Side A: First Records

Creative World-Making

The work of HipHopRx is centered on what creative work demands, what it requires, what it produces, and what it means for how we understand the world. To answer these questions honestly is to reimagine what knowledge is, where it lives, and who gets to make it.

Listening Otherwise

  • We listen differently. Rhythm, gesture, movement, and voice all hold knowledge that exceed language. In these sonic and visual remains, we might ask questions that challenge traditional research paradigms.

Beat-Makers

Our work draws on Black feminist aesthetics, performance studies, queer theory, sound studies, and visual culture. Scholars like Tao Leigh Goffe, Bettina Judd, Tina Campt, Regina Bradley, Tavia Nyong’o, and others remind us that we must engage affective, sensory, and haptic archives — what is felt, heard, and experience between people.

Research as Craft

Research, for us, is a practice of making do. We like to create alongside communities, following questions where they lead with an ethnographic key and with the patience to let art breathe.

Studio/Lab

A studio-lab is exactly what it sounds like: a place where creating and research happen together. What comes out is between worlds by design, and undisciplined on purpose. The arts, the humanities, the sciences — our work has always moved across them. HipHopRx is our way of building a home for that necessary restlessness.

  • Research
  • Creation
  • Education
  • Community