ABSTRACT
In 2001, as a component of my ethnographic research on underground hip hop, I took part in a five-week, 27-city national music tour in the United States. My role as merchandise salesperson positioned me as the most accessible member of the tour to the hundreds of fans we encountered at each show. Yet despite my responsibility to sell music, at the tour’s conclusion, I was surprised by the number of CD-Rs of music that show attendees had given to me. In this chapter, I reflect on these musical artefacts and what my acquisition of them reveals about the changing nature of hip hop at the start of the twenty-first century. Utilizing the concept of infrastructure, I discuss how, for a fleeting moment, the medium of the CD-R facilitated a series of unprecedented transactions within the world of hip-hop music touring. I specifically spotlight a nascent underground hip-hop infrastructure that arose in opposition to the existing arrangements and social practices regulating interactions between music industry insiders (including artists) and fans. In focusing on the social and affective dimensions of infrastructures, this work helps us better understand how alternative cultural logics emerge, evolve, and can come to be overlaid on top of existing ones.
