Music-Genres & Styles-Rap & Hip Hop

The origin story of hip-hop--one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx--has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material...

25 classic albums from the '80s and '90s are lovingly and extensively profiled by acclaimed rap journalist Brian Coleman in this impressive volume, making it mandatory reading for all Hip-Hop junkies.Author: Brian Coleman, Adam MansbachISBN-10: 0990307603ISBN-13: 9780990307600Publisher: Good RoadLanguage: EnglishPublished: 11/01/2014Pages: 525Format: PaperbackWeight: 3.60lbsSize:...

Personal Branding is the "art of standing out". Developing your personal brand is the process of discovering who you are, who you want to be, and who people perceive you to be. Learn 33 Branding Secrets from the life stories of Diddy, Jay Z,...

More than twenty years after the killings of global rap icons Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., Keffe D's gritty memoir is an authentic, street-level narrative from a major street player who was inextricably involved. Duane 'Keffe D' Davis' memoir underscores the universal corruption of...

Essays that explore the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture. "This book, edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world,...

A comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of rap music.Winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1995)From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a...

Leroy Moore is a black disabled artist/activist who is committed to assisting other disabled persons, whether black or not, to get a better shake in our contemporary society.He is committed to Hip Hop as a means of advancing this; lyrics and poetry are his...

"Each of these chambers contains wonders of history, destiny, and mythology. Chamber Music is hip hop as race and class politics, as music and as poetry on the move. Through Ashon's vibrant textured prose we watch in awe as these young men seize on...

Jay-Z and Kanye West's 2011 Watch the Throne is a self-avowed "luxury rap" album centered on Eurocentric conceptions of nobility, artistry, and haute couture. Critical Excess performs a close reading of the sonic and social commentary on this album, examining how the album alternately...

"Can I kick it?""Yes you can "--A Tribe Called Quest Situated squarely in the oral traditions of hip-hop and BreakBeat Poetry, Idris Goodwin's work bridges the divide between the reader and the poet. Combining the tongue-in-cheek and the irreverent with the melancholy and incisive,...

This vibrant book pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post-civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Regina N. Bradley, Outkast's work is the touchstone, a blend of funk,...

Who are you, what is real? This is the question Bobby Digital is seeking to answer. Embracing his id, ego and superego he embarks on a quest to figure out the nature of his reality and himself. He will be ambushed by enemies unknown,...

Best Damn Hip Hop Writing: The Book of Yoh encapsulates one of the defining voices in hip hop music criticism today. Each essay in this collection is written by Yoh (Travis Phillips), a writer whose work has been featured in various leading hip hop...

With over 40 unique reviews covering 60 landmark hip-hop albums, Classic Material proves that there is no lack of intelligent commentary and criticism on rap music. Written by an impressive team of North America's most talented journalists, the book tackles over 20 years of...

Should graffiti writers organize to tear up the cities, or should they really be bombing the 'burbs? That's the question posed by William Upski Wimsatt in his seminal foray into the world of hip-hop, rap, and street art, and the culture and politics that...

Provocative and prolific, Boots Riley has written lyrics as the frontman of underground favorites The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club, as well as solo artist, for more than two decades. An activist, educator, and emcee, Riley's singular lyrical stylings combine hip-hop poetics, radical...

At its rhythmic, beating heart, Close to the Edge asks whether hip hop can change the world. Hip hop--rapping, beat-making, b-boying, deejaying, graffiti--captured the imagination of the teenage Sujatha Fernandes in the 1980s, inspiring her and politicizing her along the way. Years later, armed...

Geechi Suede and Sonny Cheeba are Camp Lo. These two emcees from the Bronx, NY entered the American hip hop scene with an insider slang that bewildered listeners as they radiated the look of a bygone era of black culture. In 1996, they collaborated...

Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture, juxtaposing the voices of many of rock and hip hop's most provocative artists--Morrissey, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses,...

At the age of nineteen, Nasir "Nas" Jones began recording tracks for his debut album -- and changed the music world forever. Released in 1994, Illmatic was hailed as an instant masterpiece and has proven one of the most influential albums in hip-hop history....

Since 2001, the U.S. Department of State has been sending hip hop artists abroad to perform and teach as goodwill ambassadors. There are good reasons for this: hip hop is known and loved across the globe, acknowledged and appreciated as a product of American...

COMMUNITY LITERACY JOURNAL 16.1 (Fall 2021) The journal understands "community literacy" as the domain for literacy work that exists outside of mainstream educational and work institutions. It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, lifelong learning, workplace...

CDs, Records, & Tapes is a nostalgic Hip Hop essay collection. Told from the perspective of a creative writer who came of age with the culture, it revisits posse tracks, release dates, and classic albums. Each entry captures love for the culture, appreciation of...

Award-winning poet and playwright Idris Goodwin interrogates and remixes our cultural past in order to make sense of our present and potential futures.Author: Idris GoodwinISBN-10: 1642591769ISBN-13: 9781642591767Publisher: Haymarket BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/20/2019Pages: 100Format: HardcoverWeight: 0.64lbsSize: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.31d

In Buena Vista in the Club, Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaet. While Cuban officials initially rejected rap as "the music of the enemy," leading...

Black, Blanc, Beur is about the emergence and growing notoriety of rap music and hip-hop culture in the French-speaking world (France, Quebec, and Western Africa). It provides an introduction to many forms of expression of hip-hop cultures (rap music, hip-hop dance, and graffiti/tagging). In...

Building Fans, Fame and Wealth: The 18 Revenue Streams of Music is a groundbreaking missive containing music industry secrets to help you attain the success that you're seeking in the music business. Performing live concerts and selling merchandise are not the only ways to...

Behind the Hits is an intimate look into the creative mind and behind the music of Grammy Award winning producer Christopher James Gholson professionally known as Drumma Boy. This journey takes you through Drumma Boy's biggest songs throughout his career and the process behind...

Arguably one of the most mainstream music styles today, rap was in fact born centuries ago in West Africa with historians or 'griots' who used to tell stories of the past over the beat of a drum. But it wasn't until the 1970s in...

In "This is America," Katie Rios considers current American artists who build encoded gestures of resistance into their works. These gestures recur across images, live performances, and videos, becoming recognizable acts of resistance leveled at injustices based on a number of categories, including race,...

Author of bestselling "Behind the Beat," Raph Rashid drops a collection of photographs inside the home studios of prolific hip hop producers. Independent producers and DJs have been busy creating world class music in bedrooms, kitchens and garages for years. Meanwhile, photographer Rashid has...

With Beats by Design I wish to pay homage to the figure of the producer, artist, and visionary genius who often opts to stay behind the big spotlights while creating new musical trends and influencing entire generations.There are 60 illustrations of producers in this...

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...

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of "simply" possessing five grams of crack--the equivalent of...

Our generation made hip-hop. But hip-hop also made us. Why are suburban kids referring to their subdivision as "block"? Why has the pimp become a figure of male power? Why has dodging the feds become an act of honor long after one has made...

In a definitive and "excellent homage to a star who left this planet too soon" (Questlove), the life, career, tragic death, and evolution of Aaliyah into a music legend are explored--featuring in-depth research and exclusive interviews. By twenty-two years old, Aaliyah had already accomplished...

From funny and fearless entertainment journalist Sesali Bowen, Bad Fat Black Girl combines rule-breaking feminist theory, witty and insightful personal memoir, and cutting cultural analysis for an unforgettable, genre-defining debut.Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A panoramic experience that tells the story of Beastie Boys, a book as unique as the band itself--by band members ADROCK and Mike D, with contributions from Amy Poehler, Colson Whitehead, Wes Anderson, Luc Sante, and more. The...

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, André "André 3000" Benjamin and Antwan "Big Boi"...

The highly anticipated anthology from music industry executive Aiyisha T. Obafemi chronicles and commemorates the societal, and cultural contributions of legendary icon, Tupac Amaru Shakur.Tupac Amaru Shakur, is unquestionably hailed as one of the most influential rappers of all time. Known to many by...

The first book of photography to be published by the Academy Award-winning film director and photographer Spike Jonze. Will appeal to every fan of Beastie Boys and golden-era hip hop, as well as photography and Spike Jonze's own focused audiences. Spike Jonze and Beastie...

The revealing photographs found within the pages of Behind the Beat reveal the creative work spaces of top DJs and music producers. This book is an open invitation to step into the private world of the hip hop home studio and discover its inner...

A legend after a bullet killed him at the age of twenty-five, Tupac Shakur was the most riveting rap musician of his day. Far from being the insolent "gangsta" the press put forth, Shakur was fiercely intelligent, fearless, and determined to make a mark....

The gospel according to hip hop. Yeah, that's a thing.Christian ideas often show up in hip hop music. Biblical themes and even Jesus Himself appear in the lyrics. But beneath all the God-talk, can a true gospel message be found?Pastor D. A. Horton (aka...

The highly anticipated anthology from music industry executive Aiyisha T. Obafemi chronicles and commemorates the societal, and cultural contributions of legendary icon, Tupac Amaru Shakur.Tupac Amaru Shakur, is unquestionably hailed as one of the most influential rappers of all time. Known to many by...

The first decades of the 21st century saw dramatic changes in the music industry as technology transformed creation, communication, and consumption. Amid this turmoil one change occurred relatively quietly, almost naturally: so-called bedroom producers, music makers raised on hip-hop and electronic music, went from...

Best Damn Hip Hop Writing: The Book of Dart encapsulates one of the defining voices in hip hop music criticism today. Each essay in this collection is written by Dart Adams, a writer whose work has been featured in various leading hip hop publications,...

Theorizing the experiences of Black and Brown bodies in Hip Hop danceBaring Unbearable Sensualities brings together a bold methodology, an interdisciplinary perspective and a rich array of primary sources to deepen and complicate mainstream understandings of Hip Hop dance, an Afro-diasporic dance form, which...

One of the finest hip-hop albums ever made, A Tribe Called Quest's debut record (featuring stone-cold classics like "Can I Kick It?" and "Bonita Applebum") took the idea of the boasting hip-hop male and turned it on its head. For many listeners, when this...

In a definitive and "excellent homage to a star who left this planet too soon" (Questlove), the life, career, tragic death, and evolution of Aaliyah into a music legend are explored--now updated with new material featuring in-depth research and exclusive interviews. By twenty-two years...