The first study of hip-hop and aging, featuring insights from over twenty hip-hop pioneers and veterans.Hip-hop is now in its sixth decade. How are the culture’s oldest innovators aging in, and with, hip-hop? In In Old in the Game, Murray Forman examines how hip-hop artists, audiences, and entrepreneurs negotiate the cultural process of aging.Featuring commentary from hip-hop pioneers Grandmaster Caz, Grandwizzard Theodore, and Sha-Rock as well as ...

The 'Hood Comes First looks at the increasingly specific emphasis on real neighborhoods and streets in rap music and hip hop culture as an urgent response to the cultural and geographical ghettoization of black urban communities. Examining rap music, along with ancillary hip hop media including radio, music videos, rap press and the cinematic 'hood genre, Murray Forman analyzes hip hop culture's varying articulations of the terms "ghetto," "inner-city," and "the 'hood," and how these space...

Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV p...

This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of accumulation, curation, preservation and digitization and critically analyses institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values.The collection of essays are divided into four sections: Doing the Knowledge, Chall...

We Still Here maps the edges of hip-hop culture and makes sense of the rich and diverse ways people create and engage with hip-hop music within Canadian borders.Contributors to the collection explore the power of institutions, mainstream hegemonies, and the processes of historical formation in the evolution of hip-hop culture. Throughout, the volume foregrounds the generative issues of gender, identity, and power, in particular in relation to the Black diaspora and Indigen...

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, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays ...

Engaging with a broad range of research and performance genres, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies offers the most comprehensive research on Hip Hop dance to date. Filling a lacuna in both Hip Hop and dance studies, the Handbook places practitioners' voices at the forefront and in dialogue with theoretical insights, rooted in critical race theory, anticolonialism, intersectional feminism, and more. Volume editors Mary Fogarty and Imani Kai Johnson have included ...

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. With its close attention to beats and lyricism, and riveting first-person explorations of the isolation and desolation of urban poverty, Illmatic was pivotal in the evolution of the genre.In Born to Use Mi...

Whether along race, class or generational lines, hip-hop music has been a source of controversy since the beats got too big and the voices too loud for the block parties that spawned them. America has condemned and commended this music and the culture that inspires it. Dubbed "the Hip-Hop Intellectual" by critics and fans for his pioneering explorations of rap music in the academy and beyond, Michael Eric Dyson is uniquely situated to probe the most compelling and controversial dimensions ...

It's not just rap music. Hip-hop has transformed theater, dance, performance, poetry, literature, fashion, design, photography, painting, and film, to become one of the most far-reaching and transformative arts movements of the past two decades. American Book Award-winning journalist Jeff Chang, author of the acclaimed Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, assembles some of the most innovative and provocative voices in hip-hop to assess the most important cul...

The antagonists—oiled, shaved, pierced, and tattooed; the glaring lights; the pounding music; the shouting crowd: professional wrestling is at once spectacle, sport, and business. Steel Chair to the Head provides a multifaceted look at the popular phenomenon of pro wrestling. The contributors combine critical rigor with a deep appreciation of wrestling as a unique cultural form, the latest in a long line of popular performance genres. They examine wrestling as it happens in the ri...

Why do some music styles gain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches? Banding Together explores this question and reveals the attributes that together explain the growth of twentieth-century American popular music. Drawing on a vast array of examples from sixty musical styles--ranging from rap and bluegrass to death metal and South Texas polka, and including several created outside the United States--Jennifer Lena uncovers the shared grammar that allows us to understa...