Useful Tips
- Tip 1: Once you have located a book on your topic click on the subject headings of the catalog record. This can lead you to additional books on the same topic.
- Tip 2: Look to see if the catalog record has a summary or table of contents of the book and is available in other editions.
- Tip 3: If a record says networked resource it is usually available online.
- Tip 4: When doing keyword searching, try combining keywords/phrases. Be aware of the differences between broad and narrower, search:
Selected Books
- All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America byCall Number: Africana Library E185.615 .M3538 2008In All About the Beat, John McWhorter celebrates hip-hop for what it is (feel-good, meticulously crafted music), while defining what it is not (useful political advice). It has become an effect of hip-hop for rappers to list in their songs pressing issues in black communities - from welfare to police violence to generalized oppression - but McWhorter argues that pointing to a problem is not the same as solving it. And hip-hop cannot offer meaningful dialogue because, by its very nature, it consists in quick-hitting snips of thought, not treatises on policy planning.
- Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop Outside the USA byCall Number: Cox Library of Music ML3531 .G56 2001The 13 essays that comprise Global Noise explore the hip hop scenes of Europe, Anglophone and Francophone Canada, Japan and Australia within their social, cultural and ethnic contexts.
- Hip-Hop Revolution: The Politics of Rap byCall Number: Cox Library of Music ML3918.R37 O33 2007In this groundbreaking book, Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar celebrates hip-hop and confronts the cult of authenticity that defines its essential character-that dictates how performers walk, talk, and express themselves artistically and also influences the consumer market. Hip-Hop Revolution is a balanced cultural history that looks past negative stereotypes of hip-hop as a monolith of hedonistic, unthinking noise to reveal its evolving positive role within American society.
- Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism byCall Number: Cox Library of Music ML3531 .P86 1995This book examines hip-hop's cultural rebellion in terms of its specific implications for postmodern theory and practice, using the politics of reception as its primary rhetorical ground. Hip-hop culture in general, and rap music in particular, present model sites for such an inquiry, since they enact both postmodern modes of production--the appropriation of tropes, technologies, and material culture--and a potential means of resistance to the commodification of cultural forms under late capitalism.
- Gangsta: Merchandizing the Rhymes of Violence byCall Number: Africana Library ML3531 .R78 1996In Gangsta, Ronin Ro looks at the perversion of the music called hip-hop - the syncopated verse with a political edge and an emphasis on hope - into a medium of rage and hyper-violence. Gangsta is about selling evil in a marketplace already glutted with faulty, combustible goods. Who supplies and who demands? Can we trace the engineers behind this star-maker machinery?
- Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America byCall Number: Cox Library of Music ML3531 .R79Discusses the elements of rap music, including its lyrics, music, culture, and style, and looks at the impact of rap music.
- The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-Hop byTricia Rose argues, hip-hop has become a primary means by which we talk about race in the United States. In The Hip-Hop Wars, Rose explores the most crucial issues underlying the polarized claims on each side of the debate: Does hip-hop cause violence, or merely reflect a violent ghetto culture? Is hip-hop sexist, or are its detractors simply anti-sex? Does the portrayal of black culture in hip-hop undermine black advancement? A potent exploration of a divisive and important subject, The Hip-Hop Wars concludes with a call for the regalvanization of the progressive and creative heart of hip-hop.
- Public Enemy Number One: A Research Study of Rap Music, Culture, and Black Nationalism in America byCall Number: Cox Library of Music ML421.P97 S52 1999
- From the Underground: Hip Hop Culture as an Agent of Social Change byCall Number: Olin Library E185.86 S585x 1995
- The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap byCall Number: Cox Library of Music ML3556 .E53 1991Publication Date: 1991