Putin' On For Da Lou: Hip Hop's Response To Racism In St. Louis (original) (raw)

MARCHING IN UNISON: HIP HOP AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY'S QUEST FOR

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of Hip Hop in translating the distress and anger experienced daily by African Americans in the United States during the last decade and how this culture has also been used as a vessel for gifted black youth to reach to the masses. As such, this paper is an attempt to shed light on the influence of rap as a musical genre to divulge, on one hand on societal white privilege that eventually leads to institutional racism and police brutality against people of color; while on the other hand, on interracial racism that ultimately induces violence and "black-on-black crime". Therefore, covering both institutional and communal aspects will be carried out through critical examination of the lyrics and interviews of two progressive Hip Hop artists-Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar; two major representatives of African Americans with two different approaches to reach different audiences as well as by diving into the ways both artists have been using their platform to positively impact black lives in America. Lyrics and styles of both artists will be framed through major concepts of Critical Race Theory emphasizing color disparities and oppression in American society.

Traversing Racial Distance in Hip-hop Culture: The Ethics and Politics of Listening

Tropos (http://ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/tps)

Hip-hop is often studied as a ‘political’ culture. Listeners, however, often contest the attachment of a political nature to hip-hop. After the ‘dilution’ of “real” hip-hop by record labels seeking to package the sound for mainstream consumption, is it fair to say that hip-hop retains political relevance? To address this question I make two moves. In the first, I approach hip-hop from a perspective that moves beyond lyrics, seeking to understand what the music ‘does’ rather than what it represents. In the second, I take this approach to the study of race in hip-hop culture, examining how phenotypical variation affects the affordances and subject-positions available to a given body in hip-hop culture. In approaching hip-hop through the materiality of racial difference, I find that the “political” in hip-hop emerges in moments of creative and ethical experimentation in the face of alterity.

"Conscious" Hip-Hop Takes on Two Forms: Protest and Respectability Politics

I have been eager to expand into the political with my writing and the recent divide among hip-hop's conscious leaders has been an important discussion to engage in. Most liberal folk can agree that the media is biased, corrupt, etc. but these racist narratives are showing up in hip-hop more and more. As Tricia Rose articulated, "why are we turning youth (through attacks on rap and I add, attacks on the black community) into the agents of their own demise, seeing black kids as the source of violence in america while denying the extraordinary violence done to them?" The media loves to emphasize black on black crime in order to minimize police brutality, institutional racism, envrionmental violence and simultaneously perpetuate the idea that white people don't kill white people. But who put the guns in the communities anyways?

Hip Hop World News: reporting back

Race & Class, 2017

Responding to the BBC 4 documentary, The Hip Hop World News, the author examines a number of debates that the programme, narrated by Rodney P, a pioneer of British rap music, and a believer in the revolutionary potential of hip hop culture, throws up. For hip hop also has many reactionary elements and has become big business for the corporations and rap ‘stars’ involved in its production. Beyond just pointing to individual rappers who have been ‘conscious’ political voices, such as Public Enemy’s Chuck D, we are shown structures embedded in the origins and ‘elements’ of hip hop that continue to make it a ‘voice of the voiceless’. Some people, like Lord Jamar, who is interviewed on the documentary, have argued that hip hop as a black art form can only be performed by black artists, yet, as Rodney P points out, hip hop has been adopted everywhere to express and transmit the situations and struggles of marginalised and oppressed groups all over the globe.