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53 books match the query 'Rap & Hip Hop' and 4 start with b

cover of Blowin' Up: Rap Dreams in South Central

Blowin' Up

Rap Dreams in South Central

Jooyoung Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Dr. Dre. Snoop Dogg. Ice Cube. Some of the biggest stars in hip hop made their careers in Los Angeles. And today there is a new generation of young, mostly black, men busting out rhymes and hoping to one day find themselves “blowin’ up”—getting signed to a record label and becoming famous. Many of these aspiring rappers get their start in Leimart Park, home to the legendary hip hop open-mic workshop Project Blowed. In Blowin’ Up, Jooyoung Lee takes us deep inside Project Blowed and the surrounding music industry, offering an unparalleled look at hip hop in the making.

While most books on rap are written from the perspective of listeners and the market, Blowin’ Up looks specifically at the creative side of rappers. As Lee shows, learning how to rap involves a great deal of discipline, and it takes practice to acquire the necessary skills to put on a good show. Along with Lee—who is himself a pop-locker—we watch as the rappers at Project Blowed learn the basics, from how to hold a microphone to how to control their breath amid all those words. And we meet rappers like E. Crimsin, Nocando, VerBS, and Flawliss as they freestyle and battle with each other. For the men at Project Blowed, hip hop offers a creative alternative to the gang lifestyle, substituting verbal competition for physical violence, and provides an outlet for setting goals and working toward them.

Engagingly descriptive and chock-full of entertaining personalities and real-life vignettes, Blowin’ Up not only delivers a behind-the-scenes view of the underground world of hip hop, but also makes a strong case for supporting the creative aspirations of young, urban, black men, who are often growing up in the shadow of gang violence and dead-end jobs. 
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cover of Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans

Bounce

Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans

Matt Miller

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

Over the course of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Orleans helped define the genres of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a dance-oriented style called “bounce.”

Hip-hop has been the latest conduit for a “New Orleans sound” that lies at the heart of many of the city's best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city's rich musical and cultural traditions.

In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans's hip-hop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music. Like other forms of grassroots expressive culture in the city, New Orleans rap is a site of intense aesthetic and economic competition that reflects the creativity and resilience of the city's poor and working-class African Americans.

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cover of Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City

Breaks in the Air

The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City

John Klaess

Duke University Press, 2022

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap’s emergence on New York City’s airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop’s performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York’s African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.
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cover of Bringing Wreck: Megan Thee Stallion, Monica Roberts, and Other Houston Hurricanes

Bringing Wreck

Megan Thee Stallion, Monica Roberts, and Other Houston Hurricanes

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

University of Texas Press, 2026

A whirling exploration of how Megan Thee Stallion inspires Black women and femmes like the late Monica Roberts, framed by the storm-making work of both.

While rap megastar Megan Thee Stallion needs no introduction, fewer will be familiar with Monica Roberts, a Houston journalist, community historian, and trans activist with the popular blog TransGriot. Though the two women never met, their work has inspired Black LGBTQ+ activists to love, resist violence, speak truth to power, and dance like life depends on it. With a written energy that’s infectious, Omise’eke Tinsley highlights just how intertwined these artists are.

An incisive look at the impactful sisterhood between Black women and femmes, Bringing Wreck is a book of empowerment. From Megan’s first performance on Saturday Night Live calling to “Protect Black Women,” to Roberts’s use of Hurricane Hanna to poke fun at Donald Trump’s border wall, Tinsley digs into the world-changing power of disruption and joyful expression in the face of racial injustice, anti-trans and queer violence, mental health crises, and community disparities. Reveling in both women’s love of Houston, calling-out of gendered violence, penchant for political humor, and staunch mental health advocacy, Bringing Wreck is an ode to the Bayou City, Black music, and the difference that one woman’s voice can make when we listen carefully.

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