Week 12: B-Boys Don't Dance to Hip Hop

I am really enjoying Schloss' Foundation. So far (I promise to finish for tomorrow), the book has really been a clear-headed approach to hip hop studies that does not overemphasize the stuffy academic approach, nor is it devoid of serious academic analysis. Schloss' blend of styles and forms seems to be one of the best examples of accessible, authentic hip hop studies so far...

The one section I wanted to reflect on was from the bottom of p. 31 where Schloss quotes b-boy GeoMatrix who explains that "nowadays you can go to a party and you can't break to hip-hop"... When I first read this, I highlighted it and put all kinds of marks around it because it seems like such an odd thing to say. If b-boys can't (or won't) b-boy to rap music, commercial or otherwise, what explains the major division?

At first, it seemed to me that the three elements that are connected because their performance can share the same space easily would be deejaying, emceeing, and b-boying. So why is it that b-boys/girls have not shifted the aesthetics along with the other two forms, which seem to still be compatible. The b-boy/girl focus on foundation and history seemed almost fundamentalist in that they would only dance to a select canon and b-boying must continue its traditions.

However, Schloss points out rightly that unlike emceeing or deejaying which can experiment with rhythms and auditory structure, b-boying does not have that same luxury. Speeding up pushes the cardiovascular limits of the body and slowing down allows gravity too much time to work against the body. This sort of "estrangement from rap music" that b-boying has is not unlike graffiti or turntablism we have examined in class. Each form has its broad hip hop fundamentals, but within each style there are more specific aesthetics that insiders experiment with. Over time, each of the four pillars have developed their own space and unique characteristics at the expense of the broad connections between the four pillars. So it's not so much that b-boys/girls are refusing to modernize, it's that b-boying wants to continue to be b-boying, and there are certain restraints that make their canon most appropriate for improvisation and development.

Also, as a final note, I hope it class we can compare how Schloss addresses the heritage of b-boying/hip-hop with the framework of Perry. Looking forward to Monday!

Week 11: "Whose World is This:" Graffiti Around the Globe and the Public Space

I really liked the Spray Can book for this week. Although it did not offer a lot of text, mostly photographs through a variety of regions, I thought it really clearly demonstrated the most essential parts of graffiti as hip hop.

First of all, I loved the way the text talked about how European artists saw what this youth movement in the United States was doing, and they really dug on it. These artists from the UK, France, Spain, and lots of other places all saw the dissident nature of the art as well as the powerful visual aesthetics that these kids were pioneering. Since the abstract expressionists, the United States has been the site of fresh ideas for the arts, and this outsider culture became part of that trend. The pictures later in the book confirmed that the rest of the world could certainly hang with the styles of the New York crews. But, I could see where the authors were coming from when they said you could identity a graffiti piece that was not from inside the epicenter of the Hip Hop Nation. The global pieces lacked some of the reappropriation of imagery and symbols to suggest a political message. There was a certain bite missing, even from some of the work done outside of New York. But regardless, there was certainly diversity and a sense of commonality in all of the work; the global graffiti represented the universal and the local potential for hip hop expression.

Another thing I find really fascinating about graffiti is how it is a signification of people who do not feel a connection to the public space, or feel excluded from positions of power. I thought the quote that most directly embodied how graffiti recreates and reimagines the public space was from 3D of Bristol (interestingly a non-New Yorker): "Maybe in the eyes of the town I'm not so important... but I live here and I should have as much say as anyone else, and that's why I go out and paint" (10). To me, graffiti seems to say that the space around us is not designed by us or built with our needs in mind. Therefore, we are going to put ourselves into the mix, we are going to take on these foreign structures and make them uniquely ours. If this is going to our lived environment, then it should feel like I have say in its feel. Also the conflicts with authorities over graffiti seems to get at the fundamental question of what clean is, what defiling a public space means, and who has the power to alter the environment? If we step back and look, there is nothing functionally that graffiti can do to a building or train side that will hurt it, baring covering vital windows or something security items. If it's just a plain, blank wall, why does society feel like this cannot be used as a spot for artistic expression? "Invading" this space is very political, and often the messages related to the plight of outsiders trying to find legitimacy.

That legitimacy they are looking for is interesting, too. As we have talked about in class, often getting legitimacy is double edged, because with too much legitimacy, the cultural capital of being a dissident art form sort of wears away. Does the legitimization of graffiti in the form of college design classes or (from last week) the use of poetic meter to describe rap lyrics take away from the culture of resistance? Does this make hip hop part of mainstream, and thus, destroying some of its potency? The article on Shaping Visual Culture seemed to suggest to me that if graffiti is now just another type face, then does it still have the strong political message of invading the public space/respectability?

Week 10: The Realness of Rhymes

Unfortunately, I had to rush through this week's readings, so I will have to spend a little more time with the readings after this post and tomorrow afternoon, but they are great so far!


I was really struck by the arguments in Book of Rhymes about commodification and lyrical content becoming more and more homogeneous because of rhyming stagnation, not big business. Although I feel like big business has a lot more of a causal impact on the lyrical content, I did appreciate the analysis or framework. If we accept that language constructs our reality, then the content of rap albums and personas of rappers will be determined, in some part, by the rhymes they use. And if the music industry has determined what the successful formula is for creating a hit rap song, they will more than likely recycle lyrical styles in order to replicate previous success. So I think they are more connected than Bradley lets on (also, I wonder how many artists actually write their own lyrics? It would be interesting for our class to look at authorship of lyrics...), but I think there is something to be said for listening to the similarities between popular music. As Bradley rightly points out, rhymes shape the direction of a rap song and they determine to an extent thematic choices and content. The rhyming words do determine a lot of how the lyrics "mean" as Thompson put it. I thought that the Lexus/Texas rhyme example was a persuasive way to demonstrate the homogenizing force that rhyme schemes can have on rap. I also thought that finding the rhyming path that is uniquely expressive example of Eminem's "public housing systems" / "victim of Munchhausen Syndrome" connected well with Thompson's point about the narrative voice being informed by lived experience. Eminem's multi rhymes are outside of the traditional rhyme scheme and in order to find those expressive elements, it is clear that he called upon his own reality. The imaginative capacities of rhymes to renegotiate meanings and call on lived reality to inform narrative structure explains perfectly why rap, unlike most other expressive forms, is defined by and must essentially include rhymes.

Also, the idea that a rhyme scheme can be coercive or distract from actually expressing what a rapper wants to present is interesting. After listening to many rappers, both famous and otherwise, any seasoned hip hop head cringes when a strange or awkward word finds its way to the end of a line because there was a need for a rhyme. This force rhyming that Bradley mentioned is unfortunate, but I think Bradley is also on target with saying that the rhyme scheme offers so much versatility and expressive potential for the wordsmith that rhyming has many more benefits for rap than costs.

Looking forward to Monday!

Week 9: Constructing Hip Hop Masculinity

It feels like forever since we've blogged! Glad to get back into this swing of this...


I think that Perry does a great job outlining some of the complexities of black masculinity and its relationship to the discourse and art form of hip hop. In fact, my mid term paper was essentially a focus on the fifth and sixth chapters of Perry's book. I think she rightly points out that black masculinity does not have the same position of power or security as white male privilege. It is not a simple equation when determine identity and social position because of the multiple matrices of power.

Perry also does a good job of discussing the hypermasculine character of hip hop lyrics and personalities as a response to black men securing their own masculinity in a white supremacist culture, and the legacy of feminizing the black male body. However, this sort of sociological argument reminded me of the piece we read about how often we ascribe responses to coping mechanisms for oppressed groups. This determinism removes agency and aesthetic considerations from the discussion. Perhaps the aesthetics of hip hop are masculine and to produce authenticity, rappers have to skillfully incorporate certain ideological messages about gender with gendered language. Perry to some extent states this, but she does not really address the systemic nature of hip hop's aesthetics shaping lyrics, and instead focused on sociological explanations (which I felt were equally important).

Another thing that I felt Perry did not do well search for compelling examples. One place in particular struck me, which was her discussion of tenderness and love in hip hop lyrics on 144-147. Perry brings up Method Man to highlight the "hybrid discourse" that is encouraged in hip hop: between female objectification and compassionate gender relations. However in the other examples, Perry takes the words about rappers using females as their "partners in crime" or female gangsters as signs of a deeper, more progressive sort of love. She sees this as a creation of a shared gendered space of support between male and female. However, using women as the subject of the "ride together, die together" ballad does not seem to be equal. In all of the examples, the female subject was glorified and respected only when she transformed to fulfill the needs of the male speaker. She is tough, she cares a gun in her Coach purse, she helps push drugs. So essentially, this woman has become a pawn in the hypermasculine show, without any sign of reciprocal transformation of the male speaker to accommodate the needs of the woman. Perry actually says it best about a non-hip hop song, Ain't No Woman: The song is "vaguely sexist (in that the man is the center of the relationship)" (147). I felt like all of her examples pointed to this type of relationship: male-centered. Obviously, the male is the speaker so there are certain lyrical constraints for de-centering their narration and perspective, but it was not clear that any sort of transformations took place on the male side of the equation to signal an egalitarian shift.

Well, should be fun to discuss! Looking forward to class, but the question is: who is bringing snack!?

Week 8: Owners, Markets, and the Narrowing of Hip Hop Creativity

First of all, the movie about the "Amen Break" was really interesting. It had a lot of interesting analysis of the position and utilization of the specific 6-second drum break and the appropriate balance of copyright law and cultural production freedom.

Anyway, for this week, I had two ideas I wanted to discuss. Dimitriadis had an interesting thesis on the overall project of hip hop that seems obvious after studying the art form for 8 weeks, but he put it very well. He proposed that "Rapper's Delight" was a fundamental turning point for hip hop. Before RD, hip hop had primarily been a "live" art that was more focused on crowd interaction and engaging the public space, than content. After RD is published, not only did rap music acquire more of a focus on the narrative and content-driven songs, but also this narrowed the terms of hip hop. After the commodification of rap began, it became clear that other elements like break dancing or graffiti would be difficult to commodify in while maintaining their artistic integrity (arguably the graffiti on canvas is a potential avenue for graffiti commodification, but this would not have the same public accessibility and individual ownership as rap). This changed how people were exposed to hip hop. If people knew about hip hop pre-RD, you were locationally situated to have directly interacted with performers and music scenes. In a post-RD world, hip hop gained "exposure by way of an 'institutional context'" (425). One of the most interesting parts for me was the block quote on 427 by Mr. Wiggles from the Rock Steady Crew going to see Run-DMC, expecting to see b-boys break dancing, but only saw the two-man crew "jam". This moment of redefining the culture and creating an "Old-School" is interesting because this article makes it clear that there were two different agendas: the Old School was to rock the crowd and develop a "party community", and the New School was focused on lyrical structure and rap, exclusively. After reading this article and the early skepticism of people like Grandmaster Flash about people's desire to listen to a record re-recording onto another record makes me notice that the earliest aesthetic of hip hop was the connection with people and the ability to keep the groove going (is this still a focus today? At least something that rapper brag about in their lyrics?)

The second part I really enjoyed was theme and brief part from Schumacher's piece, which was a quote from Frith (1986): "Digital technology is 'disrupting the implicit equation of artists' "ownership" of their creative work and companies' ownership of the resulting commodities--the latter is being defended by reference to the former'" (454). I think what Schumacher best examines in his piece is the myth of the "island artist". Schumacher really addresses the idea that recordings of all kinds today, even live ones, involve technology and the studio in some capacity. Also implied in his argument, I believe, is that musical patterns or forms are part of a longer continuum of cultural ideas about musicality and artistic worth, not individual inventions. Therefore, the music industry is relying on this myth of artistic genius in order to "secure the rights of capital" at the expense of cultural creativity (453). This is a powerful idea, especially with Western conceptions of genius and creation, emphasizing individual input and ingenuity. But I believe Schumacher correctly identifies that these arguments are less about ethical issues and more about the politics of appropriation and economic control of capital. I do not think that Schumacher is saying that artists aren't individuals, creative, or talented. What I think is going on here is that Schumacher is questioning to what extent people are creating new music, and what it means to "own" any one part of the musical process.

Whew! Good stuff. Really excited for tomorrow evening!!

Week 7: Perry and "Prophet"eering

This week's readings was probably the most challenging readings that we have done because they were really theoretical and relied a lot on postmodernism and postcolonial criticism.

In generally, I really like Perry's work. I felt like she answered a lot of questions that I had been asking, such as reoccurring rap lyrics, such as her explanation of the heritage of the Mos Def line that he riffed from Rakim (54). I also liked her distinction between social science analysis of the function of hip hop lyrics and the artistic ritual of hip hop. I think the quote she used from bell hooks is such an important theme that I have picked up from the analysis of hip hop, especially after this week's readings (39). It is crucial to analyze the artistic value and cultural impacts of hip hop, not just try to understand the sociological circumstances of the music because that eliminates the agency and wit of hip hoppers, which is ultimately dehumanizing.

I was a little uncomfortable with Perry's analysis of the role of consumerism and hypercapitalist ideology in hip hop lyrics. On one level, I think she makes a fair point. Artists like Lil' Kim are able to use money as a way to subvert traditional race and gender roles by transgressing expectations. This can be said for any number of African American rappers who use "bling bling" as a way to demonstrate their ability to maneuver, manipulate, and ultimately control their own economic destiny within a white supremacist society. And to be fair, Perry clarifies that this notion of transgression does not inherently imply liberation, and the transgressive nature of their action is lost in the racism and sexism of broader society.

However, this was not entirely convincing. First of all, I felt like she gave the hyperconsumerism that defines much of hip hop today a pass because it was a metaphorical transgression. But I think that it also is intended as a marketing tool to sell products and ideas of wealth to youth. Therefore, though it may have merit, it is not entirely excusable. Focus on material gain leaves people feeling their self-worth is connected to their bank account and their individual needs, not a collective discourse on the future of culture or identity. Second, I wonder if the idea or existence of a community conversation that centers around rap, art, and blackness in America is lost or belittled if rap is flooded with consumerism, commercialization, and commodification. Is it still a legitimate conversation about society if the artists is being sponsored by Pepsi Cola and Sprint? I liked the ideas Perry (and Schur) had about the transformative power and aesthetic of hip hop to shift and reinvent meaning, but I wonder how much of that is lost in a consumerist-content hip hop...

Anyway, I look forward to discussing lots of profound ideas tomorrow!

Week 6: Dyson's Dilemma

I was really excited to read "Know What I Mean" by Dyson because I'm a big Dyson fan. Sometimes he leaves important parts of history, doesn't critically analyze as much as I would like to see, or neglects other views on societal norms. But, in spite of my disagreements with Dyson at times, it was a pleasure to read.

There were so many places in his book that I liked because he really offered a wide range of views and ideas about hip hop, focusing a lot on gender politics, generational gaps, and conscious vs. commercial. But I want to focus on one specific section from Dyson about maneuvering within the capitalist, white supremacist music/media industry.

"You can spit venom at white supremacy, social injustice, the personal limitations imposed by a dominant culture, and still use... the master's tools to dismantle the master's house or at least break in and enjoy some of the bounty" (Dyson, 56).

So on one hand, I like what Dyson has to say. I agree that it is absolutely a legitimate tactic to attempt to undermine a system of oppression by co-opting their methods of distribution, appropriating the oppressor's imagery and language, and ultimately hustling elites out of resources. In fact, this philosophy is a common argument in determining whether it is acceptable to work within the system of oppression in order to change it.

But at the same time, I don't know if Dyson's doctrine here is contributing to creating a "hip hop politic" that transforms society for the better. In some way, working within the system can give the system more legitimacy. Ultimately, unless people who are trying to make hip hop more socially and politically conscious (SPC) own the distribution and marketing entities involved, there will be powerful (white) interests profiting that do not have any interest in televising the revolution. Also, when working within major labels, I wonder if saying that you want to "change the game" eventually becomes just another gimmick. If it's not a gimmick, then do people become changed by the system they are working within and pursue profitability and marketability over their original intentions? Finally, Dyson ends with the idea that at least getting in on the "bounty" is good enough. This may be true for the elite individuals the profit from being the managers, lawyers, or producers in the hip hop industry. But this does not seem to help benefit anyone outside of the system. And if the industry keeps producing albums that are 90% "bling"-guns-booty and 10% "message", doesn't that keep highlighting the social problems that hip hop hopes to address in the community? How does this uplift or shift society?

Ultimately, it is difficult line to walk: how can you uplift in the system and how can you get heard at all outside of the system? I think Dyson makes strong points that commercial viability and SPC are not mutually exclusive. But I also think it is even more complicated than Dyson presents it.

Week 5: Turn Off The Radio?

In this week's readings, the most prominent theme that I latched onto is how structures of technology and industry influence the direction and content in artistic expression.

More concretely, in James B. Stewart's article, I saw how much emphasis certain scholars put on the diminished role of the radio DJ and the local radio station in coordinating political initiatives. Stewart explained that during the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), the radio DJ took on the role of community organizer by announcing events, promoting community education, and "carefully [selecting] particular songs to underscore the political message delivered through other formats" (200). Additionally, these radio stations took seriously their role as a voice in the community and provided serious presentation and analysis of news events in order to keep people politically engaged as well as artistically stimulated. Stewart also talked about the idea of the "community theater," which was a space where people could listen to music together and join in on creating/forming cultural expressions. All of these ideas culminated in this era of R&B politicization and community engagement that was centered around music. While it was not clear whether R&B was a catalyst or a reflection of this energy, that was not the point: the point was that through the radio, political messages were promoted and kept alive, both in the activist and artistic sense. And just the radio but record labels like Philadelphia International Records donated their record sale profits to community charities and record labels were more willing to allow artists to determine the content of their albums.

But as media conglomerates began to consolidate, crush local black disk jockeys, and exercise totalitarian artistic oversight, political message became harder and harder to put on albums. And in business/commodity terms, it's not a surprise: if you want to appeal to the largest audience possible, political messages are often divisive and challenge the status-quo, which may turn away consumers. This made me reflect on the massive media consolidation that exists today in the radio industry, as well as the broader music industry. Although I would like to discuss whether political rap inherently cannot become "mainstream," I believe that the lack of space, creativity, and risk-taking among the major powers of music industry have certainly squashed the possibility of socially/politically conscious, commercially-viable rap.

As a side note, I wanted to pose a question: Stewart and (Alridge to an extent) trace hip hop's origins back to R&B and conscious political actions. But doesn't hip hop also share its heritage with funk/disco, which were described as "a sound of mindless repetition and lyrical idiocy" (Stewart 216)? Does this fact of multiple cultural origins contribute to the complex, and often contradictory, paradigms that coexist within hip hop?


Looking forward to Monday!

Week 4: The Soul of Hip Hop

First, I wanted to share an anecdote that I thought was relevant to the last few readings. I went to a Murs show in DC about a year ago. Murs is riding a border between underground/mainstream hip hop, and he recently signed to Warner Brother Records. But at the show, I noticed tagged on his newly acquired tour bus "SELL OUT" in white spray paint. I thought that was an interesting dynamic considering all of the stories we are reading about people in "the industry" that really is not represented by Toure: the independent crowd that stands opposed to industry artists.

Anyway, I am going to stick to two ideas from Toure because I have been all over the place recently.

In the first part of the reading on some of the women of the Hip Hop Nation, I felt like there was a different character in their creation process. It seemed like Lauryn Hill and Alisha Keys have a raw passion to expressive in their music. This seems different than the first part of the Toure because I don't think that Hill and Keys are creating a character or developing an image. They both seem to be authentic artists trying to express something that is very real to them. Keys seems to reject being "iced out" and seeks to be "ghetto hot" calling on images and words that express some sort of reality, not a fantasy realm. Her concept for her song "Fallin'" and the music video express a sense of love and pain, accompanied by a social critique of incarceration stereotypes and the borderlessness of love.
At the same time Lauryn Hill wants to create respect for herself as an artist, a producer, not just someone who leaches off the creative talents of others. She would not be pigeon-holed as a pretty face. To a fault, Hill wanted to be given credit for developing dope music. As ?uestlove put it, she wanted her solo career to establish her as an independent artist from Wyclef Jean. Hill commented that she has created a public persona, but she hated it and had to break out of it.
For me, along with the article about Beyonce, showed me the side of some artists that were trying to create art that was powerfully moving and authentic, not create some kind of image.

Finally, I thought that the last two sections on gay and lesbian rappers was really eye-opening and thought provoking. I pride myself in knowing lots of artists, and I knew none of these gay artists. I think the questions posed by Toure were very valuable. The idea about homosocial interaction and brotherly love are connected to the homosexual tension that exists in hip hop. I believe the homophobia stems from the desire to protect Black masculinity because it is fragile in a white supremacist, male-dominant culture. Anything that runs contrary to the dominant construction of Black masculinity (such as being the penetrated or femininity) is a threat to the community if it is accepted. I look forward to finding and listening to Caushun and Juba Kalamka and Tim'm West.

OK, looking forward to Monday! Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

Week 3: "It's all About Reality"

Hello Hip Hop Nation!

I am dropping my blog entry early because I will be gone Monday doing a visit for post-graduate studies at Eden Theological Seminary, and I wanted to give this my attention before I leave.

Well for this week, I had a whole lot of different thoughts, so I will tease a few ideas out here:

1. In the Toure reading, I really focused on looking for the idea that Dr. Schur was talking about in class: the idea that hip hop stars use a persona to create music and sell their identity, as much as their art. I thought Toure did his best work in sort of trying to separate people like Eminem, 50 Cent, DMX, and Biggie from their hip hop-identity and get at the actual person. The part where Biggie sort of explains that he is actually nervous as hell about getting killed was really moving for me. Nervousness and fear are not emotions that hip-hoppers usually express in their work, and it is re-humanizing to hear things like that. The story of Tupac weeping from Toure's assertion about the legitimacy of his shooting story had the same effect. In reading about Eminem's life philosophies and actions with his families, I kept asking myself the question: why aren't some of these values that he is imparting on the children he is raising (i.e. being there for family, respect towards women, personal responsibility) incorporated into his music more often? I guess these things are not entertaining to the community of music listeners...

2. On the same note, I wondered how much Toure's presentation of 50 Cent made me wonder how record executives and popular culture are narrowing the definition of "authentic" and choking the diversity of hip hop. I mean, it seems like record executives are actively seeking people with rough pasts to be their new talent because if an act is believable/verifiable, it will grab much more clout. These personas reflect values such as hyperviolence, ultra-materialism, illicit drug use, a lack of concern for the community, and the objectification of women. There are rare exceptions that are commercially viable and do not reflect these dominant trends... (Also, these personas conflate being "from the street" with all of these anti-social traits) Can a hip hop star be successful in the long-term without being "authentic"? How do artists like Talib Kweli and Common balance their autheticity with their message? Can people like this sell on a large-scale with major label benefits and distribution?

3. The Rux piece was really confusing. I did not understand his Dionysus metaphor, and his cultural historiography was full of language that was not very accessible. In spite of those things, I think I got something from it: So race and identity are not tangible things, but they have real impacts on our everyday lives in structuring hierarchies of power, as well as giving meaning and ownership of the self. But these racial identification are part of a broader construction of collective consciousness of meaning. Therefore, whiteness is not real, but it is defined by the group and membership is contingent on specific cultural requirements. So in walks Eminem [here is where Rux lost me]. Somehow there is a historical construction of a whiteness that is infatuated with the oppressed culture or the "Other" identity, a social outcast. Therefore, Eminem is simply constructing his own persona within the historical context of the tradition of the supremacist culture buying into the perks of the outsider culture. Why this is not truly authetnic adaptation of black culture is because Eminem has the ability to remove himself from the outsider stance and make himself fit into the dominant white culture; Eminem can move between these worlds, unlike Black artists, who are confined to the anxiouness of being a social outcast...

So I think I got most of it, but I know I'm missing pieces too, and I'm still not sure if Rux is affirming, dissing, or neutral on the art of Eminem... I think the article was interesting and if I was in class I would like to expand on it, but I think I wrote enough here.... Well, enjoy class! See you in two weeks.

Week 2: The Art of Hip Hop

This week's readings were exceptionally interesting, and I am not sure that I will be able to pick just one idea that I had to write my entire entry about. So I think I will develop a few ideas that we could talk about or just reflect on...:

1. In Puerto Rocks, Flores points to the bilingual or Spanish raps in the African American community. Specifically on page 80, Flores quotes a member of the Latin Empire (I think) who was paraphrasing some of the African Americans on the early hip hop scene reactions. After hearing some Spanish rap, one person said "that sounds dope!... yo, I don't understand it, man, but I know it was rhyming and I hear the last word, man, that's bad"

This made me curious: does the flyness of hip hop songs transcend language? Is there something aesthetically that can be appreciated about a rap that does not necessarily require meaning? I thought that was amazing. I think this is also part of the idea that it is difficult a clear definition of what hip hop is and isn't because of its diverse heritage, but when they hear it, it is very clear what is dope and what is wack.

2."In historical perspective of Black and Puerto Rican interaction, rap is thus a lesson in cultural negotiation and transcation" (Flores 85). I thought that this was a really interesting conclusion. Perhaps it is best to understand hip hop as a medium that allows people to communicate an experience that is truly authentic. There are not the restrictions of knowing how to play an instrument on the MC; an MC can tell there story, be real, and represent without formal training. I thought a final line from this section was great: The Puerto Rican influence on hip hop "shows how creatively a people can adopt and adapt what would seem a "foreign" tradition and make it... its own." (85)

3. Blackburn's piece frustrated me. To be fair, I think that she made some excellent points about how hip hop has been manipulated by capitalist forces to perpetuate racist stereotypes and commodification/neutralization of a dissident culture. The commodification of "Blackness" should not be ignored and the disparity between rap icons and the African American community is a gross hypocrisy. But I do not think that she gives enough credit to the depth of the hip hop community, nor does she emphasize that hip hop has cultural currency as an art form. I felt like she focused on how hip hop was failing to ask political questions and mobilize youth to action, and did not address the fact that hip hop is also about making people laugh, dance, smile, and utilize their own personal creativity. I think Kelley's argument that African American expressions of hip hop are not exclusively coping mechanisms, but also expressions of aesthetics and creativity fit well against Blackburn.

Also, I felt that it was unfair to look exclusively as the mainstream popular culture version of hip hop to determine what hip hop is or means. Of course artist that are played on the radio or in clubs will reflect the hyper-capitalist mantra, the A&R teams and media conglomerates that own those airwaves like those messages. It is important to remember that within the last 10 years, hip hop has a lot more positive voices competing to its heart (i.e. Talib Kweli, Common, Immortal Technique, Sollilaquists of Sound, Lupe Fiasco, Pigeon John, Jurassic 5, etc.).

4. Finally, I know I've gone on way too long, but I wanted to say I loved the way that Kelley's pieces addressed the idea of "the dozens." I hope we get a chance to talk about this.

That was too long, but thanks for reading anyway!!

Week 1: Hip Hop's Veterans and Nay Sayers

I am glad to be hooking into the Hip Hop Nation and I am looking forward to this blog.


I have been a hip hop head since I was 13 and in a lot of hip hop music there is some mythology about the origins of the music style and culture. The best part of the reading for me was how it really gave a clear, historical sense of how hip hop came into existence. Obviously the music and culture have changed greatly over the last few decades, but understanding where it all came from gives me a richer context for evaluating contemporary hip hop. It is a common theme with artists like Public Enemy or Immortal Technique to talk about how hip hop was born out of urban frustration and political resistance. This is true, especially when we hear the voice of Afrika Bambaataa and his active construction of a Zulu Nation and unified black communities. However, it is equally valid to understand that early hip hop was all about the party. Kool DJ AJ said that "I didn't go to a party really to concentrate on [Kool DJ Herc] that much--I went to a party to party" (Ahearn and Fricke 35). I think that it is really easy to get caught up in the idea that people formed this music consciously to subvert white cultural dominance, but we cannot forget that originally hip hop was also about having fun with a community of friends. It is absolutely true that hip hop is as much about rejecting sociopolitical norms and maneuvering within the confines of white supremacy as it is about gettin' down. These competing terms of identity add to the complexity and richness of hip hop that make hip hop studies so compelling.

I really enjoyed hearing the voices of Kool DJ Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash because these are three people who have very familiar names in modern hip hop, but I never really understood there significance until now. It was also impressive to learn about the diverse musical backgrounds and knowledge that people like Afrika Bambaataa used in the early days. Today, a good DJ knows lots of types of music to get the best breaks and samples, and that characteristic seems to be modeled off of these early innovators. One question I was asking was I wonder to what extent similar sorts of proto-hip hop breakthroughs (no pun intended) were happening in other regions of the country, like the West Coast or even places like Chicago.

Finally, I was surprised in Dyson's introduction by how much negativity towards hip hop studies classes and programs exists within the academic community. As a person who grew up loving hip hop, and seeing its influences on literally every aspect of culture today, it is difficult to defend ignorance towards or rejection of hip hop.