Research Guides (LibGuides): PCA 241: Hip Hop: History, Evolution, and Culture (Voice): Welcome!

Welcome!

Welcome to the LibGuide for the Perspectives in The Creative Arts-Music in Action section:

"Hip Hop: History, Evolution, and Culture"

This guide is meant to help you develop the skills and tools to accomplish your course objective and goals:

The aim of this course will be to examine Hip-Hop as a cultural movement by journeying through
its chronology while looking at the surrounding social and political contexts that influenced its
ongoing transformations and listening to the music that was birthed through these eras.

● Develop an understanding of the ways Hip-Hop has been shaped by the experiences of African-Americans, Caribbean-Americans, and Latino Americans as oppressed and marginalized groups living in the U.S.
● Develop an understanding of and identify the four elements that comprise the foundation of Hip-Hop.
● Develop an appreciation of the cultural, political, and artistic value of Hip-Hop by understanding the socio-political catalysts that shaped the genre.
● Improve listening skills such as the ability to identify the various subgenres of hip-hop.
● Understand the literary architecture of a rap song and demonstrate the ability to write a Hip-Hop verse.

The library (and your librarian) are here to help you! Use us early and often!

Resources to Explore

If you're looking for a way to start thinking about your research, try reference! Encyclopedias and annotated bibliographies are great ways to get an overview on academic sources in the field!

The resources below are guides that can point you toward discographies, periodicals, writings on performance practice, political agency, pedagogy and language, religion and spirituality, biographies, the field of hip-hop studies and more!

The Rap/Hip-Hop Entry in "Oxford Bibliographies: Music" (2019)
Oxford Bibliographies provides a seamless pathway to reliable resources for a variety of academic topics. Written and reviewed by academic experts, every article in our database is an authoritative guide to the current scholarship, containing original commentary and annotations. (Database access requires Butler credentials)

Hip-hop studies : an international bibliography and resource guide by John Gray
Call Number: ML128.R28 G73 2016 (Music Reference)
ISBN: 0984413464
Publication Date: 2016
This remarkable new study provides the first comprehensive overview of the burgeoning field of Hip-Hop Studies and its enormous literature. Comprised of more than 7000 entries it encompasses both the early journalistic and popular writing on the subject as well as the wealth of scholarship that has emerged since the mid-1990s. Entries in Hip-Hop Studies span from the first reports on the then nascent idiom in 1978 to the digital scholarship of 2014 in fields ranging from history, anthropology, and sociology to Black and ethnic studies, gender studies, religious studies, law and economics. The book concludes with an extensive reference section that offers a list of Sources Consulted, a guide to relevant Libraries and Archives, two appendices, and separate Author and Subject Indexes.
Blues, Funk, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Hip Hop, and Rap by Eddie S. Meadows
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0203854721
Publication Date: 2010-06-10
This much needed bibliography fills an important gap in the research of African American music and culture and will serve as a fully annotated reference tool that covers the wide range of genres in that area of scholarship.
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present by Paul Finkelman (Editor)
Call Number: eBook AND in print: E185 .E5453 2009 v.1-5 (in compact shelving)
ISBN: 9780195167795
Publication Date: 2009-02-02
This remarkable work traces from the Reconstruction Era to the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, the Encyclopedia contains approximately 1,200 fully cross-referenced entries all signed by leading scholars and experts, offering the most reliable and extensive treatment to be found on African American history in this era.
Encyclopedia of Rap and Hip Hop Culture by Yvonne Bynoe
Call Number: Music Reference: ML102.R27 B96 2006 (in the basement of Irwin Library)
ISBN: 0313330581
Publication Date: 2005
This encyclopedia examines all four elements of Hip Hop Culture, providing students, scholars, and music fans with a complete history of the thirty-year music genre. This encyclopedia includes approximately 100 photographs, discographies after each entry, and a for further listening list at the end of the volume. Also included is the Hip Hop Declaration of Peace.

The Journal of hip hop studies.
Call Number: online access only
The Journal of Hip Hop Studies (JHHS) is committed to publishing critically engaged, culturally relevant, rigorously researched, and astute analyses of Hip Hop.

Global Hip Hop Studies Journal (GHHS)
Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a peer-reviewed, rigorous and community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates surrounding hip hop music and culture around the world, twice annually.

The databases below contain a number of journals that cover (among other areas) Hip Hop and rap. Try using terms from the Useful LC Class Nos. and Subjects page to find articles!

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature This link opens in a new window
Provides article citations and abstracts from 3500 international music journals and other scholarly works including books, dissertations, bibliographies, concert reviews, critical commentaries, videos and films, etc.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
This large multi-disciplinary database provides full text for more than 4,770 journals, including full text for over 4,000 peer-reviewed titles.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR provides access to full-text academic electronic journals in various disciplines including economics and finance, political science, history, literature, anthropology, mathematics, sociology, statistics, and education.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Covers literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, etc. Contains current full text scholarly journals which cover these fields and a significant collection of recent scholarly books.

The Rap Year Book by Shea Serrano; Ice-T (Foreword by); Arturo Torres (Illustrator)
Call Number: FORT ML3531 .S45 2015
ISBN: 1419718185
Publication Date: 2015-10-13
The Rap Year Book is both a narrative and illustrated guide to the most iconic and influential rap songs ever created. Butler has access in print as well as the eBook edition
Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor
Call Number: FORT ML3531 .P57 2013
ISBN: 1606996908
Publication Date: 2013-12-06
The lore of the early days of hip hop has become the stuff of myth, so what better way to document this fascinating, epic true story than in another great American mythological medium, the comic book? The Hip Hop Family Tree is an exciting and essential cultural chronicle and a must for hip hop fans, pop-culture addicts, and anyone who wants to know how it went down back in the day. Butler Libraries has access to volumes one through four.
Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (Produced by); National Museum of African American History and Culture (Executive Producer)
Call Number: M1630.18 .S65 2020
ISBN: 1734130504
Publication Date: 2020-05-01
A 9-disc collaboration between Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the National Museum of African American History & Culture that explores a cultural and social phenomenon that has changed America.

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang; D. J. Kool Herc (Introduction by)
Call Number: ML3531 .C5 2005
ISBN: 0312425791
Publication Date: 2005-12-27
Can't Stop Won't Stop is a powerful cultural and social history of the end of the American century, and a provocative look into the new world that the hip-hop generation created.
Queer Voices in Hip Hop by Lauron J. Kehrer
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0472903012
Publication Date: 2022-11-02
In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre's beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop's queer roots.
Hip Hop's Amnesia by Reiland Rabaka
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0739174932
Publication Date: 2012-03-01
This book is primarily preoccupied with the ways in which post-enslavement black popular music and black popular culture frequently served as a soundtrack for and reflected the grassroots politics of post-enslavement African American social and political movements. It does this by rescuing and reclaiming the often-overlooked early twentieth century origins and evolution of rap music and hip-hop, tracing the genre's evolution throughout the twentieth century.
The Hip Hop Wars by Tricia Rose
Call Number: FORT HN59.2 .R68 2008
ISBN: 0465008976
Publication Date: 2008-12-02
The Hip-Hop Wars is a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop, not as a sanitized vision of the form, but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yes, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video currently provide. Butler has access both to the print and eBook editions of this book.
Rap on Trial by Erik Nielson
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 1620973413
Publication Date: 2019-11-12
A groundbreaking exposé about the alarming use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence to convict and incarcerate young men of color. Detectives have reopened cold cases on account of rap lyrics and videos alone, and prosecutors have secured convictions by presenting such lyrics and videos of rappers as autobiography. Now, an alarming number of aspiring rappers are imprisoned. No other form of creative expression is treated this way in the courts. This book places the disturbing practice in the context of hip hop history and exposes what's at stake. It's a gripping, timely exploration at the crossroads of contemporary hip hop and mass incarceration.

How Hip Hop became Hit Pop by Amy Coddington
Call number: eBook
ISBN: 978-0-520-38393-X
Publication information: California: University of California Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.165
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
This book examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop’s introduction into the musical mainstream. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre’s growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream.

Rhyme's Challenge by David Caplan
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780199714100
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Rhyme's Challenge offers a concise, pithy primer to hip-hop poetics while presenting a spirited defense of rhyme in contemporary American poetry.
Flow : the rhythmic voice in rap music by Mitchell Ohriner
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0190670428
Publication Date: 2019
Flow theorizes the rhythm of the rapping voice at the intersection of music, speech, and poetry. Author Mitchell Ohriner addresses pressing questions in theories of musical rhythm and meter through a combination of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading.
What's Good by Daniel Levin Becker
Call Number: ML3531 .L45 2022
ISBN: 9780872868762
Publication Date: 2022-02-01
"A love letter to the verbal artistry of hip-hop, What's Good is a work of passionate lyrical analysis...Over a series of short chapters, each centered on a different lyric, Daniel Levin Becker considers how rap's use of language operates and evolves at levels ranging from the local (slang, rhyme) to the analytical (quotation, transcription) to the philosophical (morality, criticism, irony), celebrating the pleasures and perils of any attempt to decipher its meaning-making technologies." -- provided by publisher

AVON - Academic Video Online (Alexander Street Press) This link opens in a new window
Examples of content: “Blacking Up: Hip Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity” or "Straight Up Rappin’" – 1993 documentary about NYC rap poetry
Films on Demand This link opens in a new window
Examples of content: “Flyin' Cut Sleeves” or “From Mambo to Hip Hop: a Bronx Tale”
Swank Digital Campus This link opens in a new window
Example of content: “Boyz N the Hood”
Kanopy Streaming This link opens in a new window
Example of content: “Something from Nothing: the Art of Rap” directed by Ice-T, interviews with Afrika Bambaataa, Eminem, Nas, Mos Def, Kanye West, Chuck D, KRS-One, Snoop Dogg, Run-DMC, and Ice Cube.

Did you want to did deeper? Consider looking in the Archives!

Archives of African American Music and Culture (AAAMC) Hip Hop Collections
At IU's AAAMC, you will find materials covering a range of African American musical idioms and cultural expressions primarily from the post-World War II era.
Cornell Hip Hop Collection (CHHC)
Established in 2007, the Cornell Hip Hop Collection preserves more than 250,000 items across dozens of archives documenting the origins of Hip Hop culture and its spread around the globe.
Harvard Hiphop Archive
The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute curates all forms of Hiphop material culture. On their site they have a blog, bibliography, artist pages, audio timeline, and annotated lyrics.
Hip-Hop Radio Archive
This site curates recordings of hip-hop radio from the 1980s and 1990s (commercial, college, community, and pirate stations) and provides access to audio tracks of them with annotated descriptions, linked metadata to track DJs, shows, albums, and chronological context for the music referenced and shows that aired closest together.
50 Years of HIP HOP: "The Dirty South" : A Guide
A research guide from the Atlanta University Center covering the rise and development of "The Dirty South" with a particular focus on Trap and Bounce music as well as women in the South.

PCA 241: Hip Hop: History, Evolution, and Culture (Voice)

Performing and Visual Arts Librarian

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Welcome!

Resources to Explore

If you're looking for a way to start thinking about your research, try reference! Encyclopedias and annotated bibliographies are great ways to get an overview on academic sources in the field!

Did you want to did deeper? Consider looking in the Archives!

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