The Hip Hop Movement

The Hip Hop Movement offers a critical theory and alternative history of rap music and hip hop culture by examining their roots in the popular musics and popular cultures of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Connecting classic rhythm & blues and rock & roll to the Civil Rights Movement, and classic soul and funk to the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Movement explores what each of these musics and movements contributed to rap, neo-soul, hip hop culture, and the broader Hip Hop Movement. Ultimately, this book’s remixes (as opposed to chapters) reveal that black popular music and black popular culture have always been more than merely “popular music” and “popular culture” in the conventional sense and reflect a broader social, political, and cultural movement. With this in mind, sociologist and musicologist Reiland Rabaka critically reinterprets rap and neo-soul as popular expressions of the politics, social visions, and cultural values of a contemporary multi-issue movement: the Hip Hop Movement. Rabaka argues that rap music, hip hop culture, and the Hip Hop Movement are as deserving of critical scholarly inquiry as previous black popular musics, such as the spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, and funk, and previous black popular movements, such as the Black Women’s Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement, and Black Women’s Liberation Movement. This volume, equal parts alternative history of hip hop and critical theory of hip hop, challenges those scholars, critics, and fans of hip hop who lopsidedly over-focus on commercial rap, pop rap, and gangsta rap while failing to acknowledge that there are more than three dozen genres of rap music and many other socially and politically progressive forms of hip hop culture beyond DJing, MCing, rapping, beat-making, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing.

This work is a revealing chronicle of Hip Hop culture from its beginnings three decades ago to the present, with an analysis of its influence on people and popular culture in the United States and around the world. From Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message," to Jay-Z, Diddy, and 50 Cent, Hip Hop Culture is the first comprehensive reference work to focus on one of the most influential cultural phenomena of our time. Scholarly and streetwise, backed by statistics, documents, and research, it recounts three decades of Hip Hop's evolution, highlighting its defining events, recordings, personalities, movements, and ideas, as well as society's response. How did an inner-city subculture, all but dismissed in the early 1980s, become the ruler of the world's airwaves and iPods? Who are the players who moved Hip Hop from the record bins to the pinnacles of entertainment, business, and fashion? Who are the founders, innovators, legends, and major players? Authoritative and authentic, Hip Hop Culture provides a wealth of information and insights for students, educators, and anyone interested in the ways pop culture reflects and shapes our lives.

Examines the relationship between social justice, Hip-Hop culture, and resistance

As hip-hop artists constantly struggle to "keep it real," this fascinating study examines the debates over the core codes of hip-hop authenticity--as it reflects and reacts to problematic black images in popular culture--placing hip-hop in its proper cultural, political, and social contexts.

Since its development in the United States in the 1970s, hip-hop has grown to become a global dance phenomenon. In Beginning Hip-Hop Dance With HKPropel Access, students gain a strong foundation and learn the fundamentals of hip-hop techniques as they venture into the exciting world of this dance genre. Written by dance educator, historian, and scholar E. Moncell Durden, Beginning Hip-Hop Dance gives students the opportunity to explore hip-hop history and techniques, foundational information, and significant works and artists; understand the styles and aesthetics of hip-hop dance as a performing art and cultural art form; and learn about the forms of hip-hop dance, such as locking, waacking, popping and boogaloo, and house. The text has related online tools delivered via HKPropel, including 55 video clips that aid students in the practice of the techniques, as well as extended learning activities and prompts for e-journaling to help students understand how the dance form relates to their overall development as a dancer; glossary terms with and without definitions so students can check their knowledge; and chapter review quizzes to help students assess their knowledge and understanding of hip-hop dance and its history, artists, styles, and aesthetics. As students move through the book, they will learn the BEATS method of exploring hip-hop through body, emotion, action, time, and space. This method opens up the creative and expressive qualities of the movements and helps students to appreciate hip-hop as an art form. Students will also learn how to critique a dance performance and create their own personal style of movement to music. Beginning Hip-Hop Dance is a comprehensive resource that provides beginning dance students—dance majors, minors, or general education students with an interest in dance—a solid foundation in this contemporary cultural dance genre. It intertwines visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modes of learning and offers students the techniques and knowledge to build onto the movements that are presented in the book and video clips. Beginning Hip-Hop Dance is the ideal introduction to this exciting dance genre. Beginning Hip-Hop Dance is a part of Human Kinetics’ Interactive Dance Series. The series includes resources for ballet, modern, tap, jazz, musical theater, and hip-hop dance that support introductory dance technique courses taught through dance, physical education, and fine arts departments. Each student-friendly text has related online learning tools including video clips of dance instruction, assignments, and activities. The Interactive Dance Series offers students a collection of guides to learning, performing, and viewing dance. Note: A code for accessing HKPropel is not included with this ebook but may be purchased separately.

Avoiding the easy definitions and caricatures that tend to celebrate or condemn the "hip hop generation," Hip Hop Matters focuses on fierce and far-reaching battles being waged in politics, pop culture, and academe to assert control over the movement. At stake, Watkins argues, is the impact hip hop has on the lives of the young people who live and breathe the culture. He presents incisive analysis of the corporate takeover of hip hop and the rampant misogyny that undermines the movement's progressive claims. Ultimately, we see how hip hop struggles reverberate in the larger world: global media consolidation; racial and demographic flux; generational cleavages; the reinvention of the pop music industry; and the ongoing struggle to enrich the lives of ordinary youth.

Can't Stop Won't Stop is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created. Forged in the fires of the Bronx and Kingston, Jamaica, hip-hop became the Esperanto of youth rebellion and a generation-defining movement. In a post-civil rights era defined by deindustrialization and globalization, hip-hop crystallized a multiracial, polycultural generation's worldview, and transformed American politics and culture. But that epic story has never been told with this kind of breadth, insight, and style. Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, graffiti writers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip-hop's forebears, founders, and mavericks, including DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D, and Ice Cube, Can't Stop Won't Stop chronicles the events, the ideas, the music, and the art that marked the hip-hop generation's rise from the ashes of the 60's into the new millennium.

From Run DMC to Eminem, this encyclopedia uncoves the histories of important artists both inside and outside the hip-hop mainstream, all while examining the varied and ever-changing forms of the music.