into research, I was clearly settled in my role as an emcee performing (i.e., talking about emcee stuff ) for the video camera. As an imposed cari-cature of myself, I was already “hyping” the impending ffc album, and Prego, in typical Ghetto Source fashion, was prompting me with questions.

ms: That’s the Forest Fires Collective, album dropping . . . probably, early 2001.

pz: We’ve gotta wait that long?ms: Yeah, I mean, we’ve only got a couple months left in 2000. A

month and a half. . . . We still need to record a lot of songs. We [only] have about three or four done.

Seconds later on the video, I am explaining my history of rhyme writing and the concept of Mad Squirrel to an Amoeba co- worker’s girlfriend. Although this occurred in the context of a conversation (admittedly I was doing most of the talking), it was clearly cut and edited as a Mad Squirrel interview and presented as the closing scene in the video.

In referencing what they call “interview society,” Andrea Fontana and James H. Frey explain that interviews have become institutional-ized to the point where they “no longer require extensive training; rules and roles are known and shared” (2000: 647). I contend that interview-ing is particularly ubiquitous within home videos of aspiring entertain-ers or those captivated by the entertainment lifestyle. Fontana and Frey posit that interviews should be understood as “active interactions be-tween two (or more) people leading to negotiated, contextually based results” (2000: 646). As was the case with Mad Squirrel’s Ghetto Source interview, in the context of videotaping aspirant musicians, the gaze of the camera ushers performed identities to the fore. With our shared


understanding of what an interview with a hip hop artist looks like— cultivated through years of watching Rap City and Yo! MTV Raps— Prego and I willingly played our parts.

Both these examples demonstrate indigenous agency within the anthropological enterprise. They stand as illustrations of subjects’ ca-pacities to redirect and reframe aspects of the ethnographic project by, in the fi rst instance, gazing back and hailing a particular (university) audience, and, in the second, positioning the researcher as a perform-ing subject in a medium that overlaps both the qualitative research and hip hop fi elds. Still, far and away the most comprehensive intervention, which recast all our research roles and had signifi cant epistemologi-cal implications, surrounded the co- creation of music. Through the collaborative practices of composing and recording, which involved both moving through and settling into the liminal space between eth-nography and art, the other ffc members pushed me to recognize, and indeed forced me to experience, new ways of understanding hip hop’s socio- sonic force. This transformation was not immediate. It involved a gradual acquisition of ways of knowing, which resulted from being both immersed and invested in the creative process.

From my very fi rst minutes recording in the Cabin, I was acute-ly aware that my voice and subjectivity were being appropriated into a project for which I was not the sole author. During the process of checking my microphone levels, unbeknownst to me (although if I had bothered to look I probably would have realized it), the recording but-ton was on. In fact, when I completed the fi rst “practice” run though my verse and sheepishly asked, “How did that sound?” Dr. Lester im-mediately shouted out, “Don’t erase that!” in specifi c reference to the recording of my tentative question. To a self- conscious, fi rst- time re-cording artist, performing in a room full of people who suddenly felt like relative strangers, this was all very unsettling (see note 13 to this essay). When I fi nished my recording of the one- minute song, Feller thought I should do it again, trying to sound “more alive”; Eddie Vic kept looking at his watch and making jokes about doing twenty takes; Prego sat quietly in the other room waiting for his turn to record; and Dr. Lester began counseling me on his understanding of the psycho-logical evolution of Mad Squirrel from the emcee he had seen free-styling at an open microphone to the guy now struggling to record a sixteen- bar verse.


Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright (2010) have written per-ceptively about the “ensemble of heterogenous discourses” that art (including music) and anthropology have in common— among these they list appropriation, materiality, and texture. To an uninitiated or inattentive listener, the voice on a hip hop song may sound natural in much the same way that the content of interviews are received as neu-tral and accurate refl ections of reality (Fontana and Frey 2000).22 How-ever, recording studio vocals are profoundly synthetic products manu-factured in sophisticated and highly technical environments: voices are captured; typically fortifi ed— through such things as overdubs, equal-ization, compression, and reverb; embedded within musical sound-scapes; and on occasion repeated and remixed. Early in my recording experience, I was very attentive to studio relations of power. Some of this attention was a byproduct of having to trust those who controlled the means of production to represent me as both an emcee and a PhD candidate— a vulnerability that came with the decision to record.

One key difference between ethnography, as conventionally done, and arts- based research is that whereas the former seeks to obtain in-formation that gets re- coded, re- framed, and represented in books and journal articles, the latter aspires to generate knowledge through practice (Leavy 2009; Schneider and Wright 2010). This distinction be-tween product and process or information as object versus realization as practice became an epistemological axle around which my experiences in the studio revolved. What began as my view of the studio as a locus of power (r)evolved into my experiencing the studio as a site of revelato-ry performance. Through this experiential understanding emerged my (re- )vision of what I describe in the next section as the Cabin habitus.23 In this process my partnerships with other ffc members became both musical and epistemic. By directly experiencing collaborative music making, their/our way of doing things impacted my way of seeing and hearing things.

It is important to recognize that Feller Quentin and Eddie Vic were generating their own cultural criticisms of structures and experiences of racial identifi cation prior to my arrival in the Bay. The fi rst Latter song I ever heard, which introduced the cd- r that Feller handed me at the start of my second week working at Amoeba, was called “Ivorics”— signaling a white counterpoint to the then recently popularized term Ebonics.24 The songs opening lyrics are:


Ivorics is euphoric: euphemisms for unexplained complexities passed

out with artifi cial smiles, head nods, and affectations; ineffectual ex-

planations falling short of their intentions; frustrated exclamations at

the risk of sounding curt; dismissed cases from court; diminishing

facial expressions on the victims faces, fi nishing statements to getting

positive fi rst impressions and lasting last questions. (The Latter 2000)

My aim here is not to unpack the meaning of these lyrics but rather to present them as illustrations of the intellectual projects already under way and into which I was recruited, projects having powerful reso-nance with my own research goals.

Rappaport contends that a proper collaborative agenda for anthro-pology should include “entering into dialogue with methodologies already chosen by the community” (2008: 9). She joins Cook in chal-lenging anthropologists to “circumvent traditional notions of ‘pure’ anthropological research” (Cook 2009: 112) and produce “genres that are of greater utility to the communities being studied” (Rappaport 2008: 4). Both the practices and products of my collaborative efforts with the ffc represent ways in which collaborative ethnographers of popular music can respond to these calls. As my experiences illustrate, these iterative processes of meaning making and discovery and the cul-turally critical musical texts that come out of them can be as much acts of indigenous appropriation of research as an effort on the part of the researcher to lobby for a more participatory role.

knowledge production in practice

As a means to thinking through several key aspects of what I previously referred to as the “culture” of Cabin recording, I turn to Bourdieu’s no-tion of habitus, which he explains as a “generative principle of regulated improvisations” (1977: 78), and which through the production of prac-tices “makes possible the achievement of infi nitely diversifi ed tasks” (1977: 83). Loïc Wacquant expands on this by describing habitus as a “dispositional theory of action,” which recognizes that “social agents are not passive beings pulled and pushed about by external forces, but skilled creatures who actively construct social reality through ‘catego-ries of perception, appreciation and action’” (2011: 85). As a conceptu-al device, habitus works to bridge the divide between systematic struc-ture and individual actions, mental and corporeal dispositions, analytic


comprehensions and sensorial infatuations as well as instilled capabili-

ties and intuitive inclinations. My ethnographic journey involved acquir-

ing the outlooks and sensibilities that would enable me to negotiate the

various tasks surrounding composing and performing and recording

hip hop songs within particular social, technical, and temporal con-

texts. Signifi cant here is the domesticity of home recording studios as

spaces that are: (a) less bureaucratic; (b) less governed by service econo-

mies of hourly rates and consultant fees; and (c) more idiosyncratic to

the lived experiences of those who reside in them (and have the requi-

site mastery of the technologies of production) and their relationships

with those who “come through” to record. Within this network of rela-

tions and less formal ways of doing things, a particular modus operan-

di rooted in techniques and attitudes of the body (Mauss [1934] 1973)

prevails. Although Bourdieu’s concept suggests a level of durability, the

home studio habitus can be both fragile and temporal— for example, a

typical rupture might involve a new housemate or neighbor who is par-

ticularly disinclined to the established habits of recording.

In outlining some of the specifi c dispositional characteristics of

Cabin recording, I also utilize sociologist Ralph Turner’s (1976) classic

distinction between institutional and impulsive orientations of self. Turn-

er’s framework is especially helpful in refl ecting on the ways in which

my academic predilections and identity were mediated via the process

of recording. Turner presents institutions and impulses as alternative “an-

chors” of the self (1976: 991) which have both moral implications re-

garding true self- realization and political implications for social order

and control. Rather than a strict classifying schema, his model provides

a basis for beginning to plot the complexities of self- perceived behav-

iors and tendencies. Indeed, Turner explains his two types as “merely a

way to start thinking about variation in the sense of self,” adding that

“elements of both anchorages probably coexist comfortably in the av-

erage person” (1976: 997). Still, in giving some shape and texture to his

model, I highlight Turner’s characterization of:

The institutional locus of self as goal oriented, “adher[ing] to a high standard” (992), driven by “acts of volition” (991), “in full control of . . . faculties and behaviors” (993), and understanding the true self as “something attained, created, [or] achieved” (992).


The impulsive locus of self as spontaneous, focused on the here and now, understanding the true self as “something to be discovered” (992), which is “revealed only when inhibitions are lowered or aban-doned” (993).

Through this stark dichotomy, the tensions between the academic and musician— the Pinocchiotic dilemma— are seemingly cast in op-posing camps. Yet one of the pillars of all academic inquiry is discov-ery, and, especially within the ethnographic mode of inquiry, there are strong currents steering the researcher toward being less prescriptive and embracing the serendipitous stream of experiences that accompa-ny this mode of exploring social life. Furthermore, the characteristics of a strong institutional anchoring are common throughout the art and music worlds.25 In highlighting crucial differences between the two loci, Turner focuses specifi cally on qualities of performance:

The polished, error- free performance . . . is the most admirable by

institutionals. Whatever the task, perfection is both the goal and the

means by which the real self fi nds expression. But impulsives fi nd

technical perfection repelling and admire instead a performance that

reveals . . . human frailties. (1976: 994)

This distinction is instructive in understanding dynamics surround-ing the Cabin habitus and my practical and at times frustrating acquisi-tion of it. In the realm of performance, which would include an emcee recording a verse in the studio, the principle question contained within Turner’s distinction is whether performances are better when “perfect-ed” through extensive practice or if overfamiliarity compromises the vital force of spontaneity. It is a question that motivated my exchange with Kirby Dominant (already quoted) regarding putting one’s best foot forward every time. At an earlier point in that interview, Kirby ex-plained, “I’m almost anal . . . I will do a song and I’ll turn all the music off and listen to the a cappella and make sure every word is clear. If it’s not, I’ll do the whole thing over.”

My personal and academic inclinations toward perfectionism cou-pled with my fi xation on how I was (musically) being represented made for a trying acclimation into a recording environment where my co- collaborators tended to privilege spontaneity, improvisation, intuitive action, and process over product. There was a defi nite experimental-ism surrounding the practices of Cabin performance, without which,


quite frankly, the ffc project probably would not have even made it in the front door. This manifested through embracing a fl y- by- the- seat- of- the- pants immediacy of the moment, which in turn inspired impro-visational acts aimed at creating an atmosphere of intensity and perfor-mative weightiness.

The entire fi rst Forest Fires Collective (self- titled) cd documents my struggles transitioning from a goal- oriented approach to recording into an arts- based process orientation. One byproduct of this transition was an understanding of recorded music that is foremost about the re-cording sessions and only secondarily about the specifi c albums on which that music gets released. The music for the fi rst ffc album was recorded in fi ts and starts spanning just over six months, which for me marked my gradual habituation into the practices of recording in the Cabin. This was also a period of transmitting— through a “silent peda-gogy” (Wacquant 2011: 85) of performance— the epistemological im-peratives that were fundamental to practice- based understandings of knowledge generation. All the recordings on the fi rst album took place prior to my temporarily leaving San Francisco to assistant- manage a thirty- fi ve- day, twenty- seven- city national hip hop tour.26 Alternatively, most of the songs on the second ffc cd were recorded during what I see as a single recording period spanning the fi ve weeks between my returning from the tour and fi rst leaving the Bay as a site of long- term fi eld research.

When I returned from the tour and learned that the collection of songs we had recorded had been sent away— fully mastered with cov-er art— to a cd manufacturing house, I was genuinely surprised. De-spite my Ghetto Source interview hype about an impending album (earlier quoted), I did not sincerely believe that in my absence, Feller Quentin and Eddie Vic would go through with investing in their fi rst profession-ally manufactured release.27 Feller had burned a few cd- r copies of our “collection of songs” to pass out on tour, but professional manufactur-ing had never been discussed.28 Remarkably, it was the materialization of a professionally manufactured product— or the collective endorse-ment of our creative activities it symbolized— that solidifi ed my accep-tance of an arts- based approach. A few months earlier, three- fourths of the way through recording the songs for the album, I was still writing in my fi eld notes about how “Feller Quentin and I are not in sync,” how


“our visions of hip hop differ so drastically,” and about the power dy-namics of the studio:

So when I explained to [Feller that I didn’t want to alternate lyrics on

the song] . . . his response was “well, I don’t want to produce it then.”

Words to which I really have no response since it is all his (or more

accurately Eddie Vic’s) equipment. I really have no leverage in this

collective except as a rhymer. . . . What could I say?

Diane Wolf makes an important distinction between “the power plays during the microprocesses of interpersonal dynamics, which may render a researcher quite helpless” (1996: 22) and the broader position-al power relations that characterize the ethnographic project. Strictly in terms of my ability to conduct discipline- regulated research, my record-ing frustrations were just that. They in no way jeopardized my ability to carry out conventional ethnographic inquiries and could in fact be seen as instances of experiential learning about the issues of power on which I was initially focused. However, with regard to my intersubjective in-vestment in the co- creation of indigenous idioms and my nascent rec-ognition of the epistemological signifi cance of this experience (Kondo 1986), these frustrations were formidable speed bumps to (co- )negoti-ate along my journey to a practical realization of the Cabin habitus.

Anthropology’s historic emphasis on relational context has oc-curred at the expense of attention to artistic and poetic forms. As such, standard ethnographic methods and measures are often too static to capture or comprehend the generative capacities of music. Yet truly collaborative popular music ethnographies, of the caliber in which re-searchers join musicians in the process and co- production of musical texts, enable subjects to lead researchers in animating new, creative directions in music- based scholarship, which, I argue, are appropriate responses to changing methodological and epistemological needs.29

The changing nature of both the traditional ethnographic “fi eld” (Caputo 2000) and everyday life— including recording media, comput-ers, and ubiquitous telecommunications— have signifi cantly altered the way ethnographies can and should be carried out (Wilk 2011). With the shifting landscape of popular music and the mixing and overlaying of aspects of music, academia, and life (Petchauer 2012), new innova-tions are necessary to keep popular music ethnographies in step with the critical and collaborative movements in both anthropology and


the arts. Where music practices meet the methodologies of ethnogra-phy, powerful new paradigms that disrupt the traditional researcher- subject relationship and move meaning- making processes to the fore can emerge (Leavy 2009). What is involved here is a radical redefi nition of ethnographic intersubjectivity, where traditional roles of participant- observers get transformed to observant participators (Wacquant 2011), only to be remixed to the point where music- based ethnographers might be collaboratively re- created as members of the communities they research.30 In the ffc example, this occurred via my adopting the practices, paradigms, and idioms for moving through and making sense of that world.

Trusting Deception

Collaborative ethnography’s coming of age trumpets the good news of a post- postmodern, postrefl exive moment in anthropology that seeks moral and ethical resolutions to the problematic politics of classic ethnographic engagements. Yet ethnographers should be wary that a spontaneous endorsement of collaboration as the virtuous culmina-tion of (1) dialogic principles, (2) refl exivity, (3) attention to power rela-tions and the constructed nature of ethnographic accounts, and above all else (4) trust, overlooks trust’s “ever present” fi eldwork counter-part, deception (Daniels 1983: 196). Noteworthy is that deception too often remains hidden beneath the veneer of interpersonal and political alignments (i.e., feminism, critical ethnography, participatory action research, and collaboration). Mary C. Waters advocates for a “frank discussions of the reality of the research experience”— which would include both trust and deception— as an important correction to the more common “sanitized discussions of ‘research methods’” (2001: 347). The story of my Forest Fires Collective collaborations illuminates a much more complicated picture of deception than simply the dark side of trust. Within an ethnographic project founded on the practice of intense performitivity, is it possible for deception to act in produc-tive tension with trust? And for this tension to channel the process of intersubjective creativity toward common aesthetic goals, which in turn would foster rather than jeopardize long- term engagement?

In standard ethnographic literature (including methodological treat-ments), issues of deception and trust have been carefully managed.


Both have their places in discussions of research ethics. It is generally considered unethical to deceive members of the community in which one is conducting research unless peculiar circumstances (surround-ing their morality and the greater benefi t of your research) warrant it. Trust, which is often referenced as something to be achieved, is typical-ly treated as a natural outgrowth of the dialogues engendered through spending time within a community. Lassiter explains that “fi eldwork dialogues generate commitments to particular friends, particular per-spectives, and thus . . . deepen commitment, friendship, and mutual moral responsibility” (2005: 11, 12). The idea that deception may in fact be a natural outgrowth of fi eld relations is less commonly highlighted.

Some of the most robust considerations of ethnographic deception come from the fi eld of feminist ethnography, where scholars like Ju-dith Stacey (1988) and Wolf (1996) have refl ected on contradictions be-tween the egalitarian research principles and asymmetrical power re-lations intrinsic to their methodologies. The bases of such deceptions are often rooted in “misunderstandings and confusion” surrounding the ethnographer’s role as researcher or friend (Huisman 2008: 386). Willfully or not, such ambiguity is frequently cultivated by researchers who present a “friendly façade” (Huisman 2008; Wolf 1996), particu-larly as a nonmaterial gratuity for those who “smooth [the] pathway to the data” (Daniels 1983: 201). Whereas the question of how involved one should get may remain thorny, collaborative ethnography takes the defi nitive position that more is better. Yet the virtues of ethnographic closeness can be questioned, for example, by asking researchers to consider what activities they undertake that members of the commu-nity they study do not. Two obvious answers are writing fi eld notes (Huisman 2008; Wilk 2011) and leaving the fi eld. Stacey argues that “no matter how welcome, even enjoyable the fi eldworker’s presence may appear to ‘natives,’ fi eldwork represents an intrusion and inter-vention into a system of relationships . . . that the researcher is far freer to leave” (1988: 23). Pamela Cotterill (1992) adds that “close friends do not usually arrive with a tape- recorder, listen carefully and sympatheti-cally to what you have to say and then disappear” (quoted in Huisman 2008: 387).

Most ethnographic projects reach a defi nitive endpoint after which the amount of time spent together and (if fortunate) the bonding mo-mentum of working toward a common goal subsides. At these border


zones of research and life— the point where the research subject asks, “Does this mean that you are not going to come visit me anymore?” (Huisman 2008: 388)— the relationship (and even dependencies) de-veloped through collaboration can render the “breakup” especially painful for those who do not see themselves as having agency in the transition. Even when there are prior understandings of the temporal-ity of a project, the intimacies and investments created through collab-oration can generate confusions or deceptions (depending on which side of this interpretive or ethical divide one occupies). Dorinne Kondo reminds us that ethnographic “distance is not fi xed” but rather “con-stitutive of the fi eldwork experience” (1986: 84). It inevitably changes, and as it does, so too do the perceptions, understandings, dreams, and investments of those involved.

The most signifi cant of these border- zone moments for me did not take place when I left San Francisco to return to Syracuse to write my dissertation but rather during one of my fi rst return visits, in which we recorded music and I told my ffc collaborators the “good news” about an academic job opportunity. One evening, while we were standing around the kitchen between recording sessions, Feller confronted me about my decision to remain on the path to school:31

“Now I see this was all a game to you,” he declared in an accusatory

tone. “This [making music] is what I do. I thought you were going

to go back to Syracuse, get your degree, and come back here and we

were going to make music together. What are you doing [taking an

academic job]?”

My close relationship with Feller and keen understanding of the in-terpersonal “power plays” (Wolf 1996) he often made lead me to wonder whether this was a sincere statement of betrayed trust or a manipulative performance intended to shame me for following through with what we both understood to be my foreseeable future? Feller was known for play-ing such power games, and perhaps quite notably, he was not unaccus-tomed to using momentary and frequently manufactured antagonisms to induce spirited studio performances. In this regard, confrontation and deception were prominent aspects of his music- making mode. Rec-ognizing Kondo’s observation that “ethnographic knowledge is intrin-sically incomplete” (1986: 84), I can accept that I may never have a de-fi nitive answer to the question of Feller’s intentions. Yet an arts- based


research orientation encourages me to privilege the process— in this case Feller’s speech act– over any defi nitive resolution.32

The kitchen incident was intense enough for Eddie Vic, who was also there, to pull me aside and explain that he was “okay” with my de-cision since he had his own doubts about how long he would be liv-ing in San Francisco making music. Such conversations about commit-ments and allegiances to music are not at all rare within the context of a band. Typically commitments to music are juxtaposed to employ-ment choices, romantic relationships, starting a family, or places of residence— to the extent that all I had done was chosen to take a job in another state, there was nothing particularly remarkable about this. However, in the context of the ethnographic exchange, which fore-grounds the gaining of trust and masks the potential for deception, there is something more, something different at stake.

Good contemporary ethnography aspires to be historically in-formed, critically cognizant (of power dynamics between researchers and researched), and unfailingly adaptable as a means to addressing its inherent shortcomings (see Harrison, forthcoming). The current rec-ognition of collaboration— described by Bob W. White as an attempted “ethical solution to a series of political problems” (2012: 83)— can be looked at as a recent development in this ongoing process. As such, collaborative ethnographers should never grow too comfortable in their alliances and cannot afford to dismiss peremptorily charges of wrongdoing— even dubious ones coming from the likes of Smif Car-nivorous. They must perpetually do the homework (Williams 1996) of considering historical and circumstantial implications of their power (as well as that which is imposed on them).

In rereading our e- mail correspondences from the months be-tween my leaving the “fi eld” and my fi rst trip back to San Francisco, I am struck by the intentional emphasis Feller gave to my returning— something to which, in my own struggles to complete a dissertation and navigate being a broke college student, I don’t think I gave proper attention:

“we did a show last night . . . it wasn’t that good a show but that’s

why we need you to come back here so we can really do this shit.

That’s all I’ll say about it for now.”33

“I’m eagerly anticipating your arrival, this could be historical in

scope.”34


Feller also sent me over thirty instrumental tracks (“beats”) to write rhymes to— all of which were emphatically layered with fi fes and big drums.

Marsha Giselle Henry (2003) challenges ethnographers to conceive of research participants as agents and the fi eld as a site of complex power relations, which allow for participants’ capacities to transform research projects. As with all ethnographic relationships, roles and understandings are never settled but continuously in the unfi nished process of taking shape. The unique challenges posed by collabora-tive ethnographic partnerships are, of course, situation- dependent and contingent on, among other things, the specifi c values, characteris-tics, and pathways into and out of collaboration for both researchers and research subjects. In the end, I am reluctant to settle on a version of the Forest Fires Collective story that has me, the researcher, deceiv-ing Feller, the research subject. Nor am I comfortable reading any of our collaborations, and particularly the kitchen incident, as simply an example of “informants assert[ing] their power . . . [and] seeking to dominate the anthropological encounter” (Kondo 1986: 80).

Since that night in the kitchen, Feller and I have collaborated in eleven recording sessions— each involving somewhere between three and twenty- two songs— over an eleven- year period. Within two years of that night, Eddie Vic had left San Francisco and moved: fi rst to the East Coast, and then to Lesotho; he has since returned to the Washington dc area. Prego continues to “come through” and record with us during my time in San Francisco, although less often since moving to the East Bay; and several other emcees and musicians have been incorporated into what we still understand as Forest Fires Collective musical projects (Harrison 2011).35

To what extent have my return trips to the Bay Area been face- saving “duty visits” motivated by a need to quell a past manipulation of a re-search subject or friend (see Daniels 1983: 212)? My continued collabo-rations in music making with Feller signify that something much more meaningful is taking place; yet I cannot completely discount the possi-bility that the kitchen incident contributed to clearing the path toward this future. In light of the complexities brought out by this example, we might join Cook (2009) in questioning if true collaboration— in Lassiter’s (2005) sense of a deliberate, explicit, and sustained ethno-graphic project— is achievable. Yet we might equally appreciate the cir-


cuitous paths through which less deliberate and less explicit examples of sustained collaboration occur. To paraphrase Clifford (1986b), these always contingent partnerships might be better thought of as “partial collaborations”— governed by unfi nished questions regarding who so-licited whom and who deceived whom.

Coda

In summer 2012, during a return trip to San Francisco, I gave Feller a draft of this article— the current version has been only slightly revised. His fi rst comment, after reading it, was that he did not even remember the kitchen incident. He ultimately concluded that he must have been “fucking” (i.e., playing) with me that night in the kitchen. It has since dawned on me that this notion of “fucking with someone” ambiguous-ly encompasses both deceiving them and confronting them on a sel-dom spoken truth. Such a revelation provides a fresh perspective on (if not a satisfactory resolution to) our Pinocchiotic partnership. Whereas Feller’s encouraging me to play music with him opened up new ethno-graphic and epistemic pathways, it is perhaps apt that his mere play-ing with me taught me an important lesson regarding changing ways of retrospectively and prospectively understanding the nature of ethno-graphic collaborations. Let us keep playing.

anthony kwame harrison holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Syra-cuse University. He is an associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Virginia Tech and author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethnics of Racial Identifi cation (Temple University Press, 2009). Kwame has published widely in the areas of popular music, race, and ethnography. He is also a recording artist who has released multiple cds with the San Francisco– based Forest Fires Collective and Washington dc– based Candlewax Records.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Amber R. Clifford- Napoleone for her insightful com-ments and support as well as for providing the opportunity to write this piece. Thanks to Tim Cohen for the perceptive questions that accom-panied his endorsement of this work. Thank you also to Mike Hughes, Ali Colleen Neff, Justin D. Burton, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. Sections of this paper were originally pre-


sented at the 2011 American Anthropological Association Meeting in Montreal, Canada.

Notes

1. Collodi’s original story, completed in 1883, is quite different from Walt Disney’s popular 1940 fi lm adaptation.

2. Citing the work of Roberto Ferretti, Nancy Canepa estimates fi ve hundred refer-ences in the text to animals, “ranging from fi gures of speech to cooked food to actual characters” (2006: 87).

3. I credit this notion of scholar- practitioner to Joe Schloss and Ali Colleen Neff— especially the “Toward a Culture- Emergent Hip Hop Studies” roundtable in which we participated at the 2012 emp Pop– International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch, joint conference in New York City.

4. Collodi originally published Pinocchio as a series of episodes in a Rome newspaper under the title La Storia di un Burattino (Story of a Puppet).

5. I cannot entirely explain the impetus for this declaration, but I do recall it having something to do with the hip hop– dancehall rapper Mad Lion, who had a popular song at the time.

6. In truth, squirrels reside both in the wilds and in the borderland between wild(er)ness and civilization, commonly living in close proximity to humans and inhabiting both town squares and city parks.

7. This signifi es the hip hop dictate to “keep it real” and, conveniently, rural is one of the few words that rhymes with squirrel.

8. In other words, through the Mad Squirrel identity, I could leverage the idea that rhyming about a forest ‘hood (Forman 2002) of anthropomorphized animals— which was in line with my own personal background— was also consistent with foundational aspects of hip hop orality. I took this charge quite seriously. For instance, in line with animal story traditions (Finnegan 1970), shortly after beginning to write rhymes I com-piled a list of potential animal characters and their various human attributes, including: my friends the Bear and the Crows, my highly irritable neighbors the Bees, and my nem-esis the Woodpecker— who “never let me sleep in on my weekend.”

9. Throughout this essay I distinguish between cds— compact discs— and cd- rs. The second refers to recordable compact discs that are manufactured— or “burned”— on personal computers. cd- rs, which are rarely manufactured in quantities greater than a few hundred and frequently hand- labeled using magic marker, are notably differ-ent from professionally manufactured cds.

10. An extended play single— shorter than an album (or lp)— typically featuring about fi ve songs.

11. Through much of this article I use the term research subjects. I do this with full awareness of the recent shifts in terminology, including participants, interlocutors, collabo-rators, and co- intellectuals. Part of my reasoning is to continue to draw attention to the classic distinction— between researchers and subjects— that the collaborative enterprise aims to undermine. Indeed, this distinction and the ways in which it both dissolved and endures are important to my story.

12. A recent essay in Collaborative Anthropologies by Bob W. White (2012) resoundingly argues this point.


13. Despite receiving personal invitations from Eddie Vic to record with them, I was acutely aware of his expressed aspirations to work with “well- known emcees.” He also, following my fi rst ever attempt to record a song (described later in this article), ex-plained to Feller and me, in a tone that sounded like exasperation, that the ffc was our project, implying it was not his.

14. Cook (2009) disagrees, contending that in practice these approaches are more challenging and complex than such defi nitions indicate.

15. Feller has never explained to me exactly how he came up with the name; the most he shared was that he liked the metaphor of burning trees.

16. Critiquing studio performances during the recording process is another matter (see later discussion).

17. It also helped me to accept more easily the chauvinist and blatantly offensive lyr-ics of some of the other members of the group (i.e., they weren’t telling me I couldn’t rap about throwing acorns from tree branches).

18. In the fi nal section I complicate this straightforward conception of ethnographic trust through a discussion of its complimentary diametric: deception.

19. Although Kirby’s elaborations provided a more complex picture than his initial ‘shit- we- put- out- is- few- and- far- between’ statement, I should clarify that the “four- day” Mammals album was not a Kemetic Suns project.

20. Such spontaneity was not unusual; in the Cabin it was more of a practice of habit.21. Self- dubbed as the magazine of hip hop music, culture, and politics, the Source

has historically been regarded as the premiere music publication among hip hop enthusiasts.

22. There are also countless examples of recorded voices sounding obviously artifi cial.

23. This is not to discount the presence or implications of power but rather to high-light how both the performance and content of hip hop music and ethnography are “in-extricably bound and enmeshed within shifting relations of power” (Leavy 2009: 8).

24. In reference to African American vernacular English.25. For example, in The Mansion on the Hill, Fred Goodman recounts a story of Bruce

Springsteen auditioning seventeen different mixes of the song “The River”: “Now which one is better?” he asked Columbia A&R man Pete Philbin (Goodman 1997: 333).

26. Sponsored by the (now defunct) label Nu Gruv Alliance, the “Ground Control All-stars” tour featured Aceyalone, Rasco, Ed O. G., and the Masterminds.

27. This included pooling their money to pay for manufacturing costs, to which I willingly contributed after learning about it.

28. He may have given me a dozen copies, of which I passed out less than half— mainly thinking it was too amateurish an effort to be handing out to any serious hip hop enthusiast. To my surprise, by the time I got back to San Francisco, someone to whom I had given a cd- r to in Rhode Island had already e- mailed Feller about how much he liked it.

29. I cite this defi nition as the music- based equivalent to Lassiter’s statement that “truly collaborative ethnography . . . [is] where researchers and interlocutors collabo-rate in the actual production of ethnographic texts” (Lassiter 2005: xi).

30. Schloss (2009) is an excellent example of this.31. Note that in my reconstruction of this event, Feller’s words are not a direct quote

but rather a close approximation based on memory.32. For a discussion of speech act theory and agency in language see Duranti (2004).


33. E- mail correspondence, October 8, 2001.34. E- mail correspondence, January 5, 2002.35. As his career as an experimental rock artist has taken off, Feller has had an ever

smaller window of time and energy to dedicate to these projects.

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Reconciling Geppetto: Collaboration, (Re-)Creation, and Deception in the Practice of Hip Hop Music...

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