Very interesting (but "brilliant"???)

books:


	• Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Music/Culture) Tricia Rose Wesleyan, 1994 - 257 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"more brilliant than the sun"

brilliant, exhausting and informative... provides a feminist point of view from the inside for all important aspects... read it and love it...

Very interesting (but "brilliant"???)

This is an impressive interpretation of Black musical culture, with loads of interesting information and pertinent feminist content. I've read several books with somewhat similar subject matter, from Dick Hebdige's broad and helpful survey to the rather pretentious book by Russell Potter; but none of them captured my interest as much as this one.

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powerful topic: execution?

I read this book as a compulsory action for the 'Poetry of Rap' course in which I am currently enrolled at a major university. As a narrative and dialectic of black culture, or rather a single faction of black culture, this book is powerful and informative, providing analysis of many, many social thinkers of the Black Arts and later movements as well as Rose's perspective(s) on the developments of the culture. However, the execution of this text, ostensibly an academic account, is weakened by a diffuse structure, imprecise diction (beyond that necessitated by dealing with a topic heretofore untreated in academic circles with any rigor) and atrocious editing. I highly recommend the text, but by the same token recommend it with a disclaimer: hear why she says, and not what she says.

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Essential! Rich!

Tricia Rose details the Hip-Hop Culture - and its beauty and depth - in this book I call "essential for Hip-Hoppers". For example: I'm writing 'bout Brazilian hip-hop and "Black Noise" cleared many doubts I had on hystoric, artistic, and politic aspects of the 'Culture of Streetz'. Another contribution that elevates this 'Bible of Hip-Hop' is the way Tricia Rose writes. The words flow natural, with many rich informations reduced in a very agradable text. If you don't like this book, you'll never understand the 'Black Noise' of this new millenium! Peace!

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Thorough

Hip Hop is founded on the valorization--rather than villification--of recontextualization, revision, and redaction. In a examplary work of musical and cultural studies scholarship, Rose traces the ways prior black musical/oral traditions, technological advances, and sexism undergird the discourse (just to mention a couple of the lens through which she takes on rap). The work highly accessible to hip hoppers non hip hoppers alike, furthermore. Finally, it is to Rose's benefit that she comes from an "insider's" vantage point, giving the text a genuine concern for where the music comes from, finds itself, and is indefatigably headed towards.

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From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it.

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men.

But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

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