Category: Hip hop

  • Rap ≠ Hip Hop

    Trigger/content warning: racist language in sources, including the n-word. Wynton Marsalis has said of hardcore rap: I call it “ghetto minstrelsy” . . . Old school minstrels [i.e. whites in blackface] used to say they were “real darkies from the real plantation.” Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say that…

  • Hauntological Remixing

    DJ Shadow’s 1996 Endtroducing was the first album produced entirely from samples, and, as such, is considered not only a landmark of instrumental hip-hop, but also one of the greatest albums of all time. What do you think makes it great? How does an album made up entirely of samples advance musical creativity and innovation?…

  • “Doing 55” Playlist

    Hoodie (David Hammons, 1993). Trigger/Content Warning: Disturbing subject matter, police brutality, racism, profanity, racist language including the n-word. Read Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s article “‘Doing Fifty-Five in a Fifty-Four’: Hip Hop, Cop Voice and the Cadence of White Supremacy in the United States”: Stoever notes: As African American theorists, writers, artists and musicians – from Frederick Douglass in…

  • Wild Style

    A bankrupt New York was the incubator for rap in the early 1970s. The ethnic demographics of the formerly predominantly Jewish and Irish South Bronx had changed, in part due to the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the 1960s, which displaced thousands of people from their homes and destroyed many Bronx neighborhoods. Steeply declining…

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