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Topics of Interest
General Topics
- Women in hip-hop
- Stereotype in hip-hop
- Genres of hip-hop (Gansta rap, Nerdcore, Alternative/ Conscious rap, Trap, Underground, etc.)
- Economics of hip- hop
- Politics and hip-hop
- Fashion and hip-hop
- Graffiti and hip-hop
Questions
- How has the internet impacted the exposure of hip-hop music and culture?
- Does the mixtape still have relevance in today’s society?
- How has the role of women changed in hip hop since its inception?
- Does nerdcore and other alternative forms of hip hop help or hurt hip hop culture?
- Do TV shows such as Love and Hip Hop and Empire perpetuate stereotypes of hip hop?
- How has social or political issues influenced hip hop music in the last 40 years?
Search Term Tips
Phrase Searches- Search for phrases by placing quotation marks around the phrase. Words with quotes will appear together in all search results. Example: “hip-hop music”
Boolean Operators- Use AND or OR to specify multiple words in any field, any order. Use AND NOT to exclude words. Select the operator you wish to use from the drop down menu in the Advanced Search form. Example: “hip-hop music” AND females OR women NOT men
Definitions
Databases
- Academic Search Complete
This multidisciplinary database provides access to articles from journals, magazines, and reference sources across all subject areas. Coverage is primarily from 1980 to the present, with some older content.
- Credo Reference
Provides access to a collection of aggregated and integrated reference books from high-quality publishers.
- Google Scholar
Searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
- Grove Music Online
See: Oxford Music Online Access limited to 5 simultaneous users.
- JSTOR
Digitized back issues of scholarly journals with a rolling date of five years ago. Covers a wide variety of disciplines.
- Kanopy
Kanopy is an on-demand streaming video service for educational institutions that provides students and faculty access to more than 26,000 films. Kanopy provides students access to one of the largest collections of films in the world – including award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases – on every topic imaginable. If you are a faculty member who needs a film activated for a class, please use the request form in Kanopy. Please include the class name and number, and the date the film is needed.
- ProQuest Databases
This is a portal to a growing list of Proquest research products, including Theses & Dissertations, Historical Newspapers, ABI/Inform business collection, and more. Note: we do not subscribe to all the titles on the list.
- Rock's Backpages
Over 24,000 classic articles on artists from Aaliyah to ZZ Top, on all genres from rockabilly to hip hop, by the finest music writers of the last 50 years.
Documentaries
All documentaries can be found in the database Kanopy (see above).
China Remix This short documentary explores China's burgeoning African entertainment industry through the lives of three African hip-hop artists who are trying to find success in the face of challenging labor and immigration laws in China's southeastern city of Guangzhou. The film follows the entertainers as they prepare for their shows, perform, and live their daily lives with their Chinese and African family members and friends.
Blacking Up The ambitious and hard-hitting documentary BLACKING UP looks at the popularity of hip-hop among America's white youth. It asks whether white identification is rooted in admiration and a desire to transcend race or if it is merely a new chapter in the long continuum of stereotyping, mimicry and cultural appropriation? Does it reflect a new face of racial understanding in white America or does it reinforce an ugly history?
Fresh Dressed A fascinating chronicle of hip-hop, urban fashion, and the hustle that brought oversized pants and graffiti-drenched jackets from Orchard Street to high fashion's catwalks and Middle America shopping malls. Director Sacha Jenkins' music-drenched history draws from a rich mix of archival materials and in-depth interviews with rappers, designers, and other industry insiders.
Wild Style Wild Style follows the exploits of maverick tagger Zoro (real life graffiti artist Lee Quinones), whose work attracts the attention of an East Village art fancier (Patti Astor) who commissions him to paint the stage for a giant Rapper's Convention. A document of the earliest days of hip-hop in the boroughs of New York, everything in Wild Style is authentic - the story, style, characters, and most of the actors, are drawn from the community. It features a pantheon of old-school pioneers, including Grandmaster Flash, Busy Bee, The Cold Crush Brothers and more.
Books
Hip-Hop(E) by Call Number: LC196 .H57 2012ISBN: 9781433114335Publication Date: 2012-04-04This book won the 2014 AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award. Illuminating hip-hop as an important cultural practice and a global social movement, this collaborative project highlights the emancipatory messages and cultural work generated by the organic intellectuals of global hip-hop. Contributors describe the social realities - globalization, migration, poverty, criminalization, and racism - youth are resisting through what we recognize as a decolonial cultural politic. The book contributes to current scholarship in multicultural education, seeking to understand the vilification of youth (of color) for the social problems created by a global system that benefits a small minority. In an age of corporate globalization, Hip-Hop(e) highlights the importance of research projects that link the production of educational scholarship with the cultural activities, everyday practice, and social concerns of global youth in order to ameliorate social, economic, and political problems that transcend national boundaries.
The Languages of Global Hip-Hop by Call Number: eBook (Available to people from CARLI member institutions.)ISBN: 1441116397Publication Date: 2011In the case of hip-hop, the forces of top-down corporatization and bottom-up globalization are inextricably woven. This volume takes the view that hip-hop should not be viewed with this dichotomous dynamic in mind and that this dynamic does not arise solely outside of the continental US. Close analysis of the facts reveals a much more complex situation in which market pressures, local (musical) traditions, linguistic and semiotic intelligibility, as well as each country's particular historico-political past conspire to yield new hybrid expressive genres. This exciting collection looks at linguistic, cultural and economic aspects of hip-hop in parallel and showcases a global scope. It engages with questions of code-switching, code-mixing, the minority language/regional dialect vs. standard dynamic, the discourse of political resistance, immigrant ideologies, youth and new language varieties and will be essential reading for graduates and researchers in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.
The Hip Hop and Obama Reader by Call Number: ML3531 .H54 2015ISBN: 9780199341801Publication Date: 2015-11-03Featuring a foreword by Tricia Rose and an Afterword by Cathy J. CohenBarack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip hop - often regarded as politically radioactive - in his presidential campaigns. Just as important was the extent to which hip hop artists and activists embraced him in return. This newrelationship fundamentally altered the dynamics between popular culture, race, youth, and national politics. But what does this relationship look like now, and what will it look like in the decades to come?The Hip Hop and Obama Reader attempts to answer these questions by offering the first systematic analysis of hip hop and politics in the Obama era and beyond. Over the course of 14 chapters, leading scholars and activists offer new perspectives on hip hop's role in political mobilization, grassrootsorganizing, campaign branding, and voter turnout, as well as the ever-changing linguistic, cultural, racial, and gendered dimensions of hip hop in the U.S. and abroad. Inviting readers to reassess how Obama's presidency continues to be shaped by the voice of hip hop and, conversely, how hip hopmusic and politics have been shaped by Obama, The Hip Hop and Obama Reader critically examines hip hop's potential to effect social change in the 21st century. This volume is essential reading for scholars and fans of hip hop, as well as those interested in the shifting relationship betweendemocracy and popular culture.
Your Librarian
University of Illinois at Chicago
Still have questions about the research process? You can contact me for a consultation. Consultations can take place via email, in-person (by appointment) or via Zoom (by appointment). Email me at jmjacksn@uic.edu