Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop

Awards:   Winner of Street Literature Book Award Medal (Slbam) (Nonfiction) 2005
Author:   Imani Perry
Publisher:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9780822334354


Pages:   248
Publication Date:   30 November 2004
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained
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Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop


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Awards

  • Winner of Street Literature Book Award Medal (Slbam) (Nonfiction) 2005

Overview

"At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here - criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop, or rap, as a trans-national musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have short changed the aesthetic value of rap by attributing its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation. Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, KRS-One, Outkast, Sean ""Puffy"" Coombes, Tupak Shakur, Lil' Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, Lauryn Hill, and Foxy Brown. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs - the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides nuanced considerations of hip hop's association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She contends that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite."

Full Product Details

Author:   Imani Perry
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.00cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 23.30cm
Weight:   0.472kg
ISBN:  

9780822334354


ISBN 10:   0822334356
Pages:   248
Publication Date:   30 November 2004
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained
The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Hip Hop's Mama: Originalism and Identity in the Music 9 2. My Mic Sound Nice: Art, Community, and Consciousness 38 3. Stinging Like Tabasco: Structure and Format in Hip Hop Compositions 58 4. The Glorious Outlaw: Hip Hop Narratives, American Law, and the Court of Public Opinion 102 5. B-Boys, Players, and Preachers: Reading Masculinity 117 6. The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women 155 7. Bling Bling...and Going Pop: Consumerism and Co-optation in Hip Hop 191 Notes 205 Index 223

Reviews

Perry's a law professor at Rutgers, but she's also a hip-hop head, so she gets the music right. Paste Magazine Compelling... Clearly interest in Hip-Hop Studies is only growing and Imani Perry's Prophets of the Hood is yet another example of how far the field has come as a legitimate site of scholarly production. Online at AOL Black Voices an intertextual discussion, transcending the usual knee-jerk reactions, of how hip-hop's women have gone from MC Lyte to today's lifeless--and often light mulatta--capitalist commodities par excellence. L.A. Weekly Imani Perry has written the most subtle and nuanced treatment of hip hop that I know. Her complex view of hip hop as black democratic space subject to prophetic utterance and mainstream cooptation is powerful. Her call for the local engagement and global vision of the underground to revitalize hip hop is compelling. Her seminal work should silence all naive or ignorant trashers of this vital cultural form! Cornel West, Princeton University Imani Perry's Prophets of the Hood is an extraordinary and brilliant book. Eschewing a rigid division between the 'positive' and 'negative' in hip-hop, she takes the discussion of rap to new depths and greater heights with a probing analysis of the poetic and political dimensions of the art form. With lucid explanations, crisp writing and sharp analysis, Perry has managed to actually say some very important things in a strikingly fresh manner. With the story-telling skills of Nas, the passion of 2Pac, the lyrical dexterity of Lauryn Hill, the verbal mastery of Talib Kweli and the conceptual acuity of KRS-One, Perry has produced a stunning, magnificent work of art. Michael Eric Dyson, author of Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur.


Author Information

Imani Perry is a Professor in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.

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