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.

Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Made is a vivid journey into the heart of a misunderstood subculture. Through firsthand reporting, including interviews with Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope of the Insane Clown Posse, their friends and family, and numerous devoted fans, Juggalo explores the lives of the proud outsiders who are frequently labeled as a threat or dismissed as a joke. Author and journalist Steve Miller follows ICP across America, hanging out with Juggalos before and after shows, at the legendary annual Gathering of the Juggalos, and at work and home to share their stories. In addition, Juggalo dives deep into the FBI's misguided assault on Juggalo culture and the misidentification of this devoted group of horrorcore fans as a gang. Juggalo is also the chronicle of two hard-luck kids from Detroit who created an empire and became the unwitting stars of a uniquely American grassroots success story. Without the help of radio airplay and with little love from the music industry establishment, ICP went platinum and fostered one of America's most durable subcultures. Juggalo is required reading for the hardcore fan and pop culture buff alike, a scrupulously researched account of a subculture unlike any other -- one that so shook the establishment it launched a federal investigation -- as well as a window into the world of the Juggalos and the singular mythology of their underworld apocalypse.

Whether along race, class, or generational lines, hip-hop music has been a source of controversy since the beats got too big and the voices too loud for the block parties that spawned them. America has condemned and commended this music and the culture that inspires it. Dubbed "the Hip-Hop Intellectual" by critics and fans for his pioneering explorations of rap music in the academy and beyond, Michael Eric Dyson tackles the most compelling and controversial dimensions of hip-hop culture.

"Know What I Mean?" addresses the creative expression of degraded youth; the vexed gender relations that have made rap music a lightning rod for pundits; the commercial explosion that has made an art form a victim of its success; and the political elements that have been submerged in the most popular form of hip hops.

A first of its kind collection, How to Rap is an insightful and intelligent breakdown of the elements of rap for anyone wanting to learn the art form or understand the principles behind it. Author Paul Edwards examines the dynamics of hip hop from every region and in every form - mainstream, underground, current and classic - looking in particular at content, flow, writing and delivery. Edwards provides unparalleled access to the most acclaimed names in rap and their methods of working, with a foreword by Kool G Rap and interviews with over 100 artists, including Public Enemy, Mobb Deep, Schoolly D, Nelly, will.i.am, Arrested Development, A Tribe Called Quest, and Rah Digga. This one and only comprehensive examination of the MC art form is pure gold for the hip hop lover.

At the outset of summer in 1990, a Houston gangsta rap group called the Geto Boys was poised to debut its self-titled third album under the guidance of hip-hop guru Rick Rubin. What might have been a low-profile remix release from a little-known corner of the rap universe began to make headlines when the album's distributor refused to work with the group, citing its violent and depraved lyrics. When The Geto Boys was finally released, chain stores refused to stock it, concert promoters canceled the group's performances, and veteran rock critic Robert Christgau declared the group "sick motherfuckers." One quarter of a century later the album is considered a hardcore classic, having left an immutable influence on gangsta rap, horrorcore, and the rise of Southern hip-hop. Charting the rise of the Geto Boys from the earliest days of Houston's rap scene, Rolf Potts documents a moment in music history when hip-hop was beginning to replace rock as the transgressive sound of American youth. In creating an album that was both sonically innovative and unprecedentedly vulgar, the Geto Boys were accomplishing something that went beyond music. To paraphrase a sentiment from Don DeLillo, this group of young men from Houston's Fifth Ward ghetto had figured out the "language of being noticed" - which is, in the end, the only language America understands.

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as represented in works of canonical and contemporary black writers (Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead), rap music (e.g., Jay Z), images of black homelessness, and figurations of political activism (civil rights activist Bayard Rustin,

In "This Is America": Race, Gender, and Politics in America's Musical Landscape, Katie Rios argues that prominent American artists and musicians build encoded gestures of resistance into their works and challenge the status quo. These artists offer both an interpretation and a critique of what "This Is America" means. Using Childish Gambino's video for "This Is America" as a starting point, Rios considers how elements including clothing, hairstyles, body movements, gaze, lighting effects, distortion, and word play symbolize American dissonance. From Laurie Anderson's presence in challenging authority and playing with traditional gender roles in her works, to the Black female feminism and social activism of Beyonce, Rhiannon Giddens, and Janelle Monae, to hip hop as resistance in the age of Trump, to sonic and visual variety in the musical Hamilton, the subjects are as powerful as they are topical. Rios explores the ways in which artists relate to and represent underrepresented groups, especially groups that are not traditionally perceived as having a majority voice. The encoded resistances recur across performances and video recordings so that they begin to become recognizable as repeated acts of resistance directed at injustices based on a number of categories, including race, gender, class, religion, and politics.

This expansive collection sets the stage for the next generation of Hip Hop scholarship as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the movement's origins. Celebrating 50 years of Hip Hop cultural history, Freedom Moves travels across generations and beyond borders to understand Hip Hop's transformative power as one of the most important arts movements of our time. This book gathers critically acclaimed scholars, artists, activists, and youth organizers in a wide-ranging exploration of Hip Hop as a musical movement, a powerful catalyst for activism, and a culture that offers us new ways of thinking and doing freedom. Rooting Hip Hop in Black freedom culture, this state-of-the-art collection presents a globally diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Arab, European, North African, and South Asian artists, activists, and thinkers. The "knowledges" cultivated by Hip Hop and spoken word communities represent emerging ways of being in the world. Freedom Moves examines how educators, artists, and activists use these knowledges to inform and expand how we understand our communities, our histories, and our futures.

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.

This updated reissue of Mark LeVine's acclaimed, revolutionary book on sub- and countercultural music in the Middle East brings this groundbreaking portrait of the region's youth cultures to a new generation. Featuring a new preface by the author in conversation with the band The Kominas about the problematic connections between extreme music and Islam. An eighteen-year-old Moroccan who loves Black Sabbath. A twenty-two-year-old rapper from the Gaza Strip. A young Lebanese singer who quotes Bob Marley's "Redemption Song." Heavy metal, punk, hip-hop, and reggae are each the music of protest, and are considered immoral by many in the Muslim world. As the young people and subcultures featured in Mark LeVine's Heavy Metal Islam so presciently predicted, this music turned out to be the soundtrack of countercultures, uprisings, and even revolutions from Morocco to Pakistan. In Heavy Metal Islam, originally published in 2008, Mark LeVine explores the influence of Western music on the Middle East and North Africa through interviews with musicians and fans, introducing us to young people struggling to reconcile their religion with a passion for music and a thirst for change. The result is a revealing tour de force of contemporary cultures across the Muslim majority world through the region's evolving music scenes that only a musician, scholar, and activist with LeVine's unique breadth of experience could narrate. A New York Times Editor's Pick when it was first published, Heavy Metal Islam is a surprising, wildly entertaining foray into a historically authoritarian region where music reveals itself to be a true democratizing force-and a groundbreaking work of scholarship that pioneered new forms of research in the region.

Hip-Hop en Francais charts the emergence and development of hip-hop culture in France, French Caribbean, Quebec, and Senegal from its origins until today. With essays by renowned hip-hop scholars and a foreword by Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of the Harvard University Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, this edited volume addresses topics such as the history of rap music; hip-hop dance; the art of graffiti; hip-hop artists and their interactions with media arts, social media, literature, race, political and ideological landscapes; and hip-hop based education (HHBE). The contributors approach topics from a variety of different disciplines including African and African-American studies, anthropology, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, dance studies, education, ethnology, French and Francophone studies, history, linguistics, media studies, music and ethnomusicology, and sociology. As one of the most comprehensive books dedicated to hip-hop culture in France and the Francophone World written in the English language, this book is an essential resource for scholars and students of African, Caribbean, French, and French-Canadian popular culture as well as anthropology and ethnomusicology.

Hip-hop as survivor testimony? Rhymes as critical text? Drawing on her own experiences as a lifelong hip-hop head and philosophy professor, Lissa Skitolsky reveals the existential power of hip-hop to affect our sensibility and understanding of race and anti-black racism. Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness? examines how the exclusion of hip-hop from academic discourse around knowledge, racism, white supremacy, genocide, white nationalism, and trauma reflects the very neoliberal sensibility that hip-hop exposes and opposes. At this critical moment in history, in the midst of a long overdue global reckoning with systemic anti-black racism, Skitolsky shows how it is more important than ever for white people to realize that our failure to see this system-and take hip-hop seriously-has been essential to its reproduction. In this book, she illustrates the unique power of underground hip-hop to interrupt our neoliberal and post-racial sensibility of current events.

OutKast, the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo formed in 1992, is one of the most influential musical groups within American popular culture of the past twenty-five years. Through Grammy-winning albums, music videos, feature films, theatrical performances, and fashion, Andre "Andre 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi" Patton have articulated a vision of postmodern, post-civil rights southern identity that combines the roots of funk, psychedelia, haute couture, R&B, faith and spirituality, and Afrofuturism into a style all its own. This postmodern southern aesthetic, largely promulgated and disseminated by OutKast and its collaborators, is now so prevalent in mainstream American culture (neither Beyonce Knowles's "Formation" nor Joss Whedon's sci-fi /western mashup Firefly could exist without OutKast's collage aesthetic) that we rarely consider how challenging and experimental it actually is to create a new southern aesthetic. An OutKast Reader, then, takes the group's aesthetic as a lens through which readers can understand and explore contemporary issues of Blackness, gender, urbanism, southern aesthetics, and southern studies more generally. Divided into sections on regional influences, gender, and visuality, the essays collectively offer a vision of OutKast as a key shaper of conceptions of the twenty-first-century South, expanding that vision beyond long-held archetypes and cultural signifiers. The volume includes a who's who of hip-hop studies and African American studies scholarship, including Charlie Braxton, Susana M. Morris, Howard Ramsby II, Reynaldo Anderson, and Ruth Nicole Brown.

K-pop (Korean popular music) reigns as one of the most popular music genres in the world today, a phenomenon that appeals to listeners of all ages and nationalities. In Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-pop, Crystal S. Anderson examines the most important and often overlooked aspect of K-pop: the music itself. She demonstrates how contemporary K-pop references and incorporates musical and performative elements of African American popular music culture as well as the ways that fans outside of Korea understand these references. K-pop emerged in the 1990s with immediate global aspirations, combining musical elements from Korean and foreign cultures, particularly rhythm and blues genres of black American popular music. Korean solo artists and groups borrow from and cite instrumentation and vocals of R&B genres, especially hip hop. They also enhance the R&B tradition by utilizing Korean musical strategies. These musical citational practices are deemed authentic by global fans who function as part of K-pop's music press and promotional apparatus. K-pop artists also cite elements of African American performance in Korean music videos. These disrupt stereotyped representations of Asian and African American performers. Through this process K-pop has arguably become a branch of a global R&B tradition. Anderson argues that Korean pop groups participate in that tradition through cultural work that enacts a global form of crossover and by maintaining forms of authenticity that cannot be faked, and furthermore propel the R&B tradition beyond the black-white binary.

"Remixing multilingualism" is conceptualised in this book as engaging in the linguistic act of using, combining and manipulating multilingual forms. It is about creating new ways of 'doing' multilingualism through cultural acts and identities and involving a process that invokes bricolage. This book is an ethnographic study of multilingual remixing achieved by highly multilingual participants in the local hip hop culture of Cape Town. In globalised societies today previously marginalized speakers are carving out new and innovating spaces to put on display their voices and identities through the creative use of multilingualism. This book contributes to the development of new conceptual insights and theoretical developments on multilingualism in the global South by applying the notions of stylization, performance, performativity, entextualisation and enregisterment. This takes place through interviews, performance analysis and interactional analysis, showing how young multilingual speakers stage different personae, styles, registers and language varieties.

This book examines social change in Africa through the lens of hip hop music and culture. Artists engage their African communities in a variety of ways that confront established social structures, using coded language and symbols to inform, question, and challenge. Through lyrical expression, dance, and graffiti, hip hop is used to challenge social inequality and to push for social change. The study looks across Africa and explores how hip hop is being used in different places, spaces, and moments to foster change. In this edited work, authors from a wide range of fields, including history, sociology, African and African American studies, and political science explore the transformative impact that hip hop has had on African youth, who have in turn emerged to push for social change on the continent. The powerful moment in which those that want change decide to consciously and collectively take a stand is rooted in an awareness that has much to do with time. Therefore, the book centers on African hip hop around the context of "it's time" for change, Ni Wakati.

Hip-Hop Within and Without the Academy explores why hip-hop has become such a meaningful musical genre for so many musicians, artists, and fans around the world. Through multiple interviews with hip-hop emcees, DJs, and turntablists, the authors explore how these artists learn and what this music means for them in their lives. This research reveals how hip-hop is used by many marginalized peoples around the world to help express their ideas and opinions, and even to teach the younger generation about their culture and tradition. In addition, this book dives into how hip-hop is currently being studied in higher education and academia. In the process, the authors reveal the difficulties inherent in bringing this kind of music into institutional contexts and acknowledge the conflicts that are present between hip-hop artists and academics who study the culture. Building on the notion of bringing hip-hop into educational settings, the book discusses how hip-hop is currently being used in public school settings, and how educators can include and embrace hip-hop's educational potential more fully while maintaining hip-hop's authenticity and appealing to young people at the same time. In sum, this book reveals how hip-hop's universal appeal can be harnessed to help make general and music education more meaningful for contemporary youth.

Urban God Talk: Constructing a Hip Hop Spirituality, edited by Andre Johnson, is a collection of essays that examine the religious and spiritual in hip hop. The contributors argue that the prevailing narrative that hip hop offers nothing in the way of religion and spirituality is false. From its beginning, hip hop has had a profound spirituality and advocates religious views-and while not orthodox or systemic, nevertheless, many in traditional orthodox religions would find the theological and spiritual underpinnings in hip hop comforting, empowering, and liberating. In addition, this volume demonstrates how scholars in different disciplines approach the study of hip hop, religion, and spirituality. Whether it is a close reading of a hip hop text, ethnography, a critical studies approach or even a mixed method approach, this study is a pedagogical tool for students and scholars in various disciplines to use and appropriate for their own research and understanding. Urban God Talk will inspire not only scholars to further their research, but will also encourage publishers to print more in this field. The contributors to this in-depth study show how this subject is an underrepresented area within hip hop studies, and that the field is broad enough for numerous monographs, edited works, and journal publications in the future.

This biography, the most in-depth look at Kanye's life and career to date, lifts the mask to expose the man behind the endless myths. Featuring quotes from all of the major players in Kanye's life, Kanye West: God And Monster traces his life from the suburbs of Chicago through art school and rap apprenticeships to recording in the coolest studios of New York and Hawaii with the biggest names in music, revolutionising hip-hop at every step of the way. It documents every rumour and revelation, details the wildest extravagances and biggest ego blow-ups of this true rap original. Exploring his life, music and controversies like never before, Kanye West: God And Monster is the ultimate profile of this legendary pop culture titan.

Early hip hop film musicals have either been expunged from cinema history or excoriated in brief passages by critics and other writers. Hip Hop on Film reclaims and reexamines productions such as Breakin' (1984), Beat Street (1984), and Krush Groove (1985) in order to illuminate Hollywood's fascinating efforts to incorporate this nascent urban culture into conventional narrative forms. Such films presented musical conventions against the backdrop of graffiti-splattered trains and abandoned tenements in urban communities of color, setting the stage for radical social and political transformations. Hip hop musicals are also part of the broader history of teen cinema, and films such as Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style (1983) are here examined alongside other contemporary youth-oriented productions. As suburban teen films banished parents and children to the margins of narrative action, hip hop musicals, by contrast, presented inclusive and unconventional filial groupings that included all members of the neighborhood. These alternative social configurations directly referenced specific urban social problems, which affected the stability of inner city families following diminished governmental assistance in communities of color during the 1980s. Breakdancing, a central element of hip hop musicals, is also reconsidered. It gained widespread acclaim at the same time that these films entered the theaters, but the nation's newly discovered dance form was embattled--caught between a multitude of institutional entities such as the ballet academy, advertising culture, and dance publications that vied to control its meaning, particularly in relation to delineations of gender. As street-trained breakers were enticed to join the world of professional ballet, this newly forged relationship was recast by dance promoters as a way to invigorate and ""remasculinize"" European dance, while young women simultaneously critiqued conventional masculinities through an appropriation of breakdance. These multiple and volatile histories influenced the first wave of hip hop films, and even structured the sleeper hit Flashdance (1983). This forgotten, ignored, and maligned cinema is not only an important aspect of hip hop history, but is also central to the histories of teen film, the postclassical musical, and even institutional dance. Kimberley Monteyne places these films within the wider context of their cultural antecedents and reconsiders the genre's influence.

The Hip Hop Movement contains five remixes (as opposed to chapters) that offer a critical theory and alternative history of rap music and hip hop culture by examining their roots in the popular musics and popular cultures of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Connecting classic rhythm & blues and rock & roll to the Civil Rights Movement, and classic soul and funk to the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Movement critically explores what each of these musics and movements' contributed to rap, neo-soul, hip hop culture, and the broader Hip Hop Movement. Ultimately, The Hip Hop Movement's remixes reveal that black popular music and black popular culture have always been more than merely popular music and popular culture in the conventional sense and most often reflect a broader social, political, and cultural movement. With this in mind, The Hip Hop Movement critically reinterprets rap and neo-soul as popular expressions of the politics, social visions, and cultural values of a contemporary multi-issue movement: the Hip Hop Movement.It is hip hop's supporters and detractors belief in its ability to inspire both self transformation and social transformation that speaks volumes about the ways in which what has been generally called the Hip Hop Generation or the Hip Hop Nation has evolved into a distinct movement that embodies the musical, spiritual, intellectual, cultural, social, and political, among other, views and values of the post-Civil Rights Movement and post-Black Power Movement generation. Throughout The Hip Hop Movement sociologist and musicologist Reiland Rabaka argues that rap music, hip hop culture, and the Hip Hop Movement are as deserving of critical scholarly inquiry as previous black popular musics, such as the spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, and funk, and previous black popular movements, such as the Black Women's Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement, and Black Women's Liberation Movement.In equal parts an alternative history of hip hop and a critical theory of hip hop, this volume challenges those scholars, critics, and fans of hip hop who lopsidedly over-focus on commercial rap, pop rap, and gangsta rap while failing to acknowledge, as the remixes here reveal, that there are more than three dozen genres of rap music and many other socially and politically progressive forms of hip hop culture beyond DJing, MCing, rapping, beat-making, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing.

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, Cote 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."