Music

The origin story of hip-hop - one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx - has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music.

This Companion, written by renowned scholars and industry professionals reflects the passion and scholarly activity occurring in the new generation of hip-hop studies. It covers a diverse range of case studies from Nerdcore hip-hop to instrumental hip-hop to the role of rappers in the Obama campaign and from countries including Senegal, Japan, Germany, Cuba, and the UK. Chapters provide an overview of the 'four elements' of hip-hop - MCing, DJing, break dancing (or breakin'), and graffiti - in addition to key topics such as religion, theatre, film, gender, and politics.

Chronicling Stankonia situates hip hop as an intervention in constructing post-Civil Rights black identities and cultural discourse. For southern blacks, the past is often restricted to three recognizable historical moments - the Antebellum Era, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. Aside from the deeply traumatic experience of these periods of history, they also serve as cornerstones of validating and recognizing southern blacks' experiences. However, the challenge for post-Civil Rights generations of southern blacks is speaking truth to power when their truths depart the trajectory of what was considered power in the past. Chronicling Stankonia updates the black South using hip hop as an agent to reflect multiple intersections of time, race, and southernness in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Part of southern hip hop culture's truth remains attached to the past but its power is grounded in the fact that younger southerners use hip hop to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple entry points into contemporary southern black identities.

This book positions a unique conceptualization of the history of Hip-Hop, arguing that it was the political forces of the 1970s combined with economic forces of free market capitalism and privatization of public services, neoliberalism, and the deindustrialization of major cities, that led the cultural creation of the "Boogie Down" Bronx.

B-boying is a form of Afro-diasporic competitive dance that developed in the Bronx, NY in the early 1970s. Widely - though incorrectly - known as "breakdancing," it is often dismissed as a form of urban acrobatics set to music. In reality, however, b-boying is a deeply traditional and profoundly expressive art form that has been passed down from teacher to student for almost four decades. Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York offers the first serious study of b-boying as both unique dance form and a manifestation of the most fundamental principles of hip-hop culture.

In Hip-Hop in Africa, Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa's biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African narratives of social, political, and economic realities. Clark looks at the use of hip-hop in protest, both as a means of articulating social problems and as a tool for mobilizing listeners around those problems. She also details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa following its emergence in the United States, assessing the impact of urbanization and demographics on the spread of hip-hop culture.

In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar celebrates hip-hop and confronts the cult of authenticity that defines its essential character--that dictates how performers walk, talk, and express themselves artistically and also influences the consumer market. Hip-Hop Revolution is a balanced cultural history that looks past negative stereotypes of hip-hop as a monolith of hedonistic, unthinking noise to reveal its evolving positive role within American society.

First book on hip-hop sampling as a musical process. Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats was the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods, and values of a surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects--from hip-hop artists' pedagogical methods to the Afrodiasporic roots of the sampling process to the social significance of "digging" for rare records--Joseph G. Schloss examines the way hip-hop artists have managed to create a form of expression that reflects their creative aspirations, moral beliefs, political values, and cultural realities.

An illustrated highlight reel of more than 100 women in rap who have helped shape the genre and eschewed gender norms in the process, The Motherlode "shines a bright light on a history of overlooked female talent and breaks down the ingenuity of our current generation of stars"

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre's beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions.

A Tribe Called Quest has been one of the most commercially successful and artistically significant musical groups in recent history. The band’s sudden break-up in 1998 shocked the industry and saddened the scores of fans, whose appetite for the group’s innovative musical stylings never seem to diminish. This insightful film, directed by Michael Rapaport, takes viewers on a behind-the-scenes journey - chronicling the group's rise to fame and revealing the stories behind the tensions which erupted in the years to come.

Hip-Hop was created by urban youth of color more than 30 years ago amid racial oppression and economic marginalization. It has moved beyond that specific community and embraced by young people worldwide, elevating it to a global youth culture. The ambitious and hard-hitting documentary Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity looks at the popularity of hip-hop among America’s white youth. It asks whether white identification is rooted in admiration and a desire to transcend race or if it is merely a new chapter in the long continuum of stereotyping, mimicry and cultural appropriation? Does it reflect a new face of racial understanding in white America or does it reinforce an ugly history?

HIP HOP: BEYOND BEATS AND RHYMES provides a riveting examination of manhood, sexism, and homophobia in hip-hop culture. Director Byron Hurt, former star college quarterback, long-time hip-hop fan, and gender violence prevention educator, conceived the documentary as a "loving critique" of a number of disturbing trends in the world of rap music. He pays tribute to hip-hop while challenging the rap music industry to take responsibility for glamorising destructive, deeply conservative stereotypes of manhood.

his exciting documentary explores the history and scope of the Hip-Hop dance style. The movement is also studied as a global marketing phenomenon: despite its popularity, Hip-Hop struggles to define its historical lineage, concept, origins, aesthetics, and generational acceptance. This video illuminates these issues by featuring opinions from Hip-Hop dance pioneers, such as the renowned Rennie Harris. History and Concept of Hip-Hop Dance: The Street Culture That Became a Global Expression delves into the world-renowned dance style. Discover how it was first introduced to mainstream America in the early 1970s as breakdancing (or b-boying); learn how Hip-Hop has evolved and where it’s headed.

NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME tells the story of women who are connected by their love for hip-hop music. Despite the fact that these talented female artists exist within a culture that revolves around self-expression, the subjects of Raimist’s documentary must struggle to be heard.

Presented in particular in the form of clips, the document “Through The Years Of Hip-Hop” spans the years 1984 to 1989 and launches a healthy bridge between old school rap and international explosion. Significantly, the first two tracks sum up this oh-so-creative setting with Crash Crew and their addictive funky beats, and with Run-DMC whose 1984 "Rock Box" announces "Walk This Way" and the golden age of the labels Tommy Boy and Def Jam. Illustrated with a host of details concerning the dress codes and choreographies of the time, this compilation is also worthwhile for the extraordinary diversity of the American landscape. This richness is embodied by Queen Latifah, one of the voices of the Daisy Age, the cultural fringe of hip-hop. Or by Special Ed, whose stiff vocal phrasing synthesizes the spirit of the historic East Coast scene. Sometimes rare, these different videos are extended by an instructive magazine feature in which the filmmakers go back to the musical roots of the movement, to jazz and soul, but also to genre cinema such as Blaxploitation, before dwelling on another discipline, more precisely urban graffiti

African hip hop pioneer Didier Awadi is on a quest to craft an album that pays tribute to the great black revolutionary leaders and their struggle to realize a dream: a united, independent Africa.

In this epic musical and political journey, Awadi visits some 40 countries to collaborate with hip hop activist artists, including Smockey (Burkina Faso), M-1 of Dead Prez (United States) and ZuluBoy (South Africa). Featuring a score by Ghislain Poirier, as well as Awadi's own songs, United States of Africa draws the viewer into one artist's profound meditation on the power of music and the impact of political engagement -- both individual and collective.