haha...thanks for all the input fellas...just finished speaking w my adviser and we both agree that this topic could go one for well over a 100 or so pages...its early on and im brainstorming...appreciate all the help/suggestions.
its not my masters thesis, but some students in the class are using this opportunity to make it the basis of theirs...
of course, social awareness is a fairly broad topic...i plan to pull from varying sources---ED OG and the Bulldogs-Be a Father to your child// Professor X-close the crackhouse// to artists one wouldnt typically consider socially aware--Geto Boys, Spice 1, Ghostface, the list goes on....
and no im not looking to change the game of hiphop scholarship...we were given free reign to choose our own topics and i chose this one....
maybe ill post it up for all to read at the end of the semester when its done
Slighly off-topic. II heard media assassin Harry Allan(sp?) wrote something crazy like 1000 pgs of analysis of the song 'niggas bleed' by biggie. Anyone know where I can find?
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Hip-hop is one of those places for half-assed people to get together with other half-assed people in order to momentarily feel whole about their collective half-assedness.
Hip-hop is one of those places for half-assed people to get together with other half-assed people in order to momentarily feel whole about their collective half-assedness.
You right. Don Gigante should base his thesis on Using Your Third-Eye Vision to See Through the Illuminati-Governed Hollow Earth.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Harvey_Canal could write this paper better than the vast majority of this board (possibly, myself included)
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Hip-hop is one of those places for half-assed people to get together with other half-assed people in order to momentarily feel whole about their collective half-assedness.
You right. Don Gigante should base his thesis on Using Your Third-Eye Vision to See Through the Illuminati-Governed Hollow Earth.
Your continued regurgitation of the same-o = sub-half-assed.
I luvz you Harvey! Tell 'em how Z-RO raps the social consciousness.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Harvey_Canal could write this paper better than the vast majority of this board (possibly, myself included)
I'm with Batmon though. Quit writing disconnected academic papers on what you merely hope hip-hop to be.
And that's coming from someone who is a hip-hop educator. But what we do is teach kids how to make their own art, not waste paper with our longwinded misinterpretations of someone else's art.
Really, anything written about rap in thesis format should be immediately burned.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
I luvz you Harvey! Tell 'em how Z-RO raps the social consciousness.
Dude is looking at Ed OG and X-Clan and Geto Boys like it IS still 1991.
What's hilarious is that Z-Ro is one of the names I'd certainly mention if pressed for a current hip-hop artist with "social awareness".
RG: I'm not advocating more research papers per se, but there are also original ways to address hip-hop in a research capacity. This is not one of them...
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
What's hilarious is that Z-Ro is one of the names I'd certainly mention if pressed for a current hip-hop artist with "social awareness".
RG: I'm not advocating more research papers per se, but there are also original ways to address hip-hop in a research capacity. This is not one of them...
Yeah, I'm just hard pressed to think of any academic treatments of hip-hop that I've ever respected. I've read a lot of that crap too. Some of it is completely unreadable just for its wordiness alone, let alone its ridiculous premises.
But yeah, I imagine there is something out there that has made 20 years of getting over on college professors with a topic likely to be unknown to them worthwhile.
I'm with Harvey and this guy. I wrote a paper awhile back on generally what you're doing. Then I said why bother. Why explain hip hop to people who don't understand it? People who could really dig it ain't gonna read it. If I can dig up my paper, I can send it to you. You can even copy it, I don't care.
I'm just hard pressed to think of any academic treatments of hip-hop that I've ever respected.
Ditto. I cringe when I think of those blessedly bygone days when I was still a little geeked to see that some academic had written some something on hip-hop. "This bookish guy likes hip-hop? Hey, me too! I'ma have to cop and/or peep this!"
Even in cases where the ideas aren't totally uninspired, the writing is almost always just horse-smackingly awful.
I'm not quite as dismissive but if I were your advisor, I'd want to know what you think the overall relevance of this specific topic would be to your discipline. It's well tread in a lot of the hip-hop scholarship out there already.
Absolutely. Profs think this topic is fresh and provocative, but it's stale and predictable. And you aren't alone. Berkeley's dripping with true-school-4-life grad students picking through KRS-One lyrics, debating the essential differences between "rap" and "hip hop", all while gripping their Cheryl Keyes. Undergrads, too.
I enjoy exaggerating. But, it's true, Keyes is one enduring favorite. Not among undergrads, though.
I don't know any grad students who ride for her work either. I still have yet to read her book but the common comment I've heard is that it arrived about a generation too late.
(there are shelves' worth of unreadable, not-worth-the-paper-they're-printed-on books about almost any musical genre...)
My perspective is this: I think the vast majority of the hip-hop scholarship that's been written tends not to be for people who "get" hip-hop. And on one level, that sort of makes sense - scholarship should be about broadening conversations and bodies of knowledge rather than rapping to the choir.
But the problem, in my opinion, with so much of hip-hop scholarship is that even if they want to aim at a general audience, if they neglect to consider that those "in the know" might read their stuff too, it might help to make sure they don't have easy excuses for dismissing your work.
Factual errors, for example. Completely wrong lyrical transcriptions.
And there's the difficult task of trying to theorize on hip-hop without sounding like you're making completely obvious points OR putting out ideas that seem off-base to anyone in the know.
As I noted, I think it would be shortsighted to write only for the choir but the difficulty in almost any form of written scholarship is being able to reach a wider audience without insulting the intelligence of more informed readers.
There's also been a historical problem in hip-hop scholarship about wanting to use hip-hop as this blank cipher to spill any number of pet theories into. Especially given hip-hop's emergence in the same era that postmodern theory became vogue, there's endless attempts at comparing the two and not only does it often make for really turgid reading but as time has gone by, people are realizing that hip-hop is a lot more traditional rather than cutting-edge postmodern or post-structuralist.
Personally, and this is just me, I really like scholarship (hip-hop or otherwise) where I'm learning something I didn't know before. And that might seem self-evident but I think the rush to theory (which has been HUGE amongst scholars of color or those who work on issues of race and culture) has often meant a lack of basic, you know, data gathering.
It's really notable to me that most of the important oral histories of hip-hop have come via journalists and not scholars, even though oral history is a commonly used academic methodology. I suspect - and I'm not trying to be unkind here - that part of it is that hip-hop scholarship seems so "cutting edge" that some folks rush books to the forefront rather than spending the hard time to conduct a proper ethnography or oral history. People have wanted to write the next "Black Noise" when they should have been trying to research "Can't Stop, Won't Stop."
The other problem is that hip-hop changes so quickly, style-wise, but academic publishing is Slow. As. F*ck. And that means that by the time you've completed a 3 year ethnography of Atlanta strip club music, by the time you can actually publish something about it, that scene might be long dead or transformed beyond recognition.
And this doesn't even begin to address the problems with academic writing.
I enjoy exaggerating. But, it's true, Keyes is one enduring favorite. Not among undergrads, though.
I don't know any grad students who ride for her work either. I still have yet to read her book but the common comment I've heard is that it arrived about a generation too late.
It may just be a UCB thing, or it may be that this one growing campus organization, the graduate "Hip Hop Working Group," sort of perpetuates an admiration for the book. (I was briefly a member and am still on the mailing list, which keeps me up to date on what others are working on and discussing.) Admittedly, I've only skimmed Keyes's book, but my sense is that she sort of rehashes everything Toop said. So, there ya go.
I think you pretty much nail it on the reportage vs. theory thing. Most folks I encounter on this plane are the type to sit and think about things rather than talk to people and get the scoop. And some ideas can make a whole lot of sense in theory but that all goes out the window when they're not, you know, accurate.
When you add on that a lot of people writing about hip-hop didn't necessarily grow up in the thick of it, the frame of reference can become "what I think about it" rather than "what it is".
Comments
HAHA! I forgot about that shit. Truly one his more WTF? moments.
its not my masters thesis, but some students in the class are using this opportunity to make it the basis of theirs...
of course, social awareness is a fairly broad topic...i plan to pull from varying sources---ED OG and the Bulldogs-Be a Father to your child// Professor X-close the crackhouse// to artists one wouldnt typically consider socially aware--Geto Boys, Spice 1, Ghostface, the list goes on....
and no im not looking to change the game of hiphop scholarship...we were given free reign to choose our own topics and i chose this one....
maybe ill post it up for all to read at the end of the semester when its done
YES!! This is the best homemade video for a big artist's song that I've ever seen!
You right. Don Gigante should base his thesis on Using Your Third-Eye Vision to See Through the Illuminati-Governed Hollow Earth.
Your continued regurgitation of the same-o = sub-half-assed.
I'm with Batmon though. Quit writing disconnected academic papers on what you merely hope hip-hop to be.
And that's coming from someone who is a hip-hop educator. But what we do is teach kids how to make their own art, not waste paper with our longwinded misinterpretations of someone else's art.
Really, anything written about rap in thesis format should be immediately burned.
Dude is looking at Ed OG and X-Clan and Geto Boys like it IS still 1991.
Guaranteed ain't ready for no Ro.
Another reason to find a new topic.
I was under the impression that he'd become widely acknowledged as great here.
RG: I'm not advocating more research papers per se, but there are also original ways to address hip-hop in a research capacity. This is not one of them...
Yeah, I'm just hard pressed to think of any academic treatments of hip-hop that I've ever respected. I've read a lot of that crap too. Some of it is completely unreadable just for its wordiness alone, let alone its ridiculous premises.
But yeah, I imagine there is something out there that has made 20 years of getting over on college professors with a topic likely to be unknown to them worthwhile.
Does that suggest they're actually worthwhile at different moments in the economic landscape?
I'm with Harvey and this guy. I wrote a paper awhile back on generally what you're doing. Then I said why bother. Why explain hip hop to people who don't understand it? People who could really dig it ain't gonna read it. If I can dig up my paper, I can send it to you. You can even copy it, I don't care.
Ditto. I cringe when I think of those blessedly bygone days when I was still a little geeked to see that some academic had written some something on hip-hop. "This bookish guy likes hip-hop? Hey, me too! I'ma have to cop and/or peep this!"
Even in cases where the ideas aren't totally uninspired, the writing is almost always just horse-smackingly awful.
Don't do it, don.
Absolutely. Profs think this topic is fresh and provocative, but it's stale and predictable. And you aren't alone. Berkeley's dripping with true-school-4-life grad students picking through KRS-One lyrics, debating the essential differences between "rap" and "hip hop", all while gripping their Cheryl Keyes. Undergrads, too.
Write about rap. Just think outside the box.
Is that even true? I call b.s.!
Is it OK to write about R&B? Jazz?
(there are shelves' worth of unreadable, not-worth-the-paper-they're-printed-on books about almost any musical genre...)
I enjoy exaggerating. But, it's true, Keyes is one enduring favorite. Not among undergrads, though.
I don't know any grad students who ride for her work either. I still have yet to read her book but the common comment I've heard is that it arrived about a generation too late.
My perspective is this: I think the vast majority of the hip-hop scholarship that's been written tends not to be for people who "get" hip-hop. And on one level, that sort of makes sense - scholarship should be about broadening conversations and bodies of knowledge rather than rapping to the choir.
But the problem, in my opinion, with so much of hip-hop scholarship is that even if they want to aim at a general audience, if they neglect to consider that those "in the know" might read their stuff too, it might help to make sure they don't have easy excuses for dismissing your work.
Factual errors, for example.
Completely wrong lyrical transcriptions.
And there's the difficult task of trying to theorize on hip-hop without sounding like you're making completely obvious points OR putting out ideas that seem off-base to anyone in the know.
As I noted, I think it would be shortsighted to write only for the choir but the difficulty in almost any form of written scholarship is being able to reach a wider audience without insulting the intelligence of more informed readers.
There's also been a historical problem in hip-hop scholarship about wanting to use hip-hop as this blank cipher to spill any number of pet theories into. Especially given hip-hop's emergence in the same era that postmodern theory became vogue, there's endless attempts at comparing the two and not only does it often make for really turgid reading but as time has gone by, people are realizing that hip-hop is a lot more traditional rather than cutting-edge postmodern or post-structuralist.
Personally, and this is just me, I really like scholarship (hip-hop or otherwise) where I'm learning something I didn't know before. And that might seem self-evident but I think the rush to theory (which has been HUGE amongst scholars of color or those who work on issues of race and culture) has often meant a lack of basic, you know, data gathering.
It's really notable to me that most of the important oral histories of hip-hop have come via journalists and not scholars, even though oral history is a commonly used academic methodology. I suspect - and I'm not trying to be unkind here - that part of it is that hip-hop scholarship seems so "cutting edge" that some folks rush books to the forefront rather than spending the hard time to conduct a proper ethnography or oral history. People have wanted to write the next "Black Noise" when they should have been trying to research "Can't Stop, Won't Stop."
The other problem is that hip-hop changes so quickly, style-wise, but academic publishing is Slow. As. F*ck. And that means that by the time you've completed a 3 year ethnography of Atlanta strip club music, by the time you can actually publish something about it, that scene might be long dead or transformed beyond recognition.
And this doesn't even begin to address the problems with academic writing.
It may just be a UCB thing, or it may be that this one growing campus organization, the graduate "Hip Hop Working Group," sort of perpetuates an admiration for the book. (I was briefly a member and am still on the mailing list, which keeps me up to date on what others are working on and discussing.) Admittedly, I've only skimmed Keyes's book, but my sense is that she sort of rehashes everything Toop said. So, there ya go.
When you add on that a lot of people writing about hip-hop didn't necessarily grow up in the thick of it, the frame of reference can become "what I think about it" rather than "what it is".
Why is research so underrated in this sort of scholarship? Lyrical analysis ain't enough.
It is if the 'phors are sufficiently complex.