One Nation Under Hip-Hop? William Jelani Cobb and Jason Tanz Reviewed in the Washington Post

One Nation Under Hip-Hop

Even as its beat begins to fade, the influence of the music is everywhere.

Reviewed by Adam Bradley
Sunday, January 28, 2007; BW08

OTHER PEOPLE'S PROPERTY
A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America
By Jason Tanz
Bloomsbury. 254 pp. $24.95

TO THE BREAK OF DAWN
A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic
By William Jelani Cobb
New York Univ. 200 pp. $22.95

Hip-hop is dead. That's what rap legend Nas claims in the title of his latest album. He just might be right. According to Nielsen Soundscan, album sales in all genres declined by nearly 5 percent in 2006, largely attributable to the increasing popularity of digital downloads. Rap sales, however, plummeted by more than 20 percent, the most of any genre. Ironically, this downturn comes at a time when hip-hop seems to be catering to commercial tastes as never before, often at the expense of artistic innovation.

But don't write rap's obituary yet. Hip-hop still remains a dominant voice in youth culture, though it undoubtedly faces an identity crisis. Now 30 years old, hip-hop must reconcile the twin tensions of art and commerce -- just as jazz did in the 1940s, when bebop supplanted swing and young lions such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie emerged as cultural icons capable of crossing the color line. And because the majority of rap artists are black and much of the audience is white, the genre bears both the promise and the peril of interracial encounter. Like jazz, hip-hop has the paradoxical potential to promote understanding and to reinforce stereotypes.

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Iona Rozeal Brown

UNC-Chapel Hill visiting artist Iona Rozeal Brown paints vivid images of ancient Japanese subjects, but with a twist. Her courtesans and geisha wear cornrows, afros and Adidas. She joins host Frank Stasio to discuss cultural appropriation of hip-hop among Japanese youth sub-cultures and its impact on her art.

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Note for a “Round the Way Girl”

Note for a “Round the Way Girl” on Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow

“In Hustle, we can appreciate Nola’s (Taryn Manning)
yearning to be more than a pimp’s pussy cash box …”

By Stephane Dunn

Hmmmm ... a film about a street hustling pimp with rap star aspirations ... how special, another ghetto rags to rap riches movie ‘cause Eminem’s 8 Mile (2002) hasn’t been remade enough. Still, I swallowed my considerable skepticism and went to see it like a good cultural critic should. Surprisingly, Hustle & Flow offers a bit more of an interesting and intelligent treatment of the ghetto rags-to-riches formula and blessedly avoids the Hollywood polish of such movies as 8 Mile. Writer-director Craig Brewer’s gritty Southern ’hood drama offers an unflinching physical and social portrait of contemporary Memphis street life. While it retains the inherent phallocentric dominance that has long structured such films, it offers a significant and unique contribution to the dialogue about ghettocentric cinematic representations.

The imagery of black female sexuality, particularly that associated with poor and working-class black women has long been a controversial and disturbing issue for African American audiences because of the historical problem of racist representations. In the nineteenth century, Euro-American scientists and cultural theorists associated the very bodies of African women with sexual abnormality. Through much of the twentieth century, American popular culture imaged black women as problematically hypersexual or asexual, bitchy, domineering, emasculating, unfeminine, and unwomanly. Encapsulated somewhere between slave-era notions of the Mammy and contemporary notions of the “Jezebel,” the portrait of sexualized black women encompasses contemporary stereotypes of ghettocentric lower class women, which Hip Hop culture — rap videos and ghetto action films — have popularized.

Hustle & Flow at least adds a bit of flesh to the representations of such characters. D-Jay, played deliciously by Tarence Howard, stars as the anti-hero pimp with rap success dreams who is, unlike the more popularized black pimp archetype, unadorned and materially poor. Though D-Jay is the film’s center, the female characters build the pathos of his representation and much of the film’s richness. In ghetto action films since the 1970s blaxploitation genre, white and black female characters have by and large been treated in simple terms: blond, po’ white trash trophy ho’ (Nola in Hustle), adoring black girlfriend and/or ho’ whom the hero may treat deferentially or not (Shug in Hustle), the sapphire-like fussy bitch (Lexus in Hustle), and the unsupportive, cold, uptight, black middle-class woman (Yevette in Hustle).

Read More at Bright Lights Film Journal

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Stephane Dunn is a writer, professor, and film journalist living in Atlanta, GA. She has published several articles on film, literature, and popular culture and is the author of the forthcoming Baad Bitches and Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies (University of Illinois Press 2007).

Let the World Listen Right!

Documentary film producer Ali Neff explores hip-hop music as a bridge between people and place in her film, "Let the World Listen Right." She joins rap artist Jerome Williams, aka Top Notch, to discuss the role of afro-diasporic musical traditions in strengthening communities in the Mississippi Delta with host Frank Stasio.

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On the Road with Rap Sessions

NATIONAL TOWNHALL MEETINGS SEEK TO ANSWER THE QUESTION,
DOES HIP-HOP HATE WOMEN?

Critically-acclaimed author and hip-hop activist Bakari Kitwana collaborates with the Community Technology Foundation of California to announce a national tour focused on popular culture’s stereotypical representations of women and men in the hip-hop generation.

Rap Sessions presents a diverse panel of leading hip-hop intellectuals to engage youth and community leaders in candid, compelling conversations about the ways the mainstreaming of hip-hop culture influences relationships between young women and men. Targeting the hip-hop generation and their younger millennial siblings, these dynamic and provocative discussions tackle issues from hip-hop’s war of the sexes to ways of ensuring that hip-hop’s emerging political movement is inclusive of an empowering agenda for women.

“For too long the hip-hop community has failed to set forth a national agenda for women,” notes Kitwana. “The goal of these gatherings is to jumpstart a national discussion that asks young people, the hip-hop industry and our policy makers to assume responsibility for their complicity in making hip-hop synonymous with misogyny and homophobia.”

Reflecting on television programming like The Flava of Love, former Source editor-in-chief Kim Osario’s sexual harassment ruling and books like the New York Times bestseller Confessions of a Video Vixen, Kitwana added: “Throughout the last decade, from Congress to the campus center, hip-hop’s troubling representation of women is the question that will not go away. This tour hopes to ensure that solutions to this debate go beyond the ivory tower to intervene in the lives of everyday people.”

Beginning in March 2007, Rap Sessions' interactive community dialogues will convene in ten cities across the United States. Panelists include: Mark Anthony Neal (Duke University Black popular culture professor and author of four books including New Black Man); Hip-Hop journalist Joan Morgan (author of the groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist); filmmaker Byron Hurt (director of Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a film about misogyny and hip-hop) and professor Tracy Sharpley-Whiting (director of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of the forthcoming Pimps Up, Hos Down: Hip Hop and the New Gender Politics).

Kitwana, the moderator of these discussions, is co-founder of the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention and the former editor of The Source. His book The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture has been adopted as a coursebook at over 100 colleges and universities across the country. A consultant for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kitwana has been acknowledged as an expert on youth culture and hip-hop politics by CNN, Fox News, CNBC, BET and other leading news outlets. His writings have appeared in the Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, Savoy and the Boston Globe. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America is his most recent book.

The Community Technology Foundation of California (CTFC) is a statewide public foundation dedicated to increasing access to and use of information and telecommunications technology by underserved communities, including communities of color, low-income, disabled, immigrant, limited English proficient, rural and inner-city communities, seniors and at-risk youth. CTFC has invested over $30 million in programs and initiatives and awarded over 500 grants to 393 non-profit organizations which promote digital inclusion. Founded in 1998, CTFC operates a portfolio of innovative grantmaking, initiatives and leadership programs through an array of partnerships with nonprofits, philanthropy and corporations. For more information, go to www.ZeroDivide.org

March
5th; Purdue University
13th; Los Angeles, CA
20th; Spelman College
22nd; St. Louis, MO
27th; Buffalo State College

April
4th; San Jose, CA
12th; Vanderbilt University
18th; Case Western University
28th; University of Chicago
30th; San Antonio, TX

For more information about Rap Sessions, log onto: http://www.rapsessions.org/

Press Contact: Nicole Balin, Ballin PR, 323-651-1580, email at: nik@ballinpr.com.

Reading Jigga in Chi-Town

The Center for Black Diaspora Presents

“My Passport Says Shawn: Trafficking in Monikers”

Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D.
African and African American Studies,
Duke University

Thursday, February 8, 2007
3:30-5:30pm
Richardson Library, Dorothy Day Room 400
2350 N. Sheffield Ave.


Using the example of hip-hop artist and mogul Jay Z (Shawn Carter), Dr. Mark Anthony Neal examines how hip-hop artists might construct hybrid identities as not only a strategy to circulate in the various commercial and cultural markets that cosmopolitanism affords, but as a means to negotiate and respond to the queering that occurs as individual artists challenge the essential nigga tropes, the performed masculinities preva-lent in contemporary commercial that hip-hop circulates.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OFFICE OF MEDIA RELATIONS
HEALTHY START ACADEMY
DURHAM, N.C. 27701
JANUARY 19, 2007

CONTACT: ARONDA HILL OR R. TERREL MOORE
(919) 956-5599

HEALTHY START ACADEMY TO HOLD “HIP-HOP SPEAKOUT”
WITH SPECIAL GUEST: ACTOR/RAPPER, CHRISTOPHER ‘PLAY’ MARTIN,
AND SCHOLAR/CULTURAL CRITIC, MARK ANTHONY NEAL

DURHAM, N.C. - Healthy Start Academy, the first charter school established in North Carolina will kick-off its 10 year celebration of “Academic Excellence in Choice Education” with its first annual Hip-Hop Speak Out on Monday, January 22, 2007. The event will begin at 10:00 a.m. in Chamberlain Auditorium on the campus of Healthy Start Academy. The event is free and open to the public.

“We believe our students will benefit from the kind of exchange this panel discussion is bound to inspire”, said Principal Dietrich A.M. Danner. “With the King Holiday celebration just past, and Black History month on the horizon, we thought this would be an opportune time to discuss the relationship between Hip-Hop culture and academic achievement”, Danner said.

Christopher Martin, better known as ‘Play’ from the rap and acting duo, “Kid ‘N Play”, and an artist-in-residence at North Carolina Central University will serve as a panelist along with Cicero Leak and Mike Wilson, producers of the award-winning documentary, “Welcome to Durham USA”. Scholar and cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University will also serve as a panelist. The purpose of the event is to engage students in a dialogue with university scholars, community activists and city officials to examine the effects of Hip-Hop Culture on academic achievement. A press conference will immediately follow the event.

Healthy Start Academy is located at 807 West Chapel Hill Street. The event is free and open to the public. For more information please contact Ms. Aronda Hill or Mr. Terrell Moore at (919) 956-5599.