Hip Hop Music and (Reading) the Narrative Soundtracks of New Black Realist Cinema

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Millea
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Spike Lee ◽  
Independent Cinema ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Hip Hop Music

Hip hop is noise. It is a composite binding of contemporary, postmodern technologies and orally based ideologies that disrupts the normative and traditional characteristics of mainstream media and culture in order to create a space for subcultural revolt and resistance. Nowhere is this more fascinating than in the soundtracks of New Black Realism, African American independent cinema of the 1990s. Drawing on case studies from some of the earliest work of Spike Lee, as the foremost proponent of the genre, this chapter reads the sound and music of these narrative films through fundamental characteristics in hip hop as a postliterate orality, arguing that such an approach allows us to explore the rebellious possibilities of the music as, not just on, the cinematic soundtrack.

scholarly journals Multimodal Metaphor as the Source of Parodic Integration in Hip Hop Music Videos

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Gordana Čupković ◽  
Silvana Dunat
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Multimodal Integration ◽  
Hip Hop Music

This paper deals with multimodal metaphors as the basis of parodic integration in selected videos and album covers by rap artist Krešo Bengalka and his band Kiša metaka. The case studies of parodic integration are marked by a spectacle that significantly contributes to the blend. The study focuses on multimodal integration and disintegration and on the reversal of the conventional way of representing both the relation between the interior and exterior and the relation between the static and the dynamic.

scholarly journals Song Form and the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 93-135
Author(s):  
Ben Duinker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
21St Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Musical Genres

Song form in North American hip-hop music has evolved along the genre’s journey from its origins as a live musical practice, through its commercial ascent in the 1980s and 1990s, to its dominance of mainstream popular music in the 21st century. This paper explores the nature and evolution of song form in hip-hop music and uses them as a musical lens to view the gradual and ongoing mainstreaming of this genre. With the help of a corpus of 160 hip-hop songs released since 1979, I describe and unpack section types common to hip-hop music­—verses, hooks, and instrumentals—illustrating how these sections combine in different formal paradigms, such as strophic and verse-hook. I evaluate the extent to which formal structures in hip-hop music can be understood as products of the genre’s live performance culture; one with roots in African American oral vernacular traditions such as toasting. Finally, I discuss how form in hip-hop music has increasingly foregrounded the hook (chorus): the emergence of the verse-hook song form, an increase in sung hooks (often by singers outside the hip-hop genre), the earlier arrival of hook sections in songs, and the greater share of a song’s duration occupied by hooks. Viewing hip-hop music’s evolution through this increasing importance of the hook provides a clear representation of the genre’s roots outside of, and assimilation into, mainstream popular music; one of many Black musical genres to have traversed this path (George, 1988).

Sampling the 1970s in hip-hop

Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Demers
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
American Music ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Hip Hop Music

Musical borrowings, or samples, have long been a means of creating lineage between hip-hop and older genres of African-American music such as funk, soul, and rhythm and blues. DJs who sample from this so-called ‘Old School’ attempt to link hip-hop to older, venerable traditions of black popular music. This article investigates the importance of 1970s pop and culture to hip-hop music. This era is depicted as a time in which African-American identity coalesced, and a new political consciousness was born. The primary source for images of the 1970s was and continues to be blaxploitation film, a genre of low-budget, black-oriented crime and suspense cinema. This article will detail how blaxploitation distilled certain societal concerns of the 1970s, and how in turn hip-hop feeds off blaxploitation both dramatically and musically, reusing its story lines and sampling its soundtracks.

scholarly journals Philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop music

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Tatiana Leonidovna Pyrova
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Impact

This article is dedicated to the philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop music of the late XX century. Developed by the African philosopher Leopold Senghor, the author of the theory of negritude, concept of Negro-African aesthetics laid the foundations for the formation of philosophical-political comprehension and development of the principles of African-American culture in the second half of the XX century in works of the founders of “Black Arts” movement. This research examines the main theses of the aesthetic theory of L. Senghor; traces his impact upon cultural-political movement “Black Art”; reveals which position of his aesthetic theory and cultural-political movement “Black Arts” affected hip-hop music. The author refers to the concept of “vibe” for understanding the influence of Negro-African aesthetics upon the development of hip-hop music. The impact of aesthetic theory of Leopold Senghor upon the theoretical positions of cultural-political movement “Black Arts” is demonstrated. The author also compares the characteristics of the Negro-African aesthetics and the concepts used to describe hip-hop music, and determines correlation between them. The conclusion is made that the research assessment of hip-hop music and comparative analysis of African-American hip-hop with the examples of global hip-hop should pay attention to the philosophical-aesthetic foundations of African-American hip-hop and their relation to Negro-African aesthetics, which differs fundamentally from the European aesthetic tradition.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Christopher Driscoll
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Academy ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Hip Hop Culture

At the 2010 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in Atlanta, GA, a group of young scholars organized a wildcard session titled “What’s This ‘Religious’ in Hip Hop Culture?” The central questions under investigation by the panel were 1) what about hip hop culture is religious? and 2) how are issues of theory and method within African American religious studies challenged and/or rethought because of the recent turn to hip hop as both subject of study and cultural hermeneutic. Though some panelists challenged this “religious” in hip hop, all agreed that hip hop is of theoretical and methodological import for African American religious studies and religious studies in general. This collection of essays brings together in print many findings from that session and points out the implications of hip hop's influence on religious scholars' theoretical and methodological concerns.

Fixing Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthea Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Intellectual Property ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Intellectual Property Law ◽  
Tap Dance ◽  
American Vernacular ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter juxtaposes brief case studies of African American vernacular dancers from the first half of the twentieth century in order to reexamine the relationship between the ideology of intellectual property law and the traditions of jazz and tap dance, which rely heavily on improvisation. The examples of the blackface performer Johnny Hudgins, who claimed a copyright in his pantomime routine in the 1920s, and of Fred and Sledge, the class-act dance duo featured in the hit 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate, whose choreography was copyrighted by the white modern dancer Hanya Holm, prompt a rethinking of the assumed opposition between the originality and fixity requirements of copyright law and the improvisatory ethos of jazz and tap dance. Ultimately, the chapter argues that whether claiming or disavowing uniqueness, embracing or resisting documentation, African American vernacular dancers were both advantaged and hampered by copyright law.

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