Hip-hop
is many things to many people. In this course, we will primarily
study it as a new way of using language, of turning language
into music and poetry, and of building community through language
use and communication. Hip-hop is a creative revolution of communication
media that has put young black Americans, previously one of
the most neglected groups in U.S. society, onto the cultural
map (and given quite a few of them money and jobs); their invention
has rapidly grown from a small, local phenomenon which many
critics predicted would quickly disappear, into the global Hip-Hop-Nation:
there probably is no country on earth (other than North Korea)
where rap is not listened to, loved, and practiced at least
by a handful of kids and adults; in many places it is the dominant
form of popular music.
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program for this course is densely packed and includes a large number
of themes: we begin by trying to understand the revolution in communication
that hip hop is, looking first at graffiti writers in New York City,
and by learning about the social context in which this happened; we
will closely study the meaning-making methods of rappers and how these
relate to other modes of meaning-making with language: poetic methods
(rhymes and metaphors); relationships between language and music (beat,
rhythm, intonation) and how these have changed over time; similarities
between M.C.’s and those performers that rapped the epic poems
from which the Iliad and Odyssey developed in ancient Greece. We will
consider what “orality” means and how memory is preserved
in societies without writing; how rappers distinguish themselves from
one another through their skills and styles and how they achieve identity;
how rap is related to other African-American genres of language use
and what speech acts rappers perform to build community; what slang
and Ebonics are; what rap’s predecessors were, and how it has
sparked the new mass movement of slam poetry. What “sampling”
is and what is accomplished by it. And we will finally discuss various
political agendas that hip-hop artists have, as well as what happens,
both musically and culturally, when rap becomes global and is adapted
to local communities in other parts of the world. |
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we will listen to and analyze a broad range of musical samples, the
instructor favors the genre known as “knowledge rap”, and
this will be reflected to some extent in the selection of music. |
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