Women and Performance in Hip Hop: An Interview with Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley Part II

[By Alysha Griffin]

 

Today, I conclude my Women in Hip-Hop series by providing part II of my interview with Nicole Hodges Persley. I continue to ask her about the performative aspects of hip-hop and how does the interplay of lyrics, videos, and performances come together to create overarching impressions of women’s place in the evolving culture.

“Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop” series has aimed to provide alternative visions of black women and hip-hop.

Women and Performance in Hip Hop: An Interview with Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley Part I

[By Alysha Griffin]

 In the second interview I conducted for “Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop,” I interviewed Nicole Hodges Persley. Persley  is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Kansas.  She teaches courses on hip-hop, acting, African American theater, race and performance and improvisation theory. Her research and performance works address the impact of racial, ethnic and national identity on performance practices in theatre, television and film. She has published articles on Jay-Z and Suzan-Lori Parks with forthcoming work on Nikki S. Lee and Jean Genet.

Her research on performance culture provides new insight for how we think about women’s roles in hip-hop culture.

Women, Hip Hop, and Music: An Interview with Dr. Tammy Kernodle Part II

[By Alysha Griffin]

On yesterday, I provided Part I of my interview with Musicologist, Tammy Kernodle. Today, I provide part II of the interview where I conclude asking Kernodle specific questions about the performative aspects of hip-hop culture as it relates to black women.

“Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop” series seeks to interpret the opportunities and challenges black women encounter participating in hip-hop culture.

Women, Hip Hop, and Music: An Interview with Dr. Tammy Kernodle Part I

[By Alysha Griffin]

For “Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop” series, I interviewed Tammy Kernodle. Kernolde, an Associate Professor of Musicology at Miami University, Oxford, has served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri and has lectured extensively on the operas of William Grant Still, the life and religious compositions of jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

Given Kernodle’s background, her perspective on black women in hip-hop culture is informed by a larger historical and social tradition of black women and music culture in general.

Construction Workers: Black Women Building Community

[By Alysha Griffin]

Hip Hop has become notorious for its treatment of women. Whether through misogynistic images or the large exclusion of women in rap music, Hip Hop has become “Public Enemy #1” in the women’s fight for progress. With all this critique of Hip Hop, however, I think it is important to acknowledge those women who have navigated the tight spaces in Hip Hop culture. By comparing tropes in works of literature written by black women with those works of female Hip Hop artists, it may be possible to reclaim agency that is lost in the mainstream interpretations of Hip Hop. For this reason, HBW launches the series “Raising the Roof: Black Women’s Voices in Hip Hop.”

Song: The Invisible Character in “Song of Solomon”

[By Cindy Lyles]

An instrumental or vocal musical track typically lingers in the background as the opening credits or initial scene of a film unfolds. Music, however, is less anticipated in the opening vignette of a novel, but Toni Morrison proves that song has a place in Song of Solomon far beyond the title. At the beginning of this novel, music serves a similar purpose that it does in film to establish and maintain the emotional mood of a scene for the audience. Yet, unlike in film, music in the opening of Song of Solomon is recognized by characters and consequently highly influential, therefore making it a character in its own respect.

Break It Down: Strange Fruit

“Break It Down” is a new HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems.

This week, Blog Contributor Goyland Williams has analyzed Strange Fruit, a song written by Abel Meeropol and performed by jazz singer Billie Holiday.

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Theorizing Black Music, Theorizing Black Poetry

[By Goyland Williams]

Last semester, I had the privilege of taking a course entitled Theorizing Black Music, Theorizing Black Poetry. My curiosity was sparked throughout the course as significant connections were made between themes in blues lyrics and those in African-American poetry. Given the long history of the black oral tradition, the African-American musical tradition has merely been an extension of that narrative and has impacted the writing of many African-Americans.

It Was All A Dream: Liner Notes and 1990s Hip Hop Print and Media Culture

[By Danielle Hall]

“It was all a dream I used to read Word Up! magazine …” – opening line from “Juicy” by Notorious B.I.G.

In the digital age of itunes, mixtapes, and social media, the demand for going to stores to purchase music and/or music magazines is diminishing. Back in May, I was conversing with a professor about music artists and the necessity of liner notes. In the past, liner notes and music magazines have often served as the intermediary between artist and audience, but today we risk losing those elements of musical and literary history and knowledge of artist-intellectual productions.

It is not my intention to romanticize the 1990s or to suggest that current music artists lack any mode of creativity. My perspective simply evolves from the notion that sometimes technology can be a drawback or hinder our understandings of music, artistry, and lyricism as critical tenets of literary and intellectual history, culture, and scholarship.

Contemporary Toasts By Black Women in Music

[By Alysha Griffin]

The space for women to enter into Hip Hop is a small one. However, once through, female singers and emcees have held their own against the objectifying and misogynistic nature of Hip Hop culture. Although few have entered on the Hip Hop stage, many have established their lyrical dominance and street credibility. For this, HBW salutes contemporary, female “toast masters.”

Toasts, Black Women, and Hip Hop

[By Alysha Griffin]

The canon of African American literature overflows with stories of Stagolees, Shines, and Signifying Monkeys. These antiheroic figures in African American culture created the paradigm for the poetic form known as the toast. Derived from black folklore, toasts are narratives in which a character overcomes a sequence of events. In doing so, they illustrate their extraordinary physical and lyrical abilities. Usually told by male personas, they function to attest to one’s street credibility and physical abilities.

Exploring the Tight Bond between Music and Poetry

[By Cindy Lyles]

Whether found in Amiri Baraka mimicking piano chords in “In Walked Bud” or in quoting the 1970s Hit “Be Thankful for What You’ve Got (Diamond in the Back)” like Allison Joseph does in “Thirty Lines about the Fro,” music has a home in poetry. Melodic tunes tend to set the mood and evoke just the right feeling the poet needs to convey a story. The previous two examples and so many more exemplify this idea, but just as music enhances poetry, so too does the artistry of poetry add to music. Such is the case with rapper Kanye West’s “Never Let Me Down.”

Musical Influences on Black Writing

[By Kenton Rambsy]

Music serves as a backdrop for black writing and informs character interactions, novel settings, reader responses to novels, short stories, and poetry. For instance, consider James Weldon Johnson’s the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and how issues of black identity were related to ragtime.

In his novel, music takes center stage as the events unfold throughout the novel and the story’s protagonist comes to a greater awareness of his identity. The unnamed narrator is a child musical prodigy that excels in his piano playing abilities.

Break It Down: Ask Your Mama--Excerpt from “Horn of Plenty”

“Break It Down” is an HBW Literary Blog initiative that strives to offer critical interpretations of song lyrics, excerpts from novels, and poems.

This week, Blog Contributor Alysha Griffin has analyzed an excerpt from Langston Hughes's Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. She continues her conversation from yesterday as she looks at an excerpt from "Horn of Plenty."

Ask Your Mama: Langston Hughes and Afrofuturism

[By Alysha Griffin]

My best friends and I used to be fond of playing the dozens—particularly, exchanging “yo’ mama” jokes. Too young to realize how problematic this was from a historical angle, we realized that this was probably something we should avoid only when the battles ended with a fist fight and/or punishment from someone’s angry mother- my best friends were also my first cousins. Needless to say, one of Langston Hughes’s works that I most appreciate is his book length poem, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz  (AYM)(1961).

Struggles for Freedom: Kanye West and Toni Morrison’s Artistic Renderings of Flight

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[By Kenton Rambsy]

Tony Bolden, author of Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture, proposes “vernacular cultures are always dialogic relative to dominant cultures, so they are never static but rather always in flux...writers (artists) who appropriate the vernacular must confront the constant risk of erasure” (26). Bolden’s concept of the ever-changing vernacular culture helps to explain frequent reimagings of slavery and struggles for liberation by black literary artists.

Black writers, musicians, and other artists working in a range of genres use vernacular language to re-envision history and re-image the legacy of enslaved persons. Defiantly, against most popular appraisals of history, these artists validate the independence, intelligence, and ingenuity of their enslaved ancestors through their artistic renderings.

I Love Hip-Hop: Aesthetics, Politics, and Society

James Haile is a doctoral student in philosophy at Duquesne University. His research centers on the relation of philosophy to literature and sociology. His edited collection, PhilosophicalMeditations on Richard Wright (Lexington Books) is forthcoming this fall.

           

            What are the aesthetic, social and political messages of hip-hop music? Although much has been written—and continues to be written—on the “tremendous potential” of this musical art-form for social criticism and change (perhaps even revolution), the vast majority of it centers on the more overtly ‘socially conscious’, ‘politically oriented’ groups and MCs (a few examples: Dead Prez, Black Star, KRS-One, and, most notably, the late Tupac and the now defunct Public Enemy). Conversely, there has been scant commentary on the social and political ‘consciousness’ of more mainstream hip-hop music (a few examples: Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, and Rick Ross). Instead, many have simply relied on the too generally accepted, strict dichotomies: mainstream versus underground, authentic versus commercial, social and politically conscious versus dance/booty shake music (to name a few). And, still many of hip-hop artists (especially those who have been given the currency of social consciousness) fight these strict categories, not solely on grounds of artistic freedom (and expression), but on social and political grounds: Mos Def raps in “Close Edge”, “so stop with the nonsense that he's conscious, I'm just awake y’all”; or, Andre 3000’s insistence on “Aquemini”, “Now question: is every nigga with dreads for the cause? Is every nigga with golds for the fall? Naw, so don't get caught in appearance.” What is left for us to think about, especially with Andre 3000, is the nature of political expression: what do politics look like, especially for those who were born and/or grew up post-Civil Rights, what Mark Anthony Neal calls the post-soul era. Moreover, if we are to look to contemporary hip-hop to deliver a political message, to capture the post-soul era of American life, what should this hip-hop message look like?

Digging Amiri Baraka

By HBW Contributor: Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Professor of English at Dillard University.

 Baraka, Amiri.  Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

“Man is capable of doing what he is incapable of imagining.  His head tills the galaxy of the absurd.”

          René Char, Leaves of Hypnos, Note 227

1963.  I discover Leroi Jones and “The End of Man Is His Beauty” in Beyond the Blues (1962), edited by Rosey E. Pool.  At that time, his essays and jazz commentaries had moved beyond the United States, as far away “as CRUCIBLE, a periodical published in Scotland” (Pool 135). LeRoi Jones had also published Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), which Ralph Ellison thought was an attempt to do brain surgery with a switchblade. A proper Negro would reach such a conclusion.  I was just a black teenager in Mississippi who had first listened to Sonny Rollins’ “Oleo” in 1959, so I valued Mr. Jones more than Mr. Ellison did. And Blues People was easier to read than Invisible Man.

The Ethics of Ekstasis

James Haile is a doctoral student in philosophy at Duquesne University. His research focuses on the relation of philosophy to literature and sociology. His edited collection, Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright (Lexington Books) is forthcoming this fall.

One of the trenchant criticisms of the hip-hop generation—generally, those born after the Civil Rights Era, coming of age between 1970 and 1980—and post hip-hop generation—those born after 1980, coming of age in an era in which hip-hop has become a world wide phenomena—has been that these generations lack the attention span of the previous generations as well as the dedication and work ethic to hone the details of craft. This lack of attention to detail and work ethic is most pronounced in the music that these generations produced. Hip-hop as a musical form encompasses, for many, all that is wrong with these generations: the desire for immediate gratification, a crumbling morality that is reflected in its materialism. What is often misunderstood, though, is that this generation and its music offer a deep ethics, one that is tied to and reflective of the paradigmatic shift that occurred in the mid to late 1970s and is experienced contemporaneously. Beneath what appears to be gross materialism is a seated ethical impulse, one that is often typified as swag, but that I will articulate as ekstasis: to be or stand out or off of, apart, from external/exogenous forces.

Jazz and Rhetoric: Notes on John Coltrane

Guest Blogger Earl Brooks is a 2010 graduate of the University of Kansas. Currently, he is a graduate student of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of his current research involves musical performance and theory along with historical and literary studies. 

There are few jazz artists that have been written about as much as John Coltrane. On one hand, there are his many musical accomplishments that changed jazz forever. Born September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, Coltrane went from a side-man in Philadelphia based blues bands to performing with legends of jazz such as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, to leading an illustrious solo career with his own quartet. Along with an infamous victory over drug and alcohol abuse, Coltrane was able to remain on the cutting edge of jazz’s evolution right up until his death in 1967 from liver disease. Coltrane is most well-known for his album A Love Supreme and the album itself is heralded as a jazz classic. Although Coltrane and this album in particular have been approached from many other academic disciplines, there is however only a small amount in terms of rhetorical analysis and criticism. The album is structured as a suite split into four parts; “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm.” The album is a mixture of hard bop and free jazz with “Psalm” and the beginning of “Acknowledgement” being free jazz.