Browsing by Subject "Hip hop"
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Item A mixed methods study of the impacts and processes of a technology-mediated culturally relevant after-school program on urban elementary youth’s motivation to read(Texas Tech University, 2008-05) Deason, Chris; Maushak, NancyHeterogeneity is the norm in United States schools today. Children grow up within culturally situated environments that influence how they present themselves, interpret experiences, and understand the world around them. Because of this fact, cultural discontinuity can take place between schools, communities, and home cultures. A schism has grown between in-school and out-of-school culture for minority children. The unofficial curricula of urban music and hip-hop culture now compete with traditional learning settings such as schools, community centers, and churches. This study reported herein was grounded in culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) theory which theorized that minority children’s self-perception and value for school work would increase in a learning context that was collaborative, authentically assessed, and culturally sensitive. This current study employed the three elements of culturally relevant pedagogy theory in a 4-week hip-hop-based sound engineering class. Participants worked collaboratively to make an academic hip-hop music CD. Participants transformed science and math related books into rap songs. Digital audio workstation technology (DAW) was used to record the participants’ songs. The participants included eighty-seven 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade participants at Oak Street Elementary School with a predominately Latino and African American population demographic. The Motivation to Read Profile (MRP) scales were administered on day one and the final day of this summer-based after school program. This instrument tapped participant’s self-perception of reading and value of reading. The 51 intervention participants and the 36 control group participants received the MRP scales. Three sources of qualitative data were used. These qualitative data were triangulated and converged with the results of their MRP means. The qualitative data sources included photo-elicited interviews, 10-second video clips, and a participant-learning journal. Using a paired samples t test, results indicated no statistically significant difference between the intervention groups’ pretest and their posttest scores on the MRP scales. Based on an independent samples t test, there was a statistically significant difference found between the intervention group’s posttest scores and the control group’s posttest scores in favor of the control group. However, the qualitative data indicated high levels of reading motivation. Participants claimed that the use of hip-hop culture during the intervention made reading fun, authentic, and collaborative.Item Der Unterricht für die Unterschicht: Voices from the Margins in German Gangster Rap(2013-05) Smith, Alexa; McChesney, Anita; Borst, Stefanie; Grair, Charles A.The past decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in the popularity of gangster rap in Germany. This unique form of artistic expression is characterized by aggression, violence, and the rejection of established authority, which at first glance seems to advance a destructive message. Yet many rap artists use this form for constructive social criticism and to provide a voice for the marginalized against mainstream German society. My analysis will examine the use and effect of rap as a medium of social criticism. Through a detailed analysis of texts by contemporary rap artists, I show how they use social critical elements to point out the failures of a multicultural German society. Their message unites fans in an inclusive community based on the shared experience of marginalization and mobilizes this audience to become active proponents of a functioning multicultural society. I show how these German rappers use their music and artistic personas to re-imagine the status of multiethnic identity in the lives of their listeners and in German society as a whole. Research on rap affirms its social-critical penchant, but scholars generally view German rap predominately through the lens of the Turkish immigrant experience. Most current research therefore focuses on the genre’s diasporic qualities and asserts that rappers act as the mouthpiece for young, second- and third-generation Turkish immigrants caught between their native and adopted cultures. While early German rap was noticeably Turkish oriented, this restrictive label no longer fits the genre as it has evolved. Popular contemporary rappers represent a variety of ethnicities, including Turkish, Arab, North African, Romani, and even native German. These multi-ethnic rappers reach out to all young people experiencing marginalization and exclusion, even beyond the German immigrant community. My research shows how contemporary German rap focuses on multiethnic experience. In contrast to prevalent analyses limited to the German-Turkish duality, I show how contemporary German gangster rap provides insight into the minority experience as a whole. The music combats oppressive fixtures of mainstream society and suggests an alternative model for a more integrated, multiethnic German society.Item "I can turn karaoke into open mic night" : an exploration of Asian American men in hip hop(2013-05) Jackson, Tamela Teara; Tang, EricThe purpose of this report is to explore the ways in which Asian American men participate in hip hop culture, and what this participation says about their politics and representation in United States media and popular culture. This is done through an analysis of Freestyle Friday All Star, MC Jin, a Chinese American emcee from Queens, New York, as well as DJ Soko, a Korean American DJ from Detroit, Michigan. I argue that their participation is a desire for political power and creative visibility rendered on their own terms.Item Mashups : history, legality, and aesthetics(2011-05) Boone, Christine Emily; Buhler, James, 1964-; Alm�n, Byron; Drott, Eric; Dell'Antonio, Andrew; Weinstock, JohnAs the popularity of mashups attests, individual songs and their increasingly irrelevant prepackaged albums no longer seem to constitute a finished product to many who listen to them. Instead individual songs often serve as raw ingredients for use in another recipe – the playlist, the mix, the mashup – which those who buy the songs make and exchange. The strict division between producers and consumers, which the music industry exploited very productively throughout the twentieth century, seems to be breaking down, and I conclude that the mashup models a different, more fluid relationship between musical consumption and production. In this dissertation, I examine mashups from a music theoretical point of view. I argue that the mashup represents an important musical genre with distinguishing characteristics and its own historical development. Chapter 1 defines the mashup and devises a typology that classifies the genre based on two characteristics: number of songs combined and the mode of their combination (vertical or horizontal). This typology leads to the division of the mashup into four distinct subtypes. Chapter 2 discusses significant legal challenges raised by the mashup, especially with respect to copyright. Mashups – at least in recorded form – began as an underground, largely non-commercial phenomenon, due to the cost and difficulty of obtaining permission to use another artist’s recording. I also examine various pertinent musical lawsuits and discuss their influence on the way mashup artists make and distribute their works. Chapter 3 probes the historical factors that led to the development of mashups, including sampling in hip hop music (both recorded and live), collage techniques in art music, and looping and mixing by club DJs. Chapter 4 investigates the aesthetics of the mashup. Critics in the popular press and on the internet judge mashups without specifying the musical characteristics that make a particular mashup successful. This chapter seeks to locate the aesthetic principles that govern mashup production. Using commentary by mashup artists as well as transcription and analysis of several mashups, I divide these aesthetic principles into two categories: construction and meaning. I then develop a list of characteristics that mashup artists aim for when creating their tracks.Item Poetic organization and poetic license in the lyrics of Hank Williams, Sr. and Snoop Dogg(2010-12) Horn, Elizabeth Alena; Crowhurst, Megan Jane; Hancock, Ian F.; Epps, Patience L.; Mooney, Kevin E.; Fitzgerald, Colleen M.This dissertation addresses the way a linguistic grammar can yield to poetic organization in a poetic text. To this end, two corpora are studied: the sung lyrics of country music singer Hank Williams, Sr. and the rapped lyrics of gansgta rap artist Snoop Dogg. Following a review of relevant literature, an account of the poetic grammar for each corpus is provided, including the manifestation of musical meter and grouping in the linguistic text, the reflection of metrical grouping in systematic rhyme, and rhyme fellow correspondence. In the Williams corpus, final cadences pattern much as in the English folk verse studied in Hayes and MacEachern (1998), but differ in that there are more, and therefore more degrees of saliency. Rhyme patterns reflect grouping structure and correlate to patterns in final cadences, and imperfect rhyme is limited to phonologically similar codas. In the Snoop Dogg corpus syllables do not always align with the metrical grid, metrical mapping and rhyme patterning often challenge grouping structure, and imperfect rhyme is more diverse, as has been shown to be the case for contemporary rap generally (Krims 2000, Katz 2008). Following Rice (1997), Golston (1998), Reindl and Franks (2001), Michael (2003), and Fitzgerald (2003, 2007), meter, grouping and rhyme are modeled as driving phonological, morphological and syntactic deviation in Optimality Theoretic terms. In the Hank Williams corpus, metrical mapping and grouping constraints are shown to drive a number of linguistically deviatory phenomena including stress shift, syllabic variation and allomorphy, while rhyme patterning constraints govern syntactic inversion. In the Snoop Dogg corpus, rhyme fellow correspondence and rhyme patterning constraints play a more significant role, driving enjambment, syllabic variation, and allomorphy. Some linguistically deviatory phenomena derive from ordinary language variation, e.g. (flawr)~(flaw.[schwa]r), and some do not, e.g. syllable insertion in insista. The latter is more common in the Snoop Dogg corpus.Item Ta Ligado : rodas e hip hop no Rio(2015-05) Diaz-Hurtado, Jessica Natalia; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Leu, LorraineGiven that hip-hop has its origin in communal sharing and resistance, how do spaces of urban art empower young people and build their identities to reclaim space? Ta Ligado: Rodas e Hip Hop no Rio is a short documentary-styled web series focusing on hip hop and urban art spaces for young people in Rio de Janeiro, a city with rapid urbanization and increased marginalization. Rio presents an understudied context to explore how youth respond to changes in urban conditions and public institutional support or lack thereof. Especially as a city being placed under the international microscope because of the recent 2014 World Cup and upcoming 2016 World Olympics and the politics it has with its displacement and invisibilization of communities. Youth organizations and hip hop events in Rio de Janeiro serve as an alternative outlet to address the social issues that are ignored and marginalized through reclaiming space. Ta Ligado captures the vibrant and diverse culture through interviews and community events that occurred during the summer of 2014.