HIP HOP READER BY TIM STRODE

Hip Hop Reader by Tim Strode

Hip Hop Reader by Tim Strode

Q1. What is hip hop? What are its defining elements? What is its politics? What does the music of hip hop sound like? What is its aesthetics? Please explain thoroughly and use examples where appropriate.

Ans. Tim Strode explains the anthology about the origins, composition, politics of identity, and racial and gender issues of hip-hop and rap music. Hip hop music is characterized as a "genre of music typically consisting of a rhythmic style of speaking called rap over backing beats. Generally, hip hop is the term given to the culture in which rap music, fostered in part by individual artists and driven early on and throughout its evolution by DJs who speak over music, has developed. It is said to have been developed in New York City in the 1970s predominantly among African-Americans, Jamaicans, and Latinos. (Tim Strode et. al. 2008)Neal assigns the significance of hip-hop's relation to new digital technology as a response to the post-industrialization of black urban spaces whereby the music form and style constitute a “vehicle for forms of critique uniquely suited for the dispersed and disjointed nature of contemporary black communal formations. The erosion of social institutions and spaces indicative of the black public sphere finds hip-hop satisfying this void.

Q2. In Mark Anthony Neal's article; Sold out on Soul; he discusses the importance of West African languages to the formation of African-American music, especially polytonality. How does Neal connect this term to the condition's of slavery? What role does polytonality have in the formation of community?

Ans. the question suggests the enormity of the range and scope of the African-American experience in the New World over the last several hundred years and of his African ancestors before that. In order to address the question we must examine the nature of a couple of things. One of those is certainly what it is we mean when we say “Black” in the context of music and in the context of America and in the context of American music. There are issues of cultural inheritance and transmission that have been well documented in the scholarly literature, as well as the complexity and diversity of the geographical locations and cultural manifestations this inheritance has produced in “the irreversible scattering of the Diaspora,” or what Mark Anthony Nea refers to as “polytonality.” In examining the scope and nature of Black music, we must consider certain processes, including selective appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulation of European ideologies, cultures, and institutions, alongside an African heritage [which led to] linguistic innovations in rhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupying an alien social space, heightened expressions, hairstyles, ways of walking, standing, and talking, and a means of constituting and sustaining camaraderie and community.

What we must consider here is that when we speak of “Black” in the context of anything American, we speak of a syncretized process, perhaps more appropriately understood when we use the term ...