Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

This groundbreaking 1994 book on the early years of rap musicâ€™s emergence is now available as an e-book. This ethnographic, cultural studies text is considered the first detailed and theoretical exploration of rap music within its social, cultural, and artistic contexts. Black Noise won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995, and in 1999 was listed by Black Issues in Higher Education as of its â€œTop Books of the Twentieth Century.â€

From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and assertive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative and influential fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.

Rose sorts through the complex forces that shaped hip hopâ€™s emergence by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential setting of post industrial New York City and the black and Latino communities where hip hop developed. Rose discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional Afro-Diaspora oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.

But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint a wide range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2014-01-13
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2014-01-13
Format	Kindle eBook

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

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