Reconciling Geppetto: Collaboration, (Re-)Creation, and Deception in the Practice of Hip Hop Music Ethnography

Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story of wood coming to life.¹ Certainly all wood is at some point alive, but Pinocchio’s story is about the resilient life-force of “a regular woodpile log” (Collodi [1883] 2009: 3). The log first announces its animation through voice. “Don’t hit me too hard!” (3) it pleads to an old carpenter looking to make a table leg. When the carpenter’s neighbor, the spry and hot-tempered Geppetto, acquires the log, he first names it Pinocchio (after a family he once knew) and then carves it into a marionette—both acts that further anthropomorphize the wood. As the story unfolds, Pinocchio walks out on Geppetto, journeying into a world full of talking animals and zoomorphic humans.²

One overriding theme in Pinocchio’s adventure is transgression—described by Charles Klopp as “the testing if not the breaking of . . . social norms” (2006: 28). The rebellious Pinocchio refuses to conform. Rather than being “obedient” and “going to school,” which is what proper boys do (91), Pinocchio the scamp wants to pursue the trade of “eating, drinking, sleeping, playing, and wandering wherever [he likes] from sunup to sundown” (14). That such characteristics are typically associated with the lives of entertainers should not be lost here. Indeed Pinocchio, who is most concerned with satisfying his immediate wants, is initially lured from his path to school by “the music of fifes and the beats of a big drum” (27) and goes on to spend a short stint as a stage-performing jackass.

In his introduction to Geoffrey Brock’s 2009 English language translation of the Italian classic, Umberto Eco insists that though “simple in its prose—and musical in its simplicity . . . Pinocchio is not a simple book” (2009: x). Surpassing the protagonist’s propensity to tell falsehoods—a quality responsible for engendering the puppet’s most memorable physical attribute—Pinocchio’s greatest character flaw is his insatiable wanderlust, which encourages an astonishing gullibility that makes him easy prey for swindlers like the Fox and the Cat. Yet by the end of the book, or the key sequence that Dennis Looney describes as “the beginning of the story’s end” (2006: 38), Pinocchio’s seemingly tragic shortcomings come back to save the day. After he reunites with Geppetto in the belly of a monstrous Shark, it is Pinocchio’s refusal to accept his fate that prompts him, against his father’s “better” judgment, to lead their escape—and when the initial effort fails, to “try again” (150). It is this deep desire to explore, discover, and above all else, survive that carries Collodi’s hero from the stacks of a woodpile along the circuitous road to full humanity.

The following essay consists of three sections. In the first—the Adventures of Mad Squirrel—I narrate the development of my scholar-practitioner identity as both an ethnographer and a member of a Bay Area underground hip hop collective.³ This includes an elaboration on the network of interpersonal relations and tensions I entered into as a result of my decision to follow such a research path. I also reflect on the nature of collaborative ethnography and discuss how several issues surrounding it apply to both popular music studies in general and the context of my research in particular. In the second section, Forest Fires Collaborations, I outline several registers through which my collaborative ethnographic research and relationships resound. By considering key dynamics and moments in these ethnographic partnerships, I underscore the different ways in which knowledge emerges through complex and shifting negotiations of power. More specifically, I argue that participatory participant observation renders a different epistemological basis of inquiry, which recasts the ethnographic “field” as a dynamic and conceptually bounded space of knowledge acquisition and production. In the final section, I problematize the notion of research collaboration by discussing the multiple and ambiguous tensions between trust and deception that saturate these in-the-field relationships. My overall aim is to direct attention to the chorus of possibilities that collaborative...