Crate digging

Crate digging

A more intense method of record collecting, known as crate digging, involves thorough searching of record bins to find a recording of interest. For many collectors, that pursuit becomes a lifelong obsession, driving them to spend countless hours hunting for rare pressings. This practice is associated with and holds a particular prestige for hip hop producers, who searched for rare records with sounds to sample for a newly created recording. In her account of the North American hip-hop crate diggers of the 1980s, media and culture theorist Elodie A. Roy writes, "As they trailed second-hand shops and car boot sales – depositories of unwanted capitalist surplus – diggers were bound to encounter realms of mainstream, mass-produced LP records now fallen out of grace and fashion. They primarily used them as raw material, seeking to create beats out of them." Speaking of crate digging's broader role in hip hop culture, academic and ethnomusicologist Joseph G. Schloss says: