What is Hip Hop? Hip hop speaks in a voice that is sometimes gruff, sometimes enraged, sometimes despairing, sometimes hopeful. Hip hop is the voice of forgotten streets laying claim to the high life of rims and timbs and threads and bling. Hip hop speaks in the muddled language of would-be prophets--mocking the architects of the status quo and stumbling in the dark toward a blurred vision of a world made right. What is hip hop? It's a cultural movement with a traceable theological center. Daniel White Hodge follows the tracks of hip-hop theology and offers a path from its center to the cross, where Jesus speaks truth.

Avoiding the easy definitions and caricatures that tend to celebrate or condemn the "hip hop generation," Hip Hop Matters focuses on fierce and far-reaching battles being waged in politics, pop culture, and academe to assert control over the movement. At stake, Watkins argues, is the impact hip hop has on the lives of the young people who live and breathe the culture. He presents incisive analysis of the corporate takeover of hip hop and the rampant misogyny that undermines the movement's progressive claims. Ultimately, we see how hip hop struggles reverberate in the larger world: global media consolidation; racial and demographic flux; generational cleavages; the reinvention of the pop music industry; and the ongoing struggle to enrich the lives of ordinary youth.

Offers an overview of "Dirty South" rap--a phenomenon centered around cities such as Atlanta, Miami, and New Orleans--covering such groups as The Neptunes, Timbaland, OutKast, Lil Jon, Ludacris, and Cee-Lo.

The essays contained in this volume address some of the most visible, durable and influential of African American musical styles as they developed from the mid-1960s into the 21st-century. Soul, funk, pop, R&B and hip hop practices are explored both singly and in their many convergences, and in writings that have often become regarded as landmarks in black musical scholarship. These works employ a wide range of methodologies, and taken together they show the themes and concerns of academic black musical study developing over three decades. While much of the writing here is focused on music and musicians in the United States, the book also documents important and emergent trends in the study of these styles as they have spread across the world. The volume maintains the original publication format and pagination of each essay, making for easy and accurate cross-reference and citation. Tom Perchards introduction gives a detailed overview of the book‘s contents, and of the field as a whole, situating the present essays in a longer and wider tradition of African American music studies. In bringing together and contextualising works that are always valuable but sometimes difficult to access, the volume forms an excellent introductory resource for university music students and researchers.

I was a 7-year-old Chicago kid when Hip Hop was born in the Bronx, NY projects. .it had been around for some years getting its legs under it before I got a taste of it around junior high school...being from Chicago, my foundation is house music, but when I heard the Ultramagnetic MCs, I was sold...Hip Hop is a part of my being, I was raised on it, and it has been the soundtrack for some of the best moments/years of my life. .'til death do us part. .Hip Hop married lyricism, djing, graffiti art, breakdancing, and later, KNOwledge of Self. .every component equally as essential to the vibe. .over the years, as with other music forms created by African people, we've witnessed Hip Hop being compromised, coopted, and commercialized. .it has been whittled down gradually to something that is unrecognizable to its beginnings. .the profit motive has crept in along with the overarching agendas that anchor Black people to that bottom rung on that capitalist/classist ladder. .rich or poor, we are all being targeted with WAR. .one of our great ancestors, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, put it best, "music is the weapon". .Hip Hop was OUR weapon. .today though, Hip Hop is no longer a tool our creative linguists use to teach and reach us. .the consciousness has been evaporated and the messages have drastically changed. .from Black culture, Hip Hop is somewhat estranged. .I still LOVE her. .WE still LOVE her. .WE still want Hip Hop to return to us WHOLE. .food for US. .with a SOUL. .

In Search of Soul explores the meaning of “soul” in sacred and profane incarnations, from its biblical origins to its central place in the rich traditions of black and Latin history. Surveying the work of writers, artists, poets, musicians, philosophers and theologians, Alejandro Nava shows how their understandings of the “soul” revolve around narratives of justice, liberation, and spiritual redemption. He contends that biblical traditions and hip-hop emerged out of experiences of dispossession and oppression. Whether born in the ghettos of America or of the Roman Empire, hip-hop and Christianity have endured by giving voice to the persecuted. This book offers a view of soul in living color, as a breathing, suffering, dreaming thing.

Gospel music evolved in often surprising directions during the post-Civil Rights era. Claudrena N. Harold's in-depth look at late-century gospel focuses on musicians like Yolanda Adams, Andraé Crouch, the Clark Sisters, Al Green, Take 6, and the Winans, and on the network of black record shops, churches, and businesses that nurtured the music. Harold details the creative shifts, sonic innovations, theological tensions, and political assertions that transformed the music, and revisits the debates within the community over groundbreaking recordings and gospel's incorporation of rhythm and blues, funk, hip-hop, and other popular forms. At the same time, she details how sociopolitical and cultural developments like the Black Power Movement and the emergence of the Christian Right shaped both the art and attitudes of African American performers. Weaving insightful analysis into a collective biography of gospel icons, When Sunday Comes explores the music's essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural selves.