scholarly journals Rap Sessions From the Field: Intersectional Conversations With Jemele Hill, Bun B, Fat Joe, and IDK

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-235
Author(s):  
C. Keith Harrison ◽  
Reggie Saunders

To end this special issue, Dr. C. Keith Harrison and Reggie Saunders connected with individuals that exist at the intersection of hip-hop culture and sport. This series of interviews begins with Jemele Hill, an American sports journalist and activist. A graduate from Michigan State University, Jemele also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Central Florida from 2012 to 2014 teaching undergraduate sport business management students practical lessons about sport media. Reggie has been an adjunct faculty member at University of Central Florida since 2015, co-teaching innovation and entrepreneurship in sport/entertainment with Harrison. Reggie follows with an interview with Bun B, one half of the Texas rap duo, UGK and currently an adjunct professor at Rice University teaching a course on religion and hip-hop. New York rapper and entrepreneur, Fat Joe weighs in briefly on the topic, and Reggie closes out by interviewing rapper and Washington DC native, IDK. IDK is known for his hit song 24, and has a notable fan in Kevin Durant, National Basketball Association superstar and fellow Washington, DC native.

2008 ◽  
Vol 98 (6) ◽  
pp. 1081-1085 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel A. Muñoz-Laboy ◽  
Daniel H. Castellanos ◽  
Chanel S. Haliburton ◽  
Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila ◽  
Hannah J. Weinstein ◽  
...  

Music ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl L. Keyes

Rap evolved as a vernacular term used among African Americans to define a stylized way of speaking. Over the years, black radio disc jockeys, musicians, literary figures, and 1960s political figures incorporated rap into their performances or way of speaking to appeal to black audiences. By the early 1970s, rap continued its development in the urban streets among “rhymin’ emcees” (MCs) accompanied by pre-recorded music, provided by a disc jockey on two turntables. This concept became associated with a youth arts movement driven and populated by black and Latino youth in New York City called hip-hop. Comprised of four elements—breakdancing (b-boying/b-girling), graffiti (writing), disc jockeying (DJing), and emceeing (MCing)—hip-hop also distinguishes a distinct form of dress, gesture, and language that embodies an urban street consciousness. By the late 1970s, the rhymin’ MC/DJ combination attracted music entrepreneurs who recognized the commercial potential with the release of the recording “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. Subsequently, music trade magazines such as Billboard contributed to popularizing the MC/DJ concept as rap music. Additionally, the production of hip-hop arts via the silver screen, advertising, and fashion industries further contributed to its rise to global prominence. Realizing its viability to a growing youth constituency, entrepreneurs placed significant value on certain elements of hip-hop believed to be more marketable to youth consumers in the popular music mainstream. For example, MCing and DJing became primary markets while breakdancing and graffiti served as hip-hop’s secondary markets. As such, rap music eventually eclipsed in popularity breakdancing and graffiti, thus solidifying this music category. Occasionally, critics and aficionados use rap music interchangeably with hip-hop. The sources herein will be used interchangeably as rap music/hip-hop along with their associates (breakdance and graffiti), and allied traditions. Similar to the burgeoning success of hip-hop culture in the mainstream popular culture, rap garnered the attention of academicians during the late 1980s, who perceived it as fertile ground for the study of popular youth culture. This is evident with a flurry of theses, articles, books, journalistic writings, and photo-essays leading to the establishment of hip-hop studies. Today, there are thousands of written sources on hip-hop. Rather than attempting to present all of these written sources, which would be beyond the scope of this bibliography, this article instead offers a survey of book sources and seminal journal articles that reflect the erudition, scholarly depth, and interdisciplinary scope of hip-hop studies.


Author(s):  
Austin McCoy

Rap is the musical practice of hip hop culture that features vocalists, or MCs, reciting lyrics over an instrumental beat that emerged out of the political and economic transformations of New York City after the 1960s. Black and Latinx youth, many of them Caribbean immigrants, created this new cultural form in response to racism, poverty, urban renewal, deindustrialization, and inner-city violence. These new cultural forms eventually spread beyond New York to all regions of the United States as artists from Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, and Chicago began releasing rap music with their own distinct sounds. Despite efforts to demonize and censor rap music and hip hop culture, rap music has served as a pathway for social mobility for many black and Latinx youth. Many artists have enjoyed crossover success in acting, advertising, and business. Rap music has also sparked new conversations about various issues such as electoral politics, gender and sexuality, crime, policing, and mass incarceration, as well as technology.


Arts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam de Paor-Evans

Hip-hop culture is structured around key representational elements, each of which is underpinned by the holistic element of knowledge. Hip-hop emerged as a cultural counter position to the socio-politics of the urban condition in 1970s New York City, fuelled by destitution, contextual displacement, and the cultural values of non-white diaspora. Graffiti—as the primary form of hip-hop expression—began as a political act before morphing into an artform which visually supported the music and dance elements of hip-hop. The emerging synergies graffiti shared with the practices of DJing, rap, and B-boying (breakdancing) forged a new form of art which challenged the cultural capital of music and visual and sonic arts. This article explores moments of intertextuality between visual and sonic metaphors in hip-hop culture and the canon of fine art. The tropes of Michelangelo, Warhol, Monet, and O’Keefe are interrogated through the lyrics of Melle Mel, LL Cool J, Rakim, Felt, Action Bronson, Homeboy Sandman and Aesop Rock to reveal hip-hop’s multifarious intertextuality. In conclusion, the article contests the fallacy of hip-hop as mainstream and lowbrow culture and affirms that the use of fine art tropes in hip-hop narratives builds a critical relationship between the previously disparate cultural values of hip-hop and fine art, and challenges conventions of the class system.


Renegades ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
Trevor Boffone

This chapter analyzes the varied ways that Renegades build digital communities using Dubsmash and Instagram. It argues that online communities hold the potential to democratize access and reject coastal biases typically seen in popular US culture. The traditional entertainment centers of Los Angeles and New York City, while still important, are relegated to second-tier status behind cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta, in addition to less populated areas across the American South. By taking up digital space on an inclusive platform, Renegades re-center traditional scripts of community building, effectively demonstrating the necessity for culturally responsive communities. These Dubsmashers search for what is familiar and lay the groundwork for equity and inclusion from there, promoting a shared sense of values that enables a plurality of voices to rise to the top. The chapter uses the official Dubsmash Instagram account as a case study, unpacking the nuanced ways that Dubsmash promotes the work of its most well-known influencers alongside a growing set of Renegades who show brand loyalty by regularly engaging with the app and who promote this subset of hip hop culture through their micro-performances on Dubsmash. Specifically, this chapter explores the different ways that Dubsmash has used dance challenge and games to bring people together and further a sense of connection during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.


2016 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Piotr Majewski

Rap as identity music: from the black ghetto to Polish pop-nationalismIn today’s world, cultural products, technologies, information and ideologies more and more permeate from one society to another, crossing all kinds of borders in the least expected way. Rap career is an illustration of this process. It was created in the late seventies and eighties of the twentieth century in New York ghettos and today it represents one of the most popular genres on the global scale. Rap is not only a symbol of revolution and the domination of Western capitalist business practices but also a cultural tool by which different groups, often marginalized or considering themselves as such, express their own identity. I am analyzing the indicated above phenomenon using two, extreme at first glance, examples. First, I present the story of the emergence and development of hip-hop culture in the United States. I try to show how rap music, which is an important element of this culture, allowed a marginalized part of American society for manifesting and communicating their views, beliefs and values, becoming a “transmission channel” for various ideologies, including the ideology of black nationalism. In the second part of the text, I am additionally analyzing the artwork and public appearances by Tadeusz “Tadek“ Polkowski, a Polish rapper, whom I consider a representative of an expanding hip-hop society relating to or sympathizing with the national movement. The music he creates is designed not only to restore the Poles’ “memory”, and therefore also the pride in their heroic and admirable past, but also to open their eyes to what is happening in their country that he believes is being colonized by the occupants. Rap jako muzyka tożsamościowa: od czarnego getta do polskiego pop-nacjonalizmuWe współczesnym świecie wytwory kultury, technologie, informacje i ideologie coraz częściej przenikają z jednego społeczeństwa do drugiego, przekraczając różnego rodzaju granice w najmniej oczekiwany sposób. Przykładem tego procesu jest kariera rapu, który powstał na przełomie lat 70. i 80. XX wieku w nowojorskich gettach, a współcześnie jest jednym z najbardziej popularnych gatunków muzycznych w skali globu. Rap jest bowiem nie tylko symbolem rewolucji informatycznej i dominacji zachodnich, kapitalistycznych praktyk biznesowych, lecz także kulturowym narzędziem, za pomocą którego różne grupy, często marginalizowane bądź za takie się uważające, wyrażają własną tożsamość. Zasygnalizowany powyżej fenomen analizuję, posługując się dwoma, skrajnymi na pierwszy rzut oka, przykładami. W pierwszej części artykułu przedstawiam historię powstania i rozwoju kultury hip-hopowej w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Staram się przy tym pokazać, w jaki sposób muzyka rapowa, będąca ważnym elementem tej kultury, pozwoliła marginalizowanej część społeczeństwa na manifestowanie i komunikowanie swoich poglądów, przekonań oraz wartości, stając się „kanałem transmisyjnym” dla różnych ideologii, w tym także ideologii czarnego nacjonalizmu. W drugiej części tego tekstu analizuję twórczość i wypowiedzi medialne Tadeusza „Tadka” Polkowskiego, polskiego rapera, którego postrzegam jako przedstawiciela coraz liczniejszej grupy hiphopowców związanych bądź sympatyzujących z ruchem narodowym. Tworzona przez niego muzyka ma za zadanie nie tylko przywrócić Polakom „pamięć”, a zatem także dumę z ich heroicznej i godnej podziwu przeszłości, lecz także otworzyć oczy na to, co dzieje się w ich „skolonizowanym przez okupantów państwie”.


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