Stendhal’s quote “a novel is a mirror carried down the street” is oddly applicable to the history of hip hop music and it’s implications in the social sphere in America. At one moment the mirror reflects the blue skies as you see them but at another, it reflects the puddle at your feet. The person who carries that mirror is always the first to be blamed for what the mirror reflects, instead of the people who are actually responsible for the puddle in the first place. The artists who pioneered this music largely inherited the role of the person holding the mirror while simultaneously creating a culture and a movement towards an understanding of life for inner-city African American communities. Throughout its’ lifespan in popular culture hip hop music has been largely misunderstood because of its’ answer to no one antics. This startled the music world because it told a story foreign to anyone who had been part of the industry leading up to the birth of hip hop music. For the first time, people heard not only what it was like to live in inner-city African American communities but also why things were that way. For many, the music represents crime, poverty, anti-establishmentism, and flat out the vulgar language. What many have neglected to try and understand are the conditions that made life the way it was for people in the communities this music originated in and continues to live today. Hip hop music offered these communities a conduit for talking about the daily struggle of living in impoverished and still largely segregated communities.
For this project, I will first offer an abstract or overview of the music as a whole. I have separated hip hop music into five different generations based on style, themes, and chronology, and influence and then put them on a map of America for organization. The viewer will be able to choose one of these offered generations and in response, the important artists of that generation will pop up on the part of the map that they come from. Much like chronology plays an important role in the creation and importance of this music location largely influences an artist’s sound and the themes they choose to deal with in their music. Further, they will be able to click on each individual artists and see their discography, listen to and learn about their most famous and most influential songs and how the offer to a cultural movement. Hip hop music is often defined by four key elements: 1. Rapping 2. DJing/Scratching 3. Sampling 4. Beatboxing, these elements will play a large role in my analysis of each individuals talent and influence as each artist grew on the last and the way in which the music was produced was constantly changing and improving. This may seem like a very large scale project but in total it will look at around thirty artists briefly while giving the two or three most influential artists of each generation a much more in-depth analysis. It will assess the role of the more influential artists in contributing to a new industry and the importance of the messages that shine through their work in a larger context, this effort will be aided with the inclusion of embedded youtube interviews of these artists and some of the more renowned people who have studied the industry. For the artists who I have deemed less influential, I will offer their discography and a very brief biography. This project will offer an overview of hip hop’s rise to popularity as well as a deeper look into its implications in empowering a marginalized community and forcing a country to see things the way they are not how they want them to be.
A lot of my sources will be online interviews as most of the story of the hip hop industry has been told by its major players instead of popular historians. Rapworld.com offers a great overview of the history of hip hop in its many different stages and will contribute a lot to the overarching themes that appear throughout the website. Spotify and Billboard offer insights into the success of individual artists and songs now and during the time of their release. Rap Genius discusses the meaning of individual songs by breaking them down into individual lines and explaining their significance which will play a large role in looking at some of the more important artists and explaining the message they were trying to get across. Vox discusses the lyrical progression of the music and can separate individual artists by talent. I do need to find more scholarly pieces that deal with the social implications of the music as that is a large focus of my project but truthfully a lot of this history is told through its artists in documentaries and interviews rather than written work.
There are not many technical requirements for this project other than finding the map making software that makes it easiest for me to organize these artists by location while offering embedded sources and written information once you clock on an artist. I think this will only require a couple of meetings with IT to find the right software and then get comfortable using it.
So far I have chosen the artists I would like to focus on and divided them into 5 different generations. I then went on to pick the more influential artists within each generation to further discuss. Currently, my primary focus has been to find sources that discuss these artists I have deemed more influential artists and their role in the industry. I have yet to title these generations but chronology is the most important piece in their organization because this music largely reflected the time it was released at and was heavily influenced by the others to do it at the same time because it is still a relatively young genre of music. The next step is to pick and familiarize myself with a mapping software that makes it easy to sift through the information I will provide.
Some of the challenges I have faced are finding scholarly sources dealing with this subject matter. But most importantly, I must keep the notion that, just because I listen to this music does not mean I understand the struggle that created it, with me throughout my observations.