Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin, has written about race, politics, and culture for over thirty-five years. His career began with covering hip-hop in VIBE, The Source, The Village Voice, and other publications. He was the host/producer of the weekly WBAI-NY FM radio show NONFICTION and worked in the crisis p.r. / public affairs department of computer entertainment giant Rockstar Games. His early and singular research on architectural design in computer and video games has been recognized by the Graham Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Architectural League of New York, and the MacDowell Colony.
Fellowship Project
harbanger
I’m the creator of harbanger (pronounced “harbinger”). harbanger is a turntablist septet; an experimental, hip-hop music research project, designed to investigate turntable polyphony, polyrhythm, and polysemantics.
I started harbanger in 2020 at MIT. Its designed to:
a) combine the exuberant, typically solo performances of hiphop battle DJs — in this case, seven of them — in order to
b) understand what such fusions demand, so that we may build even larger turntablist combos.
I’ve discovered harbanger’s core intellectual challenge to be assembling a compositional practice and matrix, within which our musicians may collaborate.
No 7-part turntable repertoire exists: No charts, no scores, no sheet music, no fake books, no tabs. Instrumental hip-hop is, again, almost resolutely soloist.
In other words, creating harbanger has meant everything had to be built — please forgive the obvious pun — “from scratch.”
During my time at the Hutchins Center at Harvard, I will be working directly with harbanger, at our Boston site, inventing new compositions for us to perform, and directions for us to advance.
-Harry Allen