Cornell Hip Hop Collection. Flyers, records, personal papers, etc. Specific collections devoted to Joe Conzo, Breakbeat Lenny, Charlie Ahearn, Popmaster Fabel, Afrika Bambaataa, Crazy Legs, Grandmaster Caz, and more!

DJ Screw Collection. University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. Paul Wall tours the collection in this brief video.

Genius. My favourite site to look up song lyrics. Often helpful to look at the crowdsourced annotations as well — you get some sophomoric attempts at close reading, of course, but great for bookworms like myself who need to get clued in to memes and pop culture refernces.

Harvard Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute. This seems to be very much a work in progress, at the moment. 

Hypothes.is. Another crowdsourced annotations website. But the main attraction here is that it allows you to annotate the web and keep track of of it.

Learn Music with Ableton! This website, put up by the music-production software ;ioneers, will teach you some basics of music theory and you can play around and produce some tracks!

NOLA Hiphop and Bounce Archive. The subsidiary NOLA Hiphop Archive boasts over sixty digital videotaped oral histories with bounce artists (MCs, DJs, and producers, presumably)!

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. See also some of the collections and assets at the Smithsonian.

Sonic Pi. Make music and learn to code at the same time! This is a software synthesiser that you sontrol via Ruby, a programming language. Built for ‘live coding’—in other words, you can manipulate notes and sounds on the beat and in real time. The tutorial is quite thorough, and written in accessible language.

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Very helpful when you’re trying to get a handle on theoretical/abstract terms.

The Universal Hip Hop Museum’s Hip Hop Timeline. Begins in 1960(!?) and brings us to the present day, covering Great Hip-Hop Moments in World Events, DJing, Emceeing, Breakdancing, ‘Aerosol Art’, Breakdancing, Fashion, and more.

Whosampled.com. A great resource for any kind of sample-based music, and you can usually hear the song and the original sources right on the relevant page.