“What Happens in the Cabin . . .”: An Arts-Based Autoethnography of Underground Hip Hop Song Making

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY KWAME HARRISON
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Spontaneous Activities ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Home Recording ◽  
Recording Studios ◽  
Home Studio ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Agency And Structure

AbstractTaking an autoethnographic perspective that foregrounds the interplay between the author's artist-self and researcher-self, this article explores the relationship between agency and structure in the activities surrounding underground hip hop music making within a home studio recording space. It aims to demystify the aura of in-studio music creation by focusing on the nexus of oral/written, pre-composed/improvised, and pre-recorded/live creative practices as experienced within the context of performance. Utilizing Harris Berger's notion of stance, I discuss how hip hop recording artists transcend performative self-consciousness in the pursuit of creativity. Ultimately, this article presents hip hop home recording studios as spaces that facilitate particular kinds of musical innovation through a mix of collective and individual pursuits, as well as routinized and spontaneous activities.

scholarly journals When Beats Meet Critique: Sample-Based Hip-Hop as Knowledge-Practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Anthony Swiboda
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Knowledge Practice

This article explores sample-based hip-hop (Schloss, 2004) as a mode of critical knowledge-practice. Situated in the broader context of breakbeat culture as a feature of hip-hop music-making, hip-hop sampling is considered in its technical, aesthetic, formal, discursive and intellectual aspects. The "internal logic" (Schloss, 2004) of sample-based hip-hop is explored in how it illustrates "Afrological" versus "Eurological" musical tendencies (Lewis, 2004a; Stewart, 2010). These tendencies are examined in the context of the technological and material transformations heralded by the advent of digital technologies, rendering hip-hop sampling an example of Afrological compositional-improvisative music-making. Hip-hop sampling is hereby used to sound the critical and theoretical stakes of academic critical writing regarding idiomatically specific practices such as hip-hop sampling, at the same time as highlighting how sample-based hip-hop constitutes a mode of "critical culture" (Stiegler, 2006) in its own right.

Rap, Islam and Jihadi Cool: The attractions of the Western jihadi subculture

2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110255
Author(s):  
Sune Qvotrup Jensen ◽  
Jeppe Fuglsang Larsen ◽  
Sveinung Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Hybrid Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Recent scholarship has explored the potential of subcultural theory for understanding the convergence of Western street and jihadi subcultures. The role of jihadi rap in this radical hybrid culture, however, is yet uncharted. We argue that subcultural analysis allows an understanding of the aesthetic fascination of jihadism, sometimes referred to as jihadi cool, and that jihadi rap should be seen as an integrated part of this cultural amalgam. To better understand the role of hip-hop in the hybrid street-jihadi culture, this paper offers a historical analysis of the relationship between hip-hop and Islam and detailed insight into the more contemporary, and marginal, phenomena of jihadi rap. We track the continuities and discontinuities from the presence of Black Islam in early hip hop to recent convergences between hip hop and jihadism. Our analysis draws on Lévi-Strauss concepts of bricolage and floating signifiers. Subcultures and hip-hop music are seen as bricolages that draw on a multitude of cultural references with their own particular history. In these cultural bricolages, Islam often acts as a floating signifier, with different and often ambiguous meanings. We argue and demonstrate that Islam has a long history of being part of hip-hop rebellion and attraction and that this, channelled through jihadi rap, can contribute to jihadi cool and the contemporary pull of Western jihadi subcultures.

scholarly journals The arts of the remix: ethnography and rap

1970 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Lashua
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
School Based ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
And Performance

In this paper I take note of 'the arts of the remix', in which techniques of producing hip-hop music with First Nations young people in Canada involved remixing both music and research practices. Through a school-based leisure programme called The Beat of Boyle Street, I taught Aboriginal young people to use computers and audio software to make, produce, and record their own hip-hop music. The programme's research component involved a bricolage of arts-based and performance ethnographic techniques and analyses. The shared music-making process opened space for storytelling, and the songs that were produced articulated many of the struggles and hopes of First Nations youth.

Promiscuous πόρναι, Bad Bitches, and Misogynistic Masculinities: A Queer, Imperial-Critical Analysis of Revelation and Rap

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-149
Author(s):  
O’neil Van Horn
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
First Order ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Drag Kings ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract If the Book of Revelation is anti-imperial resistance literature of the first order, hip-hop music is its contemporary equivalent – with Kendrick Lamar as one of its most politically sensitized “prophets.” I will explore the intersections, commonalities, and divergences between Revelation 17-18 and rapper Kendrick’s “For Sale? (Interlude),” especially regarding notions of empire, gender, and sexuality. I will draw connections between the characters of “For Sale” – Kendrick and Lucy – and those of Revelation 17-18 – John of Patmos and Babylon. This analysis will reveal the relationship between anti-imperial rhetoric and the troubling “effemination” of empire. I contend that Babylon and Lucy are both figures “in drag,” dis/closing the prevailing imperial and misogynistic forces of their respective cultures. This queer interpretation, playing off Catherine Keller’s and Stephen D. Moore’s reading of the text and J. Jack Halberstam’s study of drag kings, seeks to unveil the hypermasculine performances in both Revelation and contemporary hip-hop culture.

Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines: Mapping Music and Urban Landscape

2012 ◽  
Vol 137 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Urban Conditions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between music and material urban environments by drawing on ethnographic research with rock and hip-hop musicians. The first of its three sections introduces some of the musicians who participated in that research and the maps they drew to illustrate their music-making activities in the city. The second compares these hand-drawn maps and their various lines and patterns, and relates their differences to music genre and particular urban conditions. The final section of the article explores the broader implications of the maps for conceptualizing the relationship between music and material environments. It starts by considering notions of articulation and mediation and their usefulness for understanding relations between music and material urban environments. Focusing on the maps’ detailed lines and patterns, it then describes how music and music-making are mediated by material urban environments, a process involving the navigation of journeys and boundaries and the forging of multiple relations along the way.

scholarly journals White Pop, Shiny Armour and a Sling and Stone: Indigenous Expressions of Contemporary Congregational Song Exploring Christian-Māori Identity

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Shannon Said
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Congregational Song ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Pentecostal Churches ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Sydney Australia

It has taken many years for different styles of music to be utilised within Pentecostal churches as acceptable forms of worship. These shifts in musical sensibilities, which draw upon elements of pop, rock and hip hop, have allowed for a contemporisation of music that functions as worship within these settings, and although still debated within and across some denominations, there is a growing acceptance amongst Western churches of these styles. Whilst these developments have taken place over the past few decades, there is an ongoing resistance by Pentecostal churches to embrace Indigenous musical expressions of worship, which are usually treated as token recognitions of minority groups, and at worst, demonised as irredeemable musical forms. This article draws upon interview data with Christian-Māori leaders from New Zealand and focus group participants of a diaspora Māori church in southwest Sydney, Australia, who considered their views as Christian musicians and ministers. These perspectives seek to challenge the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations within a church setting and create a more inclusive philosophy and practice towards being ‘one in Christ’ with the role of music as worship acting as a case study throughout. It also considers how Indigenous forms of worship impact cultural identity, where Christian worship drawing upon Māori language and music forms has led to deeper connections to congregants’ cultural backgrounds.

Questions of style: notes on Italian hip hop

Popular Music ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Slow Process ◽  
Explosive Material ◽  
The Public ◽  
Music And Politics ◽  
The Relationship

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert representedan unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)

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