Prep
- Andrew Nosnitsky, ‘Classic Material’. Pitchfork (19 November 2012)
- Asynchronous Discussion: Andrew Nosnitsky scrutinises the criteria we use to declare some hip-hop albums to be classics of the genre, and argues that these criteria distort our understanding of what it is capable of. ‘When many people call good kid, m.A.A.d city a classic’, he writes, ‘part of what they are unconsciously measuring is its Illmatic-ness’. The problem, for Nosnitsky, is that ‘Illmatic is an undeniable masterpiece, but it’s also a pretty narrow one. Nas does a few specific things almost perfectly on the record, while selectively sidestepping a lot of the other things that great rap songs and albums can do and have done … as a representative sampling of the genre, Illmatic only shows so much’ (Nosnitsky 2012). What song or album would you personally single out as a victim of the Illmatic standard? Please post your response in the new #discussion-prompts channel I’ve created in our Slack workspace (I’ve created the channel, but there’s no ‘Add Everyone’ button, for some reason. Do you see it?).
- Attendance
- Slight Return: The Truths of Founding Fathers
- Discussion: Beyond Illmatic
- Excursus: Liner Notes
- Review: Story Map Proposal Outline
- Reading Notes for Next Time
For Next Time
- Murray S. Davis, ‘That’s Interesting! Towards a Phenomenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1971)
