Provincial Headz

an interdisciplinary counter-narrative to that of hip hop as a strictly urban phenomenon; providing an insight into the relocation of hip hop culture from its inception in New York ghettos to its practices in provincial and rural Britain.

HEADZ-zINe is a periodical output of the HEADZ Project. Taking the approach of a fanzine with a critical edge, it challenges the convention of academic knowledge production and dissemination. HEADZ-zINe seeks to capture the personal, local, and communal histories of hip hop. HEADZ-zINe is foremost interested in the stories of its co-authors and through a series of in-depth discussions and complimentary analysis of the artefacts and archives of hip hop, HEADZ-zINe reveals a set of previously untold stories. When we talk about hip hop culture and hip hop history, we rarely talk about 50-year-olds from the far-flung corners of the UK – predominantly corners constructed of white majority space – where hip hop culture would never have been thought to have existed in the 1980s. However, as hip hop culture exploded across the globe it infiltrated the remotest inhabited parts of the world. This second issue in Volume 1 of HEADz-zINe focuses on pioneering hip hop practitioners and adopters from Devon and Cornwall. Much like the personal histories shared in issue 1 by those that grew up in the North-West of England, there are stories here of limited access to hip hop, and a shared sense of desire for fully absorbing the culture – or as much as could be absorbed – considering communication and societal practices of the era and the region’s cultural context. The hunger for knowing about hip hop and knowing hip hop became paramount in the lives of some young Westcountry people, and in this issue, the personal histories of twelve hip hop practitioners and adopters growing up in the provincial cities of Exeter and Plymouth, the local towns of Bradninch, Camborne, and Sidmouth, and the villages of Newton Poppleford and Buckland Monachorum are presented. This issue focuses on the formative and arguably most important decade for the evolution of provincial hip hop in Devon and Cornwall, 1983-1992. However, not all co-authors discuss this period, but rather have focused on specific periods of time within this developmental decade. Almost 40 years on from its arrival in Britain, this issue presents twelve conversations with its co-authors to demonstrate hip hop’s girth, reach and power. Furthermore, the narratives here also attest to hip hop’s influence on how it has shaped the lives of this issue’s co-authors, by equipping them with a creative and technological skillset, how to approach everyday life, or understanding their own personal histories and cultural identities – from The Westcountry to London to Tanzania to India to Pakistan – questioning forms of Englishness and Britishness.

HEADZ-zINe is a periodical output of the HEADZ Project. Taking the form of the fanzine with a critical edge, it challenges the convention of academic knowledge production and dissemination. HEADZ-zINe seeks to capture the personal, local, and communal histories of hip hop. HEADZ-zINe is foremost interested in the stories of its participants, and through a series of in-depth interviews and complimentary analysis of the artefacts and archives of hip hop, reveals a set of previously untold stories. HEADZ-zINe is created with much the same immediacy as a zine. It is produced within a period of weeks, is self-published and designed using standard domestic hardware and software. Although the topic addressed is historical, participants’ reflections illustrate the immediacy and closeness of this material to their current lives. True to the aims of the fanzine, HEADZ-zINe illuminates the histories of music culture which have previously been largely un-documented. These histories are told through the personal and collective stories of their participants. HEADZ-zINe is freely distributed, and the inaugural issue has been manufactured with a print-run of only 200 copies, in addition to being available in an expanded edition online. The zine presents a continued engagement with questions of knowledge production and dissemination. HEADZ-zINe has been developed in collaboration with practitioners and seeks to foreground their histories, thoughts, and ideas. We are interested in how hip hop offers practitioners a way of engaging with and knowing the world through music, artistic and dance practices. In this, we take hip hop seriously as a cultural form through which practitioners and fans learn, share and archive knowledge. Hip hop practitioners are both the creators of and thinkers about hip hop, they are local intellectuals. The principal focus of this zine is on the voices of hip hop practitioners themselves as they not only tell but theorise hip hop history. As accumulators of vinyl records, flyers, posters, photographs, and magazines ourselves we are interested in what these artefacts and archives can reveal to us about the creative acts of curating and remembering cultural history. We are interested in exploring how involvement in hip hop culture shaped the lives of practitioners and provided a space for creatively, imaginatively, and intellectually engaging with the world around them.

HEADZ-zINe is a periodical output of the HEADZ Project. Taking the form of the fanzine with a critical edge, it challenges the convention of academic knowledge production and dissemination. HEADZ-zINe seeks to capture the personal, local, and communal histories of hip hop. HEADZ-zINe is foremost interested in the stories of its participants, and through a series of in-depth interviews and complimentary analysis of the artefacts and archives of hip hop, reveals a set of previously untold stories. HEADZ-zINe is created with much the same immediacy as a zine. It is produced within a period of weeks, is self-published and designed using standard domestic hardware and software. Although the topic addressed is historical, participants’ reflections illustrate the immediacy and closeness of this material to their current lives. True to the aims of the fanzine, HEADZ-zINe illuminates the histories of music culture which have previously been largely un-documented. These histories are told through the personal and collective stories of their participants. HEADZ-zINe is freely distributed, and the inaugural issue has been manufactured with a print-run of only 200 copies, in addition to being available in an expanded edition online. The zine presents a continued engagement with questions of knowledge production and dissemination. HEADZ-zINe has been developed in collaboration with practitioners and seeks to foreground their histories, thoughts, and ideas. We are interested in how hip hop offers practitioners a way of engaging with and knowing the world through music, artistic and dance practices. In this, we take hip hop seriously as a cultural form through which practitioners and fans learn, share and archive knowledge. Hip hop practitioners are both the creators of and thinkers about hip hop, they are local intellectuals. The principal focus of this zine is on the voices of hip hop practitioners themselves as they not only tell but theorise hip hop history. As accumulators of vinyl records, flyers, posters, photographs, and magazines ourselves we are interested in what these artefacts and archives can reveal to us about the creative acts of curating and remembering cultural history. We are interested in exploring how involvement in hip hop culture shaped the lives of practitioners and provided a space for creatively, imaginatively, and intellectually engaging with the world around them.

Scratching the Surface: Hip Hop, Remoteness, and Everyday Life presents the encounters of a young, rural teenager growing up in Devon, in the south-west corner of the UK as he engages with the evolution of hip hop, told through 28 particular and detailed memories drawn from the experience of the author. 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 minutiae 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 novella which unearths a less canonical hip hop history of the 1980s and expresses the innocence and obsessions of an only child growing up in the sticks, as he strives to make sense of his personal history, identity, and place in the world, through the often dialectic relationship between Devonian life and hip hop culture. This is the first publication in the new Rhythm Obscura/Headz Projects series which seeks to uncover the hidden histories of music cultures in Britain. Adam de Paor-Evans is an independent creative practitioner, ethnomusicologist and spatio-cultural theorist and was previously Reader in Ethnomusicology at University of Central Lancashire, UK. His research is focused on the relationship of the non-obvious, societal and regional-rural phenomena within music cultures. He leads the scholarly research project 'Rhythm Obscura: Revealing Hidden Histories Through Ethnomusicology, Practice Research and Material Culture' and has been an actively involved in British hip hop culture since 1983. Between 1989-1992 he was a member of pioneering Devon hip hop crew Def Defiance as Project Cee. He also performs original 45-only DJ shows under the pseudonym RARE~GRILLS.

Via memory, material objects, music, people and place, Hip Hop In The Sticks picks up where Scratching the Surface left off. Through the eyes of an adolescent rural hip hop head, questions of identity, heritage and one’s own location in the world emerge through rich lived experience. Often idiosyncratic, humorously dry, and underpinned by comprehensive and informative endnotes, Hip Hop In The Sticks presents a deep non-fiction contextual narrative, intersecting family secrets, a different sense of community and kinship, embryonic hip hop and graffiti practice. Hip Hop In The Sticks makes visible a different account of life in late 1980s rural Britain and an alternative version of hip hop history.

This edited volume concentrates on the period from the 1940s to the present, exploring how popular music forms such as blues, disco, reggae, hip hop, grime, metal and punk evolved and transformed as they traversed time and space. Within this framework, the collection traces how music and subcultures travel through, to and from democracies, autocracies and anocracies. The chosen approach is multidisciplinary and deliberately diverse. Using both archival sources and oral testimony from a wide variety of musicians, promoters, critics and members of the audience, contributors from a range of academic disciplines explore music and subcultural forms in countries across Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America and Africa. They investigate how far the meaning of music and associated subcultures change as they move from one context to another and consider whether they transcend or blur parameters of class, race, gender and sexuality.

This book contains the proceedings of the International Conference on Law, Social Science, Economics, and Education (ICLSSEE 2023) on 6 May 2023 in Indonesia. This conference was held in collaboration with Nusantara Training and Research (NTR) at Universitas Borobudur, Jakarta, Indonesia. Papers from the conference are collected in a book of proceedings entitled: Proceedings of the International Conference on Law, Social Sciences, Economics, and Education (ICLSSEE 2023). Presentations from the conference covering these disciplines will provide a lot of inspiring input and new treasures on law, social sciences, economics, and education, especially after the Covid-19 Pandemic. Thus, it will contribute to the next generation of young researchers to generate innovative research findings and ideas. The hope is that scientific attitudes and skills through research will encourage the development of knowledge produced through research from various scholars in various regions. Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to all of the steering committee colleagues for their cooperation in organizing the conference. Hopefully, these seminars and conferences can be continued in the coming years with more insightful articles from inspiring research. We would also like to thank the invited speakers for their invaluable contributions and for sharing their visions in their talks.