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.
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.
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.
Responding to the development of a lively hip hop culture in Central and Eastern European countries, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how a universal model of hip hop serves as a ...contextually situated platform of cultural exchange and becomes locally inflected. After the Soviet Union fell, hip hop became popular in urban environments in the region, but it has often been stigmatized as inauthentic, due to an apparent lack of connection to African American historical roots and black identity. Originally strongly influenced by aesthetics from the US, hip hop in Central and Eastern Europe has gradually developed unique, local trajectories, a number of which are showcased in this volume. On the one hand, hip hop functions as a marker of Western cosmopolitanism and democratic ideology, but as the contributors show, it is also a malleable genre that has been infused with so much local identity that it has lost most of its previous associations with "the West" in the experiences of local musicians, audiences, and producers. Contextualizing hip hop through the prism of local experiences and regional musical expressions, these valuable case studies reveal the broad spectrum of its impact on popular culture and youth identity in the post-Soviet world.
Hip Hop Africa Charry, Eric; Polak, Rainer; Shipley, Jesse Weaver ...
10/2012
eBook
Hip Hop Africa explores a new generation of Africans who are not only consumers of global musical currents, but also active and creative participants. Eric Charry and an international group of ...contributors look carefully at youth culture and the explosion of hip hop in Africa, the embrace of other contemporary genres, including reggae, ragga, and gospel music, and the continued vitality of drumming. Covering Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa, this volume offers unique perspectives on the presence and development of hip hop and other music in Africa and their place in global music culture.
