Studying Hip Hop’s Place in History

By Janet Salmons, PhD Research Community Manager, Sage Methodspace

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50 Years of Hip Hop

Rap is original poetry recited in rhythm and rhyme over prerecorded instrumental tracks. Rap music (also referred to as rap or hip-hop music) evolved in conjunction with the cultural movement called hip-hop. Rap emerged as a minimalist street sound against the backdrop of the heavily orchestrated and formulaic music coming from the local house parties to dance clubs in the early 1970s. Its earliest performers comprise MCs (derived from master of ceremonies but referring to the actual rapper) and DJs (who use and often manipulate pre-recorded tracks as a backdrop to the rap), break dancers and graffiti writers. - Timeline of African American Music from Carnegie Hall

In the 50 years since hip hop started as African American street music and dance, it has become a global cultural phenomenon enjoyed across the world and studied by scholars. The resources listed here include ethnographic, mixed methods, content analysis, and case study research.

Yes, you can find hip hop research in the Library of Congress!

These e-books are open-access, freely available for to download.

Vito, C. A. (2019) The Values of Independent Hip-Hop in the Post-Golden Era: Hip-Hop's Rebels. Cham: Springer International Publishing: Imprint: Palgrave Pivot. [Image] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2019737614/.

• Explains the interactions between culture and subculture in the context of mainstream, independent and underground hip-hop

• Articulates the relationship between independent hip-hop culture and race, class, gender, and oppositional consciousness

• Methodological framework employing content analysis of artist lyrics and interviews with hip-hop fans

Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, this book uncovers the historical trajectory of U.S. independent hip-hop in the post-golden era, seeking to understand its complex relationship to mainstream hip-hop culture and U.S. culture more generally.  Christopher Vito analyzes the lyrics of indie hip-hop albums from 2000-2013 to uncover the dominant ideologies of independent artists regarding race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and social change. These analyses inform interviews with members of the indie hip-hop community to explore the meanings that they associate with the culture today, how technological and media changes impact the boundaries between independent and major, and whether and how this shapes their engagement with oppositional consciousness. Ultimately, this book aims to understand the complex and contradictory cultural politics of independent hip-hop in the contemporary age.

Zanfagna, C. (2017) Holy hip hop in the City of Angels. [Oakland, California: University of California Press, ©] [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2019667620/.

In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop--a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture--to 'save' themselves and the city. Converting street corners to airborne churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland's fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and Bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna's fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people's everyday experiences.

“Street Folk: Hip-Hop, Car Culture & Black Life in Houston, Texas” (video)
Folklorist and ethnomusicologist Langston Wilkins discusses "screw," Houston's distinctly local form of hip-hop music that emerged within the city's African American community almost 30 years ago. It is inextricably tied to "slab," a vernacular car culture in which mostly young African American men spend countless hours and money transforming outmoded American sedans into spectacular automotive art pieces. In his talk, Wilkins discussed how "screw" and "slab" combined to form a unique local tradition that affirmed and empowered working class black Houstonians across several generations.

Yes, you can find hip hop research from around the world

The Journal of Hip Hop Studies

The Journal of Hip Hop Studies (JHHS)
The journal is committed to publishing critically engaged, culturally relevant, rigorously researched, and astute analyses of Hip Hop.

Allen, T. N., & Randolph, A. (2020). Listening for the Interior in Hip-Hop and R&B Music. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 6(1), 46–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649219866470

This article analyzes how four Black musical artists make “quiet,” or the inner life of African Americans, legible. Specifically, we consider ways that the quiet found within the lyrics of recent acclaimed albums from two hip-hop artists and two neo-soul artists—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017) and Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017), Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Maxwell’s blackSUMMERS’night (2016), respectively—offer subtle, quotidian challenges to oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. We find that quiet occurs as artists describe the use of metaphysical space, or how place is used to make and take space for the self and to find peace, the protection of the interior self, and the gifts of quiet to the struggle for resistance.

These lyrics speak to the interior safe space that Blacks seek as refuge from oppression by the dominant culture and demands from within their community. We contend that Blacks exercise power through their dominion over their interior selves, which in turn expresses their humanity. It is their control of the content of inner life, whatever those contents may be, that is an expression of sovereignty.

Babalola, A. (2023). Theorizing Intimacies and Articulation in Nigerian Hip Hop Music. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00219096231186386

This paper explores how Nigerian hip hop music, lyrics, and histories illuminate connections and relationalities, intimacies, and articulations, among and across African and African diasporic communities. Drawing on the works of Lisa Lowe, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Katherine McKittrick, and others, I demonstrate how these intimacies and articulations allow us to reimagine hip hop, focusing not on origins or beginnings (or African American authenticities) but instead as an expressive transnational mode of cultural production. In this way, I discuss the significance of Black politics in popular music and foreground how intimacies and articulation produce new ways of theorizing race.

Cermak, M. J. (2012). Teaching a Hip-Hop Ecology. Contexts, 11(3), 76–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504212456191

Sociologist Michael J. Cermak discusses what he learned while teaching environmental science with hip-hop in urban public high schools. This article provides an applied perspective of teaching at the crux of social justice and the environment.

Chen, X., Tong, Y., & Zhang, J. (2021). Brotherhood and Hip-Hop: The Case of Chinese Hip-Hop Club Triple H. SAGE Open, 11(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211061532

After hip-hop increased in popularity in Chinese entertainment programs, different perceptions of hip-hop in China reflected a clash of various thinking patterns among audiences, with hip-hop club Triple H on the cusp of controversy. Taking Triple H as a case study, this paper aims to explore how emotional attachments influence the development of Chinese hip-hop clubs in post-subculture. The findings indicated that the brotherhood rooted in hip-hop culture has been reshaped by the hybridity of Chinese hip-hop featuring fraternity mixed with sensitivity, loyalty filled with controversy, and heroism heightened by diversity. This paper argues that the recurring theme of “brotherhood” contributing to the charisma of Chinese hip-hop clubs cannot be partially interpreted as either gangster love or an underground bond, which gives rise to a new approach to the notion of authenticity, with hip-hop interpreted as a distinctive lifestyle.

Hare, S., & Baker, A. (2017). Keepin’ It Real: Authenticity, Commercialization, and the Media in Korean Hip Hop. SAGE Open, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017710294

This article examines authenticity in South Korean hip hop culture. Building on subcultural theory and cultural hybridization theory, it explores authenticity dynamics in this scene, and the role of the local media as a cultural mediator. Data were collected using a mixed-methods approach over two stages. Stage 1 was a quantitative content analysis of seminal South Korean hip hop program, Show Me the Money. Stage 2 comprised of qualitative participant observation in Seoul hip hop night clubs, and eight semistructured interviews with rappers and journalists. Key findings suggest there is a constant struggle between authenticity and commodification, where commodification dominates the South Korean hip hop scene. This work contributes to the interdisciplinary field of journalism studies by aligning itself with cultural theory to widen the Western view of South Korean hip hop.

Green, A. (2022). Beyond the Crew: Hip-Hop and Professionalization in Mexico City. Cultural Sociology, 16(1), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211015170

In recent years profesionalización – professionalization – has become an increasingly influential concept in the hip-hop scene in Mexico City. This term can refer to a variety of changing practices relating to artistic presentation, the organization of hip-hop events, and the hip-hop scene’s model of creative production. The influence of professionalization relates to the rising specialization of hip-hop production and the increasing importance of the digital circulation of music and images; increasingly, success is made on YouTube and Spotify. It also relates to new sources of income, such as freestyle rap battles with corporate sponsorship, and to nascent spaces for hip-hop within adult education. Above all, professionalization relates to a series of structural changes connected to the declining influence of crews, oriented around something akin to Spillman’s ‘non-strategic solidarity’: fraternity, informality, and shared identity. In some cases, crews are giving way to more formal ‘teams’, oriented around the solo artists that now dominate the hip-hop scene.

This article builds on ongoing ethnographic research since 2012 and a series of interviews with over 40 local hip-hop artists, to explore professionalism and professionalization as emergent, negotiated values within Mexico City’s hip-hop scene. It offers a frame through which different ideas of the ‘professional’ may be considered: object-forming (relating to the creation of a ‘professional’ music object) and subject-forming (relating to the formation of a ‘professional’ subject). Profesionalización cannot be understood in a functionalist sense, nor may the hip-hop ‘professional’ be conceptualized as a straightforward antonym of ‘amateur’. This article instead shows different ways that ‘object-forming’ and ‘subject-forming’ professionalization both incorporate and texture the ‘non-strategic’ and distinguish hip-hop ‘professionalism’ from the same texture the ‘non-strategic’, and distinguish hip-hop professionalism from it.

Lundqvist, M. (2021). Nep-hop for peace? Political visions and divisions in the booming Nepalese hip-hop scene. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(3), 454–469. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920978658

This article explores the burgeoning Nepalese hip-hop scene – commonly known as nep-hop – as a discursive intervention in the post-war politics of Nepal. Its core argument is that nep-hop oftentimes demonstrates an ethos of peacebuilding through popular culture. Indeed, many songs explicitly criticize violence, war, and the political leaders who recently brought the nation to a civil war. Yet, this political critique appears to often fall on deaf ears, due to the fact that nep-hop is commonly decoded as a radically ‘alien’ and ‘vulgar’ genre by audiences in mainstream Nepalese society. Importantly, however, this should not be read as a rejection of the ideological content of nep-hop, but rather as a negative evaluation of the aesthetic form of the genre, which bars many Nepalese citizens from engaging with its political messages in a meaningful manner.

Ring, S., & Cristol, D. (2022). Hip-Hop History: A Course for Change. International Journal of Educational Reform, 31(4), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/10567879221101570 (Request full text here.)

Hip-Hop History exposes inequities within the social studies curriculum and the challenges facing those who seek to change it. In this article, we share the process for creating a new social studies course in a suburban high school in central Ohio, the need for the course, and the resources created to assist in its adoption. The article argues for the theoretical need for change in the social studies curriculum. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Hip-Hop Pedagogies, we use Hip-Hop as a medium to shift the lens through which events are viewed. We use this course as an attempt to deconstruct the white, male, privileged version of American history and provide space for voices previously silenced by the dominant narratives. The article also outlines the many challenges educators and local school boards encounter trying to make such changes in current bureaucratic systems designed to perpetuate those narratives.

Wang, Y. (2023). Keeping It Real in Chinese Hip-Hop: Everyday Authenticity and Coming From the Street. Sociological Research Online, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13607804231178628

The status of hip-hop in China is being reshaped by the sudden popularity experienced by the genre in the last few years. An aspect that has been overlooked by scholarly research on Chinese hip-hop authenticity is that underground rappers may have to simultaneously assume multiple personal, professional, and social roles while attempting to maintain authenticity. This article provides an empirical account of how authenticity and the ‘keep it real’ motto are understood and negotiated by underground Chinese rappers. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 rappers, this article proposes the notion of everyday authenticity as a means for rappers to draw inspiration from unembellished daily realities while also using music to alleviate everyday hardships. The article also examines the challenges faced by underground rappers in the attempt to retain this type of authenticity in the mainstream, commercially driven environment. The tension is resolved by creating an autonomous realm for rappers that come ‘out of the street’, which allows rappers to claim legitimacy inside and outside the underground. This article provides an extension of the conceptualisation of authenticity in the Chinese hip-hop context, thus critically contributing to the global debate around hip-hop authenticity.

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