Black noise: Rap music and black cultural resistance in contemporary American popular culture

Black noise seeks to explore some of the complex social, cultural and political threads in rap music and hip hop culture. This involves confronting rap's contradictory articulations and situating them in relation to struggles over resources, pleasure, public space and meaning. I am interested in two central aspects of rap's territory. First, I explore the central thematics in the music, lyrics and visual images. Second, I contextualize these themes and draw links between the thematic concerns and cultural and institutional contexts within which they emerge. In other words, what stories do rappers tell? Why are these stories of black urban life so compelling to people from such disparate backgrounds? How are these stories (re)presented in mainstream cultural criticism?;In rap, relationships between black cultural practice, social and economic conditions, technology, sexual and racial politics and the institutional policing of the popular terrain are complex and in constant motion. And so, Black noise is in no way an all-inclusive analysis of every facet of rap's impact on the popular terrain. Instead, I have chosen four critical areas of inquiry: (1) the history of rap and hip hop in relationship to New York cultural politics; (2) rap's musical and technological interventions; (3) rap's racial politics, institutional critiques and media and institutional responses; and (4) rap's sexual politics, particularly female rapper's critiques of men and the feminist debates within which women rappers have been implicated.