Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 2, Pages 221228

Were Talking about Practice(-Based Research): Serious Play and Serious Performance in the Practice of Popular Music Ethnography
Anthony Kwame Harrison

Virginia Tech

Reporter: So you and coach Brown got caught up on Saturday about practice? Iverson: If I cant practice, I cant practice. It is as simple as that. It aint about that at all. Its easy to sum it up if youre just talking about practice. Were sitting here, and Im supposed to be the franchise player, and were talking about practice. I mean listen, were sitting here talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, but were talking about practice. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game [like] its my last but were talking about practice man. How silly is that? Now I know that Im supposed to lead by example and all that but Im not shoving that aside like it dont mean anything. I know its important, I honestly do[,] but were talking about practice. Were talking about practice man. (laughter from the media crowd) Were talking about practice. Were talking about practice. Were not talking about the game. Were talking about practice. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, youve seen me play right[?] [Y]ouve seen me give everything Ive got, but were talking about practice right now. (more laughter) (Allen Iverson) The Allen Iverson quote used in the title of this piece was intended to imply a degree of nonseriousness associated with the activities of practice. In Iversons world(view), practice (or its musical equivalent rehearsal) was not something that really mattered. Nothing to talk about. What mattered was how he performed during the game. The frustrations that fueled his tirade are typical of the losing sports figures age-old conundrum: If we had won no one would be asking such silly questions. Of course, Iversons coach
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(or any coach) would argue that practice does indeed matter. Practice informs performance. And the behaviors, habits, and tendencies that are developed through practice follow players and/or teams to the game. This article represents my effort to advance the seriousness of practice as an emergent focal point in popular music research. The definition of practice I am using is more expansive than Iversons. It includes everything from the hours spent developing musical proficiencies to the activities of rehearsal through which patterns of performance become second nature: the times when and spaces where the foundations of improvisational possibilities get built. Practice also includes (game day) performancesboth studio performances that go on to become recorded songs and live performances for various audiences. These are the moments when creativity is actuated. A serious examination of practice can open new windows to understanding how creativeness gets mediated through convention, compromise, and negotiation. Practice dynamics are at once subjective, intersubjective, and collaborative (Brooks). At moments such as these, an aspiring young trumpeter named Ralph Ellison strained to reconcile his craving to play what he heard and felt around him with the classical traditions propagated by his teachers and endorsed in the books they assigned. These are also the moments when sound engineer Tom Dowd suggested that Cream drummer Ginger Baker try using an Indian beat on the song Sunshine of Your Love. In my own example, these are the moments when the traditions embodied in musicians of different races, heritages, and temperaments get sorted out with the tape running. In Iversons world(view), game on! If the spaces of musical activity defined as practice are my focus, my approach is unquestionably ethnographic. To be clear here, I am speaking of a post-postmodern conceptualization of ethnography that draws from feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories, phenomenology, and arts-based research modes of inquiry; and that, when useful, welcomes generous doses of reflexivity, dialogic engagement, narrative, and autoethnography within its analyses and representations. While all of these have been recognized as characteristics of the new, critical ethnography (Madison), for researchers steeped in classic traditions of noninterference it marks an abrupt shift in perspective, one that moves beyond acknowledging to embracing our roles as participants in the communities we conduct research within. What Timothy J. Cooley1 calls truly participatory participant-observation (4). My effort here is more inductive than prescriptive. Participation both in music cultures and in ethnography demands a degree of flexibility, an ability to go with

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the flow, and varying levels of improvisation. Rather than proposing a set of guidelines and/or frameworks through which to incorporate more practicebased research (PBR) methods into popular music scholarship, my interest is in advocating for greater attention to practice-based consciousness and philosophy within popular musics ethnographic habitus.2 Practice-based research is an approach to qualitative inquiry within the arts that seeks to uncover new knowledge through practice and its outcomes (Candy). The creative activities surrounding the generation of an artifact are typically at the core of its analysis. PBR has strong overlaps with other performative research approaches, most notably practice-led research (Smith and Dean) and arts-based research practice (Leavy). I will not elaborate on these distinctions here except to say that, for my purposes, PBR is an umbrella term encompassing a clustering of participatory, experiential, and phenomenological methodologies surrounding the fields of arts and media research. Practice-based insights provide new epistemological possibilities for unlocking the hidden power of aesthetics. It occupies a space between traditional participant (artist) and observer (consumer of art) perspectives. It is by nature ethnographic.

For over ten years, I have been practicing music with San Francisco psychedelic-rock musician Tim Cohenone of the creative forces behind the Fresh & Onlys band. Tim is a diverse and prolific musician. His solo projects span several genres, including hip-hop, death metal, psychedelic rock, and folk rock.3 The first CD of Tims music to ever be professionally manufactured was a hip-hop group the two of us founded during the summer of 2000 while working behind the Amoeba Music San Francisco cash registers (Harrison). Tim has since put out at least ten CDs.4 If professional manufacturing, formal Internet distribution, and/or live public performances are the measure of music productivity, Tim and I have done nothing together lately. But for a series of years nowusually once a year, sometimes more I have traveled to San Francisco and written and recorded music with Tim. Sometimes as many as twenty songs in two weeks. Our motivation has never been to release music for public consumption. It has been to spend time together collaborating aesthetically in a medium we both take pleasure in and to capture those moments in a form we can revisit and preserve. Whereas recent advances in arts-based research methodologies have concentrated on textual fields such as poetry and creative writing or visual

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fields like photography, film, theater, and the visual arts, music occupies a less-explored and undertheorized hinterland (Daykin). The visual bias pervading Western epistemological thinking (Zuckerkandl), and reflected in ethnographys chief method of participant observation, is culpable in this oversight. The most salient memories of my visits to San Francisco are more sonic than visual. The music logs from these trips include annual traditions of listening to a 1992 album by Ruthless Records recording artists Penthouse Players Clique, a weekday afternoon jam session (usually comprising the remnants and extended networks of a Zeitgeist lunch gathering), golden era hip-hop cassette tapes that serve as our soundtrack while driving through the city, and, of course, the music Tim and I make together, which features contributions from almost anyone who happens to come through his top-floor apartment. Tims studio space of practicelocated in the crows nest of an Alamo Square Victorianis nothing if not communal; and the music making that takes place there is fluently collaborative. Within the diverse music cultures of San Francisco, Tims studio serves as a third space (Bhabha) where traditions, interests, and philosophies merge. Music is at once inclusive and exclusive. It is a social force for bringing different people together and for affirming communal identity which is always done in opposition to outsiders (albeit at a range of convictions). The frontiers of identity theorizing that music can offer pathways to are increasingly populated by hybrid and remixed identities (Maira). Exploring how characteristics of musicians (including personal biographies) get activated, articulated, and energized in the practice of creation gives new meaning to the musical outcomes of practice. How do resources of production, artistic competencies, and the cultural capital and license associated with particular identities play out in these zones of practice and performance? How did the biracial and multicultural membership of the Forest Fires Collective5 (the group Tim and I founded) influence our aesthetic aspirations and points of orientation? Some of the key questions guiding my research concern the character and nature of Black Aesthetic expression. Why have Black Aesthetics been so influential in shaping national and global musics in the modern era? How, why, and to what extent are Black Aesthetics distinct from less-marked (i.e., white) forms of American artistry? To paraphrase Stuart Hall, what is this Black in Black Music? At the height of the Black Arts Movement, Julian Mayfield avowed,

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For those who must create, there is a Black Aesthetic which. . . rests on something much more substantial than hip talk, African dress, natural hair, and endless, fruitless discussions of soul. (27) Mayfield was critical of descriptive and fleeting symbols of black authenticity or what he called Black is Beautiful faddishness. Black Aesthetics emerged from something more sincereas John L. Jackson would make clear thirty-four years later. For Mayfield, the Black Aesthetic could be found in the practice: the work and performance of musicians and revolutionaries. It was the work involved in both loving and killing, and learning to live, and survive, in a nation of killers (31, original emphasis). And in the performance of going out there ready to die and playing every game like its your last. But were talking about practice. The cultivation of more practice-based approaches within ethnographies of popular music can help researchers to access, shed light on, describe, and explain what traditional methodologies turn a deaf ear to (Leavy). Practice-based researchs focus on the creative and generative activities of musicon intentions and outcomesfeeds a field of music theorizing that extends to places and spaces where music is received and interpreted. In his excellent book Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, Joseph Schloss makes this profound observation: [T]here are things that one can learn about a song instantly by dancing to it, which might take hours to articulate verbally. When you discover what kinds of movements can be performed to a songand what kinds cannotyou discover a wealth of information about the social and physical environments in which it was intended to be heard, how the musicians viewed those environments, what their priorities were, and so forth. (10) Music makes more of itself than research and writing convey. Lyrics as text never capture their power in motion. Representations of PBR typically include an artifact of practice: a sculpture, a painting, or a song. PBR also has a strong imprint in creative writing. The poetics infusing its texts are subtle, complex, and intelligentthey are the articulations of and inroads to sophisticated forms of understanding and levels of consciousness. Any advocacy for practice-based data collection methods and analyses, then, must also invite creative and/or poetic modes of academic writing.

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In conclusion, let me return to the words of Allen Iverson as an example of the aesthetic forces my work aspires to engage. Iversons quote is mentionable for its content, but memorable for its context and form. Iversons season had just ended after his teamthe Philadelphia 76erslost a tough first-round playoff series with the Boston Celtics. The reporters question marked the latest clamoring in a season-long feud between Iverson and his coach: this time about the franchise player missing a team practice. Iversons monologuehis self-conscious spectaclewas magnificently musical in its use of sequencing, cadence, and gesture. Even in its written representation (see the initial quotation), one can imagine phrases like I cant practice, not a game, and were talking about practice loaded into an MPC-2000 sampler and being played on the pads by a deft digital musician. In less than two minutes,6 Iverson repeats the phrase talking about practice over twenty times. During the upsurge that eventually wins the media crowd over, he offers it four times in succession. His improvisations, his ability to reflect on and artfully articulate what he sees happening around him, are likely better than anything on his neverreleased rap album. Iverson shows his mastery of a black oral/intellectual tradition.7 His rhetorical strategy of repetition and revision is rhythmic. Invariably his call is responded to. His orature performs the verbal alchemy of transforming animosity (at having to field such ridiculous questions) into amity. In the end, he is at one with the room full of reporters, and it is the players turn to ask the questions: Youve seen me play right? Notes
1. Referencing the work of Kay Kaufman Shelemay. 2. Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, habitus, in my usage, refers to an embodied sensibility informed by both social position and politics (what Iverson might describe as a way of playing the game). 3. Tim also draws and paints, and his visual art has been featured at San Francisco art galleries and on album covers. 4. In addition to numerous vinyl-only, cassette, and mp3 releases. 5. Two of the six original Forest Fires Collective members, including one of the founders, were born outside the United States.

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6. Including comments that precede and follow this essays initial quote (Allen Iverson). 7. What scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. refer to as signifyin(g).

Works Cited
Allen Iverson News Conference Transcript. SI.com 10. May 2002. Accessed on 22 Jan. 2010 <http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/news/2002/05/09/ iverson_transcript/>. Bhabha, Homi. Cultures in Between. Artforum 32.1 (1993): 16771. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990. Print. Brooks, Daphne A. Once More with Feeling: Popular Music Studies in the New Millennium. Journal of Popular Music Studies 22.1 (2010): 98106. Print. Candy, Linda. Practice Based Research: A Guide. Creativity and Cognition Studies. Sydney: U of Technology, 2006. Accessed on 21 Jan. 2011 <http://www.mangold-international.com/fileadmin/Media/References/ Publications/Downloads/Practice_Based_Research_A_Guide.pdf>. Cooley, Timothy J. Casting Shadows in the Field: An Introduction. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Ed. Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 319. Print. Daykin, Norma. The Role of Music in Arts-Based Qualitative Inquiry. Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. Ed. Patricia Leavy. New York: Guilford, 2009. 12334. Print. Ellison, Ralph. Living with Music. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. 22736. Print. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Hall, Stuart. What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture? Social Justice 20.12 (1993): 10414. Print. Harrison, Anthony K. Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2009. Print. Jackson, John L., Jr. Real Black: Adventures of Racial Sincerity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print. Leavy, Patricia, ed. Methods Meet Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. New York: Guilford, 2009. Print.

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Madison, D. Soyini. Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. Print. Maira, Sunaina M. Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. Print. Mayfield, Julian. You Touch My Black Aesthetic and Ill Touch Yours. The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison Gayle Jr. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. 2431. Print. Schloss, Joseph G. Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Shelemay, Kay K. The Ethnomusicologist, Ethnographic Method, and the Transmission of Tradition. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Ed. Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 189204. Print. Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean, eds. Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Print. Zuckerkandl, Victor. Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ; Princeton UP, 1956. Print.