The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation

by Reiland Rabaka

The Hip Hop Movement offers a critical theory and alternative history of rap music and hip hop culture by examining their roots in the popular musics and popular cultures of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Connecting classic rhythm & blues and rock & roll to the Civil Rights Movement, and classic soul and funk to the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Movement explores what each of these musics and movements contributed to rap, neo-soul, hip hop culture, and the broader Hip Hop Movement. Ultimately, this book’s remixes (as opposed to chapters) reveal that black popular music and black popular culture have always been more than merely “popular music” and “popular culture” in the conventional sense and reflect a broader social, political, and cultural movement. With this in mind, sociologist and musicologist Reiland Rabaka critically reinterprets rap and neo-soul as popular expressions of the politics, social visions, and cultural values of a contemporary multi-issue the Hip Hop Movement.Rabaka argues that rap music, hip hop culture, and the Hip Hop Movement are as deserving of critical scholarly inquiry as previous black popular musics, such as the spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, and funk, and previous black popular movements, such as the Black Women’s Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Black Arts Movement, and Black Women’s Liberation Movement. This volume, equal parts alternative history of hip hop and critical theory of hip hop, challenges those scholars, critics, and fans of hip hop who lopsidedly over-focus on commercial rap, pop rap, and gangsta rap while failing to acknowledge that there are more than three dozen genres of rap music and many other socially and politically progressive forms of hip hop culture beyond DJing, MCing, rapping, beat-making, break-dancing, and graffiti-writing.

Genres: Music

432 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Reiland Rabaka is Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Founder and Director of the Center for African & African American Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also a Research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Professor Rabaka has published 19 books and more than one hundred scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays, including Africana Critical Theory; The Negritude Movement; Against Epistemic Apartheid; Forms of Fanonism; Concepts of Cabralism; W.E.B. Du Bois: A Critical Introduction; Black Power Music!: Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement; Black Women’s Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas; The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics; Hip Hop’s Inheritance; Hip Hop’s Amnesia; and The Hip Hop Movement. His cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis has been featured in print, radio, television, and online media venues such as NPR, PBS, BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV, BET, VH1, The New York Times, The Associated Press, and The Guardian, among others. He is also a poet and musician.

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