Scratching the Surface: Hip Hop, Remoteness, and Everyday Life presents the encounters of a young, rural teenager growing up in Devon, in the south-west corner of the UK as he engages with the evolution of hip hop, told through 28 particular and detailed memories drawn from the experience of the author. The book is divided into four parts, and situated between 1983 and 1986, explores the emotional growth, contextual questioning, and at times, naïve journey of the protagonist as he reflects on such minutiae as the price tags on record sleeves, the LED display on cassette players, and the zips on tracksuit tops. The author of Provincial Headz: British Hip Hop and Critical Regionalism returns with a quirky contextual novella which unearths a less canonical hip hop history of the 1980s and expresses the innocence and obsessions of an only child growing up in the sticks, as he strives to make sense of his personal history, identity, and place in the world, through the often dialectic relationship between Devonian life and hip hop culture. This is the first publication in the new Rhythm Obscura/Headz Projects series which seeks to uncover the hidden histories of music cultures in Britain. Adam de Paor-Evans is an independent creative practitioner, ethnomusicologist and spatio-cultural theorist and was previously Reader in Ethnomusicology at University of Central Lancashire, UK. His research is focused on the relationship of the non-obvious, societal and regional-rural phenomena within music cultures. He leads the scholarly research project 'Rhythm Obscura: Revealing Hidden Histories Through Ethnomusicology, Practice Research and Material Culture' and has been an actively involved in British hip hop culture since 1983. Between 1989-1992 he was a member of pioneering Devon hip hop crew Def Defiance as Project Cee. He also performs original 45-only DJ shows under the pseudonym RARE~GRILLS.

Via memory, material objects, music, people and place, Hip Hop In The Sticks picks up where Scratching the Surface left off. Through the eyes of an adolescent rural hip hop head, questions of identity, heritage and one’s own location in the world emerge through rich lived experience. Often idiosyncratic, humorously dry, and underpinned by comprehensive and informative endnotes, Hip Hop In The Sticks presents a deep non-fiction contextual narrative, intersecting family secrets, a different sense of community and kinship, embryonic hip hop and graffiti practice. Hip Hop In The Sticks makes visible a different account of life in late 1980s rural Britain and an alternative version of hip hop history.