Thug life Jeffries, Michael P; Jeffries, Michael P
2011., 2011, 20110101
eBook
Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop ...is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans? These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music’s fans—young men, both black and white—and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people’s daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans’ voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.
Untranslatability as Resistance Fischione, Fernanda
Middle East journal of culture and communication,
12/2019, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Abstract
In this paper I show the close correlation between cultural resistance and the comeback of the Arabic literary heritage in Levantine rap music in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. In ...order to achieve this goal, I provide a number of textual examples that focus on both the content and the rhetorical tools used to convey it, being constantly aware that in the field of rap, perhaps more than elsewhere, 'the medium is the message' (Marshall McLuhan). In present-day Levantine rap lyrics, we can acknowledge a wide area of untranslatability, and it is specifically in this transcultural opacity that rap displays its resistant nature. In this paper I attempt to show how the conscious use of several varieties of the Arabic language, motifs belonging to the Arabic poetic tradition and references to local history and culture contribute to create small 'cultural fortresses' in individual lyrics, and these stimulate the listener to identify with it.
El presente escrito aborda las competencias de las regiones administrativas y de planificación o RAP, que son creadas por los departamentos y también por el Distrito Capital. Particularmente, se ...persigue determinar cuál es el límite que tienen las aludidas entidades territoriales para establecer las funciones que les corresponde a las RAP. Asimismo, el artículo revisa el aporte que en materia de descentralización territorial se da con la creación de las regiones administrativas y de planificación, teniendo en cuenta que el margen que tienen las entidades territoriales para definir sus competencias suele ser asociado a un mayor nivel de descentralización.
Mammalian cells are surrounded by neighbouring cells and extracellular matrix (ECM), which provide cells with structural support and mechanical cues that influence diverse biological processes
. The ...Hippo pathway effectors YAP (also known as YAP1) and TAZ (also known as WWTR1) are regulated by mechanical cues and mediate cellular responses to ECM stiffness
. Here we identified the Ras-related GTPase RAP2 as a key intracellular signal transducer that relays ECM rigidity signals to control mechanosensitive cellular activities through YAP and TAZ. RAP2 is activated by low ECM stiffness, and deletion of RAP2 blocks the regulation of YAP and TAZ by stiffness signals and promotes aberrant cell growth. Mechanistically, matrix stiffness acts through phospholipase Cγ1 (PLCγ1) to influence levels of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate and phosphatidic acid, which activates RAP2 through PDZGEF1 and PDZGEF2 (also known as RAPGEF2 and RAPGEF6). At low stiffness, active RAP2 binds to and stimulates MAP4K4, MAP4K6, MAP4K7 and ARHGAP29, resulting in activation of LATS1 and LATS2 and inhibition of YAP and TAZ. RAP2, YAP and TAZ have pivotal roles in mechanoregulated transcription, as deletion of YAP and TAZ abolishes the ECM stiffness-responsive transcriptome. Our findings show that RAP2 is a molecular switch in mechanotransduction, thereby defining a mechanosignalling pathway from ECM stiffness to the nucleus.
Este trabajo busca identificar la expresión de la socialización en las letras del rap, reflejando su posible despliegue e influencia para los adolescentes de las comunidades periféricas. Se trata de ...una investigación cualitativa y documental que analizó fragmentos de música rap de São Paulo, basándose en el marco teórico del psicoanalista inglés D. W. Winnicott. Se verificó que los raperos tienden a asumir el papel de modelos de identificación para esta población, que comparte experiencias que sostienen una relación de hermandad, pertenencia y que contribuyen a la organización de la identidad personal. Se concluyó que el género musical rap puede actuar como elemento facilitador de la experiencia de socialización de los adolescentes de comunidades periféricas, contribuyendo también al desarrollo emocional de esta población.
How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop’s introduction into the ...musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre’s diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre’s growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream. “Here it is—bam! The definitive story of rap, race, radio, and marketplace during hip hop’s Golden Age. Amy Coddington combines an archivist’s rigor and a raconteur’s wit in documenting what those of us of a certain age remember but, perhaps, never fully grasped: how, amidst expanding racial inequalities and against all odds, rap music became the most popular genre in America.” — Anthony Kwame Harrison, author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification “Making use of trade publications that have received little scholarly attention, Coddington has crafted a provocative and lucid alternative history that tracks how the radio industry’s engagement with hip hop in the 1980s and 1990s both reflected and shaped changing ideas about race and music.” — Loren Kajikawa, author of Sounding Race in Rap Songs
Powered by a driving beat, clever lyrics, and assertive attitudes, rap music and hip hop culture have engrossed American youth since the mid-1980s. Although the first rappers were African Americans, ...rap and hip hop culture quickly spread to other ethnic groups who have added their own cultural elements to the music. Chicano Rap offers the first in-depth look at how Chicano/a youth have adopted and adapted rap music and hip hop culture to express their views on gender and violence, as well as on how Chicano/a youth fit into a globalizing world. Pancho McFarland examines over five hundred songs and seventy rap artists from all the major Chicano rap regions—San Diego, San Francisco and Northern California, Texas, and Chicago and the Midwest. He discusses the cultural, political, historical, and economic contexts in which Chicano rap has emerged and how these have shaped the violence and misogyny often expressed in Chicano rap and hip hop. In particular, he argues that the misogyny and violence of Chicano rap are direct outcomes of the “patriarchal dominance paradigm” that governs human relations in the United States. McFarland also explains how globalization, economic restructuring, and the conservative shift in national politics have affected Chicano/a youth and Chicano rap. He concludes with a look at how Xicana feminists, some Chicano rappers, and other cultural workers are striving to reach Chicano/a youth with a democratic, peaceful, empowering, and liberating message.
The rap lyrics often deal with the same subjects from different perspectives. The musicians choose the themes for their rap pieces with which they identify the most. These texts have been thoroughly ...accepted by linguists, but rap has not been viewed as a whole, but the researches rather have been concentrated on its individual manifestations. In the present article I analyze whether we can regard the German and Polish song lyrics in rap as an autobiographical text type and what information they can use to enrich the biographies of their authors. I will start with the history of rap, which provides information about the primary goal and the main functions of this genre. The research material was taken from 401 quotations from 23 German and 25 Polish songs and compared with available information about the authors. All quotations are assigned to the most frequently repeatable life categories and counted. In the light of the materials I have analyzed, it is clear that there is a diver- gence not only between individual authors, but also between the German and Polish perceptions of many aspects of life.
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