Hip Hop Genius

Hip Hop Genius
Author: Sam Seidel
Publisher: R&L Education
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2011-05-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1610480260

An account of the High School for Recording Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota that demonstrates how hip-hop-based education can be a powerful medium for cultivating creativity and engaging students.

My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem

My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem
Author: Debbie Nelson
Publisher: Phoenix Books
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1614670439

To this day Debbie Nelson is asked why she abandoned her son Marshall as a boy, beat him repeatedly, and then had the audacity to dog him with lawsuits when he became rich and famous. My Son Martial, My Son Eminem is her rebuttal to these widely believed lies-a poignant story of a single mother who wanted the world for her son, only to see herself defamed and shut out when he got it. Debbie Nelson encouraged her talented son to chase success-even when Eminem hijacked her good name in his lyrics and press for "street cred," a movie that ultimately alienated them from each other by the notoriety and bitterness it spawned. In My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem, Debbie Nelson details the real story of Eminem's life from his earliest days in a small town in Missouri and his teenage years in Detroit, to his rise to stardom and very public mom-bashing.

Signifying Rappers

Signifying Rappers
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2013-07-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0316401110

David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture. Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop." The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance, glitz and gangsterdom. Signifying Rappers issued a fan's challenge to the giants of rock writing, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, and Lester Bangs: Could the new street beats of 1989 set us free, as rock had always promised? Back in print at last, Signifying Rappers is a rare record of a city and a summer by two great thinkers, writers, and friends. With a new foreword by Mark Costello on his experience writing with David Foster Wallace, this rerelease cannot be missed.

If Jesus Was a Rapper

If Jesus Was a Rapper
Author: Cellus Hamilton
Publisher: Cellus Hamilton
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN:

If you’ve ever listened to music created by Cellus Hamilton, you are aware that he is much more than a rapper. His lyrics are multidimensional, revealing him to be a sort of scholarly visionary. Because music is often subject to the listener’s interpretation, interviews have been the closest outlet we have towards understanding the complexities that exist within Mr. Hamilton. Here in his book, “If Jesus Was a Rapper”, he lays his heart bare. As the businessman, family-man, and clergyman aspects of Hamilton are revealed in his memoir, his life and journey through the music industry teach us more about Jesus than many straightforward theologians have. His personality, creativity, and boldness work together to present him as a wholistic human artist who is deeply in love with Jesus. While Hamilton seems to intentionally target the Christian creative, his rags-to-riches story easily connects to us all. By the end of the book, Jesus will likely be your new favorite rapper.

The Hip Hop Wars

The Hip Hop Wars
Author: Tricia Rose
Publisher: Civitas Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2008-12-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0465008976

A pioneering expert in the study of hip-hop explains why the music matters--and why the battles surrounding it are so very fierce.

To Live and Defy in LA

To Live and Defy in LA
Author: Felicia Angeja Viator
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0674976363

How gangsta rap shocked America, made millions, and pulled back the curtain on an urban crisis. How is it that gangsta rap—so dystopian that it struck aspiring Brooklyn rapper and future superstar Jay-Z as “over the top”—was born in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, surf, and sun? In the Reagan era, hip-hop was understood to be the music of the inner city and, with rare exception, of New York. Rap was considered the poetry of the street, and it was thought to breed in close quarters, the product of dilapidated tenements, crime-infested housing projects, and graffiti-covered subway cars. To many in the industry, LA was certainly not hard-edged and urban enough to generate authentic hip-hop; a new brand of black rebel music could never come from La-La Land. But it did. In To Live and Defy in LA, Felicia Viator tells the story of the young black men who built gangsta rap and changed LA and the world. She takes readers into South Central, Compton, Long Beach, and Watts two decades after the long hot summer of 1965. This was the world of crack cocaine, street gangs, and Daryl Gates, and it was the environment in which rappers such as Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E came of age. By the end of the 1980s, these self-styled “ghetto reporters” had fought their way onto the nation’s radio and TV stations and thus into America’s consciousness, mocking law-and-order crusaders, exposing police brutality, outraging both feminists and traditionalists with their often retrograde treatment of sex and gender, and demanding that America confront an urban crisis too often ignored.

Chronicling Stankonia

Chronicling Stankonia
Author: Regina Bradley
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2021-01-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469661977

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, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators—including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. Andre 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole. Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern black identity.

Alien Encounters

Alien Encounters
Author: Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2007-04-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822389835

Alien Encounters showcases innovative directions in Asian American cultural studies. In essays exploring topics ranging from pulp fiction to multimedia art to import-car subcultures, contributors analyze Asian Americans’ interactions with popular culture as both creators and consumers. Written by a new generation of cultural critics, these essays reflect post-1965 Asian America; the contributors pay nuanced attention to issues of gender, sexuality, transnationality, and citizenship, and they unabashedly take pleasure in pop culture. This interdisciplinary collection brings together contributors working in Asian American studies, English, anthropology, sociology, and art history. They consider issues of cultural authenticity raised by Asian American participation in hip hop and jazz, the emergence of an orientalist “Indo-chic” in U.S. youth culture, and the circulation of Vietnamese music variety shows. They examine the relationship between Chinese restaurants and American culture, issues of sexuality and race brought to the fore in the video performance art of a Bruce Lee–channeling drag king, and immigrant television viewers’ dismayed reactions to a Chinese American chef who is “not Chinese enough.” The essays in Alien Encounters demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagement with popular culture. Taking popular culture seriously reveals how people imagine and express their affective relationships to history, identity, and belonging. Contributors. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Kevin Fellezs, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Joan Kee, Nhi T. Lieu, Sunaina Maira, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Sukhdev Sandhu, Christopher A. Shinn, Indigo Som, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Oliver Wang

Determined to Stay

Determined to Stay
Author: Jody Sokolower
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2022-11-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1623710952

Palestinian youth and the fight for their village Silwan is a Palestinian village located just outside the ancient walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Determined to Stay: Palestinian Youth Fight for Their Village is a moving story of a village and its people. As Silwani youth and community members share their lives with us, their village becomes an easily accessible way to understand Palestinian history and current reality. Written with young people in mind, the richly illustrated text stresses connections between the lives of youth in the US and Palestine: criminalization of youth, forced relocation, the impact of colonialism on Indigenous communities, efforts to bury history, and inspiring examples of resistance and resilience.