Urban and Electronic Music Production

Wavelength (the predecessor to Offbeat Magazine) was originally been a record review insert. Throughout its run from 1980-1991, Wavelength was dedicated to telling the life stories of the many unheralded New Orleans musicians who had influenced American popular music. It covered the range of New Orleans music -- jazz and gospel, rock and classical, but with an emphasis on rhythm and blues, highlighting the work of some of the city’s most talented writers, artists, and photographers including Jeff Hannusch, Bunny Matthews, Skip Bolen, Rick Olivier, Kalamu ya Salaam, Gene Scaramuzzo, Rick Coleman, Paula Burch, Al Kennedy and dozens of others. The

Compiled by Bill Adler, a noted journalist and founding VP of Publicity at Def Jam Recordings, the Adler archive contains thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, recording industry press releases and artist bios, correspondence, photographs, posters, flyers, advertising, and other documents.

Digital collections include:
The Afro-American in Indiana (radio series)
Reclaiming the Right to Rock: Black Experiences in Rock Music
What Must Be Done radio series
Logan Westbrooks Collection
and more.

Created entirely by hand, well before widespread use of design software, these flyers preserve raw data from the days when Hip Hop was primarily a live, performance-based culture in the Bronx. They contain information about early Hip Hop groups, individual MCs and DJs, promoters, venues, dress codes, admission prices, shout outs and more. Celebrated designers, such as Buddy Esquire (“The Flyer King”) and Phase 2, made these flyers using magazine cutouts, original photographs, drawings, and dry-transfer letters.

The UCLA Music Library's Archive of Popular American Music is a research collection covering the history of popular music in the United States from 1790 to the present. The collection, fully accessible at the item level through the UCLA Library Orion2 catalog, is one of the largest in the country, numbering almost 450,000 pieces of sheet music, anthologies, and arrangements for band and orchestra. The collection also includes 62,500 recordings on disc, tape, and cylinder.

Digital collections include Carlos (DJ Styles) Garza Drawings and Memorabilia; DJ Screw Photographs & Memorabilia; HAWK Photographs and Memorabilia; Pen & Pixel
Houston Hip Hop Posters; Peter Beste “Houston Rap” Photographs

View archived versions of websites from Mello Music Group, Doomtree Records, Stones Throw Records, Rhymesayers Entertainment, and many more.

The NOLA Hiphop Archive was founded by Holly Hobbs in 2012. To date, the NOLA Hiphop Archive has focused on the recording and collection of digital videotaped oral histories. The collection currently contains over 40 videotaped interviews with leading hiphop and bounce artists, with new interviews added on an ongoing basis.

A "living collection of books, articles, documentaries, series, podcasts and more about the Black origins of traditional and popular music dating from the 18th century to present day. Resources are organized chronologically and by genre for ease of browsing."

Community-contributed lyrics and analysis of music from a wide variety of genres.

"Discover Music through Samples, Cover Songs and Remixes. Dig deeper into music by discovering direct connections among over 700,000 songs and 228,000 artists, from Hip-Hop, Rap and R&B via Electronic / Dance through to Rock, Pop, Soul, Funk, Reggae, Jazz, Classical and beyond."

Access to the Monroe Library is currently limited to study space and classroom use. Use the links on the Interlibrary Loan page to find out how you can request access to books, article scans, and more.