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.