Prep
- Nelson George, ‘Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth’, in Forman and Neal (2012); also available in Forman and Neal (2004)
- Attendance/Introductions, cont’d
- Admin: Group Projects/Group Communication
- Q&A: The Truths of Founding Fathers
- Reading Notes for Next Time
For Next Time
- 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?).
