scholarly journals ‘We Wanted Our Coffee Black’: Public Enemy, Improvisation, and Noise

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Niel Scobie
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Thelonious Monk ◽  
The Past ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Public Enemy ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Entire Society

In Music and Discourse, Jean-Jacques Nattiez theorizes that noise is not only subjective, its definition, and that of music itself, is culturally specific: “There is never a singular, culturally dominant conception of music; rather, we see a whole spectrum of conceptions, from those of the entire society to those of a single individual” (43). Noise in this context is therefore most often positioned as the result of music that runs contrary to an established set of rules. However subjective the assessments of both the musical producer and listener, Nattiez notes that these “‘criteria’ are always defined in relation to a threshold of acceptability encompassing bearable volume, the existence of fixed pitches, and a notion of order – which are only arbitrarily defined as norms” (45). If these criteria are arbitrary, then music might just as arbitrarily be redefined to valorize noise rather than eschew it, something true of Public Enemy and their musical aesthetic of noise. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) uses saxophone samples in many songs that act in tandem with the lyrics to form “an aggression against the code-structuring messages” (Attali 27) found in popular music conventions. Moreover, noise has been a part of the musical landscape for longer than we might think. Public Enemy’s examples are comparable to the use of dissonance in the music of jazz legends Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and others. Public Enemy created noise with saxophone squeals, erratic drums, and countless scratches on Nation, a recording that has influenced numerous hip-hop artists and it stands today as a critically lauded and influential album. This paper investigates Public Enemy’s use of saxophone samples as a strategy of creating noise as representative of ideals contrary to conventional Western musical practices, and as a bridge to African-American musical practices and suppressed voices of the past.

Real Niggas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miles White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Males ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Crack Cocaine ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Young Males ◽  
Public Enemy ◽  
Jay Z

This chapter discusses the performance of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop performance, the trope of the bad nigger and the notion of the hard man, and how African American performers have engaged the sign of blackness in both pejorative and empowering ways. For young males—blacks, whites, indeed of many racial and ethnic stripes—hardcore rap transformed black males from the 'hood into totemic performers of a powerful masculine authenticity and identity at a time in which there appeared to be few real men left. The chapter also discusses the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and how the intrusion of gang and drug cultures contributed to the transformation of hip-hop culture, the performance of masculinity within that culture, and the influence of a number of seminal artists including Run-DMC, N.W.A., Public Enemy, and Jay-Z.

scholarly journals CHOCQUIBTOWN: Young Voices Shattering Afro-Colombian Invisibility

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra M. Gaviria-Buck
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
The Past ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Media

In the past two years an Afrocolombian hip-hop band from the Pacific region of Colombia has been getting a lot of attention in the media, especially after winning a Latin Grammy Award in 2010 and being nominated to several categories of the Grammy Music Awards in 2011 and 2012.  In their lyrics, they claim to represent the black population of the Pacific coast, people of African descent who have traditionally lived in marginalized conditions of poverty and exploitation of different sorts.  By borrowing some insights from African American criticism, the afrocentricity in Choquibtown's songs is explored.  Additionally, through a postcolonialist approach, this band's musical production is analyzed as a voice of widespread racism and as means of resistance to political and cultural oppression. 

Beyond the White Negro

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Chabot Davis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
College Classrooms ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Self Examination

Critics often characterize white consumption of African American culture as a form of theft that echoes the fantasies of 1950s-era bohemians, or “White Negroes,” who romanticized black culture as anarchic and sexually potent. This book claims such a view fails to describe the varied politics of racial crossover in the past fifteen years. The book analyzes how white engagement with African American novels, film narratives, and hip-hop can help form anti-racist attitudes that may catalyze social change and racial justice. Though acknowledging past failures to establish cross-racial empathy, the book focuses on examples that show avenues for future progress and change. Its study of ethnographic data from book clubs and college classrooms shows how engagement with African American culture and pedagogical support can lead to the kinds of white self-examination that make empathy possible. The result is a book that challenges the trend of focusing on society's failures in achieving cross-racial empathy and instead explores possible avenues for change.

scholarly journals Disruptive Dialogics: Improvised Dissonance in Thelonious Monk and Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Watkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Thelonious Monk ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Black Noise

My performative paper makes the suggestion that the act of incorporating Jazz samples into Hip Hop music is a type of disruptive performance that interprets a standard musical form to create new styles, producing hybrid genres of music, such as jazz-rap. I examine the sample as a cultural tactic that enacts what Hip Hop scholar Tricia Rose terms as “flow, layering and ruptures in line.” “Layering” is comparable to what we might term in literary studies as intertextuality. DJs layer sounds literally one on top of the other, creating dialogues among samples, sounds, and words; the layers function as dialogue, commentary, percussive rhythms and counterpoint. Julia Kristeva argues that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.” In Hip Hop, visual, physical, musical, and lyrical lines are set in motion and broken abruptly with sharp angular breaks, yet they sustain motion and energy through fluidity and flow. The song “Shame on a Nigga” (from 36 Chambers) samples “Black and Tan Fantasy” as performed by Thelonious Monk. Using sampling as a tactical style that denotes improvisation as a disruption (or break) from classical European tradition to posit African American priorities, many of the songs on 36 Chambers participate in polyphonic layering and center around three central concepts outlined in Tricia Rose’s Black Noise: flow, layering, and ruptures in line. Further, the rupturing effect of incorporating a jazz sample into a Hip Hop production compels us to think about how disruption can function as a model for critical practice that relates to the notion of a globally improvised community.

scholarly journals Dissecting the Word: The Use of the Lexeme Shit in Selected Performances of Comedian Dave Chappelle’s Stand-Up Routine

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Radosław Dylewski
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American English ◽  
The Past ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Analytical Section ◽  
Formal Equivalent ◽  
Rap Lyrics

Abstract The paper explores the use of the lexeme shit in the corpus of Dave Chappelle’s stand-up specials released between 2000 and 2019. It consists of two parts: theoretical and analytical. The first one presents theoretical and pragmatic considerations connected with stand-up routines, touches upon slang semantics, and depicts the links between Dave Chappelle’s stage persona and the hip hop community. Lastly, it presents the reader with the past and present-day status of the lexeme at issue. In the analytical section of the paper the use of shit in the aforesaid corpus is scrutinized from the semantic angle. The discussion is supplemented with the results culled from the corpus of rap lyrics compiled at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The paper argues that (i) shit has lost its taboo status and is mainly used in both corpora as a less formal equivalent of stuff, anything and something and (ii) Chappelle’s stage use of shit, even though present in a different context and serving context-specific purposes, corresponds to the use of African American rappers in their song lyrics (assuming that rap lyrics depict African American English, this conclusion can be extended to the sociolect of African Americans).

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.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

The Literary Ellington

2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Hayes Edwards
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
American History ◽  
African American History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Formal Relationship

The literary plays an indispensable role in the creative process and compositional technique of the great jazz composer and orchestra leader Duke Ellington. It is well known that he based a number of his pieces on literary sources and that many of his larger works in particular rely on narrative written by Ellington and/or his collaborator Billy Strayhorn, whether it was programmatic, recitative, or lyric. In all his music, Ellington was concerned with ''telling tales'' in language, not only in sounds - or more precisely, in both: composing in ways that combined words and music. This imperative is evidenced in the pieces Ellington called ''parallels,'' a word he chose in particular to highlight the formal relationship between music and literature. In some, such as the ''Shakespearean Suite'' known as ''Such Sweet Thunder,'' he used various structural approaches and instrumental techniques to achieve portraiture through the interrelationship between the musical and the literary. In other pieces, such as ''My People'' and especially ''Black, Brown and Beige,'' Ellington attempted to integrate literary texts into his music in a manner that is not programmatic. The longer pieces demonstrate that for Ellington's aesthetic, the representation of African American history necessitated a mixed, multimedia form.

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