Hip-hop has become a popular subject of academic discourse, serving as a medium through which members of several disciplinary communities can engage issues of race, representation, aesthetic, gender, class, and performance, to list some of the most frequently evoked topics. This discussion explores the aims and procedures of contemporary ethnographies in conjunction with those of traditional hip-hop studies, thus highlighting the potential a more ethnographically driven branch of hip-hop scholarship would have on the field as a whole.