Hip-Hop as Literature? The Conversation Continues

Minnesota Public Radio
Midmorning Live

Anthology of Rap and Hip-hop

Over the past 30 years rap and hip-hop have emerged as a powerful and influential cultural force. Midmorning examines the power and the poetry of rap music, from the "old school" to the present day.

Guests

* Adam Bradley: Associate professor of English and author of the "Anthology of Rap.

* Mark Anthony Neal: Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University.

* Toki Wright: Professor at McNally Smith School of Music in St. Paul, MN and professional rapper/hip-hop artist.

Rediscovering Ourselves in Classic Black Books

A Time To Read:
Rediscovering Ourselves in Classic Black Books
by Stephane Dunn | TheLoop21

I’d huddle under the covers, literally reading by flashlight after I’d worn out Mama’s indulgence and she ordered the light off and me to sleep. There was always some book I couldn’t let go of easily. Mama and my father helped create my reading addictions; there were always books – all the Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney fairytales, children’s encyclopedias and so forth, and I tagged along to the library with my big sister who remembers taking me to there for my first library card.

Between fifth and seventh grades, there were the Nancy Drew and Judy Blume books, Walter Dean Myers, and the 'Little House on the Prairie' series. In middle school, I fell upon 'Little Women' and 'The Grapes of Wrath,' John Steinbeck’s beautiful tragic tale of the Joads, a displaced family of poor white sharecroppers in the depression era that drew me again and again.

Then there was a turning point in my reading life somewhere around the summer before eighth grade. I combed the library shelves looking for something different – actually some more books by black writers - and discovered an autobiography I’ve never forgotten and reread many time. 'Coming of Age in Mississippi' by Anne Moody brought the Civil Rights movement alive for a post Civil-rights young girl like me, growing up in the Midwest, far removed from my Mom’s adolescence spent picking cotton in the South. I could imagine what it was like being a black girl, surviving despite being preyed upon by white and black men and fighting white supremacy amidst the constant threat of violence and death.

I was starved then for other stories by black voices and I found many – Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Mildred Taylor, Walter Mosley, Gloria Naylor, Charles Johnson, Malcolm X, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and too many more to list them all. I was helped along from the tenth to twelfth grade when Mrs. Poe, my white English teacher, saw my passion for books, and opened up her considerable private collection of books by black authors to me. By senior year, I’d cried over Morrison’s Pecola, Alice Walker’s Celie, and Anne Petry’s (pre-'Coldest Winter Ever' and 'Push') urban black girl tale – 'The Street.' I was an average student by high school standards (somewhere between a low B and C range), but little did I know, my reading habit formed a foundation that would help me be successful in college. I was a disciplined reader and I loved it.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

Literature from The Underground: 'Born to Use Mics'

Does a new anthology devoted to a hip-hop classic elevate the genre to its rightful place as a literary form?

Literature from the Underground

ADAM SERWER | February 5, 2010

Illmatic, the first album by hip-hop elder statesman Nas, is a masterpiece. Released in 1994, its tales of scowling corner boys, prowling drug addicts, undercover cops, treacherous lovers, and remorseful gangsters are so vivid that you can almost feel your nostrils being singed as Nas brushes the marijuana ash from his clothes. From out the gate, Nas identifies himself as a writer's writer ("see with the pen I'm extreme") and proceeds to prove himself right, offering lines that are poetic ("with more kicks/than a baby in a mother's stomach"), bleak ("straight-up shit is real/and any day could be your last in the jungle"), and cautiously hopeful ("that buck that bought a bottle/could have struck the lotto").

As the legend goes, the frenetic pace of Nas' flow, his complex internal rhyme schemes, and his dense lyricism had people wearing out their cassette tapes, rewinding them over and over again in disbelief. It's the one album in all of hip-hop whose artistic value, regardless of the critic's personal taste, is unassailable. Even Nas' longtime nemesis, Jay-Z, frankly confesses that the first time he heard the album, "the shit was so ahead/thought we was all dead."

Despite not being a commercial success at the time, Illmatic was recognized as a classic almost immediately. A lean album comprising 10 tracks that eschew trendy beats and high-profile guest appearances, its mythical status was virtually assured when The Source magazine -- then still widely known as hip-hop's bible -- broke its embargo on giving albums a five-mic rating (the equivalent of a five-star rating) to bestow the honor on Illmatic. Nas was praised for reclaiming hip-hop from the gangsta rap groups of the West Coast and ushering in an East Coast renaissance that included the likes of the Notorious B.I.G. and Jay-Z himself.

The new anthology Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas's Illmatic, edited by Michael Eric Dyson and Sohail Daulatzai, is a love letter to Illmatic, a self-conscious effort to preserve the album as a classic of poetic nonfiction. There's plenty of academic work on hip-hop as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. But despite being the most distinct and dominant form of poetic nonfiction of the past 30 years, it has yet to be given its due as literature. Sure, your average liberal-arts college has more than its share of rap-focused classes taught by hip professors ready to act as urban-culture guides for wide-eyed private-school kids. (My class at Vassar was called "Literature from the Underground.") But these are seen as quirky electives. For the most part hip-hop is still fighting a dulled American impulse -- the same one that dismissed jazz out of hand as "noise" for so long -- that the artistic contributions of urban black culture are just fodder for the groundlings. If Illmatic fails to persuade the reader of hip-hop's intrinsic value as poetic nonfiction, the editors seem to be asking, what else could?

Read the Full Review @ The American Prospect

5th African-American Literature Symposium @ NCCU

Fifth African-American Literature Symposium

The Fifth African-American Literature Symposium, “It’s A New Day: The Vicissitude of African American Autobiography from Briton Hammon to President Barack Obama,” is a symposium is sponsored by the Department of English and Mass Communication and the NCCU Lyceum Series.

This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African-American Studies at Duke University. His keynote address, “A (Nearly) Flawless Masculinity: Barack Obama’s Performance of Cosmopolitan Blackness,” will begin at 10:45 a.m. Dr. Neal is a renowned scholar whose works include Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and New Black Man (2005). He has appeared on National Public Radio and in the Los Angeles Times.

Additionally, panelists from universities such as Hampton University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Maryland at Eastern Shore, and University of North Carolina at Wilmington will give paper presentations throughout the day.

Contact Name: Dr. Wendy Rountree

Contact Phone: 919-530-7105

Location: On Campus, Farrison-Newton Communications Building, Theatre