Hip Hop Hall of Fame Coming to Harlem, Might Be Awesome
Cool news, music lovers. Soon there will be another institution that will systematically ignore your favorite artists and canonize the ones you feel pretty “meh” about. Plans are in the works for the city’s first hip-hop devoted museum, the Hip Hop Hall of Fame, to break ground in Harlem sometime next year. The space will feature memorabilia, turntables, and other stuff donated by artists like Run-DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Outkast, Young Jeezy, Common, Eminem, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. Just wait till you see the Iggy Azalea room!
The plan is to have a 12,000 square foot space with museum and TV studio in Harlem, and another 50,000 square foot place in Times Square. The project is being spearheaded by JT Thompson, who produced the Hip Hop Hall of Fame Awards show in the 90s at BET and is presumably hoping for a nostalgia-fueled revival of same.
“This will be the home of hip hop history,” Thompson told the Daily News. “People need to understand the importance of hip hop, the elements, the DJs, the B-boys and B-girls and the graffiti writers.”
The project will cost some $80 million, $50 million of which has already been raised, according to Thompson. (Though Thompson, it should be noted, has announced similar projects before that haven’t come to fruition.) It’s not the first time a hip-hop museum has been attempted in the city. Afrika Bambaataa and others had pushed for a museum to be opened in the Bronx. Still, we’d visit, but only if they can convince Cam’ron to donate his entire collection of pink and purple furs.