Hip Hop Paper Outline

Intro: Ask question; Is Hip Hop a Musical Style or a culture? And what it means to the youth? BOOKS: Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop by Michael Eric Dyson Close to the Edge, In search of the Global Hip-Hop Generation by Sujatha Fernandes In Search Of the Black Fantastic: By Richard Iton

Definiton of a Musical Genre Genre a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content Music the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity. Culture The integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. *Merriam-Webster

Dyson
"Words are important, as a means of upward mobility, or as a means to escape suffering, especially by exposing its horrible intrusion into one's group or

neighborhood, or to grapple with a white supremacist society that refuses to acknowledge our fundamental humanity" [Dyson 54]

"So Many young black people are cut off from the political wisdom they might receive if older black people would sit down and talk to them, teach them, converse with them-and, yes, learn from them. Older folks shouldn't primarily be about beating young folk down. As a member of an in-between generation, I want to use my tongue as a bridge between the civil rights generation" [Dyson 56] "At it's best, hip hop grapples with politics, which is the art of making argument over how social resources are distributed, cultural capital is accumulated, and ideological legitimacy is secured"

Iton
"In many respects, it is not the engagement with black popular cultures's wide-ranging normative intentions that distinguishes the moment; it is the representation of a superpublic hip hop with its hyperchronic potentials as grounds for disengagement and as a justification for the disarticulation of black possibilities. The forms of black popular culture-including hip-hop-that emerged in the late twentieth century as the dividing line in black life became important not only because of what was going on with these subgenres but also because of the reactions to the representations of the cultural developments"

Fernandes
"Underlying all my endeavors is the hope that some universal thread connects all of us who have been brough t together though hip hop culture, especially those in the most vulnerable and impoverished sectors. But I also came to the realization that privilege--whether by birth or acquired, of skin color, nationality, or

social class--would always inhibit the attempt to create global communities." [Fernandes XXI]