Hip Hop Research Articles

CONECTANDO RESISTÊNCIA E AFETOS COM A CONSTRUÇÃO DE UM GRAFITE NA EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL

This article sought to narrate the daily development of a pedagogical activity using digital graffiti with Early Childhood Education students from a public school in Aparecida de Goiânia, during the transition from the Covid-19 pandemic to the post-pandemic period. The aim is to demonstrate how the practice of digital graffiti can be employed in Early Childhood Education to promote children’s creative expression and socio-emotional education. The methodology adopted was an exploratory, descriptive investigation based on the authors’ experiences and the adaptation of the Physical Education curriculum to incorporate digital graffiti activities. The sessions were structured in four stages, each inspired by songs and relevant artists from the Hip Hop movement, guiding reflections on the pandemic and the collective creation of digital graffiti. The main results include enhancing creative expression through digital graffiti and integrating digital technology into children’s educational processes. Additionally, the activity allowed participants to share experiences related to overcoming the pandemic period, strengthening their socio-emotional skills. It is concluded that digital graffiti can be used as an important curricular tool in Early Childhood Education, expanding interaction through play and paving the way for hybrid teaching models that combine innovative pedagogical practices in cyberculture.

Computational kinematics of dance: distinguishing hip hop genres

Dance plays a vital role in human societies across time and culture, with different communities having invented different systems for artistic expression through movement (genres). Differences between genres can be described by experts in words and movements, but these descriptions can only be appreciated by people with certain background abilities. Existing dance notation schemes could be applied to describe genre-differences, however they fall substantially short of being able to capture the important details of movement across a wide spectrum of genres. Our knowledge and practice around dance would benefit from a general, quantitative and human-understandable method of characterizing meaningful differences between aspects of any dance style; a computational kinematics of dance. Here we introduce and apply a novel system for encoding bodily movement as 17 macroscopic, interpretable features, such as expandedness of the body or the frequency of sharp movements. We use this encoding to analyze Hip Hop Dance genres, in part by building a low-cost machine-learning classifier that distinguishes genre with high accuracy. Our study relies on an open dataset (AIST++) of pose-sequences from dancers instructed to perform one of ten Hip Hop genres, such as Breakdance, Popping, or Krump. For comparison we evaluate moderately experienced human observers at discerning these sequence’s genres from movements alone (38% where chance = 10%). The performance of a baseline, Ridge classifier model was fair (48%) and that of the model resulting from our automated machine learning pipeline was strong (76%). This indicates that the selected features represent important dimensions of movement for the expression of the attitudes, stories, and aesthetic values manifested in these dance forms. Our study offers a new window into significant relations of similarity and difference between the genres studied. Given the rich, complex, and culturally shaped nature of these genres, the interpretability of our features, and the lightweight techniques used, our approach has significant potential for generalization to other movement domains and movement-related applications.

Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures

Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures

Children’s and adolescents’ engagement with music and the potential for (digital) empowerment processes: A text-mining-supported scoping review

Extracurricular and out-of-school engagement with music is often associated with positive effects for musical goals while also holding potential for developmental and empowerment processes. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance and the potential of digital technologies for facilitating musical engagement. The emergence of digitally transformed musicking has added complexity to the already multifaceted and complex field of research on non-formal musical engagement. Thus, the aims of this text-mining-supported scoping review are (1) to map and describe the underlying research topics in the field of children’s and adolescents’ musical engagement, (2) to explore potential for empowerment processes, and (3) to identify the extent to which digital aspects emerge. Based on N = 624 articles, a topic-modeling procedure yielded k = 10 topics covering cognitive, emotional and attitudinal, youth cultural and digital aspects. Among these, one predominantly digital topic comprised studies on the production and consumption of music. Implications for the potential for empowerment can be drawn from studies that focus on youth cultural aspects, such as hip-hop culture and digital aspects. Limitations and implications for further research are discussed, including how to transfer these findings and how new technologies can further enhance music-making and creation.

Assembling with VR

In this paper, we consider the claims that constellate around the concepts of immersion, presence and empathy that have been made about virtual reality across many disciplines of study, including psychology, criminology, immersive film and media. These claims are applied to an interdisciplinary, collaborative project: VR Dance; which engaged young people (11-16 years) in hip hop and immersive technology workshops over a six-week period. We discuss the ways in which co-created immersive environments which centre the body offer potential to tune into and re-calibrate our sensitivities and modes of engagement with each other and the environments we are in. We argue that this is not simply as a result of technology’s effects on individuals but constituted in wider assemblages of human and nonhuman actors.  We make the case for virtual reality, not as a tool for ‘becoming other’, but as part of wider assemblages in ongoing transformations, relocations, and calibrations. Funding Acknowledgement VR Dance is an East London Dance programme, funded by the Mayor of London’s Young Londoner’s Fund & the London Borough of Redbridge and delivered in partnership with the University of Bristol, BirdGang Ltd, Maskomi and PlayLa.bZ.

“Hip Hop and the Televisual Global South: Atlanta and Sintonia”

In recent years, audiences in the United States and around the globe have witnessed an explosion of television and streaming content focused on hip hop. Such content contemplates, historicizes, promotes, and represents the art form, artists, industry, and regional genres that have together emerged as a central feature of contemporary popular culture. This article explores the spatial and thematic links to the theoretical Global South in Atlanta and Sintonia. Analyzing the series’ respective portrayals of race and inequality from the margins, I examine how hip-hop/ funk and the Global South function as narrative tools and symbolic spaces through which notions of a shared precarity stemming from global flows of capital are constructed, consumed, and challenged. By considering the series’ connections to the Global South, this article contributes to a growing body of work that aims to move beyond research that centers the west and the nation-state.

Hip Hop, Social Reproduction, and the Possible Selves of Young Black Men

Twenty-seven years ago, the documentary Hoop Dreams solidified a theory—that the world of athletics was one of the few places where adolescent Black males could find success. By the late 1990s, researchers were framing athletics as the next direction in the Civil Rights Movement. In this article, I argue that the historical framing of Black boys in athletics—as a way up, a way out—is similar to the contemporary framing of Black boys in Hip Hop Based Education (HHBE). Using an ethnographic case example of the Homeboys, a group of adolescent Black males experiencing homelessness, I maintain that HHBE, without critical implementation and reflection, limits the possible selves of Black boys in socially reproductive ways. Unlike Hoop Dreams, which historically created an incentive to stay invested in formal educational settings, HHBE offers little “possible selves” development for young Black men. This research asserts that if HHBE, and the myriad ways Hip Hop is taken up in formal and informal educational settings is not dually paired with the critical process of institutional actors envisioning all the possible selves that black boys can become, then it becomes another hegemonic socially reproductive tool wielded by educators.

Development and validation of a hip hop intervention programme for pre-school children: Crescer+ (Grow+)

Physical inactivity and obesity in children are public health problems that can be fought through the practice of rhythmic activities such as hip hop. The aim of this study was to develop and validate the Crescer+ hip hop physical exercise programme, designed to promote increased physical activity and improved physical-motor skills in children aged 3 to 5 years old. The exercise programme was designed and validated by physical fitness and motor development specialists, following the Revised Guidelines for Reporting Criteria on the Development and Evaluation of Complex Health Interventions (CReDECI2), and the Consensus Guidelines on Physical Exercise Programme Reporting Model (CERT), and went through three phases: development, piloting and evaluation. This study presents an intervention proposal based on children's motor development, emphasizing foundational motor skills and drawn on hip hop's identity motor skills, as well as its exploration of various coordinative abilities. The Crescer+ programme proposal presents suggestions for adapting to the target population and choreographies that can be replicated by physical fitness professionals. Keywords: motor development, second childhood, foundational motor skills, complex intervention, fitness  

"The Design and Acceptability of a Hip Hop Themed Integrated Nutrition Math Curriculum for Minoritized 5th Grade Students Using the Multisensory Multilevel Health Education Model".

Digital technology creates new opportunities to design multisensory learning experiences. Evidence suggests that digital innovation can greatly benefit health education, including nutrition programs. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the education sector, forcing schools to modify standard practices from exclusively in-person delivery to online or blended learning. Digitalized curriculums became particularly useful as an Emergency Remote Teaching tool. This article focuses on developing and implementing a multimedia, multisensory, and scalable Hip-Hop Healthy Eating and Living in Schools (H.E.A.L.S.) Nutrition-Math Curriculum (NMC). NMC comprises 20 lessons-music-based multimedia resources used in the classroom or at home. Fourteen lessons represent self-directed online modules (asynchronous learning) hosted on a Learning Management System (LMS) called "Gooru." The remaining six lessons are teacher-facilitated (in person or using Zoom) review sessions (synchronous learning). The article discusses (1) the development of NMC through the lens of the Multisensory Multilevel Health Education Model (MMHEM), (2) the high acceptability of NMC evaluated using a mixed-methods design among minoritized fifth-grade students attending an after-school program, and (3) the students' completion and mastery rates of the NMC modules based on LMS data. Multimedia nutrition education programs integrated with common core curriculum content, such as NMC, may be a promising avenue for disseminating health education to minoritized children living in New York City and similar high fast-food density cities.

Gentlemen rappers: Masculinity and traditional style in Korean popular music performance

Across its history, K-pop has put traditional Korean elements to a diversity of uses, including in music, dance and visual style. This article investigates the use of traditional elements in the sub-genre of Korean hip hop and rap performance. In this strongly masculine sub-genre, the cultural meanings invoked in the incorporation and remediation of traditional Korean elements take on a more particular generic significance, one that highlights the hegemonic masculinity enjoyed by the referenced figure of the ‘gentleman scholar’ ( seonbi). With this narrower scope of investigation, I argue that the use of traditional cultural elements in Korean popular music can simultaneously function as an element of attraction for global audiences, as has previously been argued, while still maintaining local, genre-specific meanings. In particular, I argue that the gentlemanliness of the ‘gentleman scholar’ comes from and expresses a position of power and privilege.

Hip Hop Pantsula making Setswana fashionable: impact on Setswana orthography

The aim of this article is to investigate how South African hip-hop lyrics break language rules and promote South African indigenous languages. The article focuses on youth participation in linguistic change in South Africa and illustrates how youth linguistic cultures are practised in everyday interactions. In South Africa, most rap musicians consider hip-hop to be the voice of youth culture. The challenge is that hip-hop has a bad reputation, mostly because hip-hop rappers were associated with bad language and violence. However, motswako (a South African genre of hip-hop) lyricists want to be associated with creativity and freestyling that make sense to the youth in a contemporary era. The study of hip-hop and identity from a factual narrative perspective is not well represented. In this article, discourse analysis is used to examine how the linguistics and identities are presented by motswako lyricists to associate creativity with freestyling from an African perspective. A few examples of motswako lyrics were selected to analyse the creativity of the lyricists and their contributions to linguistic and cultural change. The results show that youth in these spaces are active creators and contributors to linguistic and cultural change, which has led to the popularity of this genre.

Suicide in Song: A Thematic Analysis of 674 Songs Referencing Suicide

ABSTRACT Music is a ubiquitous form of entertainment, engaging millions and providing emotional release for both musicians and listeners. Songs referencing suicide – a generally taboo subject – are common in U.S. culture, appearing in every genre of music from country to hip hop, punk rock to blues. Suicide songs prompt concern among the lay public (e.g., lawmakers, parents) and also researchers, whose work has documented statistically significant relationships between musical preference and suicidality. Still, suicide songs could also carry positive effects for listeners through behavioral modeling by illustrating alternatives to suicide. The outcomes are likely dependent, in part, on lyrical content. To understand lyrical content about suicide, the present study used thematic analysis to identify common threads in modern English-language songs referencing suicide. The lyrics of 674 songs were examined. The analysis identified 5 themes in which musicians illustrated: (1) support and empathy for people struggling with suicide, (2) personal experience with suicidal thoughts, (3) endorsement of suicide, (4) suicide as rebellion or revenge, and (5) self-medication. The study provides the foundation for future research on the relationship between song exposure and listener beliefs, attitudes, and behavior related to suicide.

Russian Hip Hop and the War in Ukraine

In response to the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, beginning as early as 2014 but reaching a critical apex in the early parts of 2022, hip hop in Russia has only further cemented its role as a “popular” vehicle for the promotion of cultural activism and sociopolitical critique. Born out of post-Soviet antagonism, imperial hegemony, neoliberal commercialism, and jingoist logic, “Russian” rap is a mouthpiece of contemporary conditions. A tangible vehicle for the rediscovery of post-Soviet optimism and the promise of financial prosperity, rap in Russia both upholds and challenges cultural norms and values. In February 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict turned savage, and what it meant to be Russian and be a Russian rapper changed forever. While some rappers rejected Putin’s actions, others either endorsed Putin or stayed silent. Despite the foreignness of rap to the Russian nation, by studying Russian rap and its response to geopolitical unrest the Russian “popular” thought can be more accurately understood. To ascertain how the invasion was conceptualized and synthesized into rap by the Russian rap community, two Russian rap tracks (Oksimiron, Miron Yanovich Fyodorov, Oida and Husky, Dmitry Kuznetsov, God of War) were aesthetically and linguistically analyzed. Lying on divergent sides, they represent polar opposites of Russian rap, each encoding their worldview and position of Russian life in disparate ways, reflecting their respective political voice. While limited in scope, the study provides researchers one possible way to observe how Russian rappers internalize and then aestheticize their political beliefs into their musical style.

Rethinking the MBA through Hip Hop innovation and Hip Hop innovators: Fat Joe and DJ Khaled pair with two sport × entertainment faculty.

Theory without relevance for practice in a professional graduate degree has been critiqued by some scholars as a deficit approach when preparing MBA students for the workforce. Scholars and practitioners alike call for more pedagogy in the curriculum with a focus on innovation, creativity, and the involvement of industry practitioners. This paper serves as a case study of a moment in time on Monday, 14 June 2021, when the concept of "pracademics" was realized between two artists and two faculty. Following the transcription of the dialogue between two guest speakers from the Hip Hop world (i.e., Fat Joe and DJ Khaled) and two faculty from the sport management MBA program, the paper analyzes the deeper meaning of their intellectual presence with their expertise in the business of culture (i.e., Hip Hop). Findings reveal how the pairing of Hip Hop artists and faculty in an MBA program can address the innovation gap within global business curricula and models. The broader umbrella of pedagogy and application has implications for other academic disciplines to embrace this concept of pairing academics and industry practitioners.

From Our Cell to Your Block: Hip Hop and Podcasting as a Youth Participatory Action Research Intervention

This narrative inquiry explores the experiences of youth in a school within a juvenile detention facility, who participated in a hip hop and podcasting small-group counseling intervention. Specifically, youth wrote and recorded a podcast consisting of a hip hop song, interviews with their peers, and staff reflections on the youth’s experience. Salient results from this study offered that the hip hop podcasting group supported youth in emotionally processing their experience of being incarcerated.

Hip-hop Subculture as a Media Phenomenon

Subcultures are of significant interest to researchers in the humanities. The processes of digitalization and mediatization, when media network activity and media activities globally affect basic social institutions, suggest a systematic study of subcultures in the context of communication theory. It is noted that the formation and further stability, up to the rooting in the general culture, is characteristic of the youth subculture of hip-hop. The authors of the article set a strategic goal - to find out, on the basis of theoretical and methodological approach, due to what systemic (formal and content) characteristics hip-hop has spread among young people, what communicative characteristics of this subculture determined its flourishing in the period of digitalization. Among the tasks that were solved are the following: characterization of the hip-hop industry as a network media phenomenon is given, the dynamics of its changes at the level of subsystems is considered. The authors for the first time put forward and proved the hypothesis that hip-hop reflects all five stages of development of the system of mass communications. The analysis reveals the rhizome-like nature of the hip-hop subculture as the main reason for the systemic stability of this media phenomenon. The article comprehensively considers the totality of components of the hip-hop subculture as effective communicative practices: graffiti, breakdancing, DJing, rap (rap battles). The tendency of active entry of some subcultural processes and products into mass culture is noted. The peculiarities of hip-hop slang are outlined. The article brings the media-communication approach into the agenda of further scientific research of youth subcultures (primarily hip-hop) and actualizes it.

Mizrahi Rap in Israel: Ethnicity and Intertextuality in the Cosmopolitan Post-Genre Era

Abstract This article uses ethnography and music analysis to compare the intertextuality of Mizrahi music and rap by two generations of hip hop artists in Israel. The perceived compatibility of the two genres is often motivated by apparent similarities between Mizrahiness and Blackness as two ethno-racial categories associated with disenfranchisement. We argue that varied musical approaches to combining Mizrahi music and rap reflect the ways that different generations have negotiated local and global cultural spaces. Early rappers in Israel, who regarded Mizrahi music and rap as two distinct genres, tended to compose a rather mechanistic juxtaposition between them that suggests a perceived ontological gap between the local and the global. Conversely, contemporary rappers have been socialized in and make use of a virtual and borderless musical environment, a realm that arguably breaks down the logic of coherent musical genres and the cultural and spatial compartments they once seemed to occupy. This is reflected in their typical compositional style, which merges the two genres into a seamless, indistinguishable form. The case of “Mizrahi rap” demonstrates how global trends are inscribed into local negotiations of ethnicity and how the perceived relatedness between ethnic and racial categories (i.e., Mizrahiness and Blackness) defines new conceptions of the global sphere itself.

Public Prayer as Serious Play: Coming-of-Age in Hip Hop Cultures

Abstract Aggrieved religious practitioners often speak to God in public. Their demands of God elicit critical examination not least because they are irreverent and apathetic. The first part of this article explains the importance of hip hop culture to a democratic society through an analysis of Cornel West’s “danceable education”. The second part describes such an education as pious and playful. The next two parts examine how public prayers from a hip hop (part three) and gospel (part four) artist show how questioning God is a socially valuable way to come-of-age. Artists whose vocation is an act of protest against God-forsakenness and poor governance are exemplified in the invocations of those for whom respectability and redemption remain essential. The vocation of invocations in public stress the social value of loss and negation for reasons—maturation and playing—that make public God-talk good for groups that stubbornly need or actively ignore religious practices.

Hip hop entrepreneurship: the poetics of the Hip Hop Mogul

ABSTRACT Scholars of entrepreneurship, business, and economics have been reluctant to consider Hip Hop as a viable means for research and theory-building. Oddly enough, through the 1970s – a period that was generally characterized by stagnation and high unemployment – Hip Hop captivated audiences around the globe, creating innovative and diverse market opportunities for a host of different communities. The term ‘Hip Hop Mogul’ emerged to describe artists whose commercial viability appealed to varied sensibilities and disparate public spheres. Who are these Hip Hop Moguls? What are the interests of these Hip Hop Moguls? Drawing on lyrical content from a sample of Hip Hop Moguls (n = 15), we examine the discursive frameworks that make-up Moguldom, its politics, and its ways of being. Ultimately, our findings shed light on the different ways that marginalized communities negotiate antagonistic economic relations and disrupt traditional business paradigms.

Meaning construction in Nigerian multilingual hip hop: a study in sociology of music

Abstract The wide acceptability of Nigerian hip hop music, home and abroad, indicates increasing value of the inclusion of local popular languages in the composition and performance of the music. In the text of many of the award winning singles and albums are mixtures of different languages ranging from English, Pidgin English, Yoruba, Igbo and other local dialects. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of structuralism, this study examines meaning construction in hip hop music in Nigeria. By focusing on the Nigerian hip hop artists, who adopt different slangs embedded with codes considered absurd within the mainstream cultural milieu, the study closely investigates constructed meanings in the lyrics of four Nigerian award winning hip hop artists. All the artists adopted multilingual codes-switching from one language to another in presentation of their messages. The codes in the songs generally symbolise and present messages or meaning that appears out of the mainstream cultural meanings. Listeners and artistes meet at the level of interpretations. The article argues that Nigerian artists creatively present a sub-culture where they and their fans can relate through codes and words embedded with symbolic meanings shared by both artists and fans.