Abstract
I am a musician. In fact, my musical being is rooted in the art of percussion performance. Throughout the course of my life I have been fortunate to study at some of the finest institutions for musical study, including the Interlochen Center for the Arts, which has provided opportunities to perform with some of the world’s finest musicians. As a student of music I have been educated in a system that espouses European classical-derived music as the canon for study. In my maturation as a musician and researcher I have found that the canon, which lays the foundation for my musical being, has been exclusive to the extent that it has not involved multicultural and multiethnic musical forms as a source for musical ways of knowing. Although this research begins with a personal statement, its content is not about me; rather it is about the appropriation of a youth artistic movement and culture known today as hip hop. More specifically, this research is about the victimization of hip hop’s music and its compositional practice as “less than” in comparison to other musical genres. What proceeds is a personal commentary and theoretical perspective on hip hop’s music through the lens of an educator-musician on a quest to develop academic studies with hip hop as a point of departure for expansive musical skill development and knowledge acquisition.
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Notes
Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Plume/Penguin Group, 2006), 116.
Ibid., 117.
Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1.
Philip Dorrell, What Is Music? Solving a Scientific Mystery (Lulu.com/http://whatis-music.info/download.html, 2005), PDF e-book, 50.
John O. Calmore, “Critical Race Theory, Archie Shepp, and Fire Music: Securing an Authentic Intellectual Life in a Multicultural World,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al. (New York: The New Press, 1995), 317–18
And Cornell West, “Charlie Parker Didn’t Give a Damn,” New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 60–63.
Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 125.
Robert Walser, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy,” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 2 (Spring 1995), 196–97.
Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 212–13.
Also see, Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
And Martin T. Williams, “Liner Notes,” The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz, Smithsonian Institution/ Columbia Special Products P6 11891, 1973.
Mark Dery, “Public Enemy: Confrontation,” Keyboard, September 1990, 84, and Walser, 196.
Walser, 196.
Murray Forman, “Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop!: Hip-Hop History and Historiography,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9
And Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana Press, 1981).
Richard Shusterman, “The Fine Art of Rap,” New Literary History 22, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 614.
Joseph G. Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 36.
David J. Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University, Press, 1995), 162.
Shusterman, 615.
Schloss, 42.
Ibid., 106.
9th Wonder, personal communication with the author, October 12, 2007.
Elliott, 170.
Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, 10th-anniversary ed. (1995; New York: Basic Books, 2004), 7.
Levitin, 115.
Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 257.
David L. Atheide, “Media Hegemony: A Failure of Perspective,” Public Opinion Quarterly 48, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 477
See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
Hall, 259.
Turino, 197.
Hall, 24.
Tricia Rose, The Hip-Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 218.
See Geoff Boucher, “A Politician Who Runs on Hip-Hop,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2003, http://www.articles.latimes.com/2003/may/11/nation/na-kwame11
Hall, 257. Also see Richard Dyer, ed. Gays and Films (London: Film Institute, 1977).
Rose, 29.
Ibid., 218.
Dery, 82, and Walser, 192.
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© 2014 Tamara Lizette Brown and Baruti N. Kopano
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Clemmons, K. (2014). I’m Hip: An Exploration of Rap Music’s Creative Guise. In: Brown, T.L., Kopano, B.N. (eds) Soul Thieves. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137071392_4
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