Quote 1 – Chang, Jeff, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop
Quote 2 – Forman, Murray. “Space Matters: Hip-Hop and the Spatial Perspective”
Quote 3 – Chang., Jeff. Furious Styles: The Evolution of Style in the Seven-Mile World
Quote 4 – Chang, Jeff. Furious Styles: The Evolution of Style in the Seven-Mile World
Quote 5 – Pardue, Derek. Brazilian Hip Hoppers Speak From the Margins We’s on Tape
Quote 6 – Cooper, Morris & Boylorn. The Crunk Feminist Collection
Quote 7 – Durham, Cooper & Morris. The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built
Quote 8 – Morgan, Joan. Hip-Hop Feminist
Quote 9 – Navarro, Jenell, Solarize-ing Native hip-hop
Quote 10 – Sharpley-Whiting. “I See the Same Ho” Video Vixens, Beauty Culture, and Diasporic Sex Tourism
Quote 1: He had just been initiated into a secret Bronx kids’ society. Later he would say that jam made him a witness to the rise of hip-hop’s “four elements” – b-boying, DJing, MCing, and graffiti.
Why: As I grew up during this time in Gun Hill Projects in the Bronx, I remembered what the vibe of hip hop culture was like. The pop-up street parties that would start with a boom box, then a DJ would come with his set-up, run an extension cord through someone’s window from an apartment on the first floor and the jam would be on. The party would bring people out of their apartments, fostering community. B-boys broke down large cardboard boxes so they could claim their space to show off their moves. Anyone who thought they could rap would step up to the mic and show their skills. In retrospect, those were good times as growing up in the projects then meant that you knew everybody who lived there and they knew you and watched out for you.
Quote 2: “In black popular culture, the city is hip. It’s the local of cool. In order to be ‘with it’, you must be in the city…The city is where black cultural styles are born.” ~ John Jeffries
Why: At the time the hip hop culture developing in the early 80s, the quote was the truth. When my family moved from the Bronx to Middletown in the mid-80s, it felt like we were moving to the country (it didn’t help my brother’s grade school was across the street from a cow farm). When we would tell people we were from the Bronx, the would say, “oh, so you’re from the City,” with wonder in their voices, then proceed to tell you where they have family members in the city. They weren’t wrong, though as there was nothing really happening in Upstate NY. But in the five boroughs, there was always something going on.
Quote 3: It put you on a relentless quest to prove to them that you were bigger, wilder, and bolder than the circumstances dictated you should be, to try to generate something from nothing, something no one else had…
Why: It resonated with me as it was the truth for the time. At Gun Hill Projects in the 80s, you saw swaths of cardboard in different sections of the complex. B-boys and a sparse number of B-girls battled crews from nearby projects, but especially crews from Edenwald Projects. The poses and breaks and spins they pull on that cardboard was jaw-dropping. If crews didn’t pull something new every battle, they got blasted by the crowd watching them.
Quote 4: Style involves conflict, the strain of races, classes, ages and sexes pitted against each other in the arenas of clothing and music and slang.
Why: At the time the scene was developing you strove to differentiate yourself by incorporating clothing elements from different musical genres – the chains with spikes from Punk, rubber bracelets from Pop, feathers, loud colors and sparkles from Glam Rock. You mixed everything up and made it your own. The one thing that was hip hop’s own was fat laces, though. Your Pumas or Addidas had to have fat laces that weren’t tight (which makes absolutely no sense now that I think about it).
Quote 5: The black female voice is not epiphenomenal to hip hop history; rather, it has been a fundamental force to the development of “skill” and “attitude”
Why: When I first read this quote, I mumbled a “hellz yeah!” because it resonated with my beliefs.
Quote 6: Hip hop gifted us crunkness, ratchetness, the ability to dis and dismiss, the option to get buck, and the willingness to wreck shop when necessary.
Why: I just loved this line. As an old hip hop head, I can say that this line is just the truth. When I’m just walking and Pete Roc & CL Smooth’s They Reminisce Over You comes on, I bop-strut that beat, not caring whos watching. I guess that my own expression of crunkness.
Quote 7: Hip-hop feminists insist on living with contradictions, because failure to do so relegates feminism to an academic project that is not politically sustainable beyond the ivory tower.
Why: The quote struck me as true as we’ve discussed the contradictions in class many times. When the beat is bumping but the words make you cringe…what can you do but accept the contradictions.
Quote 8: White women’s racism and the Feminist Movement may explain the justifiable bad taste the f-word leaves in the mouth of women who are over thirty-five, but for my generation they are abstractions drawn from someone else’s history.
Why: While I suppose I have what some would consider feminist views, I have never called myself one because I never felt like there was a space for me in the movement.
Quote 9: Not all hip-hop music and culture functions with the same political consciousness.
Why: More truth as hip hop used to be more than shaking asses and making money. I know my view is biased because I cannot help but frown down on what’s considered hip hop today.
Quote 10: [But] the spaces that have emerged in commercial hip hop are categorically one-dimensional. Beauty is nothing short of the helpmate to sex, and we have become reducible to our sexuality as the predominate arbiter of our reality.
Why: To paraphrase Cardi B, the public doesn’t buy music that has deeper meanings, so she won’t make it as it won’t make her money. I can say that this course made me reevaluate my ambivalent feelings toward her though. I may not like all her music, but at least she is real with her shit and that, I can appreciate.
