MUSIC 15 Week 8
The Takeover
General Themes
• By the late 1990s hip hop had become the
single dominant form in mainstream pop
music
• What did this mean for the music?
• What did it mean in broader social terms?
• What does is it mean when a minority form
becomes dominant?
• How did it start to reflect and influence a
global pop music context?
Tricia Rose “Mutual Denials”
• Works through some of the more
controversial issues surrounding hip hop from
the perspective that the contested viewpoints
are often based in the same (sometimes
faulty) understanding of the situation
• Much is a response to the film “Beats,
Rhymes and Life” and both provide a useful
guide to thinking about more recent popular
hip hop
Tricia Rose cont’d
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Creative Disregard
Unadulterated Products
Profiting from Black Suffering
Invisible White Consumption
Sexism Isn’t Really a Problem
Homophobia is OK
Mase “Feel So Good”
• Definitive Bad Boy pop rap single
• Produced by P Diddy (or Sean Puffy Combs
at the time), as the hook says “take songs
from the 80s, make them sound crazy” basic
concept was rapping over already hugely
popular songs
• Based on the party DJ practice of “blends” or
mixing acapella over one song over
instrumental of another (later mashups)
Jay Z “Nigga What, Nigga
Who?”
• One of Jay Z’s more technically complex
raps, at least rhythmically
• Beat is by Timbaland and (as do many of his
beats) shifts between regular and double
time: some elements of the song are in a slow
tempo, others move twice as fast
• Jay Z’s rhyming shifts between the two layers
• Song also features Jaz O (his mentor)
Clipse “Grindin’”
• One of the Neptunes most distinctive and
influential beats: heavily syncopated drums,
with barely a chorus
• Pusha T and Malice rhyme in doubleentendre heavy verses about the minutiae of
the drug trade
• Both Clipse and the Neptunes are from
Virginia Beach
• Clipse’s manager was indicted on conspiracy
charges relating to drug dealing
Eminem “Stan”
• Story of an obsessive fan, told in first
person via letters to Slim Shady
(Eminem’s alter ego)
• Actually quite a subtle examination of
the fan dynamic, including implications
of homoeroticism and projection
Eninem “Way I Am”
• Pushback to criticism of the first record
which was made in the voice of Slim
Shady
• This is from the Marshall Mathers album
(I.e. under his real name) but explicitly
plays games with the relationship
between his various images and
personae
Jay Z “Big Pimpin”
• Because of the video, the gold standard for
hip hop’s embrace of the culture of excessive
consumption
• Jay Z is way past street metaphors here, but
pulls in UGK as guests to maintain
credibility/authenticity
• Built around an uncredited sample from an
Egyptian cabaret song
• Part of a wave of “orientalist” samples of
Indian and Middle Eastern music in hip hop
Missy Elliott “Get Ur Freak
On”
• Another Timbaland production built
around, this time a Bollywood sample
• “Orientalism” as a term is used by
literary scholars to refer to Western use
of an idealized/stylized image of
Eastern culture. What are the dynamics
around this in hip hop?
Panjabi MC (feat. Jay Z)
“Beware the Boyz”
• Bhangra song with Jay Z verses on it
• Symbolic of both the popularity of the
Bollywood sound within hip hop and of
hip hop’s international influence
• In a curious circularity the original Indian
record is actually built around a
Timbaland beat (itself based on the
Knightrider theme)
Terror Squad “Lean Back”
• Summer street record from 2004, the year
that all the number one songs were hip hop
or hip hop related
• Features Fat Joe, Remy Ma, DJ Khaled I.e.
mixtape rappers rather than pop figures
• Song about not dancing
• Beat by Scott Storch again draws on Middle
Eastern music
Damian Marley “Welcome to
Jamrock”
• Dancehall became increasingly hip hop
influenced and increasingly influential on hip
hop in the early 200s
• This is a kind of retro move back to a more
obvious reggae sound. Was known as “one
drop” and is built on a sample of a 1970s
reggae track
• Slice of life of the streets of Kingston, one of
the most violent places in the world
Kanye West “Jesus Walks”
• Notable for being an explicit and detailed
religious statement within hip hop. Plenty of
artists dedicate records to God, make
occasional statements, but few mainstream
artists have made an entire song like this on
a religious subject
• Representative of Kanye’s career in general
in terms of being almost deliberately
unpredictable and leftfield, while tapping into
big mainstream issues
Snoop/Pharrell “Beautiful”
• Strong flavour of exoticism, especially
the video. Both exoticism of place
(Brazil) and the exoticism of the women
Snoop leers at throughout the video
(mostly mixed race)
• Also functions as clearly as an R&B
song as it does as a rap song
Dead Prez “Hip Hop”
• Hip hop as conduit for radical politics
• Dead Prez have combined real world activist
work with making music that expresses those
political positions
• The imagery here owes a lot to third world
revolutionary movements
• Critique of hip hop as cultural form as well as
of broader society
• Theme of Chappelle’s Show