Hip Hop & Social Issues AMS 111 Spring 2014

Spring 2014

The University at Buffalo
Department of Transnational Studies

Contemporary Popular Music Special Topics:
Hip Hop & Social Issues
AMS 111

Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays
12:00 to 12:50 PM

This course will examine hip-hop's place in America and the world. We will begin the course with a simple question: Where does hip hop come from? To answer this, we will place hip-hop in its larger historical and political contexts. We will visit hip-hoppers in a 1970s New York City and then trace its history from the Jim Crow South to Kingston, Jamaica and then forward to the supposed end of the civil rights era. We will think through the implications of hip-hop's addiction to James Brown, misogyny, and all-things keepin' it real. We will listen for hip-hop's African and African American sonic roots while placing hip-hop in its present context as a world cultural movement. We will then move to issues of social justice and mass incarceration - phenomenon that hip-hoppers have been hell-bent on addressing and bringing to bear in their politics since the very beginning. To get at these and other ideas, we will focus on the following course question: Consider its roots, how and why has hip-hop changed over the past 40 years? What does this change reveal about our world and our future? And what does hip-hop's presence in the world tell us about race, class gender, and American culture? We will pay special attention to the changing roles of race, class, gender, and nation as seen in hip-hop's relationship to resistance as well as struggle for a more equal and just present.