Black Noise: Rap Music
and Black Culture in Contemporary America, is the ground-breaking book of 1994
containing the early years of rap music’s emergence. It is considered as the
first detailed and theoretical exploration of rap music within its social,
cultural, and artistic contexts. This book takes up a comprehensive look at the
lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed
storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues. The author, Tricia Rose,
is a professor of African Studies at Brown University and has written numerous
articles on black culture, rap music, and contemporary popular culture. She discussed
rap as a unique musical form in which traditional Afro-Diaspora oral traditions
fuse with cutting edge music technologies. She also takes up rap’s racial
politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the
responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual
politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female
rapper’s critiques of men. Rose thoroughly analyses several facets of the
musical genre and provides an effective antidote to the severally flawed
hip-hop coverage in mainstream media. She, in her book, accurately traces rap’s
sonic history and gives substantial information about the innovative rhythm
manipulations. She also makes clear the connections between rap’s beginning and
the political turmoil that afflicted black and Latino urban neighborhoods
throughout the 1970's and 1980's. In discussing what is probably rap’s most
controversial aspect- lyrics supposedly advocating “cop killing”- Rose vividly
delineates the social conditions that bring about such fierce responses to
real-life police brutality and has carved the very fact in her book “Black
Noise”. Finally, she examines the often-neglected role of women in rap in
rewarding depth. Rose sorts through the complex forces, that shaped hip-hop’s
emergence by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the
influential setting of post-industrial New York City and the black and Latino
communities, where hip hop developed. In this book, she discusses rap as a
unique musical form in which traditions fuse with cutting-edge music
technologies. Rap music brings together a tangle of some of the most complex social,
cultural, and political issues in contemporary American society. Rose observes
that “rap music” stays as a vibrant force with its own aesthetic. She made her
book “Black Noise” as the canvas of her realization towards rap culture as well
as the black culture and scribbled her observation in words. She claims rap to
be a noisy and yet powerful element of contemporary American popular culture
which eventually draws a bagful of attention to itself.
Book: Black Noise: Rap
Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
Author: Tricia Rose
Reviewed By: Deblina Das
Picture Courtesy: https://www.brown.edu/news/2019-03-07/hiphop
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