Conference Abstracts
Lila Willis, Albany State University, English Major
“Yeezus: A Modern Analysis of the New Negro”
Larry “LAK” Henderson, The Hiphop Educator
Hip Hop Meets History
“LAK” Henderson’s educational Hiphop music explores the stories of history as a way to educate, advance the discussion about cultural relevance, and empower a so-called lost generation. If Harriet Tubman could rap, she would tell her story in the way that LAK does in his song, “Harriet Tubman – The Conductor.” The song chronicles Tubman’s life from the ages of five through her triumphant leadership of a troop during the Civil War. It offers facts about her that often aren’t discussed, including her ability to lead an abolitionist movement despite having narcolepsy and seizures. LAK starts the song, “Kings & Queens” by saying, “We don’t come from slaves, but from enslaved Africans.” The song reminds the African American community that they aren’t the descendants of slaves, but of an enslaved group of people. It offers stories about African kings & queens, including King Senwosret, who conquered Greece, and Queen Candace, who was able to hold back Alexander the Great’s army because of her fierce reputation. LAK’s empowering anthem called “Black Men Rock” recognizes the accomplishments of those that deal with the development of black youth, and attempts to deconstruct negative images of black males in the media. LAK’s 25-minute performance uses an authentic Hiphop sound to offer lessons on history, and to inspire and empower.
Dr. Kimberly Harper, Director of Foreign Languages Institute, Albany State University
“Mental Health and the Hip Hop Nation”
Lynn Reid, Lecturer and Coordinator of Basic Writing
Fairleigh Dickinson University, College at Florham,Kandace Moore
Fairleigh Dickinson University, College at Florham,Hollie Taylor
Fairleigh Dickinson University, College at Florham
Roundtable Discussion
Challenging Binaries: Hip Hop as a Literate Practice
While there is a great deal of research to suggest that literacy narratives can provide insights into students’ lived experiences (Clark and Medina; Prensky and Bailey), much of the scholarship on this genre emphasizes the need for students to overcome obstacles (Corkery) and mediate the transition between home and academic modes of knowing. This roundtable will focus on a particular literacy narrative assignment that avoided this binary by asking students to analyze the ways in which literacy has impacted their relationship to a particular community. Among the assigned texts for this unit, students read James McBride’s “Hip Hop Planet,” an essay which focuses on the conflicted relationship that McBride had with hip hop as an adult. Those students who chose to write about the theme of hip hop in their own literacy narratives connected McBride’s conflicted relationship with hip hop to their own perceptions of a “good” and “bad” version of the genre. Through conversations with family members, students drew conclusions about how their relationships to hip hop would mark them as representing a particular aspect of their own cultural communities.
The instructor for this course will frame the discussion with some background on literacy narratives and two undergraduate student presenters will introduce McBride’s essay and then share their own work. During the time remaining, the instructor will facilitate a discussion about how to apply Harris’ work on Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts (which the two students will be reading in their spring course) to student literacy narratives in order to facilitate both class discussion and faculty development opportunities.
Mark Hankerson, Director of Writing Center, Albany State University
“Who protects us from you?: A Hip-Hop public service announcement for America’s racial profiling and police brutality apologists”
Ever since the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) became the face of police brutality following the videotaped Rodney King beating in 1991, the public has become more aware of the aggressive practices of law enforcement in urban communities. Nearly 25 years later, however, law enforcement’s overreaching tactics toward minorities continue to be emboldened by political and media apologists who assert that the racial profiling of victims and the subsequent violence toward them (shootings, choke-holds, beatings) are necessary to protect people’s lives (i.e. the lives of police officers).
Unfortunately, the criminal acts of some police officers are further justified by many minorities themselves who seem to rely on five basic arguments. To wit:
• Police brutality and profiling are not historically systemic, but instead are recent phenomena in response to thuggish hip-hop culture.
• If individuals looked like respectable citizens and dressed appropriately, then many of these acts by the police could be averted.
• Black people need to do a better job raising their children to be respectful toward authority (law enforcement) in order to avoid hyper-violent confrontations.
• No one in the black community raises hell about black-on-black crime, but as soon as a cop shoots, chokes, or beats a black person, Revs. Al and Jesse show up with the media in tow.
• Good, law-abiding black people need to do a better job speaking out about the “nigga” elements in their culture so that they (the good blacks) will not be subject to guilt by association (to the “niggas”).
My presentation aims to address these arguments within a framework of white supremacy; to do otherwise would be to confuse issues rather than resolve them. Therefore, in an attempt to maintain one of the critical aspects of hip-hop, which, according to Tricia Rose is “culturally relevant, anti-racist community building,” I want to examine why people raise these arguments.
The title of my presentation comes from a 1989 song by Boogie Down Productions entitled, “Who Protects Us From You.” The song is a two-minute treatise on how crooked cops have bullied rather than protected individuals in urban communities.
Tien Sydnor-Campbell, and Yolanda Neals
“Music is What Feelings Sound Like: Where Is The Love in Hip-Hop?”
Music is what feelings sound like and the power of hip-hop and its influence on the language of love for the self and others has had a tremendous impact on the world and particularly the community from which the music and culture comes to center stage. Over 40 years of influence on and by the Hip-Hop culture has changed the face of love. This presentation seeks to explore the language of love in hip-hop by asking the question, “Where is the Love?” Audiences from all over the world know how to dress like the artists, sing all their songs, and emulate the things talked about in the music. At the bottom of the list is the self love and respect that we have for ourselves and for others. This discussion will use the top 10 hip-hop songs of the end of 2014 to analyze the current state of love in the context of finding what fairytale is currently being told about it. The book “Dear Yvette:Shattered Fairytales” looks at the influence of music in the context of living a life by the music book handed to the story’s protagonist. Yvette is able to look at her life and choices through several therapy sessions, reviewing her soundtrack. When one listens to music, it is important because what you listen to and love essentially becomes your personal soundtrack. There is music to go along with every mood and special event of your life. If today’s music is the soundtrack, we are circling the wagon to talk about love. For the purpose of this discussion, the most current lyrics will be analyzed.
Kyesha Jennings, Danville Community College
“Hip-Hop Matters”: The Disposability of Black Bodies in Hip-Hop”
Since the corporate “take over” of hip-hop, record companies interest in rappers have been based solely on economic gain. This essay addresses how for corporate hip-hop, artists are disposable commodities. Previously, labels were able to invest and market a product (the rapper) and profit immensely off of album sales whereas rappers found themselves bound in a contract, deep in debt. This formula worked flawlessly (i.e. rich corporate executives and broke rappers) until the birth of Cash Money records and the idea of label deals, opposed to obtaining a record deal. In the past five years or so, commercial hip-hop has seen a decline in album sales; however, new artists despite talent or lack thereof, are obtaining million dollar deals. The question then arises, what is the product that makes the artist financially valuable if no albums are selling? Through an examination of the career trajectories of artist Bobby Shmurda, Trinidad James and Dej Loaf, I critique their marketing rhetoric, lyrical content and financial “success,” to argue record labels are packaging “young black dysfunction and drama” (the product) and disposing of their “bodies” (the artists) once deemed fruitless. This notion of disposableness of black bodies has also recently been present in the unjustified killings of young black males. Like record labels, the media has targeted victims of police brutality attempting to zoom in on young black dysfunction for higher ratings, which thus leads to economic gain. This clichéd gangster narrative told repeatedly through disposable rappers is ultimately suffocating hip-hop to the point where it “cannot breathe” and for any,
hip-hop matters.
Darlene Anita Scott, Virginia Union University
"Money, Cash, Hoes: The Performance of War in Hip Hop"
In discussions of power, might is typically masculine whether the might comes from physical strength, financial wealth, or social status. In war the mightiest—the victor—is masculinized through the feminization of the loser using at least one archetypal weapon of war—rape. In acts of rape of males, victimization is largely represented by perceived emasculation; the stripping away of malehood as represented by sex with another male. Power is claimed by assuming the loser’s “property” including his malehood vis-à-vis sexual assault, his autonomy, and his women (who are sexually assaulted effectivelyeroding ownership). Power—the quest for it, the realization and boastful description of it—is central to hip hop. Such power reveals itself in the sexually and materially excessive lifestyles assumed by artists and lyrics that regale these lifestyles. They bask in the ownership achieved. Hip-hop music, as a product of powerlessness, is necessarily located in the metaphor of war; is the constant assertion and reassertion of power. The victors’ spoils as identified in Jay Z’s “Money, Cash, Hoes,” show that females are as much object as cash and what it can buy. And not just for males. Disenfranchised females objectify themselves in service to their quests for power. Their sexualization sells their records; validates recordings of male rappers; or earns their position in the harem of fans patronized as groupies. Like males, they earn influence, cash; the Lox and Lil Kim’s “Money, Power, Respect.” The performance of power in hip hop music is essentially military strategy, as identified in the language and guidance in The Prince and The Art of War. The war these artists fight is against powerlessness and the female body is a site of power as one of the spoils of victory.
Timothy Welbeck, Temple University, Department of African American Studies
“People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths to Rhythms: Hip-Hop’s Continuation of the Enduring Tradition of African and African American Rhetorical Forms and Tropes”
By 1986, a mere thirteen years after the legendary party said to have birthed hiphop, rappers were increasingly heralded as the “voices of their generation”1 In the four decades since that infamous party, hip-hop has blossomed from a relatively obscure cultural expression housed primarily in the de-industrialized Bronx, into a global, multi-billion dollar, multi-faceted industry and cultural phenomenon. Nevertheless, the term “hip-hop” itself has become inextricably linked to urban youth culture. Hip-hop’s dual status as the preeminent African-derived aesthetic and the most domineering cultural expression in the nation2 means its ubiquitous presence in American popular culture has only continued that trend.3 When done correctly, hip-hop is merely a microcosm of a larger cultural, economic, historical, political and spiritual struggle of African Americans (and that of those people groups impacted by the culture) in their quest for developing an identity in American society. Hip-hop music itself then becomes a dual expression of culture in that it allows for the creator of the expression to present its ideas relating to that struggle. Consequently, one of the prevailing themes throughout the span of the creative output of hip-hop culture has revolved around the narrative of marginalization. AIM The aim of this presentation is to describe, analyze and narrate how a remarkable portion of hip-hop music, both past and present, presents first hand accounts of marginalization of men of color.
Michael Dando, University of Wisconsin - Madison
“Hip-Hop Culture and the Art of Public School Pedagogy”
There is an emergent field of academic study and research regarding what Marc Lamont Hill calls Hip-Hop Based Education that centers student investment in hip-hop culture as an educational endeavor. The works done by self-described hip-hop scholars have proven that pedagogy that centers Hip-Hop Culture as an integral component of the classroom has positive ramifications for students in nearly every aspect.
From academic content to socio-cultural concerns, pedagogy that affirms and supports students’ lived experiences has moved beyond conversations of usefulness, scaffolding toward traditional content knowledge and validation, to examination of the potential for transformative and emancipatory educational opportunities found in elements of hip-hop culture.
These Hip-Hop Educational Studies have established themselves as thoroughly rigorous in scholarship and liberatory in scope. Though these previous projects have established centering hip-hop culture to be an effective educational experience to be effective that provides students with cognitive and social tools for agency, almost all have been limited to an individual unit, project, or assignment.
Furthermore, many of these studies have been limited to “special” sections and/or confined to spaces outside the classroom. While these projects are beneficial, in that critically minded educators see that it can be done, there is little examination of whether what I’ll call Sustained Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy (SCHHP) is possible and what the social, political, academic, and cultural ramifications of such a project might be for both public school students and educators.
Consequently, the scope of this study builds off previous works, but examines SCHHP as a long-term endeavor, meaning that the public secondary school classes participating in this project will last a full academic year. Moreover, the educators and students will be working in a mainstreamed, core content classroom during the school day. This project asserts that not only is this type of education possible, it’s necessary.
Steven Lessner, Elon University, English Department
“I Put My Life Lines In Between The Paper’s Lines”: Centering Hip Hop in an Organic Intellectual Writing Pedagogy To Learn from the Literacy Practices of African American Undergraduate Male Writers”
This presentation offers suggestions for building and sustaining an organic intellectual writing pedagogy for first-year writing courses focused on Hip Hop, with the primary goal of learning from the literacy and language practices of African American undergraduate male writers. The presenter will share data collected from a case study with four African American undergraduate male writers at a public research university who completed a first-year writing course where Hip Hop lyrics, videos, and performances were used. Drawing from extensive interviews with these men, as well as coding of their writing, the presenter will share language and literacy practices in terms of arrangement, invention, reading, and collaboration learned from study participants that enact Edward W. Said’s theoretical construct of the organic intellectual. For example, one writer recalls learning about the arrangement possibilities in writing through listening to a pastor’s sermons and reflecting back on this when composing his own pieces. Another writer offers insights on how he engages in writing invention processes organically through listening to interviews with musical artists. The influence of spoken word poetry, Hip Hop lyrics, and reading texts of Malcolm X outside of classrooms walls are emphasized as highly important to an additional study participant’s intellectual and writerly growth. Finally, a further study participant speaks on the importance of collaboration with other African American male students while reflecting on Hip Hop lyrics that have strong connections to his memory and their influence on his own writing strategies. After sharing these insights from this case study, the presenter will then recommend Hip Hop texts, in-class freewriting activities, and writing assignments that are directly informed by the study participants with the goal of a pedagogy that opens up spaces for African American males to actively contribute to the field of Composition Studies through expanding our ideas for teaching writing.
*The quote in the title is taken from artist Mobb Deep’s single “Quiet Storm” from the album Murda Musik (released 1999).
KASHI JOHNSON, Department of Theatre at Lehigh University
“Act Like You Know: Employing Hip Hop Theater to Create a Safe Space for Protest and Self Expression”
With the advent of social media, the imperceptible struggles of Black students at predominantly white colleges and universities are more visible than ever. The “Being Black at University of Michigan” Twitter hashtag #BBUM, and the “I, Too, Am Harvard” Tumblr blog have spawned similar movements at other schools nationally and abroad. The message is clear: Black students are tired of being ignored, devalued and alienated. These campaigns underscore the need for a consistent, productive pedagogical space where students can release their frustrations, speak up and celebrate their identity. At Lehigh University, alumna and theatre professor Kashi Johnson, personally understood Black student struggles, and decided to create an educational space where marginalized students could be empowered to address such concerns. What resulted was the creation of the Hip Hop theater course, “Act Like You Know: Hip Hop Theater.” Engaging Hip Hop performance modalities, Johnson connects students to social justice issues and challenges them to incorporate these concerns into their work on stage. Johnson's unique and contemporary pedagogical approach to improving the campus climate, while providing students a space to not only critically think about such issues, but also, affectively embody and feel such concerns, has been a tremendous success. With the explosion of hip hop courses on campuses nationwide, this talk will not only address the course’s origin at Lehigh, but also focus on the manner in which culturally responsive education and digital humanities is a must in today’s world, in addressing issues of diversity and inclusion. By integrating photos and videos of student performances throughout the talk, Professor Johnson will speak to the future of this course, and the role that new media and digital humanities will play in its continued progression and development.
Dr. Florencia V. Cornet, University of South Carolina
Michelle E. Jones, Columbus State University
“Let Me Tell You About My Fam: Family Identities from the Hip Hop Generation”
Our research illustrates the influence of Hip Hop culture on the familial sociological constructs in US society today. We argue that Hip Hop culture has left its mark on the ways in which contemporary urban families have come to (re)present themselves. Hip Hop as a cultural construct spans forty plus years in the United States. We can speak of several generations that have been influenced by this grassroots cultural movement that has not only influenced the formation of several other US musical genres but that has also influenced the ways in which young men and women relate when conveying the parameters for the design of a family. We speak specifically of how Hip Hop has influenced men and women in the contemporary patterns of constructing a family. Mainstream Hip Hop culture in particular has introduced a limited array of symbolic models that have shaped the very boundaries and designs of contemporary family constructs in Black and Latino communities in US urban locations. We will illustrate the various transactional patterns that have shaped Hip Hop generation families over the past forty years. We will also pattern several ‘healthy cores’ of family relationships that have come out of US Hip Hop cultures. Stories, ethnographies, and case studies from adults, and young adults from the Hip Hop generation inform our presentation.
Mikayla Beaudrie, University of Florida
"Blood on the Leaves": African-American Rhetoric, Gothic Remixes, and Hip-Hop Narratives
Rhetoricians suggest that African-American rhetorical techniques are based in ancient Egyptian communicative practices. This phenomenon, as I will discuss in this paper, is subsequently traceable throughout African American narrative discourses, specifically contemporary rap music. Through a rhetorical and narrative analysis of Kanye West’s “Blood on the Leaves,” Gothic systems, African American rhetorical methods, and oral narrative structures clearly critique Black horror, tragedy, and vitality. Analyzing “Blood on the Leaves” will reveal the devices rap artists utilize to imitate and revise African and European rhetorical methods of epistemology.
Analyses of African-American rhetoric usually locate slave songs narrating a life of horror alongside hopeful dreams of liberation as displays of oral rhetoric. However, these songs eventually morphed into literacy (e.g. slave narratives), and thereafter, African Americans consistently produced both oral and written texts with similar underlying goals. For instance, during the emergence of 1960s hip-hop, African Americans revived and revised an epistemological oral rhetoric. As this paper is part of a larger project, it thus posits that rap music has steadily displayed elements of a structured and methodological European, Gothic literacy that can also be traced to ancient Egyptian orality.
In order to analyze West’s rhetorical prowess, “Blood on the Leaves” will first be contextualized within the scope of contemporary rap music, so as to correctly identify the song within other African American narratives. Additionally, this paper will draw upon the critical works of Molefi Kete Asante and Jacqueline Jones Royster in order to locate this discussion within a framework of rhetorical analysis. By addressing critical hip-hop theory, genre studies, and rhetorical theory, this paper also integrates the work of Gwendolyn D. Pough, Teresa Goddu, and Toni Morrison. Specifically, this paper will introduce a new method to African American rhetorical analysis – one which merges the ideas of African and European rhetorical origins.
Dr. Beauty Bragg,Georgia College and State University
"Hip Hop Narrative and Contrasting Expressions of the Diva Archetype”
Hip Hop Narrative and Contrasting Expressions of the Diva Archetype
Feminist critics have recently begun to account for the significance of women’s written narratives within the context of hip hop culture. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Eve Dunbar have suggested that genres such as memoir and fiction have provided an opportunity for women to participate in hip hop culture with more autonomy than is typically accorded the recording artist. This paper will illustrate the emergence of new archetypes of black femininity which have emerged as a result of women’s production of urban fiction. In particular, I will compare the Diva identity that is articulated in Jacqueline Bush’s memoir, The Gold Club: the Jacklyn “Diva” Bush Story, with Beyonce’s gloss on diva identity in the 2008 song “Diva.” In doing so I will argue that while both women’s embodiment of the Diva are deeply imbricated in exploitive consumer capitalist systems, the written narrative exhibits a more expansive notion of female freedom than the song version. Ultimately, I conclude that the prominence of the diva figure in contemporary black culture can be read as an expressive symbol of black female power arising out of the specific social context of the hip hop era.
Payton Clark, University of Arkansas – Fort Smith
“Why Logic Is The Next Hip Hop Legend: Critical Analysis of 'Under Pressure' as North America's Next Iconic Rap Movement”
By the 1980s, rappers such as Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., and Nas were icons in music; today’s rapper icons are yet to found. I think Logic has potential to one such. Sir Robert Bryson II, “Bobby,” is a twenty-four year old from Gaithersburg, Maryland, who has been rapping since he was fifteen and been on the rap scene since he was seventeen. After five years without a publicist and spending half of a million of his own money, he signed with Def Jam. The transparency of the lyrics and the complexity of his rhymes and flow set his album, Under Pressure (2014), apart from all that have come before it. Through the albums tracks, the listener hears of absent and addict parents, gang-banging, child protective services, and the drug scene, all of which were experienced by Bobby firsthand. This album differs from so many others because it is truly an autobiography. Being a biracial rapper who is mistakenly taken for a white rapper but is accepted, nonetheless, shows the expansion of cultural acceptance in hip hop. Logic was featured on the XXL magazine for Freshman Class 2013 of upcoming rappers. Under Pressure was also just named iTunes Hip Hop Album of the Year. In this paper, I will analyze each song and the album as a whole and contrast Logic’s work from the rap population. By doing this, I will support my belief that Logic is the next rap icon.
Jacqulyn Harper West, University of Arkansas Fort Smith's College
"Once Upon a Time in the West: Mr. Bobby Lopez Raps about the Legendary Bass Reeves"
Identity politics are integral to both hip hop culture and the white racial frame valued in one subculture of Southern American identity, and both find a home in the border town of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Exhibited through both symbolic and literal battles and expressed through contentious cultural and spatial boundaries, both incorporate the subjectivity of race and privilege, an occasionally ambivalent connection to place as both constraint and comfort, and a fierce commitment to community, though to different ends and for the benefit of ostensibly disparate groups. This study elucidates some intersections of these contested spaces and performances in Fort Smith, Arkansas—the state’s second largest city, known as the place “where the New South meets the Old West”—by examining the trap beats and status quo-reinforcing rhymes of Mr. Bobby Lopez, a local hip hop artist, at the dedication of a bronze statue called Into the Territories, featuring Bass Reeves, a 19th century African American Deputy US Marshal.
The development and evolution of Southern rap as a regional response to the evolution of hip hop will be considered in historical context on a local level. By applying interdisciplinary methodology, including close reading of performance-as-text and ethnographic reporting, to hip hop in Fort Smith, this work interrogates the racialized mercenary implications of the city’s cultural heritage tourism agenda.
This study is the latest product of a research agenda exploring representations of, and implications of, race in Fort Smith’s cultural heritage tourism sites.
Trevor Lance Seigler, Clemson University, English Department
"Even White Boys Got to Shout: The Evolution of the Beastie Boys in the History of Hip-Hop"
When they emerged on the hip-hop scene in 1986, the Beastie Boys were viewed as a noxious novelty, white interlopers onto a music scene dominated by African-American artists, and jokesters whose work ignored the real concerns of the black community that had fueled much of early rap. By the time Adam “MCA” Yauch lost his battle with cancer in 2012, they were elder statesmen of the rap scene. How exactly did that happen? In a world where white rap went from Vanilla Ice to Eminem, the Beasties not only became elder statesmen of the genre but helped to expand the boundaries of what the music could be. By being themselves (i.e. by not “acting black”), the Beasties helped to expand the reach of hip-hop and invigorate the genre in numerous ways. A serious discussion of hip-hop and rap can’t help but include the group, even in a dismissive tone. But any attempt to deny the reach of the Beasties and what they gave back to the hip-hop community is woefully ill-informed, because the Beasties made a huge impact by using their license to ill and make some noise that still matters and will continue to do so.
Melvin L. Williams, Howard University
“White Chicks with a Gangsta Pitch”: Gendered Whiteness in Mainstream Rap Culture
Dr. Kareem R. Muhammad, North Carolina State University
“-Mic Checks and Balances: Politically Conscious Hip-Hop’s Engagement with the Presidency of Barack Obama”
Hip-hop subculture has long existed as an anti-disestablishment space that has provided some of U.S. society’s strongest and most unfiltered critiques against the federal government. This adversarial posture has been most effectively communicated by hip-hop MC’s. While far from monolithic, the collective sentiment that has most consistently been communicated to the men residing in The Oval Office has ranged from hostile to ambivalent. The presidential check and balancing inherent to hip-hop has come in a variety of forms over the years through rap music, hip-hop’s most visible element. The election of the nation’s first black president, however, has presented an interesting quandary for the hip-hop nation. On one hand, hip-hop has an obligation to stand up to power. On the other hand, there is also a long standing tradition for hip-hop to mobilize and band together when its members are under attack from outsiders. This article tries to explore the extent that hip-hop artists view Barack Obama as an outsider or an insider. A qualitative content analysis will be conducted of politically conscious rap music in an attempt to find out now that Obama is in the White House, has hip-hop gone soft in its traditional role in challenging White House orthodoxy? The qualitative and quantitative data used here makes it hard to make the case that hip-hop hasn’t gone soft on President Obama in comparison to previous presidents, specifically President George W. Bush.
Daniela Gomes, The University of Texas at Austin
“Raising our voices – Brazilian Hip Hop movement and the creation of a new generation of Afro Brazilian leaders"
This research aims to observe how the arrival of the hip-hop movement in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil created a transformation in the life of poor black youth and how this fact was responsible for a new generation of Afro Brazilian leaders, who were able to use their messages to promote awareness and guide the hip hop generation in a search for equal rights and justice. I suggest that this model of leadership was inspired by African American leaders and was the starting point for a new moment in Afro Brazilian resistance, where rap music became the main tool to denounce the exclusion suffered by Afro Brazilians living in poor communities. Marked by extreme social and racial inequality, the city of Sao Paulo has a particular dynamic in its structure that allowed this identification with the movement, and it is considered the birth place of the hip hop in Brazil. Over the years the movement evolved and developed particular characteristics that allowed it to spread and become a voice in the whole country, offering to the youth a possibility of changing and constructing a new future.
Michael Overstreet, Albany State University
“Hip hop & Rap: Two Outlets- One Community”