ABSTRACT
This chapter follows the Breakfast Club – a Detroit hiphop cooperative made up of Hodgepodge aka Montana aka Big Tone (Hodge for short), Lacksi-daisy-cal aka Tarach (Lacks for short), and Elzhi (El for short) – as they start the process of making names for themselves as professional musicians. When we met, both Lacks and Hodge had put out homemade tapes of their material with tracks featuring Elzhi as a guest artist. Later, they began dropping singles on Antidote – the hiphop imprint of a local electronic music label that Angela, their unofficial manager and full-time supporter, helps to run – with EPs (extended plays) and full-lengths on deck. While tracing this artistic growth, my work here also tells the story of me on a mission to strike an agreement between the senses I have of myself as a hiphop head and as a scholar. To be successful means doing scholarship that’s not just about hiphop, but is hiphop. In other words, I’m hoping for a day when hiphop will be acknowledged as a way of being a scholar and scholarship is considered an official – that is, popularly recognized – element of hiphop. To these ends, I’d like to share my experiences of getting to know and staying in touch with the Breakfast Club.
