Mortal Man: A Book Review About The Inner Thoughts Of Kendrick Lamar Through His Rap Lyrics

Are you a music lover? A fan of hip hop? Do you enjoy wordplay? If so, this book might interest music and hip-hop fans alike! Lewis shares exciting insight about a modern hip-hop star. Although the times have changed, the definition of perseverance and determination remains the same. Lewis explores the ups and downs of life and fame associated with Kendrick Lamar's rise to fame in the hip-hop world. The story centralizes a young kid from Compton, California, named Lamar, who becomes aware of his influences upon his generation. Lamar wants to become successful and does what he can to ensure he takes care of himself and his community. Promise That You Will Sing About Me: The Power and Poetry of Kendrick Lamar examines the life and words of Lamar. Lamar is known as a prominent rapper of his generation. In addition, he uses his words as a weapon to combat his circumstances.

They See Me Rollin’, They Hatin’

Aubrey Graham, more commonly known as hip-hop performer Drake, presents himself as a man of contradiction—a lover and a fighter, sensitive but hard, successful but humble. Despite this subjective work, designed to present a complex embodiment of an artistic and financial success, the discourse of Graham online is often underpinned by suspicion and derision that seeks to redefine him as a pretender who is unworthy of the status he claims. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Wheelchair Drake” memetic cluster, which uses an old Degrassi: The Next Generation promotional image of Graham sitting on a wheelchair, combined with humorous juxtaposition of rap lyrics, to critique Graham’s status as both a performer and a Black man. In various Wheelchair Drake memes, physical impairment becomes a living metaphor for a spoiled identity; the memes argue that, just like ableist imaginations of physically disabled people, Graham is doomed to a life of impotence and dependency. Built upon a sample of 583 user-generated images, coded into 9 thematic groups, this article excavates the latticed discourses of masculinity, disability and race that animate the Wheelchair Drake meme and consider the ways that this memetic cluster subjects Aubrey Graham to the strictures of ableist hegemonic masculinity.

Dirty South Feminism: The Girlies Got Somethin’ to Say Too! Southern Hip-Hop Women, Fighting Respectability, Talking Mess, and Twerking Up the Dirty South

Within southern hip-hop, minimal credit has been given to the Black women who have curated sonic and performance narratives within the southern region. Many southern hip-hop scholars and journalists have centralized the accomplishments and masculinities of southern male rap performances. Here, dirty south feminism works to explore how agency, location, and Black women’s rap (lyrics and rhyme) and dance (twerking) performances in southern hip-hop are established under a contemporary hip-hop womanist framework. I critique the history of southern hip-hop culture by decentralizing male-dominated and hyper-masculine southern hip-hop identities. Second, I extend hip-hop feminist/womanist scholarship that includes tangible reflections of Black womanhood that emerge out of the South to see how these narratives reshape and re-inform representations of Black women and girls within southern hip-hop culture. I use dirty south feminism to include geographical understandings of southern Black women who have grown up in the South and been sexually shamed, objectified and pushed to the margins in southern hip-hop history. I seek to explore the following questions: How does the performance of Black women’s presence in hip-hop dance localize the South to help expand narratives within dirty south hip-hop? How can the “dirty south” as a geographical place within hip-hop be a guide to disrupt a conservative hip-hop South through a hip-hop womanist lens?

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

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).

The concepts of “human”, “time”, “life” and methods of their representation in the Russian-language rap lyrics

This article is dedicated to the semantic arrangement of rap lyrics. Based on the quantitative and statistical processing of the material, the author determines the lexical units that acquire a new functional purpose and conceptualization in the literary text. The goal of this research is to describe the functionality of the universal concepts of “human”, “time” and “life”, as well as the methods of their representation in the Russian rap lyrics. The relevance and novelty of this work are defined by the fact that despite the attempts existing in the linguistic science to determine the semantic and conceptual fields common to the lyrics of rap culture, this topic remains poorly studied within framework of interpretation of the Russian rap lyrics as a literary text. The concepts of “human”, “time”, “life” in rap lyrics manifest as the key indicator of the system arrangement of a literary text; and despite their universal nature, reflect the specific content, which is substantiated by communicative and stylistic peculiarities of rap. The conducted analysis of rap lyrics demonstrates that the concept of “life” can perform a leading role one in arrangement of the lexical-semantic space of the text, as it suggests a complex representation of social reality (time and space), life activities of the subject and their assessment, reflection on the new life and new people. The article employs descriptive method, contextual analysis, quantitative-statistical analysis, as well as the method of continuous sampling.