Homies In the'Hood: Rap's Commodification of Insubordination

2000

2010

Race and Society, 2000

The major objective of this paper is to qualitatively demonstrate that rap music is not simply (what some may perceive to be) a disgusting display of violent and misogynistic music. While the authors are aware of the fact that there is a large section of rap music that is lewd and obscene, they argue, instead, that rap music is, at its basic level, an extension and analyses of the greater frustrations of the lived experiences of African Americans, specifically men, in today's society. They suggest that this expression of the frustrations of a certain segment of the United States population is a beneficial qualitative data source that, if triangulated with other methodologies, could have major social policy ramifications.

Journal of Negro Education, 2002

Considers rap music as a creative expression and metaphorical offspring of America's well-established culture of violence, highlighting rap music in the context of a violent culture; violence in music; rap, cultural capital, and social reproduction; rap in the scholarly literature; political and judicial scrutiny of rap; and capitalism and rap. Recommends refusing to accept the culture of violence and seeking alternative songs of transformation, empowerment, and self-determination.

The Sociolinguistics of Hip-hop as Social Conscience, 2018

This chapter presents a diachronic, corpus-based study of mainstream American rap. By analyzing lyrical themes and conducting a genre analysis of lyrics from the past and present, the author demonstrates that expressions of dissatisfaction and dissent have all but disappeared from contemporary American rap. Didactic messages from “authentic”, streetwise artists of the past have been replaced with more introspective lyrical content from current artists. The data indicates that while the focus of lyrical themes and genres has shifted over the years, the demographics of the artists who create them has not. The most influential rap artists have remained almost exclusively Black and male from the birth of rap music until today.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of Hip Hop in translating the distress and anger experienced daily by African Americans in the United States during the last decade and how this culture has also been used as a vessel for gifted black youth to reach to the masses. As such, this paper is an attempt to shed light on the influence of rap as a musical genre to divulge, on one hand on societal white privilege that eventually leads to institutional racism and police brutality against people of color; while on the other hand, on interracial racism that ultimately induces violence and "black-on-black crime". Therefore, covering both institutional and communal aspects will be carried out through critical examination of the lyrics and interviews of two progressive Hip Hop artists-Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar; two major representatives of African Americans with two different approaches to reach different audiences as well as by diving into the ways both artists have been using their platform to positively impact black lives in America. Lyrics and styles of both artists will be framed through major concepts of Critical Race Theory emphasizing color disparities and oppression in American society.

I have been eager to expand into the political with my writing and the recent divide among hip-hop's conscious leaders has been an important discussion to engage in. Most liberal folk can agree that the media is biased, corrupt, etc. but these racist narratives are showing up in hip-hop more and more. As Tricia Rose articulated, "why are we turning youth (through attacks on rap and I add, attacks on the black community) into the agents of their own demise, seeing black kids as the source of violence in america while denying the extraordinary violence done to them?" The media loves to emphasize black on black crime in order to minimize police brutality, institutional racism, envrionmental violence and simultaneously perpetuate the idea that white people don't kill white people. But who put the guns in the communities anyways?

In this chapter we describe a pedagogy for building hip hop communities that can fulfill hip hop's liberatory potential. This pedagogy is based on the work of Project HIP-HOP (Highways Into the Past, History, Organizing, and Power), a Boston-based youth organization that trains young black and Latino/a hip hop artists as cultural organizers who can use their art to catalyze social change in their communities. Using the metaphor of the hip hop cypher, we show how Project HIP-HOP works to link young people to deep reservoirs of cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) by connecting them to their peers, their past, and their purpose. To envision the kind of hip hop communities we need in order to realize hip hop’s liberatory potential, we offer the metaphor of the cypher. The hip hop cypher, in which individual artists take turns performing and supporting one another in friendly competition, embodies hip hop’s roots as a form of individual and communal expression. Hip hop today, at least in its most widely disseminated forms, is out of balance. Building—and in some ways, rebuilding—the cypher means balancing hip hop’s tendencies toward individuality, competition, and boastfulness with the increasingly marginalized values of community, collaboration, and representing. It means supporting individual artists, while rebuilding the circle around him or her.

2015