Trip-hop described some of the 1990s' best music, and it was one of the decade's most revealing bad ideas. The music itself was an intoxication of beats, bass, and voice. It emerged amid the social tensions of the late 1980s, and as part of hip-hop's rise to global dominance. It carried the innovations of Jamaican soundsystem culture, the sweet refuge of Lovers Rock, the bliss of club jazz dancefloors and post-rave chill-out rooms. It went mainstream with Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, DJ Shadow, Kruder & Dorfmeister, and Bjoerk; and with record labels like Ninja Tune and Mo' Wax. To the artists' despair, the music was tagged with a silly label and packaged as music for the boutique and the lounge; made respectable with awards and acclaim. But the music at its best still sounds experimental and dramatic; and its influence lingers through artists like FKA twigs, Sevdaliza, James Blake, Billie Eilish, and Lana Del Rey. This short book is a guide to 'trip-hop' in its context of the weird 1990s: nostalgia and consumerism; pre-millenium angst and lo-fi technology; casual exoticism amid accelerating globalization and gentrification. This book presents a survey of the music and its leading artists, packed with recommended listening, essential tracks, great remixes, and under-recognized albums.

From Morrissey and Nick Cave to The Streets and Kanye West, this is the book that explores the links between hip-hop and rock. Reynolds has focused on two strands: white alternative rock and black street music. He's identified the strange dance of white bohemian rock and black culture, how they come together at various points and then go their own way. Through interviews he has carried out as a top music journalist for the last twenty years, Reynolds is here able to tell a story of musical rivalry which noone has told before. The approach is similar to Rip It Up and Start Again: a cultural history told through the music we love and the stars and movements that have shaped the world we live in.

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aTo the Break of Dawn marks a crucial turning point in hip-hop writing. . . . By opening the discourse on hip-hopas aesthetic, Cobb spearheads a new sub-genre, and perhaps a return or revolution in hip-hop aesthetics.a
--"Black Issues Book Review"

a[P]eels back the many digitized layers of hip-hop to explore the evolution of the MC, from African folkloric traditions to the global (and often hypercommercial) phenomenon it is today.
a--"Utne"

SEE ALSO: "Pimps Up, Hoas Down: Hip Hopas Hold on Young Black Women" by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting.

aTo the Break of Dawn is smart, funny, conversational -- a book to touch off serious study of the modern MC.a
--"The Austin Chronicle"

aUpon finishing To The Break of Dawn any objective fan will acknowledge that Cobb has done a commendable job in chronicling rapas evolution and explaining its multiple influences and impact.a
--"City Paper"

aTo the Break of Dawn dissects the evolution of hip hop lyricism from its most primitive beginnings to its current manifestation as a global phenomenon. Author Jelani Cobb examines issues of race, geography, genre and bravado in this overview of hip hopas lyrical art. Covering words from B.I.G., Cube, Obie Trice and Pimp C, Cobb offers an intellectual and up-to-date report on hip hopas most powerful elementa
--"The Source Magazine"

aWhat makes William Jelani Cobb's To the Break of Dawn so refreshing is that it centers on what hip-hop is, rather than on what it does. Eschewing the common practice of treating rap lyrics as just another way to talk about race, politics or the self, Cobb treats them as art. His aim is ambitious: toarticulate hip-hop's aesthetic principles while tracing its roots back to the aancestral poetic and musical traditionsa of black oral culture, from Sunday sermons to gut-bucket blues. To the Break of Dawn celebrates lyrical invention, the artists and even the particular rhymes that make hip-hop great. For the uninitiated, it is Hip-Hop 101, offering a rich overview of rap's verbal artistry. For the aficionado, it alternately affirms and challenges deeply held beliefs of what is valuable in hip-hop.a
--"Washington Post Book World"

aThis book makes an important contribution to hip-hop history. . . . Cobbas writing style is engaging, and the book benefits from the legitimacy provided by the authoras background: he is a former MC who grew up with the culture.a
--"Choice"

aOn literally every page [Cobb] displays a tremendous command of language and history as he aexamines the aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic evolution of hip hop from its inception in the South Bronx to the present era.a But make no mistake: this groundbreaking work is an artfully constructed and vividly written look at athe artistic evolution of rap music and its relationship to earlier forms of black expression.a Much of the book's pleasure also comes from Cobb's ability to afreestylea serious and humorous insights-from how artists such as Tupac and Nas sometimes astepped outside the conventions of hip-hop to pen sympathetic narratives about the sexual exploitation of young women, a to how LL Cool J's pioneering aI Need a Beata sounded alike he'd raided every entry in an SAT book.a aa
--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

aVital stuff for hip hop fans eager to know more about their favorite culturalidiomas development and underpinnings.a
--"Booklist"

aAt a time when academics are just beginning to recognize hip hop as a legitimate form, William Jelani Cobb, a child of rap himself, brings an unparalleled level of understanding to the music. His historically informed yet hip-to-the-tip viewpoint roots readers in the art form rather than the hype.a
--Chuck D

aWith poetic passion and surgical precision, William Jelani Cobb's engaging exploration of the hip hop aesthetic lovingly demonstrates that, when it comes to beats and rhymes, the beauty of the (bass) god resides in the details.a
--Joan Morgan, author of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost"

aFinally, a hip hop study that captures the verve and swagger that marked the work of our critical forebears Albert Murray and Amiri Baraka. In his brilliant new tome, William Jelani Cobb bridges the gap between the majesty of the blues and the gully regality of hip hop.a
--Mark Anthony Neal, author of "New Black Man"

"Wow! "To the Break of Dawn" is a crucial contribution to hip hop history. I'm thrilled that William Jelani Cobb has documented hip hop's relationship to the blues. If you want to truly understand how hip hop was born, read this booka
--MC Lyte

"aTo the Break of Dawn" tells the serious story of hip hop's artistic roots, and in the process revels in the great MCs who stand at the crossroads of music and literature. In a crowded field of hip hop scholars, pundits, and journalists, "To the Break of Dawn" puts William Jelani Cobb way out in front.a
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

aUpon finishing To the Break of Dawn, any objective fan will acknowledge that Cobb has done a commendable job in chronicling rapasevolution and explaining its multiple influences and impact. Hereas a fresh look at a music that continues to electrify, confound, alienate, and fascinate.a
--"Nashville City Paper"

"He'll idle with some prelim scratches to let the crowd know what's coming next. And if his boy got skills enough, if the verbal game is tight enough, that right there will be the kinetic moment, that blessed split-second when beat meets rhyme."

With roots that stretch from West Africa through the black pulpit, hip-hop emerged in the streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s and has spread to the farthest corners of the earth. To the Break of Dawn uniquely examines this freestyle verbal artistry on its own terms. A kid from Queens who spent his youth at the epicenter of this new art form, music critic William Jelani Cobb takes readers inside the beats, the lyrics, and the flow of hip-hop, separating mere corporate rappers from the creative MCs that forged the art in the crucible of the street jam.

The four pillars of hip hop--break dancing, graffiti art, deejaying, and rapping--find their origins in traditions as diverse as the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira and Caribbean immigrants' turnstile artistry. Tracing hip-hop's relationship to ancestral forms of expression, Cobb explores the cultural and literary elements that are at its core. From KRS-One and Notorious B.I.G. to Tupac Shakur and Lauryn Hill, he profiles MCs who were pivotal to the rise of the genre, verbal artists whose lineage runs back to the black preacher and the bluesman.

Unlike books that focus on hip-hop as a social movement or a commercial phenomenon, To the Break of Dawn tracks the music's aesthetic, stylistic, and thematic evolution from its inception to today's distinctly regional sub-divisions and styles. Written with an insider's ear, the book illuminates hip-hop's innovations in a freestyle form that speaks to both aficionados and newcomers to the art.

In his exciting new book, based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Maurice Magana considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance is essential reading for students and scholars interested in youth politics and culture in Mexico, social movements, urban studies, and migration.

J-Rod moves like a small tank on the court, his face mean, staring down his opponents. "I play just like my father," he says. "Before my father died, he was a problem on the court. I'm a problem." Playing basketball for him fuses past and present, conjuring his father's memory into a force that opponents can feel in each bone-snapping drive to the basket. On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half-men, half-heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket. Basketball is popular among young black American men but not because, as many claim, they are "pushed by poverty" or "pulled" by white institutions to play it. Black men choose to participate in basketball because of the transcendent experience of the game. Through interviews with and observations of urban basketball players, Onaje X. O. Woodbine composes a rare portrait of a passionate, committed, and resilient group of athletes who use the court to mine what urban life cannot corrupt. If people turn to religion to reimagine their place in the world, then black streetball players are indeed the hierophants of the asphalt.

Frames hip-hop as the defining cultural force in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras When Lauryn Hill stepped forward to accept her fifth Grammy Award in 1999, she paused as she collected the last trophy, and seeming somewhat startled said, "This is crazy, 'cause this is hip hop music.'" Hill's astonishment at receiving mainstream acclaim for music once deemed insignificant testifies to the explosion of this truly revolutionary art form. Hip hop music and the culture that surrounds it-film, fashion, sports, and a whole way of being-has become the defining ethos for a generation. Its influence has spread from the state's capital to the nation's capital, from the Pineapple to the Big Apple, from 'Frisco to Maine, and then on to Spain. But moving far beyond the music, hip hop has emerged as a social and cultural movement, displacing the ideas of the Civil Rights era. Todd Boyd maintains that a new generation, having grown up in the aftermath of both Civil Rights and Black Power, rejects these old school models and is instead asserting its own values and ideas. Hip hop is distinguished in this regard because it never attempted to go mainstream, but instead the mainstream came to hip hop. The New H.N.I.C., like hip hop itself, attempts to keep it real, and challenges conventional wisdom on a range of issues, from debates over use of the "N-word," the comedy of Chris Rock, and the "get money" ethos of hip hop moguls like Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Russell Simmons, to hip hop's impact on a diverse array of figures from Bill Clinton and Eminem to Jennifer Lopez. Maintaining that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is less important today than DMX's It's Dark and Hell is Hot, Boyd argues that Civil Rights as a cultural force is dead, confined to a series of media images frozen in another time. Hip hop, on the other hand, represents the vanguard, and is the best way to grasp both our present and future.

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York's African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

Taking inspiration from Public Enemy's lead vocalist Chuck D - who once declared that 'rap is the CNN of young Black America' - this volume brings together leading legal commentators to make sense of some of the most pressing law and policy issues in the context of hip-hop music and the ongoing struggle for Black equality. Contributors include MSNBC commentator Paul Butler, who grapples with race and policing through the lens of N.W.A.'s song 'Fuck tha Police', ACLU President Deborah Archer, who considers the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and many other prominent scholars who speak of poverty, LGBTQ+ rights, mass incarceration, and other crucial topics of the day. Written to 'say it plain', this collection will be valuable not only to students and scholars of law, African-American studies, and hip-hop, but also to everyone who cares about creating a more just society.

Taking inspiration from Public Enemy's lead vocalist Chuck D - who once declared that 'rap is the CNN of young Black America' - this volume brings together leading legal commentators to make sense of some of the most pressing law and policy issues in the context of hip-hop music and the ongoing struggle for Black equality. Contributors include MSNBC commentator Paul Butler, who grapples with race and policing through the lens of N.W.A.'s song 'Fuck tha Police', ACLU President Deborah Archer, who considers the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and many other prominent scholars who speak of poverty, LGBTQ+ rights, mass incarceration, and other crucial topics of the day. Written to 'say it plain', this collection will be valuable not only to students and scholars of law, African-American studies, and hip-hop, but also to everyone who cares about creating a more just society.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop-a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture-to "save" themselves and the city. Converting street corners to airborne churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland's fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna's fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people's everyday experiences.

On the tenth anniversary of his death, The Dirty Version is the first biography of hip hop superstar and founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Ol' Dirty Bastard, to be written by someone from his inner circle: his right-hand man and best friend, Buddha Monk. Ol' Dirty Bastard rocketed to fame with the Wu-Tang Clan, the raucous and renegade group that altered the world of hip hop forever. ODB was one of the Clan's wildest icons and most inventive performers, and when he died of an overdose in 2004 at the age of thirty-five, millions of fans mourned the loss. ODB lives on in epic proportions and his antics are legend: he once picked up his welfare check in a limousine; lifted a burning car off a four-year-old girl in Brooklyn; stole a fifty-dollar pair of sneakers on tour at the peak of his success. Many have questioned whether his stunts were carefully calculated or the result of paranoia and mental instability. Now, Dirty's friend since childhood, Buddha Monk, a Wu-Tang collaborator on stage and in the studio, reveals the truth about the complex and talented performer. From their days together on the streets of Brooklyn to the meteoric rise of Wu-Tang's star, from bouts in prison to court-mandated rehab, from Dirty's favorite kind of pizza to his struggles with fame and success, Buddha tells the real story-The Dirty Version-of the legendary rapper.

Hamilton Easy Piano Selections presents music from the critically acclaimed musical about Alexander Hamilton. The show debuted on Broadway in August 2015 to unprecedented advanced box office sales and has already become one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever. This collection features 9 songs arranged for easy piano from the music penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Already a winner of 11 Tony Awards, a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize, Sir Cameron Macintosh's production opened in London's West End in December 2017.

Hip-hop is in crisis. For the past dozen years, the most commercially successful hip-hop has become increasingly saturated with caricatures of black gangstas, thugs, pimps, and 'hos. The controversy surrounding hip-hop is worth attending to and examining with a critical eye because, as scholar and cultural critic Tricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States . In The Hip-Hop Wars , Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop. What Rose calls for is not a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide.

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 break-dancing 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 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.

Back In The Days documents the emerging hip-hop scence from 1980-1989--before it became today's multi-million-dollar multinational industry. Jamel Shabazz was on the scene, photographing everyday people hangin' in Harlern, kickin' it in Queens, and cold chillin' in Brooklyn. Street styling with an attitude not seen in fashion for another twenty years to come. Shabazz's subjects strike poses that put supermodels to shame. For anyone who wants to know what "'keepin' it real" means, Back In the Days is the book of your dreams.

Though cultural hybridity is celebrated as a hallmark of U.S. American music and identity, hybrid music is all too often marked and marketed under a single racial label.Tamara Roberts' book Resounding Afro Asia examines music projects that foreground racial mixture in players, audiences, and sound in the face of the hypocrisy of the culture industry. Resounding Afro Asia traces a genealogy of black/Asian engagements through four contemporary case studies from Chicago, New York, and California: Funkadesi (Indian/funk/reggae), Yoko Noge (Japanese folk/blues), Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble (jazz/various Asian and African traditions), and Red Baraat (Indian brass band and New Orleans second line). Roberts investigates Afro Asian musical settings as part of a genealogy of cross-racial culture and politics. These musical settings are sites of sono-racial collaboration: musical engagements in which participants pointedly use race to form and perform interracial politics. When musicians collaborate, they generate and perform racially marked sounds that do not conform to their racial identities, thus splintering the expectations of cultural determinism. The dynamic social, aesthetic, and sonic practices construct a forum for the negotiation of racial and cultural difference and the formation of inter-minority solidarities. Through improvisation and composition, artists can articulate new identities and subjectivities in conversation with each other. Resounding Afro Asia offers a glimpse into how artists live multiracial lives in which they inhabit yet exceed multicultural frameworks built on racial essentialism and segregation. It joins a growing body of literature that seeks to write Asian American artists back into U.S. popular music history and will surely appeal to students of music, ethnomusicology, race theory, and politics, as well as those curious about the relationship between race and popular music.

As immediately believable as they were cartoonish, as much an inner city cipher as a suburban boys gang, the foursome that made up the Pharcyde were the most relatable MCs to ever pass the mic. On their debut and magnum opus Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, they created a record almost overstuffed with possibility, the sound of four restless man-children fresh out of their teens, finding a perfect outlet in a form of music that was just as young and fertile. And like the product of any adolescent, Bizarre Ride wears its contrarianism and contradictions on its sleeve. It's a party album about shyness and unrequited love. A swirl of jubilant L.A. psychedelia recorded in the midst of the Rodney King trial. A blast of black consciousness that still makes room to poke fun at Public Enemy and reference the Pixies. A dense, sophisticated sonic stew punctuated by yo mama jokes and prank calls. While hip-hop was already calcifying its tropes of steely machismo and aspirational fantasy, Bizarre Ride was a pure distillation of the average hip-hop listener's actual lifestyle-the joys and sorrows of four guys who were young, broke, sexually frustrated, and way too clever for their own good. A touchstone for Kanye West, Drake, Lil B and a whole generation of off-center MCs, Bizarre Ride sketched out a whole strata of emotions that other rappers hadn't yet dared to tackle, and to a certain extent, still haven't.

"NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER
"Decoded" is a book like no other: a collection of lyrics and their meanings that together tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history, and one of the most provocative and successful artists of our time.
Expanded edition

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo shifts attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, subservient wives, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of Hip-Hop's regulation, the "euphemism," as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism - the zombie, hero, robot, and judge - constitute a way of seeing Filipino Hip-Hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and U.S. global power. Choreographing in Color therefore reveals how the Filipino dancing body has come to be, paradoxically, both globally recognized and indiscernible.

Mary J. Blige is an icon who represents the political consciousness of hip hop and the historical promise of soul. She is an everywoman, celebrated by Oprah Winfrey and beloved by pop music fans of all ages and races. Blige has sold over fifty million albums, won numerous Grammys, and even played at multiple White House events, as well as the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Displaying astonishing range and versatility, she has recorded everything from Broadway standards to Led Zeppelin anthems and worked with some of popular music's greatest artists-Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Sting, U2, and Beyonce, among them. Real Love, No Drama: The Music of Mary J. Blige tells the story of one of the most important artists in pop music history. Danny Alexander follows the whole arc of Blige's career, from her first album, which heralded the birth of "hip hop soul," to her critically praised 2014 album, The London Sessions. He highlights the fact that Blige was part of the historically unprecedented movement of black women onto pop radio and explores how she and other women took control of their careers and used their music to give voice to women's (and men's) everyday struggles and dreams. This book adds immensely to the story of both black women artists and artists rooted in hip hop and pays tribute to a musician who, by expanding her reach and asking tough questions about how music can and should evolve, has proven herself an artistic visionary.