Reviews 459

Rap and Hip Hop Culture.

By Fernando Orejuela. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 272 pp. ISBN
9780199987733
doi:10.1017/S0261143017000460
The availability of academic texts for classroom use on rap and hip hop has not kept
pace with the growing global appeal of one of the world’s most popular music gen-
res. Although there are many books on the subject – such as Adam F. Bradley’s Book
of Rhymes, with the requisite bibliography, glossary, index and so on – not many have
been written that exclusively address the concerns of a college audience, without
sidebars that speak to general trade book readers. This gap in the market for access-
ible, engaging and revealing textbooks on rap is exactly what Fernando Orejuela’s
title Rap and Hip Hop Culture attempts to fill, and this is a task that it accomplishes
admirably.
The book comes equipped with a bevy of classrooms aids that will make both
the teacher and student’s job easier. For the student, every chapter begins with a list
of learning objectives to be achieved during that week’s reading. Each chapter is
clearly laid out in a straightforward manner, with headings and subheadings that
keep that chapter’s pedagogical goals at the forefront of a reader’s attention. The vis-
ual graphs, charts and photos that populate all 10 chapters are clean, clear and abun-
dant, making the internalization of content not just convenient, but engaging. As just
one example, the global map that charts the geographical flow of the African slave
trade immediately imparts the scale, cultural exchange and brutal efficiency that
defined that human trafficking system. Additionally, every chapter concludes with
a summary, a glossary of key terms and study questions for further investigation
that help to make any work outside of classroom meetings as productive as possible.
For the teacher, the aids are no less numerous. Through an online portal on the
Oxford University Press website, a teacher can access a semester’s worth of materials
that are organized according to a 10 week system. This database includes weekly
PowerPoint presentations, a model syllabus, a draft of a final exam, as well as 10 dif-
ferent lessons plans. The teaching lesson plans themselves include a chapter sum-
mary, teaching objectives and sample test questions. With these extra materials, it
is likely that even a teacher unfamiliar with hip hop as a genre could conduct
such a class with positive results. With its informative and accessible prose, this
text would likely be right at home in any college elective course, with or without a
mix of both majors and hobbyists.
The problem of writing about a type of music that largely dispenses with
musical notation is herein overcome through the use of several listening guides
that are structured according to the time stamps of notable musical moments from
historic rap recordings. Each of the 17 listening guides consists of a multipage intro-
duction that is followed by a second-by-second walkthrough of the song in question,
where important and notable musical events are pointed out: the orchestral doubling
at 2:50 in Lauryn Hill’s 1998 track ‘Doo wop (that thing)’ for instance. The listening
guides themselves reflects the book’s staggering breadth of music, spanning from
James Brown’s 1969 ‘Give it up or turnit a loose’ to Kanye West’s 2010 track
‘Monster’, which was released two years before this book’s survey concludes (with
rapper Rick Ross, in 2012).
That evolutionary line drawn between soul artist James Brown and modern
rapper Kanye West also demonstrates Orejuela’s ethnomusicological,

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 460 Reviews

anthropological and cultural perspective. To paraphrase: rap is just one element of a

dynamic, intermixing culture that stretches back centuries, to the African slave trade
diaspora and before. In fact, the book spends almost 50 pages establishing hip hop’s
roots before it deals with the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit ‘Rapper’s delight’, which is
commonly taken as the starting point of modern rap.
Orejuela’s handling of his content itself is equally adroit, as he manages to
relate and position the major landmarks – 1960s and 1970s block parties, Afrika
Bambaataa and the Sugarhill Gang – within the context of equally revealing sub-
genres or movements – Jewish and Christian rap, for example. The book manages
to avoid the pitfalls of a potentially anchorless survey course by continually remind-
ing the reader that rap is an exemplar of ‘the changing same’, an Amiri Baraka phrase
that Orejuela deploys as a pedagogical mantra. In critiquing the negative effects of
cultural appropriation, Orejuela likewise elevates an understanding of the communi-
ties from which rap was born over any single individual’s pleasant experiences of lis-
tening, although those are certainly still affirmed through the aforementioned
listening guides. As he writes in the book’s initial chapter, ‘[T]he more industry
moguls try to homogenize hip hop culture, the more “original school” innovators
and particular frames of cultural reference become disconnected from it, further mar-
ginalizing hip hop from contemporary enthusiasts and consumers’. As such,
Orejuela’s work is, in some ways, a formalized extension of the activist projects of
hip hop journalists, such as Harry Allen, that date back to the 1980s. Furthermore,
in fixing a historical problem identified by scholars like Guthrie Ramsey in his
own 2004 title Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop, Orejuela restores to
prominence the large role that the Latino community played in the formulation of
hip hop culture, beginning with the Rock Steady Crew and extending through Big
Pun, all the way down to Pitbull today.
This textbook comes without an accompanying CD of the listening guides’ rap
song examples, but the guides’ songs are all easily located and accessed through
Spotify, YouTube or any number of other online streaming services. As a textbook
meant for undergraduate consumption, pricing will always be an issue and, at
$62.95 through the publisher Oxford University Press, the teacher will be pleased
to know that the cost of the book is not prohibitive by any means (and likewise
kept low by the aforementioned absence of an accompanying CD).
Indeed, Rap and Hip Hop Culture does make a careful and sustained effort to
constantly bring along the non-musician into discussions of technical musical termin-
ology. However, the extent to which even the most basic of musicological terminolo-
gies can be completely inscrutable to a novice outsider can never be underestimated.
For example, some elements in the following definition of ‘funk’ from the glossary
would likely need more treatment than the book currently provides: ‘A musical
genre characterized by group singing, complex polyrhythmic structures, percussive
instrumental and vocal timbres, and a featured horn section . . .’. Although ‘poly-
rhythm’ is defined elsewhere, ‘percussive’ and ‘timbre’ are not. In the end, however,
such problems are most likely part and parcel of any accessible musical survey
course, and should be thoroughly surmountable through the presence of a classroom
teacher anyway.
As the history of rap is still being written even now, Rap and Hip Hop Culture is
probably not the last word on the best way to present an amazingly diverse genre of
music to a group of students over the course of a single semester. However, it is hard
to imagine what else a textbook could offer that would surpass it, once debatable

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 Reviews 461

concerns of departmental orientation, teacher style and scholarly perspective are set
aside.

Martin Connor
Brandeis University, USA
mepc36@brandeis.edu

American Popular Music in Britain’s Raj.

By Bradley G. Shope. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016. 256 pp.
ISBN 13: 9781580465489
doi:10.1017/S0261143017000472

In their earnest attempt to articulate sonic globalization to the new globalizing wave
of the 1990s, scholars have overlooked earlier waves of transnational cultural
exchanges and cosmopolitanism. Bradley Shope’s American Popular Music in
Britain’s Raj puts together ethnographic material and archival research to confirm
the presence of an entertainment globalization in 19th century India. Through tracing
the history of American popular culture including black minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz and
Hollywood film music in India to the 1850s, he establishes musical intersections
enabled through trilateral flows of American live, recorded and filmed performance
genres between the USA, Britain and India during the British Raj, which were sup-
ported by global commercial and military enterprises. In doing so, he uncovers alter-
nate trajectories of economic and cultural exchange, globalization, transnationalism
and cosmopolitanism that disengage sonic globalization from the Americanization
myth. Asserting that the flows of American popular culture were enabled through
the improvement in transportation and infrastructural facilities, Shope makes the
important point that they were mediated by Britain. He argues that racialized and
exoticized African-American musical genres were incorporated in a trilateral con-
sumption culture on which domiciled Europeans, visiting Americans and wester-
nized Indians converged to stake their claims to metropolitan cosmopolitanism.
Shope reproduces the emergence of an entertainment culture in India in the
1850s centred on ballrooms, social clubs, theatres and cinema houses that catered
to the social needs of the domiciled Europeans but also became a marker of social
status, modernity and cosmopolitanism. Initially produced by amateur regimental
bands in clubs in metros as well as smaller cities and towns, the arrival of travelling
professional performers kept the audience abreast with current entertainment trends
in the US and Britain. Although it began in 1850, African-African minstrel Dave
Carson’s performance of black minstrelsy in 1865 in Bombay introduced African-
American culture, albeit in a distorted form, to a diverse Indian audience. Carson’s
appeal largely lay in his ability to adapt the genre to local sensibilities by improvising
on themes, characters, style and language to the Indian setting through incorporating
stereotypes of Indian ethnic communities and Hindi and Bengali words. Along with
blackface minstrelsy, ragtime performances came to be included in the same venues
following the popularity of ragtime in England and subsequently musical sequences
from Hollywood films, particularly cabarets, were fitted in the performances.
Shope avers that these transatlantic African-American musicians and genres
were constructed as signifiers of both exoticism and cosmopolitanism for the
Indian audience. Demonstrating that the primitivized iconography and nostalgic

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