I play it cool
I dig all jive
That’s the reason
I stay alive
My motto as I live and learn
Is dig and be dug in return
—Langston Hughes, “Motto”
The DJ never allowed us to stray far from everything the music has meant. The layering of sound, rhythm, memory, sacrifice, celebration and love required the digging for more layers, more beats, and more buried memories. . . . The DJ works to make sure we are not forgotten, ensuring we are more than a footnote in the building of communities and nations. We will persist in the soundscape—to be dug in return.
—Marcyliena Morgan, “Mission Statement,” Classic Crates
The Classic Crates project at Harvard University’s Hip Hop Archive seeks to establish a hip hop canon by collecting and preserving two hundred of the most significant hip hop albums of all time, as well as related records, such as those that were sampled on the classic albums. On the website and introductory video, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recites a Langston Hughes poem about digging and being dug; Marcyliena Morgan writes about crate-digging DJs who connect us to the past and future, and quotes Amiri Baraka’s book Digging: The African American Soul of American Classical Music. This is a draft of a proposal that I will submit to Morgan and 9th Wonder, who created the project. In the spirit of digging, I want to construct an adaptable time capsule called the Classic Crates Capsule, a long-term preservation project that will bury these two hundred or more albums for one thousand years, to be dug up, and dug, by future humans.
The outer case will be a sarcophagus in the form of an anonymous b-boy from the early ’80s, wearing Adidas hightops, hands clasping his opposite shoulders in the b-boy stance’s modification of the pharaoh’s arm-crossing, bucket hat or Kangol on his head, thick-rimmed black glasses a la Run DMC. The Capsule will be expandable. Each year, the albums added to the canon, and thus added to Harvard’s library collection, will be sealed inside a new glass subcapsule inside the sarcophagus. The subcapsules will be filled with an inert gas like argon, a design based on the same technology that preserves the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. The inert gas eliminates the presence of moisture and prevents the growth of mold or any other microscopic life forms that would cause the albums to deteriorate. On each glass subcapsule will be a sand-blasted and enameled male and female representation of hip hop fashion from a specific era. The b-boys and b-girls depicted on the glass crates would represent a range of hip hop clothing styles, and companies could pay to have their logos sand-blasted into the surface of the glass crates. Partnerships could include Karl Kani, Cross Colours, Adidas, Kangol, Rocawear, Nike, Mecca, Triple 5 Soul, Ecko Unlimited, Beats, Billionaire Boys Club, and on the high fashion side, Raf Simons and Rick Owens, Maison Martin Margiela, and Yeezy.
Each year the sarcophagus lid will be removed to add an additional sealed subcapsule of ten to twenty albums to the inner case. My ultimate hope is that the capsule will be housed, displayed, and maintained at the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture until the selection of two hundred albums is complete, at which point the Capsule will be deposited in the South Bronx, deep underground, with a burial ceremony and after-party. I’d invite surviving hip hop pioneers, legends, and next generation greats to bless the capsule, talk to fans, cipher, and, of course, pose for mad pictures. The target opening date of the capsule will be one thousand years from the date of deposit.
In my most extravagant vision, the underground preservation chamber—buried fifty feet below sea level—would contain the two hundred albums on vinyl, a crank-powered turntable and speaker (that can function without electricity), as well as backup recordings of the albums on stainless steel records, similar to the technologies used by L. Ron Hubbard’s followers to preserve oral versions of all of his writings in the Trementina vault, buried under the desert sands of New Mexico. On the ground where the Capsule is buried will be a bronze marker.
Of course, the South Bronx will likely be underwater before the one-thousand-year target opening date. So, at some point, when flooding is immanent, someone will need to attach a steel cable coated with plastic to the bronze marker on the ground, with a buoy at the other end of it. The cable must be long enough to reach the surface of the ocean, based on projections of what the sea depth will be 1,500 years from now, which allows for a margin of error in our current projections. The buoy will lead future “diggers” down, down through the sea, past the rooftops and empty windows of the kelp-wrapped and barnacled high-rise apartment buildings, down, down to the asphalt and concrete courtyard of a South Bronx housing project that will be the new ocean floor.