10/10/2023 0 Comments Growing up hip hop season 3 episode 8The nine years separating Toop’s book from Cross’s might as well have been 90 Salary is largely comprised of interviews with artists like DJ Quik, Eazy E, Ice-T, and Nefertiti, each of whom treats hip-hop as its own fully realized ecosystem. Cross would go on to great renown as a photographer - he was behind the lens for such iconic album covers as Ras Kass’s Soul on Ice and DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing … - but his work as a writer is incisive and unambiguously radical. It’s Not About a Salary … Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles by Brian Cross (1993)Īnother hybrid work of ethnomusicology and photography, It’s Not About a Salary shifts focus to the West Coast, where Brian “B+” Cross sees the scene as inextricable from L.A.’s political reality, which by 1993 had become as fraught as it had been since the 1965 Watts rebellion. What Toop - a prolific musician and writer with a tendency toward the experimental and obscure - does offer is a primer on rap that begins with the utterly rudimentary (rap is “rhythmic talking over a Funk beat,” he writes early on) before tracing its roots through other Black musical and narrative forms back to “the savannah belt of West Africa this social pressure is embodied by the caste of musicians known as griots.” Academic to a fault though it may be, Rap Attack is a relentless, thorough attempt to canonize an emerging form in real time. If all of David Toop’s writing were excised from The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop, the book would still be worth the exorbitant prices it fetches on auction sites thanks to the rare Patricia Bates photographs of early hip-hop figures included in its pages. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop If there’s an organizing theme to be found, it’s the understanding that hip-hop is an art form created in response to dire material conditions and political persecution - one that has the capacity to be militant in its effort to correct those injustices, but also to fill these pre-revolutionary days with style, checks that clear, and something to dance to. What follows is a list of 11 books on hip-hop that are essential for any fan of the genre, though many of them are just as gripping for someone who couldn’t pick Puff out of a lineup. While rap songs quite literally allow for higher word counts than songs in other genres - and therefore facilitate the kind of autobiographical writing and introspection that other musicians might have to save for the memoir - their sociopolitical underpinnings, production histories, and contractual red tape are fascinating both at face value and as lenses onto American culture and commerce, a protest art that became hugely popular for those invested in maintaining the established economic order. To step back from the scene and tie yourself to a particular, static critical analysis was to miss what might happen next.īut any major artistic movement deserves serious study. Even as rap became a massive commercial force, it preserved the thrill of the impermanent: the sample chopped or flipped on the spot only to be nixed by the folks in legal affairs, the virtuosic freestyle that trails off into nothing. Hip-hop in its earliest incarnations was an experiential thing - not just because rappers and DJs had yet to secure the backing of major labels, but because their work depended on the texture and context that only a cramped nightclub or a sweaty multipurpose room could provide.
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