The availability of academic texts for classroom use on rap and hip hop has not kept pace with the growing global appeal of one of the world's most popular music genres. Although there are many books on the subject – such as Adam F. Bradley's Book of Rhymes, with the requisite bibliography, glossary, index and so on – not many have been written that exclusively address the concerns of a college audience, without sidebars that speak to general trade book readers. This gap in the market for accessible, engaging and revealing textbooks on rap is exactly what Fernando Orejuela's title Rap and Hip Hop Culture attempts to fill, and this is a task that it accomplishes admirably.
The book comes equipped with a bevy of classrooms aids that will make both the teacher and student's job easier. For the student, every chapter begins with a list of learning objectives to be achieved during that week's reading. Each chapter is clearly laid out in a straightforward manner, with headings and subheadings that keep that chapter's pedagogical goals at the forefront of a reader's attention. The visual graphs, charts and photos that populate all 10 chapters are clean, clear and abundant, making the internalization of content not just convenient, but engaging. As just one example, the global map that charts the geographical flow of the African slave trade immediately imparts the scale, cultural exchange and brutal efficiency that defined that human trafficking system. Additionally, every chapter concludes with a summary, a glossary of key terms and study questions for further investigation that help to make any work outside of classroom meetings as productive as possible.
For the teacher, the aids are no less numerous. Through an online portal on the Oxford University Press website, a teacher can access a semester's worth of materials that are organized according to a 10 week system. This database includes weekly PowerPoint presentations, a model syllabus, a draft of a final exam, as well as 10 different lessons plans. The teaching lesson plans themselves include a chapter summary, teaching objectives and sample test questions. With these extra materials, it is likely that even a teacher unfamiliar with hip hop as a genre could conduct such a class with positive results. With its informative and accessible prose, this text would likely be right at home in any college elective course, with or without a mix of both majors and hobbyists.
The problem of writing about a type of music that largely dispenses with musical notation is herein overcome through the use of several listening guides that are structured according to the time stamps of notable musical moments from historic rap recordings. Each of the 17 listening guides consists of a multipage introduction that is followed by a second-by-second walkthrough of the song in question, where important and notable musical events are pointed out: the orchestral doubling at 2:50 in Lauryn Hill's 1998 track ‘Doo wop (that thing)’ for instance. The listening guides themselves reflects the book's staggering breadth of music, spanning from James Brown's 1969 ‘Give it up or turnit a loose’ to Kanye West's 2010 track ‘Monster’, which was released two years before this book's survey concludes (with rapper Rick Ross, in 2012).
That evolutionary line drawn between soul artist James Brown and modern rapper Kanye West also demonstrates Orejuela's ethnomusicological, anthropological and cultural perspective. To paraphrase: rap is just one element of a dynamic, intermixing culture that stretches back centuries, to the African slave trade diaspora and before. In fact, the book spends almost 50 pages establishing hip hop's roots before it deals with the Sugarhill Gang's 1979 hit ‘Rapper's delight’, which is commonly taken as the starting point of modern rap.
Orejuela's handling of his content itself is equally adroit, as he manages to relate and position the major landmarks – 1960s and 1970s block parties, Afrika Bambaataa and the Sugarhill Gang – within the context of equally revealing subgenres or movements – Jewish and Christian rap, for example. The book manages to avoid the pitfalls of a potentially anchorless survey course by continually reminding the reader that rap is an exemplar of ‘the changing same’, an Amiri Baraka phrase that Orejuela deploys as a pedagogical mantra. In critiquing the negative effects of cultural appropriation, Orejuela likewise elevates an understanding of the communities from which rap was born over any single individual's pleasant experiences of listening, although those are certainly still affirmed through the aforementioned listening guides. As he writes in the book's initial chapter, ‘[T]he more industry moguls try to homogenize hip hop culture, the more “original school” innovators and particular frames of cultural reference become disconnected from it, further marginalizing hip hop from contemporary enthusiasts and consumers’. As such, Orejuela's work is, in some ways, a formalized extension of the activist projects of hip hop journalists, such as Harry Allen, that date back to the 1980s. Furthermore, in fixing a historical problem identified by scholars like Guthrie Ramsey in his own 2004 title Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip Hop, Orejuela restores to prominence the large role that the Latino community played in the formulation of hip hop culture, beginning with the Rock Steady Crew and extending through Big Pun, all the way down to Pitbull today.
This textbook comes without an accompanying CD of the listening guides’ rap song examples, but the guides’ songs are all easily located and accessed through Spotify, YouTube or any number of other online streaming services. As a textbook meant for undergraduate consumption, pricing will always be an issue and, at $62.95 through the publisher Oxford University Press, the teacher will be pleased to know that the cost of the book is not prohibitive by any means (and likewise kept low by the aforementioned absence of an accompanying CD).
Indeed, Rap and Hip Hop Culture does make a careful and sustained effort to constantly bring along the non-musician into discussions of technical musical terminology. However, the extent to which even the most basic of musicological terminologies can be completely inscrutable to a novice outsider can never be underestimated. For example, some elements in the following definition of ‘funk’ from the glossary would likely need more treatment than the book currently provides: ‘A musical genre characterized by group singing, complex polyrhythmic structures, percussive instrumental and vocal timbres, and a featured horn section …’. Although ‘polyrhythm’ is defined elsewhere, ‘percussive’ and ‘timbre’ are not. In the end, however, such problems are most likely part and parcel of any accessible musical survey course, and should be thoroughly surmountable through the presence of a classroom teacher anyway.
As the history of rap is still being written even now, Rap and Hip Hop Culture is probably not the last word on the best way to present an amazingly diverse genre of music to a group of students over the course of a single semester. However, it is hard to imagine what else a textbook could offer that would surpass it, once debatable concerns of departmental orientation, teacher style and scholarly perspective are set aside.
