Debating Hip-Hop: Does Gangsta Rap Harm Black Americans?

2014 ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
Peter Katel
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Gangsta Rap

scholarly journals Jay-Z and O.J.: Sport and the Performance of Race in Hip-Hop Music

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 192-206
Author(s):  
Kellen Jamil Northcutt ◽  
Kayla Henderson ◽  
Kaylee Chicoski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
Jay Z ◽  
The Impact

The purpose of this study was to understand the symbolic messaging in hip-hop music as it relates to the lived experiences and realities of Black Americans in the United States. The study examined the song and music video titled “The Story of O.J.,” by hip-hop artist Jay-Z to gain a better understanding of how Jay-Z interpreted the impact of Black Americans’ lived experiences in the United States on their identity and ability to progress economically and socially, regardless of social standing, within subcultures such as sport. Employing a content analysis method, data were collected and analyzed using critical race theory. The results of the analysis of lyrical and video data identified three major themes: (a) battle with Blackness, (b) economic enslavement and financial freedom, and (c) systematic subjugation.

scholarly journals The Alert Collector: Hip Hop in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 215
Author(s):  
Holly Boyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
American Society

Hip hop is a ubiquitous part of American society in 2015—from Kanye West announcing his future presidential bid to discussions of feminism surrounding Nikki Minaj’s anatomy, to Kendrick Lamar’s concert with the National Symphony Orchestra, to Questlove leading the Tonight Show Band, hip hop has exerted its influence on American culture in every way and form.Hip hop’s origin in the early 1970s in the South Bronx of New York City is most often attributed to DJ Kool Herc and his desire to entertain at a party. In the 1980s, hip hop continued to gain popularity and speak about social issues faced by young African Americans. This started to change in the 1990s with the mainstream success of gangsta rap, where drugs, violence, and misogyny became more prominent, although artists who focused on social issues continued to create. The 2000s saw rap and hip hop cross genre boundaries, and innovative and alternative hip hop grew in popularity.

scholarly journals Du gangsta rap au hip-hop conscient : subversions et alternatives critiques en réponse aux mythes américains

2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-217
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lessard
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Gangsta Rap

L’émergence du gangsta rap américain au tournant des années 1990 a stimulé des débats d’envergure nationale sur la question de la liberté d’expression. Bien que le hip-hop ait émergé victorieux de cette guerre culturelle, il semble que grâce à un procédé de marginalisation des discours jugés subversifs, le récit national américain soit demeuré largement inchangé face aux attaques du gangsta rap. Toutefois, avec l’émergence du hip-hop conscient, de nouveaux récits critiques contribuent à nuancer les mythes nationaux américains de l’intérieur et offrent des conceptions alternatives de l’identité américaine au travers de la culture hip-hop.

scholarly journals Rola kultury hip-hop w kształtowaniu się tożsamości młodzieży – wybrane konteksty

2018 ◽  
pp. 457-467
Author(s):  
Monika Bieńkowska
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Master's Thesis ◽  
Youth Subculture

This article was developed on the basis of my master’s thesis on hip-hop culture as a factor shaping young people’s identity. In today’s world, young people are increasingly looking for ways to express themselves and their values, which may be associated with belonging to different types of subcultures. Growing individuals manifest their independence by disagreeing with the surrounding reality and defying the prevailing social principles. It seems appropriate to belong to a chosen youth subculture. I will devote my attention to the subculture originating among the black Americans, namely the hip-hop subculture. The rap environment is very often associated with a pejorative phenomenon, vulgarisms, blockers derived from the social margin. In today’s times, in the era of ubiquitous openness and availability of mass media, in the consumer-oriented environment, hip-hop has become a part of the lives of most young, adolescent audiences. The article will also present the development of hip-hop culture in Poland and around the world, as well as the effects that it brought in the process of shaping the identity of young people.

scholarly journals The Construction of Jazz Rap as High Art in Hip-Hop Music

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Multiple Factors ◽  
Elite Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Reception

Multiple factors contributed to the elevation of jazz as "high art" in mainstream media reception by the 1980s. The stage was thus set for hip-hop groups in the late-1980s and early 90s (such as Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, and Digable Planets) to engage in a relationship with jazz as art and heritage. "Jazz codes" in the music, said to signify sophistication, helped create a rap-music subgenre commonly branded "jazz rap." Connections may be identified between the status of jazz, as linked to a high art ideology in the 1980s, and the media reception of jazz rap as an elite rap subgenre (in opposition to "gangsta" rap and other subgenres). Contemplation of this development leads to larger questions about the creation of hierarchies, value judgments, and the phenomenon of elite status within music genres.

Pit Bulls and Dogfighting as Symbols of Masculinity in Hip Hop Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 852-871
Author(s):  
Claudia Alonso-Recarte
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Dog Breed ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Connections

This article explores the aesthetic and cultural connections between the hyper-masculinization inherent to hip hop culture (and particularly to gangsta rap), the pit bull dog breed, and dogfighting. Building on recent scholarship that has identified the racial and racist assumptions underlying the pit bull controversy, I provide further evidence and arguments on how the highly racialized and genderized hip hop discourses inoculate the pit bull body and suffuse it with multiple meanings reminiscent of America’s traumatic encounter with otherness. As a palimpsest that attests to both mainstream and countercultural explorations of racialized masculinities, the pit bull body is made to “perform” its role as both an agent and a victim within the nation’s compulsive need to control and monitor the “other.”

For Those in the “Ghetto Torture Chambers”

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Teutsch ◽  
Jason Lee Oakes
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Connective Tissue ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores the connective tissue that joins the urban noir tradition to the representations of antiheros that populate Iceberg Slim’s texts and many hip hop narratives. Specifically, it analyzes Slim’s construction of realness in his writings and his 1976 album Reflections in order to understand how his work shapes a notion of “pulp authenticity” that would come to influence gangsta rap. Slim and his hip hop progeny arose from the noir tradition, a literary genre that confronted anxieties of race and gender identity amid an ever-changing urban landscape. Pulp authenticity incorporates the sensational on one hand and varying forms of genuineness on the other, appearing in African American noir cultural productions in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. At its core, pulp authenticity funnels “genuineness” through a genre that privileges the sensational.

Recuperating the Real

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damon Sajnani
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
The Real ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Alternate Version ◽  
Black Resistance

“Recuperating the Real” revisits the perennial question of authenticity in hip hop to show how its original iteration connotes a commitment to Black liberation. In the post–golden era, this counterhegemonic version of realness was overshadowed in mainstream rap productions by an alternate version that reinscribes dominant norms more than it challenges them. This chapter delineates these versions as hip hop authenticity and rap authenticity, and traces their common origins through their divergence and eventual loose associations with conscious hip hop and gangsta rap respectively. It then argues that scholars have disproportionately attended to rap authenticity at the expense of hip hop authenticity. Consequently, performances of realness that commercialize a supposed Black cultural pathology have been exhaustively critiqued. However, hip hoppers’ use of authenticity discourse as a means of critical self-definition and communal boundary work organically rooted in Black resistance against intersecting systems of oppression remains undertheorized.

Jesus and Postsoul Satire on the Small Screen

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Eric Thurman
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Gangsta Rap ◽  
Race And Religion

This essay explores how Aaron McGruder’s television show Black Jesus uses satire to critique constructions of race and religion in twenty-first-century America. It begins with an overview of representations of Jesus in popular media, highlighting both the dominant convention of depicting Jesus as white and the increasing racial diversity of representations in pop culture artifacts. The essay suggests that McGruder’s show is best understood as an example of postsoul satire, that is, forms of comedy produced by African American humorists that target stereotypes within black culture as well as the persistence of white racism. To support this claim, the essay discusses how the show’s humor satirizes white-dominated society, including representations of a white Jesus, as well as the ideals of black masculinity expressed in hip-hop culture and gangsta rap. The essay concludes by situating McGruder’s satire in the context of antiracist work by Black Lives Matter activists.

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