Hip-hop as poetry (original) (raw)

Using Hip-Hop Culture as a Bridge to Canonical Poetry Texts in an Urban Secondary English Class

2000

This paper argues that hip-hop music is an effective way to reach previously marginalized urban youth and to teach them critical and analytical skills necessary for succeeding in school. It suggests that students learn more effectively when motivated, and hip-hop music is a tremendous motivating force for urban youth. It is also a legitimate voice of urban youth resistance and a viable literary genre worthy of serious academic contemplation. The first section shows how students are more inclined to develop literacy skills if they have a cultural frame, which will help them understand the material presented during instruction. The second section argues that rap music and urban youth are closely aligned, discussing the literary viability of rap texts, their worthiness for serious academic study, and their ability to be used to scaffold complex literary concepts. The third section looks at a high school unit that was created to incorporate elements of popular culture as well as to faci...

Wordsmith: Examining the role hip-hop texts play in viewing the world

2014

WORDSMITH: EXAMINING THE ROLE HIP-HOP TEXTS PLAY IN VIEWING THE WORLD by Crystal LaVoulle Originally the voice of a silenced group of inner city Black males, hip-hop culture contains a historical road map that chronicles the experiences of its members. This study attempted to examine hip-hop through the stories of adults who incorporateaspects of hip-hop culture into their daily lives. Specifically, this study investigated, “How is hip-hop a critical element in the lives of poets, artists, and educators who are actively and intimately involved in its music and culture?” Additionally, this study will explore the following sub-questions: (1) What does it mean to be a member of the hip-hop community? (2) How does hip-hop inform the view of the world for participants in this study? This qualitative research study, framed by critical literacy, attempted to fill the void in the scholarship of hip-hop texts. Data collection included in-depth individual interviews, photoelicited interviews ...

THE TEXTUALITY OF CONTEMPORARY HIPLIFE LYRICS

ABSTRACT This research looks at the textuality of hiplife - the Ghanaian version of hip hop - by investigating the hiplife discursive and non discursive practices. The thesis of this research is that hiplife provides the platform for self expression or a new culture for the Ghanaian youth. This ethnography of hiplife covers two main areas of investigation: hiplife as a syncretic and a protest culture. Chapter one presents the background and research design of the study while chapter two provides a broad scholarly exploration of hiplife, taking into account the history and culture of hiplife against the background of African hip hop literature. Chapter three explores the cultural production of hiplife while chapter four investigates the very core of hiplife rap, its oral rhythmic production. In chapter five, the hiplife culture, like all hip hop cultures, seeks to redefine the Ghanaian normative moral grounds. This redefinition normally presents the oppressed protest against the dominant: two artistes of the same moral ground protest against each other’s moral weakness in “dissing”. There is no higher moral ground. Chapter six, an extension of chapter five, presents an in-depth treatment of hiplife as a transgressive culture. This transgressive culture serves as the fodder for hiplife business in chapter seven. Chapter eight continues the study of hiplife as a protest culture, projecting the female rapper, within the context of the Ghanaian feminist debate, as a new breed of Ghanaian woman fighting the Ghanaian masculine hegemony. In investigating a culture like that of hiplife, I choose a qualitative methodology that meets the subtle demands of an enquiry on expressive culture. Using focus group discussions, interviews and participant observation to collect data from the whole country with emphasis on the four main cities in Ghana, this research analyses transcribed data and comes up with new findings about the social and economic realities of the hiplife culture, which can be seen as a metaphor of the contemporary Ghanaian social order. The generality of the old population in Ghana however consider its discursive and non discursive practices as imitation of a perceived Western moral degeneration and thus antithetical to the Ghanaian mainstream cultural decorum and propriety. This study, however, reveals that, contrary to this popular perception, hiplife has a strong traditional input that is re-invented in modernity and that what gives it its entrepreneurial appeal is located in its cultural shareability, both traditional and modern. Youth culture as seen in hiplife textuality, therefore, is not apocalyptic: it is only an attempt to leave the institutional pathways and develop new ones. The intended outcome of this research, therefore, is to promote the theory of performance in popular culture in literary studies in the Ghanaian universities, a study that has already started in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, but with little success. The knowledge gained from this research can also add to a corpus of teaching materials to train young Ghanaian musicians for economic purposes. Again, information from this research is to help Ghanaian readers, and other readers for that matter, understand the realities of the hiplife culture within the context of globalization.

Standard language in urban rap

2014

This article focuses on a case that compared to previous studies of hip hop language, is surprising; a group of adolescents in Copenhagen increasingly use more monolingual, standard linguistic practices in their hip hop productions on YouTube. We argue that to fully understand this development, it is necessary to take into account the local, sociocultural meanings given to particular linguistic resources, and that this cannot be fully captured without attention to the ethnographic and sociolinguistic context. We find that the hip hop language and literacy practices in this context are related to both traditional educational norms and artistic aspirations. 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.