California Series in Hip Hop Studies – Serie

Detroit, MIchigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts.

Detroit, Michigan, has long been recognized as a center of musical innovation and social change. Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay draw on seven years of fieldwork to illuminate the important role that women have played in mobilizing a grassroots response to political and social pressures at the heart of Detroit’s ongoing renewal and development project. Focusing on the Foundation, a women-centered hip hop collective, Women Rapping Revolution argues that the hip hop underground is a crucial site where Black women shape subjectivity and claim self-care as a principle of community organizing. Through interviews and sustained critical engagement with artists and activists, this study also articulates the substantial role of cultural production in social, racial, and economic justice efforts.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Today, Morocco's hip hop artists are vital to their country's reputation as diverse, creative, and modern. But in the 1990s and 2000s, teenage amateurs shaped their craft and ideals together as the profound socioeconomic changes of neoliberalization swept through their neighborhoods. Values That Pay traces Moroccan hip hop's trajectory from sidewalk cyphers and bedroom studios to royal commendations and international festivals. Kendra Salois draws from more than ten years of research into her interlocutors' music and moral reasoning to explore the constitutive tensions of institutionalization, hip hop aesthetics, and neoliberal life. Entrepreneurial artists respond to their unavoidable complicity with an extractive state through aesthetic and interpersonal sincerity, educating their fans on the risks and responsibilities of contemporary citizenship. Salois argues that over the past forty years, Moroccan hip hop practitioners have transformed not only themselves but also what it means to be an ethical citizen in a deeply unequal nation.

This expansive collection sets the stage for the next generation of Hip Hop scholarship as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the movement’s origins.  Celebrating 50 years of Hip Hop cultural history, Freedom Moves travels across generations and beyond borders to understand Hip Hop’s transformative power as one of the most important arts movements of our time. This book gathers critically acclaimed scholars, artists, activists, and youth organizers in a wide-ranging exploration of Hip Hop as a musical movement, a powerful catalyst for activism, and a culture that offers us new ways of thinking and doing freedom.  Rooting Hip Hop in Black freedom culture, this state-of-the-art collection presents a globally diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Arab, European, North African, and South Asian artists, activists, and thinkers. The “knowledges” cultivated by Hip Hop and spoken word communities represent emerging ways of being in the world. Freedom Moves examines how educators, artists, and activists use these knowledges to inform and expand how we understand our communities, our histories, and our futures.

This expansive collection sets the stage for the next generation of Hip Hop scholarship as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the movement’s origins.  Celebrating 50 years of Hip Hop cultural history, Freedom Moves travels across generations and beyond borders to understand Hip Hop’s transformative power as one of the most important arts movements of our time. This book gathers critically acclaimed scholars, artists, activists, and youth organizers in a wide-ranging exploration of Hip Hop as a musical movement, a powerful catalyst for activism, and a culture that offers us new ways of thinking and doing freedom.  Rooting Hip Hop in Black freedom culture, this state-of-the-art collection presents a globally diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Arab, European, North African, and South Asian artists, activists, and thinkers. The “knowledges” cultivated by Hip Hop and spoken word communities represent emerging ways of being in the world. Freedom Moves examines how educators, artists, and activists use these knowledges to inform and expand how we understand our communities, our histories, and our futures.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Nairobi Hip Hop Flow combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop's embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines how hip hop artists in Nairobi's underground rap culture engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound by fostering a creative playfulness using bodily movement. This unprecedented study shows how Nairobi artists circulate diasporic blackness while at the same time indigenizing hip hop music to interrogate Kenya’s sociopolitical landscape.

A literary mixtape of transformative dialogues on justice with a cast of visionary rebel activists, organizers, artists, culture workers, thought leaders, and movement builders.Rebel Speak sounds the alarm for a global movement to end systemic injustice led by people doing the day-to-day rebel work in the prison capital of the world. Prison activist, artist, and scholar Bryonn Rolly Bain brings us transformative oral history ciphers, rooted in the tradition of call-and-response, to lay bare the struggle and sacrifice on the front lines of the fight to abolish the prison industrial complex.Rebel Speak investigates the motives that inspire and sustain movements for visionary change. Sparked by a life-changing interview with working-class heroes Dolores Huerta and Harry Belafonte, Bryonn invites us to join conversations with change-makers whose diverse critical perspectives and firsthand accounts expose the crisis of prisons and policing in our communities. Through dialogues with activists including Albert Woodfox, founder of the first Black Panther Party prison chapter, and Susan Burton, founder of Los Angeles's A New Way of Life Reentry Project; a conversation with a warden pushing beyond traditions at Sing Sing Correctional Facility; and an intimate exchange with his brother returning from prison, Bryonn reveals countless unseen spaces of the movement to end human caging. Sampling his provocative sessions with influential artists and culture workers, like Public Enemy leader Chuck D and radical feminist MC Maya Jupiter, Bryonn opens up and guides discussions about the power of art and activism to build solidarity across disciplines and demand justice.With raw insight and radical introspection, Rebel Speak embodies the growing call for "credible messengers" on prisons, policing, racial justice, abolitionist politics, and transformative organizing. Reimagining the role of the writer and scholar as a DJ and MC, Bryonn moves the crowd with this unforgettable mix of those working within the belly of the beast to change the world. This is a new century's sound of movement-building and Rebel Speak.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Nairobi Hip Hop Flow combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop's embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines how hip hop artists in Nairobi's underground rap culture engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound by fostering a creative playfulness using bodily movement. This unprecedented study shows how Nairobi artists circulate diasporic blackness while at the same time indigenizing hip hop music to interrogate Kenya’s sociopolitical landscape.

Hip Hop Studies and Queer Black Feminism presents a dynamic and much-needed fresh analysis of Black gendering and racialized sexualities in the sphere of Hip Hop. Editors Elaine B. Richardson, Gwendolyn D. Pough, and Treva B. Lindsey bring together established and rising scholars to examine the work of Hip Hop creators and practitioners, using the genre as a lens to address the crises of this historical moment, marked by attacks on bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ rights, education, and Black studies. Tracing legacies of queer Black feminist activism and expression through Hip Hop culture and music, this timely anthology recenters queer Black feminism and cements its place in (Black) culture, liberation movements, and education.

Hip Hop Studies and Queer Black Feminism presents a dynamic and much-needed fresh analysis of Black gendering and racialized sexualities in the sphere of Hip Hop. Editors Elaine B. Richardson, Gwendolyn D. Pough, and Treva B. Lindsey bring together established and rising scholars to examine the work of Hip Hop creators and practitioners, using the genre as a lens to address the crises of this historical moment, marked by attacks on bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ rights, education, and Black studies. Tracing legacies of queer Black feminist activism and expression through Hip Hop culture and music, this timely anthology recenters queer Black feminism and cements its place in (Black) culture, liberation movements, and education.

The first study of hip-hop and aging, featuring insights from over twenty hip-hop pioneers and veterans.Hip-hop is now in its sixth decade. How are the culture’s oldest innovators aging in, and with, hip-hop? In Old in the Game, Murray Forman examines how hip-hop artists, audiences, and entrepreneurs negotiate the cultural process of aging, illuminating the deeper meanings and values associated with evolving within a hip-hop sensibility.Featuring commentary from hip-hop pioneers and veterans like Chuck D, LL Cool J, Ice-T, Pepa, and Yo-Yo, Forman reveals age as an essential component of identities and forms of expression through which hip-hop–identified “heads” comprehend the world and present themselves. The book covers themes such as generational difference and dissonance, ageism, memory and nostalgia, and retirement and death and offers a new way of understanding hip-hop as generations of hip-hop heads come of age, mature, and learn to grow old within the culture.

The first study of hip-hop and aging, featuring insights from over twenty hip-hop pioneers and veterans.Hip-hop is now in its sixth decade. How are the culture’s oldest innovators aging in, and with, hip-hop? In Old in the Game, Murray Forman examines how hip-hop artists, audiences, and entrepreneurs negotiate the cultural process of aging, illuminating the deeper meanings and values associated with evolving within a hip-hop sensibility.Featuring commentary from hip-hop pioneers and veterans like Chuck D, LL Cool J, Ice-T, Pepa, and Yo-Yo, Forman reveals age as an essential component of identities and forms of expression through which hip-hop–identified “heads” comprehend the world and present themselves. The book covers themes such as generational difference and dissonance, ageism, memory and nostalgia, and retirement and death and offers a new way of understanding hip-hop as generations of hip-hop heads come of age, mature, and learn to grow old within the culture.

A profound meditation on hip hop’s transformative power, In the Hour of Chaos takes us deep into the mind of the genre’s most unabashed revolutionary.This book is not an autobiography. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a razor-sharp investigation into hip hop and rap music by searing lyricist and global music icon Chuck D of Public Enemy.  Engaging with some of the world’s leading thinkers on hip hop, “Professor Chuck” sets out on a journey that celebrates fifty years of hip hop and charts paths forward for its future. Exploring the intersections of hip hop with Black radicalism and feminism, media and technology, and globalization and politics, this curated collection shows the power of culture and the arts not only to bring people together but to bring about political change in this current hour of chaos.Features conversations with leading thinkers, including Robin D. G. Kelley, H. Samy Alim, Jeff Chang, Davey D, Scot Brown, Cheryl L. Keyes, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Bryonn Bain, Maya Jupiter, Adam Bradley, Joan Morgan, and more.