 Hip hop culture is important to me and is part of the story of New Orleans music, but its documentation is up to every individual to prevent archival gaps in the story. Early hip hop culture, both in New York and in New Orleans, first exists organically in neighborhoods and parties with young people. This is not something that just pops up on records to be distributed, commercially sold immediately. The whole culture of hip hop in New York lasted for several years, about five, six years before there was ever anything recorded in a studio for a commercial sale to the public. This was done with MCs rapping to a live band playing in the studio doing interpolations or covers of popular R&B funk and disco hits. One of the main examples of that is Rapper's Delight by the Sugar Hill gang in 1979, which is the first commercially successful rap record released in conjunction with hip hop culture. The first one released in conjunction with hip hop culture was actually released two months before and it was by an R&B band called Fatback. The song was called Kings in the Third, Personality Jock in 1979, but their record label didn't do anything with it. They thought it was weird because this is a new thing. What is this? And two months later, the Independence Sugar Hill record label led by Sylvia Robinson and her husband, Joe Robinson. They capture this scene on a bottle, but they did not capture the DJ because it was new. How are they gonna compete with other songs being played at disco techs? You can't capture a DJ live on a record, so obviously they would have a band to play and recreate what a DJ would have been doing. And in this case, in the case of Rapper's Delight from the Sugar Hill gang, it was a house band, the Sugar Hill Records house band doing an interpolation of Sheik's Good Times, another 1979 hit. The earliest rap records that come out in New Orleans in the early to mid-1980s are the same thing. There are MCs with more novelty style of rhymes, a rapping over a track laid down by a live band in a studio. One example of this in New York, you had Curtis Blow with Christmas Wrapping that comes out in 1979. Here in New Orleans in the mid-1980s, there is a rap 12-inch single by a group called Parley, P-A-R-L-E-Z. And the name of that song is Make It Shake It, Do It Good, Mardi Gras and Your Neighborhood. So this culture was not yet viewed as being legitimate. It almost was viewed by outsiders outside of the culture as being a novelty, a fad. This isn't gonna last, this is good for holiday records, for cute records, you know, comedy or something like that. Bounce music is New Orleans' indigenous contribution to New Orleans culture, meaning it didn't just replicate what was being done in other parts of the country and New York specifically, it meshed what was happening in the New Orleans community. Really what happens is in the early 90s, bounce emerges in spaces for young people, similar to what happened in New York in the early and mid-1970s. This eventually becomes recorded and then it reaches local radio and it becomes a sensation with young people. That's the thing to remember is that hip hop culture is the culture of young people. That's how it started, that's how it is. Everyone can enjoy it, but it's always going to be young people moving the culture, right? Young people drive that, that wasn't always the case. Rap music in conjunction with hip hop culture, again, was originally looked at as a fad as something that wasn't legitimate, something that wouldn't last that only a few years, five or six years, many R&B artists and record label executives looked down on it, laughed at it, some of them embraced it, but most people thought it was very strange, but young people did not stop and they're the ones who pushed the culture. When we speak about the hip hop culture origins in the New York City boroughs in the 1970s, you have to have discussions of the young black and brown people and neighborhoods, the places it thrived, whether park jams or club parties and showcases, DJ technology, art, dance and more, all culture. This is similar to the trajectory of rap music and more broadly speaking hip hop culture in New Orleans and any music culture in New Orleans because music is one factor, a cause factor or an effect factor, but it's never solely about music, it's about place, time and people, that's where the culture comes in. There are elements that pull from characteristics of music making that comes from people of Africa and the Caribbean people, enslaved people that were in New Orleans and Congo Square during the period of enslavement and they brought their culture and characteristics with them and part of that is a sense of music not solely existing for performance purpose. The audience gets in to the act and we call that call and response. So those are two things that are similar in how black masking Indians will chant with call and response, how bounce emcees will use call and response in audience participation. In my position, I oversee the development responsible stewardship and accessibility of archival collections, primary source items, things like photographs, memorabilia and business and personal papers. These tell stories that reflect communities and people. Hip hop culture is important to me and is part of the story of New Orleans music but its documentation is up to every individual to prevent archival gaps in the story. The narrative happens but the memory work of that narrative is only as good as what we leave behind for others.