Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics

2004 ◽  
pp. 469-485
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Musical Aesthetics

Soul in Seoul

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal S. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Korean Music ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
American Popular Music

Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop examines how K-pop cites musical and performative elements of Black popular music culture as well as the ways that fans outside of Korea understand these citations. K-pop represents a hybridized mode of Korean popular music that emerged in the 1990s with global aspirations. Its hybridity combines musical elements from Korean and foreign cultures, particularly rhythm and blues-based genres (R&B) of African American popular music. Korean pop, R&B and hip-hop solo artists and groups engage in citational practices by simultaneously emulating R&B’s instrumentation and vocals and enhancing R&B by employing Korean musical strategies to such an extent that K-pop becomes part of a global R&B tradition. Korean pop groups use dynamic images and quality musical production to engage in cultural work that culminates the kind of global form of crossover pioneered by Black American music producers. Korean R&B artists, with a focus on vocals, take the R&B tradition beyond the Black-white binary, and Korean hip-hop practitioners use sampling and live instrumentation to promote R&B’s innovative music aesthetics. K-pop artists also cite elements of African American performance in Korean music videos that disrupt limiting representations. K-pop’s citational practices reveal diverse musical aesthetics driven by the interplay of African American popular music and Korean music strategies. As a transcultural fandom, global fans function as part of K-pop’s music press and deem these citational practices authentic. Citational practices also challenge homogenizing modes of globalization by revealing the multiple cultural forces that inform K-pop.

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.

‘Where all my bad girls at?’

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyhanna Yoo Garza
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American English ◽  
African American English ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Performance Challenges

This article examines the polyvalence of racial(ised) representations in K-pop performances. The analysis of K-pop star CL’s (2013) song and video ‘Nappeun gijibae’ (‘The bad girl’) demonstrates how the artist projects an assertive femininity by embodying and localising the Bad Bitch: a sexually agentive figure of womanhood from US hip hop. CL’s use of African American English and conventionalised hip hop tropes helps resignify gijibae, a pejorative Korean term for women. By shifting between decontextualised styles invoking a different time and place, CL is able to build a kind of chronotopic capital that transforms fragmented styles into an empowered cosmopolitan femininity. However, although CL’s performance challenges Korean gendered norms in its use of local linguistic resources, her selective appropriations of US Black and Chicanx cultural signifiers reproduce narrow images of racialised femininities and reify a hierarchy of valuation along lines of gender and race.

Impoliteness in hip-hop music

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Delis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
White Male ◽  
White Female ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Social ◽  
Determining Factors ◽  
And Gender

Abstract The aim of this paper is to examine the functionality of impoliteness strategies as rhetorical devices employed by acclaimed African American and White hip-hop artists. It focuses on the social and artistic function of the key discursive element of hip-hop, namely aggressive language. The data for this paper comprise songs of US African American and White performers retrieved from the November 2017 ‘TOP100 Chart’ for international releases on Spotify.com. A cursory look at the sub-corpora (Black male/ Black female/ White male/ White female artists’ sub-corpus) revealed the prominence of the ‘use taboo words’ impoliteness strategy. The analysis of impoliteness instantiations by considering race and gender as determining factors in the lyrics selection process unveiled that both male groups use impoliteness strategies more frequently than female groups. It is also suggested that Black male and White female singers employ impoliteness to resist oppression, offer a counter-narrative about their own experience and self (re)presentation and reinforce in group solidarity.

Hip-Hop to Prevent Substance Use and HIV among African-American Youth: A Preliminary Investigation

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn O. Turner-Musa ◽  
Warren A. Rhodes ◽  
P. Thandi Hicks Harper ◽  
Sylvia L. Quinton
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Preliminary Investigation ◽  
African American Youth

“Yo I am Superman, You Kiddo Go Home”: ritual impoliteness in Chinese freestyle rap battles

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mian Jia ◽  
Shuting Yao
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Mixed Methods ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Filial Piety ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Community Norms ◽  
Moral Qualities

Abstract Introduced by African American communities, Chinese rap battle features an intensive ritual exchange of impoliteness, aggression, and vulgarity, but its linguistic realizations have not been systematically examined. Taking Iron Mic as a case study, this paper explores how advanced and novice rappers perform ritual impoliteness in Chinese underground rap battle competitions. Using mixed methods of discourse analysis and content analysis, we analyze the ritual impoliteness strategies in 51 rounds of Chinese freestyle rap battles. The findings show that advanced and novice rappers employed comparable instances of taboo language, threatening, and insults on their opponents’ superficial qualities and rap skills. Moreover, advanced rappers performed significantly more boasting and ritual insults on the others’ moral qualities. Their use of ritual impoliteness is warranted by hip-hop community norms of authenticity and creativity as well as Chinese social values of reciprocity, filial piety, and moral educators. This paper contributes to the research on Chinese ritual impoliteness and rap battle competitions.

Japanese street dance culture in manga and anime: Hip hop transcription in Samurai Champloo and Tokyo Tribe-2

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79
Author(s):  
Po-Lung Huang
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Hip Hop Culture ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Local Media ◽  
Main Material

Street dance, one of the four most important elements of hip hop culture, was developed mainly by African American youths in the 1970s and imported to Japan in the 1980s. Since then, street dance has been diversified by local media such as manga/anime in Japan. This article therefore analyses how Japanese storytelling, exemplified by Shin’ichirō Watanabe’s anime Samurai Champloo (2004–05), Santa Inoue’s manga Tokyo Tribe-2 (1997–2005) and Tatsuo Satō’s anime adaptation Tokyo Tribes (2006–07), has transcribed the hip hop elements into the Tokugawa-Edo period’s art scenes and fictitious ‘Tōkyō’, and provides a basis for understanding hip hop culture in Japan by drawing on Charles Taylor’s ‘language of perspicuous contrast’ (1985). Although manga and anime quickly reflected popular cultural trends in Japan, hip hop elements did not manifest as main material until Tokyo Tribe-2 was released. Thus, there was apparently a prolonged interval between the arrival of hip hop culture in Japan and its representation by manga/anime after Japanese youths’ first fancied street dance. Therefore, street dance culture could have been transformed within the Japanese cultural context. This article also analyses the representation/transcription of street dance and hip hop in manga/amine by contextualizing the Japanese sociopolitical background to explain this prolonged interval.

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