This chapter argues that rap has been undervalued by English studies. It conducts a close analysis of the work of Roots Manuva to develop a nuanced account of how his rap songs engage with contemporary human experience, and to demonstrate how literary critics might respond to them. It draws on the work of Jaques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben to examine the literary singularity of Roots Manuva’s third album Awfully Deep. Rodney Smith can be seen to play with with forms of temporality, the tension and difference between sound and sense, and understandings of the self in a digitally mediated world. The chapter proposes that by drawing on the concept of the semiotic-performative alongside that of the semantic and semiotic-poetic, students of English literature might be better able to engage with the significance of Smith’s oeuvre.

This chapter contributes an Australian perspective to a growing body of scholarship that explores “applied” hip-hop programs. It begins by introducing international studies that examine how and why hip-hop is used for applied aims, including concerns that hip-hop culture may be trivialised or exploited in institutional settings. The focus then shifts to Australia, where hip-hop workshops have been running since the 1980s. This background informs a literature review that outlines how hip-hop is drawn on in diverse settings from schools to youth centres with an emphasis on hip-hop music (rhyme writing / music production). The review suggests that applied programs are important creative outlets that achieve diverse educational and wellbeing outcomes. However, a recurrent theme is the need for further research. The chapter concludes by linking the literature review with a case study: a pilot project that evaluated hip-hop workshops for First Nations young people in Adelaide. This project found that mentors who run applied programs view hip-hop as a vital tool for self-expression and emotional healing. Together, the literature review and case study demonstrate the potential power of hip-hop but also the need for more evaluations of applied hip-hop programs especially in settings outside of North America, like Australia.

This chapter discusses the variegated dynamics of English-language rap in the complex, stratified, and multilingual sociolinguistic environment of India. The first section provides a brief overview of the historical and sociocultural positioning of English in India. The following section lays out a genealogy of English rap in India, discussing its evolution over the past three decades. The third and final section, which forms the analytical crux of the chapter, uses examples from lyrics and an interview to contextually analyze how the choice to rap in English reproduces as well as contests the intersections between sociolinguistic dynamics, politics of regionalism and marketability, caste identities, and racialization. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how English rap in India is simultaneously rife with possibilities for artists while also transcending the oversimplifications associated with English usage in India.

This chapter invites readers to consider how an engagement with hip-hop music and culture can contribute to a better understanding of mental health, psychiatry, psychology, public health, and neuroscience. It provides an introduction to hip-hop therapy, highlighting the use of rap by psychologists and counsellors to promote mental well-being. The chapter goes on to examine the work that the Hip-Hop Psych initiative has undertaken in advancing the role of hip-hop in primary care. With hip-hop’s pre-eminence as a global musical force, greater attention to how mental health is represented in hip-hop can provide healthcare professionals with tools to aid discussions with patients about potential trends related to hip-hop icons, such as contagion effects of suicide, self-harm, and self-medication. Hip-hop offers a platform for artists and those who embrace the culture to address their emotional experiences through rap. By exploring lyrical content, the chapter uncovers how performers express their mental health challenges and fashion resilience within challenging circumstances. It argues that attention to this material could also help identify language disturbances associated with mental health conditions, and indicates the potential gains from the use of technology and neuroscientific research to support hip-hop music interventions.

This chapter explores the history of sound system and emcee culture. Originating in Jamaica, during the 1950s, the sound system has spawned numerous multi-billion dollar generating genres, including electronic dance music and hip-hop. The chapter outlines the contribution that figures such as Clement Dodd, Duke Reid, and Prince Buster made to the emergence of dancehall culture and the innovations of Count Machuki and U-Roy to the development of emceeing. It goes on to examine the role that sound system culture played in the birth of hip-hop, and the movement of artists from Jamaica, the United States and the UK, across the Atlantic, which has produced an outernational sound. The chapter reveals the ongoing significance of dubplates to garage music, clashing in grime, and riddims throughout the history of hip-hop culture. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the influence of the sound system on popular music culture across the globe.

Music award shows play a key role in shaping the direction of popular music, by reflecting current trends and predicting future movements within a music scene. In Tanzania, the rise of music awards in the early 2000s paralleled the growth of rap, R&B, and the locally created genre bongo flava. This chapter explores how award shows contributed to the popularity of these genres, providing artists a means to both celebrate their musical achievement and attain a sense of legitimacy. Award shows also became spaces to contest political and social norms in the country. During the early 2000s, for instance, artists in these genres used their music to counter state censorship and to openly critique politicians and government policies. Conversely, the government attempted to influence artistic expression through state-sponsored music awards shows that often promoted winners who aligned with specific values viewed as more favorable to state ideologies. Thus, music awards in Tanzania became a platform that not only celebrated artistic achievement but also actively attempted to influence the relationship between artists and political authority.

This chapter provides a historical grounding and introduction to rap – the lyrical element of hip-hop – as the genre with which we identify it today. It details the origins and the multicultural nature of the deep history that rap carries in its words and rhythms, blending cultural influences and practices across the continents, stretching as far back as the seventeenth century. For such a contemporary and relevant form of music, rap has deep and widespread roots, both musical and lyrical. The chapter therefore tackles some of the complex questions that arise regarding the genre’s changing, and often contested, musical and political identity, as well as its potential to represent the plethora of different communities that claim it as their own. Is rap a vessel for otherwise unheard voices? Does it represent all that came together to make it what it is today, or have these identities shifted over time and space? The chapter concludes with a case study of French rap as an example of dialogue between rap, politics, and cultural representation.

From rap’s dense lyrical content to its speech-like vocal delivery, it seems apparent that few genres of music or cultural movements place a greater focus on language than hip-hop. As such, it should come as no surprise that hip-hop music and hip-hop culture have been the subject of a range of linguistics-oriented research. This chapter presents an overview of linguistic approaches to hip-hop, exploring sociolinguistic research on African-American English in the context of hip-hop, discourse analytical approaches to rap lyrics, and linguistic approaches to hip-hop musicology. Though the chapter’s literature review of linguistic research into hip-hop should not be considered exhaustive, it will serve as a starting point for those interested in diving deeper into the field of hip-hop linguistics. Following its literature review, the chapter shifts its attention to one of hip-hop’s most prolific artists – Tupac “2Pac” Shakur. It examines from several hip-hop linguistics perspectives how 2Pac’s lyrical content, speech, and style of rapping evolved throughout his career. The results of the case study indicate that 2Pac manipulated his speech accent and rap flow over time to express his newfound identity as West Coast hip-hop’s leading figure during the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop feud of the 1990s.

What is Chinese hip-hop? How is its authenticity negotiated and contested in China? Instead of seeing Chinese hip-hop as a given cultural form that follows a singular trajectory, this chapter conceptualizes it as a precarious cultural formation suspended by competing claims to authenticity and overdetermined by divergent forces, such as the hip-hop communities, the state, and commercial forces. The broadcast of The Rap of China in 2017 was a decisive moment in the massification of hip-hop in China, in which the subcultural genre was domesticated, commercialized, and re-infused with hegemonic ideology. Focusing on the televisual remediation of hip-hop in China, this chapter illuminates how battles for authenticity have been fought out among different actors or groups, how tensions between the ethos and the techne of hip-hop unfold, and how censorship and propaganda imperatives delimit the contours of the genre’s representation to the mass audience. It problematizes the line between “the underground” and the mainstream, while foregrounding the process in which different horizons of hip-hip negotiate with one another, co-shaping what is visible, audible, and commendable. The issues discussed in this chapter will likely remain central to the development and dilemma of Chinese hip–hop in the years to come.

Research on rap music in Germany has focused on questions of transnationalism, ethnicity and gender. This chapter advances studies of German rap through an analysis of the rap song and music video “Ich bin Schwarz” (I am Black, 2016) by the popular female rap duo SXTN. Drawing on intersectional, feminist, and hip-hop studies scholarship, we conduct a close reading of the visuals, lyrics, and signifying practices that are mediated in the cultural text. We argue that “Ich bin Schwarz” promotes a new version of a self-empowered, humorous, and unapologetic Black female German identity by remixing the popular German music genre Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), subverting racist and sexist imaginations of Afrodiasporic womanhood, and continuing hip-hop’s political legacy against right-wing extremism in Germany. Ultimately, “Ich bin Schwarz” contributes to a growing body of performances in rap music and larger popular culture that destabilise white-dominated notions of German national identity.

Drill YouTube music videos are contradictory – nihilistic and collective, empty and humanizing, negatively assessing marginalization and societal nihilism, performing those scripts as a placebo for pain and humiliation, and also shaping popular culture in that image. This chapter explores drill YouTube music videos as cultural form, for what they tell us about the historical transformation of black diasporic sound culture, contemporary popular culture and its alternative cultural politics. Through an analysis of drill music videos, it identifies a shift away from sound culture towards video-music, and therein a shift to the networked and platformed moving image, and to narrative. This requires a reevaluation of the role of sound in alternative cultural politics and in black diasporic popular culture, and asks that drill video-music be evaluated on its contingent cultural terms, not on the terms of other cultural and musical moments.

Rap music is stereotypically perceived, discussed and policed as the soundtrack to “Black criminality”. Blamed for glamourising, glorifying and even causing violence in major cities around the world, rap is usually approached as the source rather than the target of violence. Writing against legal penal logics that obscure how rappers are victimised by the police, prosecutors and judges, this chapter offers an overview of how rap music is criminalised. UK drill music takes centre stage here, as the most recent rap subgenre to bear the brunt of such criminalisation, showing how “race”, crime and Black expressive culture(s) are interpreted as a public safety threat. The chapter argues that rap music tells us more about how and why it is racially criminalised, and encourages a more critical take on this issue than law-and-order rhetoric and politics allow.

Writings on hip hop education from hip-hop’s golden age onwards have often concerned themselves with the relationship between educational institutions, pedagogic practices and spaces and the vernacular identities and multicultural literacies of their disadvantaged students. This parallels and is related to the contentious educational debates that erupted during the so-called US culture wars of the 1990s concerning race, cultural identity, relevance and value. Accordingly, the chapter argues that a chief source of hip-hop education’s legitimacy derives from an abiding insistence amongst its practitioners and advocates that the more ostensibly “positive” and “conscious” examples of rap, in keeping with the black cultural continuum, express hip-hop’s inherent didacticism. I describe and examine these issues and their methodological and pedagogic claims – past and present – against a backdrop of moral panic that has long dogged rap music but also supplied it with critical impetus. The final section of the chapter offers a case-study of a recent British hip-hop education programme that seeks to make use of UK drill music to develop the capacities of educationally disaffected school-age young people.

Grime music emerged at the turn of the millennium in the United Kingdom. Performed by MCs and DJs, it is a vital and vibrant form with unrelenting energy. This chapter focuses on live collective performance in grime music. In particular, it explores the spaces where grime is performed, paying attention to the specificity of these contexts, and their impact on group practice. It is split into three sections. Firstly, it positions grime as genre, demonstrating how antecedent forms—principally hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall—inform its collaborative, yet competitive nature. Secondly, it will offer an overview of these key arenas (radio, raves, record shops), unpacking how grime thrived within a “Black Public sphere” outside of heavy censorship and racialised policing of mainstream public fora. Finally, it will focus on a performance that captures grime’s improvisatory framework. Taken from 2007, this acclaimed “Birthday Set” for East London MC Ghetts possesses many hallmarks of grime performance. The analysis addresses competitiveness within MCs, intergeneric allusions (lyrical or otherwise), and the DJ’s technical cachet. This chapter therefore demonstrates dense interconnectivity within grime’s contexts for performance, offering insight into the ways in which the live domain acts as the pivotal ground for new creative work.

This chapter explores the rap debates of philosophical aesthetics, where early academic discourse on rap was at its most active. Rap aestheticians (led by Richard Shusterman) accentuated rap’s nature as an “art form”. The chapter examines the key issues within this debate, including the aesthetic experience of rap, flow (Mtume ya Salaam), the need for public support (and Herbert Grabes’ criticism of this position), and rap’s affinities with the Harlem Renaissance (Marvin Gladney). Rap’s engagement with other cultural practices, like driving and everyday culture, was discussed very early within philosophical aesthetics. Right from the beginning the debate was very international, with many of the authors coming from the Nordic Countries (Esa Sironen, Stefán Snaevarr, Martti Honkanen). It argues that there is still a lot to learn from aesthetic discussions on rap, and these philosophical debates are an interesting historical phenomenon, which rap scholars should know more about.