Scratching The Surface: Hip Hop, Remoteness, and Everyday Life

Abstract

Scratching The Surface: Hip Hop, Remoteness, and Everyday Life presents the evolution of hip hop through 28 particular and detailed memories drawn from the encounters of a young, rural teenager growing up in Devon, in the south-west corner of the UK. The book is divided into four parts, and situated between 1983 and 1986, explores the emotional growth, contextual questioning, and at times, naïve journey of the protagonist as he reflects on such miniscule details as the price tags on record sleeves, the LED display on cassette players, and the zips on tracksuit tops. The author of Provincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism returns with a quirky, contextual non-fiction novel with extensive endnotes, which explores some of the less canonical hip hop artefacts of the 1980s and expresses the innocence and obsessions he experiences as an only child growing up in the sticks.