The Official Site of Virginia Tech Digging In The Crates: Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech

Hip Hop Hxstories

Hip Hop Hxstories is an opportunity for VTDITC leadership board and staff to share their stories about their connection with hip hop

Chip 

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“I was born in 1976 in rural Virginia. By the time I was 10 I had Beastie Boys, License to Ill, Run DMC, King of Rock, Raising Hell, and even PE, Yo Bum Rush the Show. I was honestly too young to realize what any of it was but I liked it. It wasn't till about 1990, when I was in 8th grade on a band trip and we were all on a school bus and someone had a boom box and one of the older kids dropped in a cassette single of Bonita Applebum by Tribe. I'd heard rap, but I'd never heard hip hop until then. I dug deeper, which back then, meant staying up late on weekends watching the late night video shows and saw Gangstarr, A Jazz Thing. From that point I was hooked as hard as you could be hooked. I took my 12 year old Christmas and birthday money and bought People's Instinctive Travels and got the Mo Betta Blues soundtrack for my birthday just for that Gangstarr track. 

After that high school happened and so did the Native Tongues, Wu, Nas, Hiero, the Pac and Biggie thing. I went to college (Radford Grad), but I lived in Blacksburg and my boy bought turntables and we started our own thing. Record Exchange (The Cellar 6 pack store now), Crossroads (Moe's now) was our jam. We did our college years buying anything  Rawkus Records put out and all underground hip hop those shops would get on vinyl. We would DJ parties around Blacksburg and were never popular because no one wanted to hear Dilated Peoples or some obscure Mos Def track b-side we got from the Record Exchange. 

Hip hop changed around 2000 and it was all about Cash Money Millionaires and Jay-Z. Believe it or not people weren't even feeling OutKast back then anymore (it was around the time of Stankonia and not a lot of people got that album when it came out). We kind of put hip hop to the side and focused on graduating and getting jobs. I did end up with a career in video and photography and communications and my DJ partner did end up with a career in marketing (he's a VT grad). 

I'm now in my 40s and I still have those turntables and all of those records. I honestly would say I owe my career to hip hop because it taught me production and that you don't have to have a $100,000 budget to produce videos, music or any media. You just have to care about what you're doing and know what you're doing and you can make gold. I love the future of hip hop too. It's gotten way bigger and more ingrained into culture and it makes me proud that it's what our generation started and what future generations are refining and changing and making it dope as ever. Thank you all for doing this project. Hip hop was birthed from Jazz and they are both the truest American art forms our culture can ever claim. Thanks for reading my story.

Chip”