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.

Afro-Samurai: techno-Orientalism and contemporary hip hop

Popular Music ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken McLeod
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
American Identity ◽  
High Tech ◽  
African American Identity

AbstractThis article examines the practice and recent rise in the use of various aspects of Japanese popular culture in hip hop, particularly as manifest in the work of RZA, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Often these references highlight the high-tech, futuristic aesthetic of much Japanese popular culture and thus resonate with concepts and practices surrounding Afro-futurism. Drawing on various theories of hybridity, this article analyses how Japanese popular culture has informed constructions of African American identity. In contrast to the often sensational media coverage of racial tensions between African American and Asian communities, the nexus of Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop evinces a sympathetic connection based on shared notions of Afro-Asian liberation and empowerment achieved, in part, through a common aesthetic of technological mastery and appropriation. The synthesis of Asian popular culture and African American hip hop represents a globally hybridised experience of identity and racial formation in the 21st century.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Homage or Biting Lines: Critically Discussing Authorship, Creativity, and Copyright in the 21st Century through Hip-Hop

Arts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Art Students ◽  
Hip Hop Music

The inherent traits of digital media have challenged traditional understandings of artistic authorship and creativity. This division in understanding can clearly be observed in the popular culture context of hip-hop music. Hip-hop initially began with analog technologies such as vinyl record players, then transitioned to predominately digital mediums. This changeover in artistic mediums has been well documented by opposing viewpoints from hip-hop artists, consumers, record companies, and lawyers. By focusing on hip-hop for critical discussion on artistic authorship and creativity, art students can engage in discussion reflecting on their own artistic and online practices, and how these behaviors are legally supported or suppressed by copyright law.

scholarly journals "'Jackin’ for Beats'": DJing for Citation Critique

2013 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 20-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Craig
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
English Composition ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Hip Hop Music ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Musical Genres

A challenge in teaching English composition is helping students envision plagiarism as “borrowing” – showing love to author(s) and/or text(s) that further their argument(s), versus “stealing” – biting someone’s style and words. Alastair Pennycook (1996) and Sarah Wakefield (2006) have contributed pieces to the elaborate plagiarism/citation puzzle, while Houston Baker situated the hip-hop DJ in seminal text Black Studies, Rap and the Academy (1993). Merging these moments introduces critical questions: Did Diddy invent “the remix” or become the illest beat-biter ever? How did DJ/Producers Pete Rock and Large Professor pay homage to previous musical genres to further hip-hop remix production without just taking 4-8 bar samples, copying sources and claiming unethical ownership? And how can this discussion provide students a window into citation conversations? This article will remix these “texts” to introduce the idea of DJ Rhetoric to discuss plagiarism. Through the lens of the hip-hop DJ in writing classrooms, one can foster an appreciation of the difference between “love and theft” in student citation. This article will couple examples from hip-hop music/culture while simultaneously remixing interviews from various hip-hop DJ/producers to help answer these difficult questions. 

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.

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