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For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France’s “other” face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv’ developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of “Arabic” North African, African and Asian forms circulating with classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone else. French hip hop develops into concert dance not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture; it nuances an “Anglo-Saxon” model of identity politics with a “francophone” post-colonial identity poetics and grants its dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and transmit body-based knowledge. This book-- the first in English to introduce readers to the French mouv’ --analyzes the choreographic development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

This book enters into the many worlds of expression brought forth across Africa by the ravaging presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a common and essential interest in understanding creative expression in crushing and uncertain times. Chapters investigate and engage the social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures that enable the arts to convey messages of hope and healing, and of knowledge and good counsel to the wider community. And from Africa to the wider world, the text here brings intimate, inspiring portraits of the performers, artists, communities, and organizations that have shared here their insights and the sense they have made of their lives and actions from deep within this devastating epidemic. Covering the wide expanse of the African continent, the chapters include explorations of, for example, the use of music to cope with AIDS; the relationship between music, HIV/AIDS, and social change; visual approaches to HIV literacy; radio and television as tools for “edutainment”; several individual artists’ confrontations with HIV/AIDS; various performance groups’ response to the epidemic; combating HIV/AIDS with local cultural performance; and more. Source material, such as song lyrics and interviews, weaves throughout the collection, which is a nuanced and profoundly affective portrayal of the intricate relationship between HIV/AIDS and the arts in Africa.

B-boying is a form of Afro-diasporic competitive dance that developed in the Bronx, NY in the early 1970s. Widely - though incorrectly - known as “breakdancing,” it is often dismissed as a form of urban acrobatics set to music. In reality, however, b-boying is a deeply traditional and profoundly expressive art form that has been passed down from teacher to student for almost four decades. Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York offers the first serious study of b-boying as both unique dance form and a manifestation of the most fundamental principles of hip-hop culture. Drawing on anthropological and historical research, interviews and personal experience as a student of the dance, Joseph Schloss presents a nuanced picture of b-boying and its social context. From the dance’s distinctive musical repertoire and traditional educational approaches to its complex stylistic principles and secret battle strategies, Foundation illuminates a previously unexamined thread in the complex tapestry that is contemporary hip-hop.

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 as a transnational 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 shortchanged 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\" Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil' Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, and Lauryn Hill. 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 complex considerations of hip hop's association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She shows 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.

There's a surging demand for whiskey in the world, and Tom Lix has found a way to age whiskey in just 24 hours. Traditionally, it takes years to age a barrel, and traditionalists are up in arms over Lix's new product. He tells us about his company, why the industry is ripe for disruption and what it's like to be the most-hated man in whiskey.

2007 Alan Merriam Prize presented by the Society for Ethnomusicology 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Book Award Finalist When we think of African American popular music, our first thought is probably not of double-dutch: girls bouncing between two twirling ropes, keeping time to the tick-tat under their toes. But this book argues that the games black girls play —handclapping songs, cheers, and double-dutch jump rope—both reflect and inspire the principles of black popular musicmaking. The Games Black Girls Play illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earliest games African American girls learn—how, in effect, these games contain the DNA of black music. Drawing on interviews, recordings of handclapping games and cheers, and her own observation and memories of gameplaying, Kyra D. Gaunt argues that black girls' games are connected to long traditions of African and African American musicmaking, and that they teach vital musical and social lessons that are carried into adulthood. In this celebration of playground poetry and childhood choreography, she uncovers the surprisingly rich contributions of girls’ play to black popular culture.

Story-telling, autobiography, documentary and musical theatre are some of the ways in which Indigenous artists and theatre companies critique decades of invasion, dispossession, misrepresentation and silencing. Since the 1960s, Indigenous theatre and performance have represented diverse urban and regional perspectives on important historical and contemporary issues - especially the Stolen Generation, deaths in custody and land rights. These issues relate to the forced removal of \"light-skinned\" Aboriginal children from their families from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, the disproportionate number of Indigenous deaths in police custody relative to the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, and Indigenous claims for the recognition of prior occupation of the land and the award of Native Title. More recently, the impact of British nuclear testing at Maralinga in outback South Australia is explored in a new work, Ngapartji Ngapartji, that situates Indigenous experience within the wider context of the bombing of Hiroshima and the Cold War-led nuclear arms race of the 1950s and 1960s. Maryrose Casey and Helena Grehan have published thoughtful and challenging essays on the new political and aesthetic terrain uncovered in this performance. Ngapartji Ngapartji's linking of Maralinga and Hiroshima signifies a shift from a national to a more global perspective that is also reflected in the multi-cultural characters and cast. Critiques of the policies and practices of successive state and national governments give way in this work to a more international perspective reflecting the globalising forces of the contemporary era. The recent engagement with the global intensifies in two new Indigenous works at the 2010 Adelaide Festival: Tony Briggs' The Sapphires, a multi-cultural cast play which tells the story of an Indigenous \"Motown\" singing group that entertains the troops in Vietnam in the late 1960s, and Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu [Wrong Skin], which deals with global entertainment culture including hip-hop and Bollywood. By drawing out the global influences in Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu [Wrong Skin], this article discusses the issues of modernity, digital media, globalisation and identity in contemporary Indigenous theatre that look beyond the nation to the new horizons of the global.

The ways that Anne Deavere Smith's drama \"Fires in the Mirror\" pertains to hip-hop music are examined. \"Fires in the Mirror,\" like hip-hop, uses technology and performance to highlight the current American crisis of race, community and identity.

In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to—and making money for—a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the highly charged lyrics, public battles, and hard, fast lifestyles that characterize the genre have incited the anger of many public figures and proponents of \"family values.\" Constantly engaging questions of black identity and race relations, poverty and wealth, gangsta rap represents one of the most profound influences on pop culture in the last thirty years. Focusing on the artists Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, the Geto Boys, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur, Quinn explores the origins, development, and immense appeal of gangsta rap. Including detailed readings in urban geography, neoconservative politics, subcultural formations, black cultural debates, and music industry conditions, this book explains how and why this music genre emerged. In Nuthin' but a \"G\" Thang, Quinn argues that gangsta rap both reflected and reinforced the decline in black protest culture and the great rise in individualist and entrepreneurial thinking that took place in the U.S. after the 1970s. Uncovering gangsta rap’s deep roots in black working-class expressive culture, she stresses the music’s aesthetic pleasures and complexities that have often been ignored in critical accounts.