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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Rap & hip-hop
As much as Martha Stewart or Oprah - and perhaps more than any
musician - Jay Z has turned himself into a lifestyle. You can wake
up to the local radio station playing his newest hit, spritz
yourself with his latest cologne, slip on a pair of his Rocawear
jeans, lace up your Reebok S. Carter sneakers, watch baseball star
Robinson Cano smack a couple of hits in an afternoon game, and grab
dinner at The Spotted Pig. On the way to Jay Z's 40/40 Club for a
D'Usse cognac nightcap, sign up for streaming service Tidal and
hear his latest collaboration with Beyonce. He'll profit at every
turn of your day. Empire State of Mind reveals the story behind Jay
Z's rise as told by the people who lived it with him, from
classmates at Brooklyn's George Westinghouse High School and the
childhood friend who got him into the drug trade, to the DJ who
persuaded him to stop dealing and focus on the music. Now with new
interviews with industry insiders like Russell Simmons, Alicia
Keys, and J. Cole - more than one hundred in total - this book
explains just how Jay Z propelled himself from the bleak streets of
Brooklyn to the heights of the business world. 'I'm not a
businessman - I'm a business, man.' Jay Z 'Fascinating, well-done
biography of one of the most extraordinary entrepreneurs of our
era.' Steve Forbes 'Greenburg has become one of the rare reporters
to bring dignified coverage of the hip-hop business into the
mainstream. Empire State of Mind is a pure product of Greenburg's
care and insight, an exploration of hip-hop's most enigmatic
mogul.' Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback- The History of the
Business of Hip-Hop 'Greenburg follows the money and key pieces of
the Jay Z puzzle in this insightful, savvy read. This book is like
a GPS leading us through the modern urban realityof how Jay Z's
empire was built.' Fab 5 Freddy, artist, hip-hop pioneer, and
former host of Yo! MTV Raps 'A superb guide for your career, even
if you are looking to be an investment banker or grocery store
manager instead of a hip-hop legend.' CNN.com
Project Blowed is a legendary hiphop workshop based in Los Angeles.
It began in 1994 when a group of youths moved their already
renowned open-mic nights from the Good Life, a Crenshaw district
health food store, to the KAOS Network, an arts center in Leimert
Park. The local freestyle of articulate, rapid-fire, extemporaneous
delivery, the juxtaposition of meaningful words and sounds, and the
way that MCs followed one another without missing a beat, quickly
became known throughout the LA underground. Leimert Park has long
been a center of African American culture and arts in Los Angeles,
and Project Blowed inspired youth throughout the city to consider
the neighborhood the epicenter of their own cultural movement. "The
Real Hiphop" is an in-depth account of the language and culture of
Project Blowed, based on the seven years Marcyliena Morgan spent
observing the workshop and the KAOS Network. Morgan is a leading
scholar of hiphop, and throughout the volume her ethnographic
analysis of the LA underground opens up into a broader examination
of the artistic and cultural value of hiphop.
Morgan intersperses her observations with excerpts from
interviews and transcripts of freestyle lyrics. Providing a
thorough linguistic interpretation of the music, she teases out the
cultural antecedents and ideologies embedded in the language,
emphases, and wordplay. She discusses the artistic skills and
cultural knowledge MCs must acquire to rock the mic, the
socialization of hiphop culture's core and long-term members, and
the persistent focus on skills, competition, and evaluation. She
brings attention to adults who provided material and moral support
to sustain underground hiphop, identifies the ways that women
choose to participate in Project Blowed, and vividly renders the
dynamics of the workshop's famous lyrical battles.
It has long been commonplace to speak of hip-hop as a form of music
deeply reliant on borrowing, especially when it comes to sampling.
And yet, until now, almost no one has seriously investigated these
critical elements, except to judge them on ethical and legal
grounds. In Rhymin' and Stealin', Justin Williams presents the
first book-length study to approach hip-hop intertextuality from a
musicological perspective. Using examples from Nas, Jay-Z, A Tribe
Called Quest, Eminem, and many others, Williams shows that the
transformation of preexisting material is the fundamental element
of hip-hop aesthetics, detailing how it works and situating it
within the context of other music forms. Whether by taking a
familiar dance move, quoting a famous speech, or sampling a rapper
or 1970s funk song, by appropriating and reappropriating these
elements, hip-hop artists transform something old into something
new, something different, something quintessentially hip-hop.
Although all music genres use and adapt preexisting material in
different ways, hip-hop music celebrates and flaunts its "open
source" culture through highly varied means. Indeed, within hip-hop
culture there exists a constantly evolving web of reference both to
the genre's own past and to other musical and cultural forms. This
web of references, borrowed material, and digitally sampled sounds
forms the basis of this book.
This collection of three hip hop plays by Conrad Murray and his
Beats & Elements collaborators Paul Cree, David Bonnick Junior
and Lakeisha Lynch-Stevens, is the first publication of the
critically acclaimed theatre-maker's work. The three plays use hip
hop to highlight the inequalities produced by the UK's class
system, and weave lyricism, musicality and dialogue to offer
authentic accounts of inner-city life written by working-class
Londoners. The plays are accompanied by two introductory essays:
The first gives a specific social and historical context that helps
readers make sense of the plays, the second positions hip hop as a
contemporary literary form and offers some ways to read hip hop
texts as literature. The collection also includes a foreword by
leading hip hop theatre practitioner Jonzi D, interviews with the
Beats & Elements company, and a glossary of words for students
and international readers.
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