Download or read book Rap Music and Street Consciousness written by Cheryl Lynette Keyes and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first musicological history of rap music, Cheryl L. Keyes traces the genre's history from its roots in West African bardic traditions, the Jamaican dancehall tradition, and African American vernacular expressions to its permeation of the cultural mainstream as a major tenet of hip-hop lifestyle and culture. Rap music, according to Keyes, is a forum that addresses the political and economic disfranchisement of black youths and other groups, fosters ethnic pride, and displays culture values and aesthetics. Blending popular culture with folklore and ethnomusicology, Keyes offers a nuanced portrait of the artists, themes, and varying styles reflective of urban life and street consciousness. Drawing on the music, lives, politics, and interests of figures including Afrika Bambaataa, the "godfather of hip-hop," and his Zulu Nation, George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, Grandmaster Flash, Kool "DJ" Herc, MC Lyte, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Ice-T, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and The Last Poets, Rap Music and Street Consciousness challenges outsider views of the genre. The book also draws on ethnographic research done in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and London, as well as interviews with performers, producers, directors, fans, and managers. Keyes's vivid and wide-ranging analysis covers the emergence and personas of female rappers and white rappers, the legal repercussions of technological advancements such as electronic mixing and digital sampling, the advent of rap music videos, and the existence of gangsta rap, Southern rap, acid rap, and dance-centered rap subgenres. Also considered are the crossover careers of rap artists in movies and television; rapper-turned-mogul phenomenons such as Queen Latifah; the multimedia empire of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; the cataclysmic rise of Death Row Records; East Coast versus West Coast tensions; the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace; and the unification efforts of the Nation of Islam and the Hip-Hop Nation.
Download or read book Rap Music and Street Consciousness written by Cheryl L. Keyes and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity written by Adam Krims and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-04-24 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to discuss in detail how rap music is put together musically and how it contributes to the formation of cultural identities for both artists and audiences. It also argues that current skeptical attitudes toward music analysis in popular music studies are misplaced and need to be reconsidered if cultural studies are to treat seriously the social force of rap music, popular musics, and music in general. Drawing extensively on recent scholarship in popular music studies, cultural theory, communications, critical theory, and musicology, Krims redefines 'music theory' as meaning simply 'theory about music', in which musical poetics (the study of how musical sound is deployed) may play a crucial role when its claims are contextualized and demystified. Theorizing local and global geographies of rap, Krims discusses at length the music of Ice Cube, the Goodie MoB, KRS-One, Dutch group the Spookrijders, and Canadian Cree rapper Bannock.
Download or read book Noise and Spirit written by Anthony B. Pinn and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rap music is often seen as a Black secular response to pressing issues of our time. Yet, like spirituals, the blues, and gospel music, rap has deep connections to African American religious traditions. Noise and Spirit explores the diverse religious dimensions of rap stemming from Islam (including the Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation), Rastafarianism, and Humanism, as well as Christianity. The volume examines rap’s dialogue with religious traditions, from the ways in which Islamic rap music is used as a method of religious and political instruction to the uses of both the blues and Black women’s rap for considering the distinction between God and the Devil. The first section explores rap’s association with more easily recognizable religious traditions and communities such as Christianity and Islam. The next presents discussions of rap and important spiritual considerations, including on the topic of death. The final unit wrestles with ways to theologize about the relationship between the sacred and the profane in rap.
Download or read book Tha Global Cipha written by James G. Spady and published by Umum/Loh. This book was released on 2006 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents in-depth conversations with hip-hop artists from around the world, representing the many regional scenes of the U.S. (from the East Coast to the Bay Area to the Dirty South), France, the Caribbean (from Jamaica to Puerto Rico), and Africa (from Algeria to Senegal), as well as diverse forms of street musics, such as Reggaeton, Reggae/Dancehall, Shaabi and Rai. Conversations with Jay-Z, Mos Def, Eve, Sean Paul, Young Jeezy, Foxy Brown, Booba, Buju Banton, Ivy Queen, Afrika Bambaataa, Sonia Sanchez, DJ Kool Herc, Oxmo Puccino, Trina, Cornbread, Mannie Fresh, Intik, Beanie Sigel, Cheb Khaled, Pitbull, Manu Key, Tego Calderon and many others, demonstrate these artists to be critical interpreters of their own culture and of the world around them. This book centers the usually marginalized voices of Hip Hop communities, presenting a remarkably refreshing and revealing view of Hip Hop Culture from the inside-out.
Download or read book I Got Something to Say written by Matthew Oware and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do millennial rappers in the United States say in their music? This timely and compelling book answers this question by decoding the lyrics of over 700 songs from contemporary rap artists. Using innovative research techniques, Matthew Oware reveals how emcees perpetuate and challenge gendered and racialized constructions of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. Male and female artists litter their rhymes with misogynistic and violent imagery. However, men also express a full range of emotions, from arrogance to vulnerability, conveying a more complex manhood than previously acknowledged. Women emphatically state their desires while embracing a more feminist approach. Even LGBTQ artists stake their claim and express their sexuality without fear. Finally, in the age of Black Lives Matter and the presidency of Donald J. Trump, emcees forcefully politicize their music. Although complicated and contradictory in many ways, rap remains a powerful medium for social commentary.
Download or read book When Rap Music Had a Conscience written by Tayannah Lee McQuillar and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2007-03-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rap music has many detractors. Today, it is often associated with a culture of crass materialistm, sex, violence and irresponsibility. It wasn't always so. In her thorough and entertaining tour of the "golden age" of rap from 1987 to 1996, McQuillar takes us back to a time when the music voiced the social and political concerns of inner-city youth, reflected their hopes and dreams for the future, and strove to inspire positive social change. When Rap Music Had a Conscience gives us the A's - to - Z's of major groups and artists, from Arrested Development to YZ, of this creative and socially conscious age. Broadening its outlook on the culture, the book discusses the interactions of rap music with literature, film and fashion. Finally, it delves into the socio-political dimensions of Hip-Hop in the golden age, exploring the influence of events from the L.A. riots to the unearthing of the oldest human remains in Kenya, to paint a rich and fascinating picture of rap music and its diverse contexts and consequences.
Download or read book Making Beats written by Joseph G. Schloss and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects—from hip-hop artists’ pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of “digging” for rare records—Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities. This second edition of the book includes a new foreword by Jeff Chang and a new afterword by the author.
Download or read book Blowin Up written by Jooyoung Lee and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What many readers have wished for is now reality: a richly descriptive ethnography of street rappers. "Blowing up” refers to rappers’ dream of becoming rich and famous, or, at the least, successful as recording artists. Jooyoung Lee adds a shape to his story of Flawliis, VerBS, E. Crimsin, Psychosiz, and Tick-a-Lott: how do young black men from the inner city navigate their twenties? Blowin’ Up is a vibrant look at the young-adult stage of people who grow up in the shadow of gangs, dead-end jobs, and a glittering entertainment industry (the setting is Los Angeles). No other account of ghetto youth affords us this particular angle of vision. Lee discovers that in South Central L.A., rap can create bridges that bring young men together with peers from different neighborhoods (underscoring the importance of a healthy alternative to gangs). A rapper’s underground artistic career is rooted in battle skills and crowd appeal, and, to boot, is meritocratic (whereas mainstream career success is based on branding, timing, funding, networks, and gimmicks). Rapping is an embodied art--it takes much practice to learn, and requires body skills in dance, stance, and voice. Lee homes in on the skills and personalities of individual rappers, but he also illuminates the complex hip-hop scene around which these young men orbit, giving us detailed understandings of how young men navigate the intricate, tightly-wound world of tragedy and opportunity in the city. Lee balances the prospect of risk and existential uncertainty for youth entering a young adult life-stage with the hope for a big break in forging an entertainment career. In the end, Lee shows us how the arts can shape the lives of at-risk youth.
Download or read book Hip Hop and the Law written by Pamela D. Bridgewater and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is important to understanding American law? What is important to understanding hip hop? Wide swaths of renowned academics, practitioners, commentators, and performance artists have answered these two questions independently. And although understanding both depends upon the same intellectual enterprise, textual analysis of narrative storytelling, somehow their intersection has escaped critical reflection. Hip Hop and the Law merges the two cultural giants of law and rap music and demonstrates their relationship at the convergence of Legal Consciousness, Politics, Hip Hop Studies, and American Law. No matter what your role or level of experience with law or hip hop, this book is a sound resource for learning, discussing, and teaching the nuances of their relationship. Topics include Critical Race Theory, Crime and Justice, Mass Incarceration, Gender, and American Law: including Corporate Law, Intellectual Property, Constitutional Law, and Real Property Law.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop written by Justin A. Williams and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion covers the hip-hop elements, methods of studying hip-hop, and case studies from Nerdcore to Turkish-German and Japanese hip-hop.
Download or read book Street Conscious Rap written by James G. Spady and published by Umum/Loh. This book was released on 1999 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Prophets of the Hood written by Imani Perry and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop as a transnational musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have shortchanged the aesthetic value of rap by attributing its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation. Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, krs-One, OutKast, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, and Lauryn Hill. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs—the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides complex considerations of hip hop’s association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She shows that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite.
Download or read book To Live and Defy in LA written by Felicia Angeja Viator and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How gangsta rap shocked America, made millions, and pulled back the curtain on an urban crisis. How is it that gangsta rap—so dystopian that it struck aspiring Brooklyn rapper and future superstar Jay-Z as “over the top”—was born in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, surf, and sun? In the Reagan era, hip-hop was understood to be the music of the inner city and, with rare exception, of New York. Rap was considered the poetry of the street, and it was thought to breed in close quarters, the product of dilapidated tenements, crime-infested housing projects, and graffiti-covered subway cars. To many in the industry, LA was certainly not hard-edged and urban enough to generate authentic hip-hop; a new brand of black rebel music could never come from La-La Land. But it did. In To Live and Defy in LA, Felicia Viator tells the story of the young black men who built gangsta rap and changed LA and the world. She takes readers into South Central, Compton, Long Beach, and Watts two decades after the long hot summer of 1965. This was the world of crack cocaine, street gangs, and Daryl Gates, and it was the environment in which rappers such as Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E came of age. By the end of the 1980s, these self-styled “ghetto reporters” had fought their way onto the nation’s radio and TV stations and thus into America’s consciousness, mocking law-and-order crusaders, exposing police brutality, outraging both feminists and traditionalists with their often retrograde treatment of sex and gender, and demanding that America confront an urban crisis too often ignored.
Download or read book Emerald Street written by Daudi J. Abe and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first rap battles in Seattle's Central District to the Grammy stage, hip hop has shaped urban life and the music scene of the Pacific Northwest for more than four decades. In the early 1980s, Seattle's hip-hop artists developed a community-based culture of stylistic experimentation and multiethnic collaboration. Emerging at a distance from the hip-hop centers of New York City and Los Angeles, Seattle's most famous hip-hop figures, Sir Mix-A-Lot and Macklemore, found mainstream success twenty years apart by going directly against the grain of their respective eras. In addition, Seattle has produced a two-time world-champion breaking crew, globally renowned urban clothing designers, an international hip-hop magazine, and influential record producers. In Emerald Street, Daudi Abe chronicles the development of Seattle hip hop from its earliest days, drawing on interviews with artists and journalists to trace how the elements of hip hop--rapping, DJing, breaking, and graffiti--flourished in the Seattle scene. He shows how Seattle hip-hop culture goes beyond art and music, influencing politics, the relationships between communities of color and law enforcement, the changing media scene, and youth outreach and educational programs. The result is a rich narrative of a dynamic and influential force in Seattle music history and beyond. Emerald Street was made possible in part by a grant from 4Culture's Heritage Program.
Download or read book Vibrate Higher written by Talib Kweli and published by MCD. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY LITERARY PRIZE From one of the most lyrically gifted, socially conscious rappers of the past twenty years, Vibrate Higher is a firsthand account of hip-hop as a political force Before Talib Kweli became a world-renowned hip-hop artist, he was a Brooklyn kid who liked to cut class, spit rhymes, and wander the streets of Greenwich Village with a motley crew of artists, rappers, and DJs who found hip-hop more inspiring than their textbooks (much to the chagrin of the educator parents who had given their son an Afrocentric name in hope of securing for him a more traditional sense of pride and purpose). Kweli’s was the first generation to grow up with hip-hop as established culture—a genre of music that has expanded to include its own pantheon of heroes, rich history and politics, and distinct worldview. Eventually, childhood friendships turned into collaborations, and Kweli gained notoriety as a rapper in his own right. From collaborating with some of hip-hop’s greatest—including Mos Def, Common, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, and Kendrick Lamar—to selling books out of the oldest African-American bookstore in Brooklyn, ultimately leaving his record label, and taking control of his own recording career, Kweli tells the winding, always compelling story of the people and events that shaped his own life as well as the culture of hip-hop that informs American culture at large. Vibrate Higher illuminates Talib Kweli’s upbringing and artistic success, but so too does it give life to hip-hop as a political force—one that galvanized the Movement for Black Lives and serves a continual channel for resistance against the rising tide of white nationalism.
Download or read book Issues in African American Music written by Portia K. Maultsby and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-26 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation is a collection of twenty-one essays by leading scholars, surveying vital themes in the history of African American music. Bringing together the viewpoints of ethnomusicologists, historians, and performers, these essays cover topics including the music industry, women and gender, and music as resistance, and explore the stories of music creators and their communities. Revised and expanded to reflect the latest scholarship, with six all-new essays, this book both complements the previously published volume African American Music: An Introduction and stands on its own. Each chapter features a discography of recommended listening for further study. From the antebellum period to the present, and from classical music to hip hop, this wide-ranging volume provides a nuanced introduction for students and anyone seeking to understand the history, social context, and cultural impact of African American music.
