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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Rap & hip-hop
The Advanced Rhyming Dictionary represents the culmination of more
than seven years of work. It is the first of its kind and is a
compendium of two and three syllable multisyllabic rhyme schemes
aimed at rappers, poets, educators and academics. Adam 'Shuffle T'
Woollard has been a battle rapper for seven years, and is a UK
Battle rap doubles champion, with his friend and long-time
collaborator, Theo 'Marlo' Marlow. He has performed in the US,
Canada, Australia and all over Europe. Jamie 'Bleez' Blackmore has
been performing and creating rap for well over a decade and is a
hidden gem of the UK hip-hop world, considered to be one of the
best rhymers there is. He and Adam met in 2014 in Brighton and they
have been working on this project ever since.
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.
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.
Featuring an introductory interview with LL Cool J and epilogue
from Paul Rosenberg, Eminem's manager In 1999, a former dishwasher
from Detroit became the most influential music artist in the world.
Eminem's dexterity, wit and honesty turned him into one of the
biggest-selling artists of all time and changed the landscape of
music and pop culture as we know it. Then, in 2006, at the height
of his fame, he all but disappeared. Beset by non-stop
controversies, bewildering fame, a debilitating drug problem and
personal tragedies, he withdrew from the world. Over the next
decade, he struggled and suffered through what he would call his
"wilderness years" but eventually managed to get sober, get clean
and get, triumphantly, back to the top. Not Afraid is the
definitive account of that story. In this revelatory book, which
follows on directly from the bestselling Whatever You Say I Am,
rock journalist Anthony Bozza chronicles the personal and spiritual
growth of one of music's most enduring and enigmatic artists
through the insights of those closest to him, including Royce da
5'9", LL Cool J, Mr Porter, Paul Rosenberg and other friends and
associates. Capturing Eminem's toughest years in his own words, Not
Afraid is a uniquely intimate portrait of an incredibly private man
known by many to be the greatest rapper alive.
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