Making Beats Schloss, Joseph G
2013, 2004, c2014., 2014-11-20
eBook
<!CDATADespite having created one of the most important musical cultures of the last fifty years, hip-hop composers who use digital sampling are rarely taken seriously as artists. But hip-hop deejays ...and producers have collectively developed an artistic system that features a complex aesthetic, a detailed array of social protocols, a rigorous set of ethical expectations and a rich historical consciousness.
Based on ten years of research among hip-hop producers, Making Beats is the first work of scholarship to explore the goals, methods and values of this surprisingly insular community. Focusing on a variety of subjects--from hip-hop artists' pedagogical methods to the Afro-diasporic 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.>
Reality first appeared in the late 1980s-in the sense not of
real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by
shows such as Cops and America's Most Wanted ; the
daytime gabfests of ...Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid
news of A Current Affair . In a bracing work of cultural
criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog
with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while
borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers
Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, "reality rap."
Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural
revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling
medium. Reality entertainment borrowed journalistic tropes but was
undiluted by the caveats and context that journalism demanded.
While N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police" countered Cops ' vision of
Black lives in America, the reality rappers who emerged in that
group's wake, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, embraced
reality's visceral tabloid sensationalism, using the media's
obsession with Black criminality to collapse the distinction
between image and truth. Reality TV and reality rap nurtured the
world we live in now, where politics and basic facts don't feel
real until they have been translated into mass-mediated
entertainment.
Hip-Hop music encompasses an extraordinarily diverse range of approaches to politics. Some rap and Hip-Hop artists engage directly with elections and social justice organizations; others may use ...their platform to call out discrimination, poverty, sexism, racism, police brutality, and other social ills. InPulse of the People, Lakeyta M. Bonnette illustrates the ways rap music serves as a vehicle for the expression and advancement of the political thoughts of urban Blacks, a population frequently marginalized in American society and alienated from electoral politics.
Pulse of the Peoplelays a foundation for the study of political rap music and public opinion research and demonstrates ways in which political attitudes asserted in the music have been transformed into direct action and behavior of constituents. Bonnette examines the history of rap music and its relationship to and extension from other cultural and political vehicles in Black America, presenting criteria for identifying the specific subgenre of music that is political rap. She complements the statistics of rap music exposure with lyrical analysis of rap songs that espouse Black Nationalist and Black Feminist attitudes. Touching on a number of critical moments in American racial politicsincluding the 2008 and 2012 elections and the cases of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, and Trayvon MartinPulse of the Peoplemakes a compelling case for the influence of rap music in the political arena and greatly expands our understanding of the ways political ideologies and public opinion are formed.
In its early days, rap was understood as the poetry of the "inner city," which usually meant New York. Few expected anything as hard-edged as gangsta rap to emerge from Los Angeles, home of surf and ...sun. Felicia Viator tells the story of LA's self-styled "ghetto reporters," whose music forced America to see an urban crisis it preferred to ignore.
Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their ...communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.
99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So
why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do? DVS Mindz might
be the greatest rap group you've never heard of. Formed in ...Topeka,
Kansas, in the mid-1990s, they developed a reputation for ferocious
rhyming and frenetic live performances. In their heyday, DVS Mindz
released a critically acclaimed CD, received nominations for
prestigious awards, and opened for legends such as Wu-Tang Clan,
Run-DMC, and De La Soul as well as KC icon Tech N9ne. But the group
struggled with creative differences, substance abuse, ego battles,
and money issues, and they split up in 2003. Geoff Harkness takes
readers on a unique two-decade journey alongside the members of DVS
Mindz, chronicling their childhoods, their brush with success, and
what became of them in the years that followed. Based on more than
one hundred hours of video and audio recordings from 1999 to 2022,
this fly-on-the-wall account offers a backstage pass into the
recording studios and radio stations, video shoots and house
parties, nightclubs and concert halls of the Kansas
City-Lawrence-Topeka music scene circa 2000. DVS Mindz is
at once a compulsively readable group biography of four talented
MCs, a vibrant voyage through the forgotten history of local hip
hop, and a breathtakingly real story of struggling to achieve big
dreams.
24 Bars to Kill Armstrong, Andrew B
06/2019, Volume:
14
eBook
The most clearly identifiable and popular form of Japanese
hip-hop, "ghetto" or "gangsta" music has much in common with its
corresponding American subgenres, including its portrayal of life
on the ...margins, confrontational style, and aspirational
"rags-to-riches" narratives. Contrary to depictions of an
ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, gangsta J-hop gives
voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion
experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill
offers a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as
the subculture around it, showing how gangsta hip-hop arises from
widespread dissatisfaction and malaise.
This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South,
probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern
identities for a post-civil rights generation. For scholar and
...critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend
of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work
of other culture creators-including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn
Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural
possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s
and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from
the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era.
Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as
founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger
question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but
also contemporary American society as a whole. Chronicling
Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and
southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains
attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners
use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths,
multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary
southern black identity.
The neighborhoods of Fifth Ward, Fourth Ward, Third Ward, and the Southside of Houston, Texas, gave birth to Houston rap, a vibrant music scene that has produced globally recognized artists such as ...Geto Boys, DJ Screw, Pimp C and Bun B of UGK, Fat Pat, Big Moe, Z-Ro, Lil’ Troy, and Paul Wall. Lance Scott Walker and photographer Peter Beste spent a decade documenting Houston’s scene, interviewing and photographing the people—rappers, DJs, producers, promoters, record label owners—and places that give rap music from the Bayou City its distinctive character. Their collaboration produced the books Houston Rap and Houston Rap Tapes. This second edition of Houston Rap Tapes amplifies the city’s hip-hop history through new interviews with Scarface, Slim Thug, Lez Moné, B L A C K I E, Lil’ Keke, and Sire Jukebox of the original Ghetto Boys. Walker groups the interviews into sections that track the different eras and movements in Houston rap, with new photographs and album art that reveal the evolution of the scene from the 1970s to today’s hip-hop generation. The interviews range from the specifics of making music to the passions, regrets, memories, and hopes that give it life. While offering a view from some of Houston’s most marginalized areas, these intimate conversations lay out universal struggles and feelings. As Willie D of Geto Boys writes in the foreword, “Houston Rap Tapes flows more like a bunch of fellows who haven’t seen each other for ages, hanging out on the block reminiscing, rather than a calculated literary guide to Houston’s history."
The History of Gangster Rap is a deep dive into one of the most fascinating subgenres of any music category to date. Sixteen detailed chapters, organized chronologically, examine the evolution of ...gangster rap, its main players, and the culture that created this revolutionary music. From still-swirling conspiracy theories about the murders of Biggie and Tupac to the release of the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton, the era of gangster rap is one that fascinates music junkies and remains at the forefront of pop culture. Filled with interviews with key players such as Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, and dozens more, as well as sidebars, breakout bios of notorious characters, lists, charts, and more, The History of Gangster Rap is the be-all-end-all book that contextualizes the importance of gangster rap as a cultural phenomenon.
