For Wednesday, 6 November

In Class

  1. Attendance
  2. Q&A: What do feminists hear when they listen to hip-hop?
  3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Monday, 4 November

In Class

  1. Attendance
  2. Q&A: If hip-hop is protest music, why did so many conscious rappers support the patriarchy?
  3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

 

For Wednesday, 30 October

Today we’re going to spend the whole period talking about the Story Maps Proposal Outline assignment. We’ll also make some time to huddle up in our small groups. 

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Review: Story Maps Proposal Outline
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Monday, 28 October

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: What do we mean when we talk about ‘authenticity’ in hip-hop?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Wednesday, 23 October

For Monday, 21 October

The Davis article is great in that it’s almost a primer on 19th- and 20th-century social theory, but it’s a lot for anyone who isn’t already familiar with the classics of the modern social sciences. Focus on Part II, ‘The Index of the Interesting’ (pp. 313-326).

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: How can we come up with a thesis, and what is the mark of a good one?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Wednesday, 16 October

  • Adam Bradley, ‘Rhyme’, Ch. 2 in Book of Rhymes (2009)
  • Audio: Adam Bradley, ‘American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them’New York Times (4 March 2021). To complement T’s recent feature on how the barrier between rap and poetry is becoming increasingly porous thanks to a new generation of practitioners in both art forms, we asked a number of poets mentioned in the piece about the hip-hop songs they return to again and again. (These excerpts from interviews with various poets shouldn’t be read apart from the embedded Spotify playlist, ‘A Playlist from the Poets’.)
  • Video: ‘Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time’Vox (19 May 2016)
  • Due BEFORE Class: What’s your favourite rap song? Identify all the techniques from ‘Rapping Deconstructed’ (e.g., crossing the bar line, motifs, daisy-chaining, etc.) or Bradley, ‘Rhyme’ (e.g., assonance, consonance, epistrophe) that occur in this song.  (Note: Using one of the verses discussed in the videoessay is cheating, obviously.) Post a link to the song (YouTube or Whosampled, ideally), along with a brief explanation as to how one of these techniques is illustrated in the verse you’ve selected (define the technique and cite the page[s] where it’s discussed in the reading), in the #discography channel on our Discord server before our next class.

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: What can the study of poetics teach us about rap lyricism?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Tuesday, 15 October

We spent much of the class huddled up in group work. So we still need to discuss the assigned texts from last Wednesday.

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: What can the study of linguistics teach us about the language of hip-hop?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Wednesday, 9 October

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: What can the study of linguistics teach us about the language of hip-hop?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

For Monday, 7 October

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: What defines a hip-hop classic?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time