Williams - The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop

It has been more than thirty-five years since the first commercial recordings of hip-hop music were made. This Companion , written by renowned scholars and industry professionals, reflects the passion and scholarly activity occurring in the new generation of hip-hop studies. It covers a diverse range of case studies from nerdcore hip-hop to instrumental hip-hop to the role of rappers in the Obama campaign and from countries including Senegal, Japan, Germany, Cuba, and the UK. Chapters provide an overview of the four elements of hip-hop MCing, DJing, breakdancing (or breakin), and graffiti in addition to key topics such as religion, theater, film, gender, and politics. Intended for students, scholars, and the most serious of hip-hop heads, this collection incorporates methods in studying hip-hop flow, as well as the music analysis of hip-hop and methods from linguistics, political science, gender and film studies to provide exciting new perspectives on this rapidly developing field.

JUSTIN A. WILLIAMS is Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol, and the author of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop (2013). He has taught at Leeds College of Music, Lancaster University, and Anglia Ruskin University, and has been published in Popular Music , Popular Music History , and The Journal of Musicology . As a professional trumpet and piano player in California, he ran a successful jazz piano trio and played with the band Bucho! which won a number of Sacramento Area Music Awards and were signed to two record labels. He has co-written (with Ross Wilson) an article on digital crowd funding for The Oxford Handbook to Music and Virtuality and is currently co-editing (with Katherine Williams) The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter .

For a list of titles published in the series, please see .

The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop

Edited by

Justin A. Williams

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom

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Cambridge University Press 2015

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2015

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

The Cambridge companion to hip-hop / edited by Justin A. Williams.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-107-03746-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Rap (Music) History and criticism. I. Williams, Justin A.

ML3531.C356 2015

782.421649dc23 2014032226

ISBN 978-1-107-03746-5 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-107-64386-4 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Dedicated to the memory of Professor Adam Krims