ABSTRACTNothing in the music industry has been more controversial than so‐called gangsta rap. This article examines the behavior of the major recording labels involved with rap music, and how they have responded to calls from the minority community and various politicians to clean up the offensive lyrics associated with the genre. In large part, the companies have basically ignored their critics and continued to market gangsta rap because for years it had been so highly profitable. Their basic tactic has been (...) to diffuse responsibility and distance themselves from rap by allowing subsidiaries to handle that part of the business. The industry's behavior is certainly troubling. I argue that, at the very least, the companies should have met the “moral minimum” to avoid harm and correct social injuries by censoring certain lyrics. Unfortunately this never occurred, and, in the end, only declining sales appear to have had any mitigating effects on gangsta rap. (shrink)

Ice Cube "What's a brother gotta do to get a message through to the Red, White, and Blue?" Ice-T Rap music has emerged as one of the most distinctive and controversial music genres of the past decade. A significant part of hip hop culture, [1] rap articulates the experiences and conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions. In this cultural context, rap provides a (...) voice to the voiceless, a form of protest to the oppressed, and a mode of alternative cultural style and identity to the marginalized. Rap is thus not only music to dance and party to, but a potent form of cultural identity. It has become a powerful vehicle for cultural political expression, serving as the "CNN of black people", or upping the high-tech ante, as their "satellite communication system". It is an informational medium to tune into, one that describes the rage of African-Americans facing growing oppression, declining opportunities for advancement, changing moods on the streets, and everyday life as a matter of sheer survival. In turn, it has become a cultural virus, circulating its images, sounds, and attitude throughout the culture and body politic. (shrink)

Do these lyrics ring true to you? When truth rings, when it oscillates, it reverberates in one’s soul and imagination. These lyrics confer a feeling of sincerity that does not translate without a certain context: the rhythm, rawness, and rhyme open the ear of the listener to retrieve this depiction of an almost unimaginable world expressed from an equally difficult-to-imagine perspective. For some, while the veracity of this description is beyond the pale of their reality, the significance, the proverbial weight (...) of these lyrics, resonates in a different register of truth that follows from a sense of their honesty.Yet, for other listeners these lyrics cannot be heard in this register. They instead must be a literal... (shrink)

Dissertação: SANTOS, George Harrison Sena. Religiosidade e Educação: Rap mineiro em perspectiva de libertação. 2014. Dissertação , Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências da Religião, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.

A cross-cultural approach to moral psychology starts from researchers withholding judgments about universal right and wrong and instead exploring what the members of a community subjectively perceive to be moral or immoral in their local context. This study seeks to identify the moral concerns that are most relevant to listeners of hip-hop music. We use validated psychological surveys including the Moral Foundations Questionnaire to assess which moral concerns are most central to hip-hop listeners. Results show that hip-hop listeners prioritize concerns (...) of justice and authenticity more than non-listeners and deprioritize concerns of respecting authority. These results suggest that the concept of the “good person” within hip-hop culture is fundamentally a person that is oriented towards social justice, rebellion against the status quo, and a deep devotion to keeping it real. Results are followed by a discussion of the role of youth subcultures in moral socialization. (shrink)

Black feminist theory has shown how respectability politics shape cultural discourses about African American women's sexuality. Responding to ‘silent’ depictions resulting from racial uplift strategies among turn-of-the-century middle-class black women, subsequent work theorises alternative discourses that portray a desiring and agentic black female sexual subject. Locating these alternative discourses in a ‘politics of irreverence’, I argue that respectability/irreverence oppositional logic narrowly frames theorising of black female sexuality. Although recent work emphasises dialectical – rather than oppositional – dynamics, this analytic approach (...) is unevenly applied. Binary frameworks continue to shape analyses of women's rap. Drawing upon lyrics of rappers Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, I highlight three discursive strategies whereby women rappers render the respectability/irreverence binary problematic: (1) using irreverence to claim respectability, (2) ‘claiming both’ or, embracing contradiction, and (3) beating to the punch. This analysis shows how dialectical approaches account for potential ‘third spaces’ where more complex representational politics are possible. (shrink)

By breaking with the bases of national imaginary representation that gave MPB a symbolic and ideological sense, rap makes the dissolution of the symbolic cultural horizon which guided part of Brazilian society it’s starting point. What to MPB represented a deep crisis –to the point where composer Chico Buarque affirmed that the song template that his generation had consolidated probably had come come to an end – that´s the starting point of national rap. In this way, rap´s get to change (...) into an artistic form that what Brazil effectively had assumed as a political project: a real extermination in the open field, that has the production and management of violence as it’s decisive aspect. This article is an attempt to follow the developments of this peripheral survival model from its consolidation to its most recent developments. (shrink)

Politics, and in particular the question of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is currently dealt with rather through fiction and art, and much less through genuine political actions, is a strong sign of the failure of politics as a positive, voluntaristic political project. Rap /hip hop music, the most naturally political art, does not have the political agenda anymore. The particular history or Israeli rap illustrates this process in a striking way, embodying the recent evolution of the Israeli society. The country was (...) established on a political project and previously unknown social generosity. Yet, the economical and geopolitical context of Israel, as well as increasingly difficult relationship with Palestinians, made its citizens surprisingly uninterested in rethinking the political project of the country. Individual preoccupations, also economical, family and friends’ problems, started to occupy the central place in art and in daily life in Israel, and politics has been definitively associated to corruption and self-interest of an elite. Rap reflects this evolution, is its condensed version. (shrink)

This book is discussing patterns of radical religious thought in popular forms of Black music. The consistent influence of the Five Percent Nation on Rap music as one of the most esoteric groups among the manifold Black Muslim movements has already gained scholarly attention. However, it shares more than a strong pattern of reversed racism with the Bobo Shanti Order, the most rigid branch of the Rastafarian faith, globally popularized by Dancehall-Reggae artists like Sizzla or Capleton. Authentic devotion or calculated (...) marketing?Apart from providing a possible answer to this question, the historical shift of Bobo adherents from shunned extremists to firmly anchored personifications of authenticity in mainstream Rastafarian culture is being emphasized. A multi-layered comparative case study attempts to shed light on the re-contextualization of language as well as expressed dogmatic perceptions and symbolism, attitude towards other religious groups and aspects of ethnic discrimination. Further analysis includes the visibility of artists and their references to practical and moral issues directly derived from two obscure ideologies that managed to conquer airwaves and concert halls. (shrink)

La question de la relégation à travers la musique rap.

Revolution of a next kind : building black London from the bottom -- On the bus my oyster card goes ding de diing de ding ding : transforming the space of London's public transport -- I see the glow in you : summoning the aura in London's post hip-hop culture -- That there kind of sumthin' sounds strange to me : social representation and the recorded soundscape -- From a junior spesh to the keys to the Bentley : the routes (...) of grimey London -- Conclusion. Take back the scene. (shrink)

“The Subliminal K i d moved in and took over bars cafes and jukeboxes of the world cities and installed radio transmitters and microphones in each bar so that the music and talk of any bar could be heard in all his bars and he had tape recorders in each bar that played and recorded at arbitrary intervals and his agents moved back and forth with portable tape recorders and brought back street sound and talk and music and poured it (...) into his recorder array so he set waves and eddies and tornadoes of sound down all your streets and by the river of all language‐Word dust drifted streets of broken music car horn and air hammers—The Word broken pounded twisted exploded in smoke—.Nothing is true—Everything is permitted—1—William Burroughs, Nova Express. (shrink)

Ao romper com as bases de representação do imaginário nacional que conferiam sentido simbólico e ideológico à MPB, o rap torna a dissolução do horizonte cultural que orientava parte da sociedade brasileira seu ponto de partida. Aquilo que para MPB representou uma crise profunda - a ponto do compositor Chico Buarque afirmar que o modelo de canção que a sua geração havia consolidado provavelmente teria chegado ao fim –, é o ponto de partida do rap nacional. Dessa maneira, o rap (...) consegue transfigurar em matéria formal aquilo que o Brasil havia efetivamente assumido enquanto projeto político: um verdadeiro campo de extermínio a céu aberto, que tem como aspecto decisivo a produção e a gestão da violência. O presente artigo é uma tentativa de acompanhar os desdobramentos desse modelo de sobrevivência periférico desde sua consolidação até seus mais recentes desdobramentos. (shrink)

This chapter aims at pointing out the correspondences between the transformative Five Percenter process of self-cultivation outlined in the Supreme Mathematics and previous interpretations articulated and transmitted in the sapiential traditions of Islam, Christianity, or Taoism.

Philosophie und Hiphop -- Selbstmeisterung -- Die 10 Gesetze der Rap-Philosophie -- Wo bin ich zu Hause? -- Hiphop heisst Wissen, was ungerecht ist -- Dialektik der Gewalt -- Anleitung zur Dekonstruktion -- Täter*in des Wortes -- Kampf um Anerkennung -- Intersektionale Perspektiven -- Performative Philosophie -- Wahrsprechen -- Die Vision des Neu-Anfangen-Könnens -- Sehnsucht nach dem guten Leben -- Transfiguration der Welt -- Philosophie in Bewegung: zwischen Hip und Hop -- Wider die Wiederkehr des Gleichen -- Hiphop don't stop... (...) . (shrink)

It has been over two decades since Miranda Fricker labeled epistemic injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The philosophical literature has proliferated with variants and related concepts. By considering cases in popular music, we argue that it is worth distinguishing a parallel phenomenon of art-interpretive injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their creative capacity as a possible artist. In section 1, we consider the prosecutorial use of rap lyrics in court as (...) a central case of this injustice. In section 2, we distinguish art-interpretive injustice from other categories already discussed in recent literature. In section 3, we discuss the relationship between genre discourse and identity prejudice. The case for recognizing the category of art-interpretive injustice is that it allows one to recognize a class of harms as being importantly related in ways that one would otherwise overlook. (shrink)

Philosophy and Hip-Hop: Ruminations on Postmodern Cultural Form opens up the philosophical life force that informs the construction of Hip-hop by turning the gaze of the philosopher upon those blind spots that exist within existing scholarship. Traditional Departments of Philosophy will find this book a solid companion in Contemporary Philosophy or Aesthetic Theory. Inside these pages is a project that parallels the themes of existential angst, corporate elitism, social consciousness, male privilege and masculinity. This book illustrates the abundance of philosophical (...) meaning in the textual and graphic elements of Hip-hop, and thus places Hip-hop within the philosophical canon. (shrink)

In Hip-Hop in Africa, Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa's biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African narratives of social, political, and economic realities. Clark looks at the use of hip-hop in protest, both as a means of articulating social problems and as a tool for mobilizing listeners around those problems. She also details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa following its emergence in the United States, assessing the impact of urbanization and demographics (...) on the spread of hip-hop culture. Hip-Hop in Africa is a tribute to a genre and its artists as well as a timely examination that pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions. (shrink)

If rapid growth (rap) mutants of Escherichia coli could be obtained, these might prove a valuable contribution to fields as diverse as growth rate control, biotechnology and the regulation of the bacterial cell cycle. To obtain rap mutants, a dnaQ mutator strain was grown for four and a half days continuously in batch culture. At the end of the selection period, there was no significant change in growth rate. This result means that selecting rap mutants may require an alternative strategy (...) and a number of such alternatives are discussed. (shrink)

A major theme in rap lyrics is that the only way to survive is to use your head, be aware, know what’s going on around you. That simple idea packs a lot of background. The most obvious ideas about knowledge turn out if you look at them close up to be pretty questionable. For example: How do we get knowledge about the world? A natural and ancient answer to this question is that much if not all of our knowledge comes (...) from our senses. So for example the nose gives us knowledge of what things smell like, and if all goes well, also indicates whether the thing we’re smelling is healthy, tasty, or noxious. Likewise, the eyes tell us the color and shape of things, and thereby give us information about whether those things are useful, dangerous, and so on. Like everybody else, rappers know all this. Or do they? Maybe some rappers know that this isn’t really so. I’m not talking about Extra-Sensory Perception, channeling, auras, or about what. (shrink)

A major theme in rap lyrics is that the only way to survive is to use your head, be aware, know whats going on around you. That simple idea packs a lot of background. The most obvious ideas about knowledge turn out if you look at them close up to be pretty questionable. For example: How do we get knowledge about the world? A natural and ancient answer to this question is that much if not all of our knowledge comes (...) from our senses. So for example the nose gives us knowledge of what things smell like, and if all goes well, also indicates whether the thing were smelling is healthy, tasty, or noxious. Likewise, the eyes tell us the color and shape of things, and thereby give us information about whether those things are useful, dangerous, and so on. Like everybody else, rappers know all this. Or do they? Maybe some rappers know that this isnt really so. (shrink)