Music

Islam has been a part of hip-hop culture since it sprang from New York's street culture in the 1970s. Today hip-hop has evolved into a truly global artform with a diversity of Muslim Islamic discourses expressed. Using tools from the field of social semiotics, this book examines how Islamic themes feature in US hip-hop culture, maintaining a particular awareness that both Muslims as well as non-Muslims participate in their production. The book also argues that there is a historical continuity in the use of Islamic semiotic resources in US musical culture that runs through the entirety of the 20th century and can be observed in gospel, blues and jazz

Hip-hop legend, Grammy, Oscar and BAFTA award winner Questlove dives into half a century of the genre, from its birth, growing pains and maturity to its continuing reverberation around the world When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn't expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Award-winning musician, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, a New York Times bestselling author, a producer, an entrepreneur, a cofounder of one of hip-hop's defining acts (the Roots), and the genre's unofficial in-house historian. In this landmark book, Hip-Hop Is History, Questlove skilfully traces the creative and cultural forces that made and shaped hip-hop, highlighting both the forgotten but influential gems and the undeniable chart-topping hits-and weaves it all together with the stories no one else knows.

Nairobi Hip Hop Flow combines ethnographic methods, political history, and music and performance analysis to illustrate the richness of hip hop's embodied performance practices. RaShelle R. Peck examines how hip hop artists in Nairobi's underground rap culture engage with political seriousness in lyrics and sound by fostering a creative playfulness using bodily movement. This unprecedented study shows how Nairobi artists circulate diasporic blackness while at the same time indigenizing hip hop music to interrogate Kenya's sociopolitical landscape.

Today, Morocco's hip hop artists are vital to their country's reputation as diverse, creative, and modern. But in the 1990s and 2000s, teenage amateurs shaped their craft and ideals together as the profound socioeconomic changes of neoliberalization swept through their neighborhoods. Values That Pay traces Moroccan hip hop's trajectory from sidewalk cyphers and bedroom studios to royal commendations and international festivals. Kendra Salois draws from more than ten years of research into her interlocutors' music and moral reasoning to explore the constitutive tensions of institutionalization, hip hop aesthetics, and neoliberal life.

In Black Women's Health in the Age of Hip Hop and HIV/AIDS, Nghana tamu Lewis chronicles the work of five black women creators to demonstrate how hip hop feminism operates as a vital tool for interpreting and building knowledge about the lived experiences of black women and girls. Between 1996 and 2006, novelists Sapphire and Sister Souljah, television producer Mara Brock Akil, and playwrights Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira addressed the neglect of black women's health in mainstream biomedical and public health discourses. At a time when responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic largely focused on gay white men, Lewis argues, these creators deployed the strategies of hip hop feminism to frame and untangle issues of self-care, risk, and the ways that caregiving roles place black women and girls at disproportionate risk of adverse health outcomes. Building on previous intersectionality and social justice advocacy scholarship, Lewis argues that Sapphire, Souljah, Brock Akil, and Salter and Gurira both documented the effects of the epidemic on black women and girls and equipped the masses with solutions-oriented responses to the crisis, thus intervening in ways that mainstream biomedical and public health research has yet to do.