- Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 1970s Bronx
- The Strain of the Voice: Hip Hop’s Ambient Vocalities
- Between Live Performance and Mediated Narrative: Contemporary Rap Battle Culture in Context
- On Politics and Performativity in Atlanta Hip Hop Party Culture, Or How to Get Crunk with (Body and) Words
- “Check Out the Hook While My DJ Revolves It”: How the Music Industry Made Rap into Pop in the Late 1980s
- “I’m Ready to Die”: The Notorious B.I.G., Black Love, and Death
- Vocal Vulnerabilities: The New Masculinities of Millennial Hip Hop
- From Black Hipsters to Black Hippy: Flow and the Cultural Genealogy of “Neo-Bohemian” Hip Hop
- Properly Compensating Artists in Academic Hip Hop Research
- Intersectionality in American Sign Language Hip Hop Interpreting
- All in the Family: The Contested Meanings of Mothers, Fathers, and Children in Hip Hop Culture
- Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems: Hip Hop and Luxury’s Uneasy Partnership
- Recuperating the Real: The Liberation Imperative of Hip Hop Authenticity
- Hip Hop Life Writing: An Intermedial Challenge to Essentialist Reading Practices
- Hip Hop as Martial Art: A Political Economy of Violence in Rap Music
- “I Still Don’t Understand Award Shows”: Kanye West and Hip Hop Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century
- Prince Paul’s Psychoanalysis: What Is It?: The Rap Album as Psychoanalytic Self-Exploration
- Hip Hop Music and (Reading) the Narrative Soundtracks of New Black Realist Cinema
- Rhythm Technologies, Workflows, and Convergence Culture in Amateur Hip Hop Beat-Making YouTube Videos
- The Ghosts Got You: Exploring the Queer (After) Lives of Sample-Based Hip Hop
- Noise Reconsidered: Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad as Hip Hop Outlier
- Hip Hop without a DJ: Authenticating The Roots in an Era of Sample-Based Hegemony
- Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip Hop
- “Playas” and Players: Racial and Spatial Trespassing in Hip Hop Culture Through Video Games
- Digital, Underground: Black Aesthetics, Hip Hop Digitalities, and Youth Creativity in the Global South
- “When We Gonna Quit? The 31st Of Never!”: Hip Hop Sounds and Sensibilities in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit
- Brazilian Hip Hop in Three Scenes
- Rappalachia: The Performance of Appalachian Identity in Hip Hop Music
- Bucktown vs. 'G' Thang: The Enduring East Coast/West Coast Dialectic in Hip Hop Music
- Remixing the Environment: Climate Change, Rhythm Science, and DJ Spooky’s Digging in the Landscape
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines how hip hop exemplifies the instrumentalization of verbal arsenals, lyrical kung fu, and other rhetorical gestures to “words as weapons.” Indeed, this weaponization of knowledge may be thought of as the very premise of hip hop—of rap music as martial art. While this theorization will help explain hip hop’s enduring polycultural commitment to martial arts, the aim here is a more foundational one—to account for the ways that the trope of physical violence functions in hip hop discourses and performative practices. The chapter employs a political economy framework to argue that this translation from the discursive to the material is a counterhegemonic response to the conflation of the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution: “the freedom of speech” and “the right to bear arms.” The chapter concludes by explaining why hip hop has proven an unlikely force for nonviolence in the Black Lives Matter moment.
Keywords: hip hop, martial arts, violence, nonviolence, political economy, metaphysics, US Constitution, polyculture, Black Lives Matter
Department of Music, University College Cork
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- Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 1970s Bronx
- The Strain of the Voice: Hip Hop’s Ambient Vocalities
- Between Live Performance and Mediated Narrative: Contemporary Rap Battle Culture in Context
- On Politics and Performativity in Atlanta Hip Hop Party Culture, Or How to Get Crunk with (Body and) Words
- “Check Out the Hook While My DJ Revolves It”: How the Music Industry Made Rap into Pop in the Late 1980s
- “I’m Ready to Die”: The Notorious B.I.G., Black Love, and Death
- Vocal Vulnerabilities: The New Masculinities of Millennial Hip Hop
- From Black Hipsters to Black Hippy: Flow and the Cultural Genealogy of “Neo-Bohemian” Hip Hop
- Properly Compensating Artists in Academic Hip Hop Research
- Intersectionality in American Sign Language Hip Hop Interpreting
- All in the Family: The Contested Meanings of Mothers, Fathers, and Children in Hip Hop Culture
- Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems: Hip Hop and Luxury’s Uneasy Partnership
- Recuperating the Real: The Liberation Imperative of Hip Hop Authenticity
- Hip Hop Life Writing: An Intermedial Challenge to Essentialist Reading Practices
- Hip Hop as Martial Art: A Political Economy of Violence in Rap Music
- “I Still Don’t Understand Award Shows”: Kanye West and Hip Hop Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century
- Prince Paul’s Psychoanalysis: What Is It?: The Rap Album as Psychoanalytic Self-Exploration
- Hip Hop Music and (Reading) the Narrative Soundtracks of New Black Realist Cinema
- Rhythm Technologies, Workflows, and Convergence Culture in Amateur Hip Hop Beat-Making YouTube Videos
- The Ghosts Got You: Exploring the Queer (After) Lives of Sample-Based Hip Hop
- Noise Reconsidered: Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad as Hip Hop Outlier
- Hip Hop without a DJ: Authenticating The Roots in an Era of Sample-Based Hegemony
- Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip Hop
- “Playas” and Players: Racial and Spatial Trespassing in Hip Hop Culture Through Video Games
- Digital, Underground: Black Aesthetics, Hip Hop Digitalities, and Youth Creativity in the Global South
- “When We Gonna Quit? The 31st Of Never!”: Hip Hop Sounds and Sensibilities in Post-Bankruptcy Detroit
- Brazilian Hip Hop in Three Scenes
- Rappalachia: The Performance of Appalachian Identity in Hip Hop Music
- Bucktown vs. 'G' Thang: The Enduring East Coast/West Coast Dialectic in Hip Hop Music
- Remixing the Environment: Climate Change, Rhythm Science, and DJ Spooky’s Digging in the Landscape
