Politics and Social Justice

Kenya has hit the headlines most recently as the ancestral home of the USA’s first black president, Barack Obama. But the nation is also home to East Africa’s oldest and most diverse popular music traditions, reaching back to Kenyan musical father Fundi Konde.

Amateur hip hop about issues ranging from drugs, AIDS, eating disorders, black agency, etc.

Inauguration Address of Harold Washington, Chicago's 42nd Mayor (content of speech available at: http://www.chipublib.org/cplbooksmovies/cplarchive/mayors/washington_ina...)

Rap's critique of police brutality in the 1980s. The Hip Hop Political Convention. The rise (and fall) of Kwame Kilpatrick, the "hip-hop mayor" of Detroit. Barack Obama echoing the body language of Jay-Z on the campaign trail. A growing number of black activists and artists claim that rap and hip-hop are the basis of an influential new urban social movement.

Slingshot Hip Hop weaves together the stories of young Palestnians living in Gaza, the West Bank and inside Israel as they discover Hip Hop and employ it as a tool to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty.

This newly expanded and revised second edition of That's the Joint! brings together the most important and up-to-date hip-hop scholarship in one comprehensive volume.

How did the Depression-era folk-song collector Alan Lomax end up with a songwriting credit on Jay-Z’s song “Takeover”? Why doesn’t Clyde Stubblefield, the primary drummer on James Brown recordings from the late 1960s such as “Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat,” get paid for other musicians’ frequent use of the beats he performed on those songs?

In Buena Vista in the Club, Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaetón.

Rap music has always been under surveillance, and the purpose of this article is to explore the most significant ways that the genre has been influenced by it. It begins with an overview of some of the ways in which surveillance has played a crucial role in the emergence of hip hop in general and rap in particular.