From the school yards of the South Bronx to the tops of the "Billboard" charts, rap has emerged as one of the most influential cultural forces of our time. This pioneering anthology brings together more than 300 lyrics written over 30 years, from the "old school" to the present day.

Popular music and its listeners are strongly associated with newness and youth. Young people can stay up late dancing to the latest hits and use cutting-edge technology for listening to and sharing fresh music. Many young people incorporate their devotion to new artists and styles into their own developing personalities. However, if popular music is a genre meant for the youthful, what are listeners to make of the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past? In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form. In chapters ranging across the landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, Meyers finds indications of historical consciousness at work in multiple genres. Rock music canonizes its history in tribute performances and museums. Jazz and pop musicians cover tunes from the “Great American Songbook.” Hip-hop and contemporary R&B singers invoke Black popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the work of influential artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Prince, D’Angelo, and Janelle Monáe, Meyers argues that contemporary artists’ homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.

From its dynamic start at dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have exploded into a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism and expression all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on hip hop and rap music grown. Yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip hop artists. Fundamental among these choices is the rhythm of the rapping voice, termed "flow." Flow presents unique theoretical and analytical challenges. It is rhythmic in the same way other music is rhythmic, but also in the way speech and poetry are rhythmic. For the first time, Mitchell Ohriner's Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music reconciles approaches to key concepts of rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, treated independently across other branches of scholarship. Ohriner theorizes flow by weaving between the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses and individual tracks, the book addresses theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. In a series of case studies in the second half, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow can relate to text, the work of Black Thought of The Roots clarifies how flow can relate to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow can relate to rap's persistent meter. While Ohriner focuses on rap music throughout the book, the methods he introduces will be useful for other musical genres that feature the voice freely interacting with a more rigid metric framework.

Desi Rap is a collection of essays from South Asian American activists, academics, and hip-hop artists that explores four main ideas: hip-hop as a means of expression of racial identity, class status, gender, sexuality, racism, and culture; the appropriation of Black racial identity by South Asian American consumers of hip-hop; the furthering of the discourse on race and ethnic identity in the United States through hip-hop; and the exploration of South Asian Americans' use of hip-hop as a form of social protest. Ultimately, this volume is about broadening our horizons through hip-hop and embracing the South Asian American community's polycultural legacy and future.

This collection of three hip hop plays by Conrad Murray and his Beats & Elements collaborators Paul Cree, David Bonnick Junior and Lakeisha Lynch-Stevens, is the first publication of the critically acclaimed theatre-maker's work. The three plays use hip hop to highlight the inequalities produced by the UK's class system, and weave lyricism, musicality and dialogue to offer authentic accounts of inner-city life written by working-class Londoners. The plays are accompanied by two introductory essays: The first gives a specific social and historical context that helps readers make sense of the plays, the second positions hip hop as a contemporary literary form and offers some ways to read hip hop texts as literature. The collection also includes a foreword by leading hip hop theatre practitioner Jonzi D, interviews with the Beats & Elements company, and a glossary of words for students and international readers.

In the realm of higher education, a persistent challenge exists in empowering Black and brown students within Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) to transcend societal limitations. Often labeled as "at risk" or lagging within the achievement gap, these students possess untapped potential hindered by traditional teaching methods. The impact of COVID-19 and racial injustice has exacerbated disparities, underscoring the need for innovative teaching approaches that connect academic subjects with the real experiences of these learners. Educators navigating evolving technology and diverse classrooms strive to bridge this gap while fostering cultural inclusivity. Addressing this challenge is the book Culturally Responsive Pedagogies in the Humanities at HBCUs and HSIs, curated by DuEwa M. Frazier. Representing a groundbreaking collective effort, the book offers transformative educational practices that bridge the gap between conventional teaching and the diverse realities of HBCU and HSI classrooms. Covering topics like teaching ESL and EFL students, accommodating disabilities, integrating hip-hop pedagogies, and promoting social justice education, the anthology provides research-driven solutions that empower educators to revolutionize their teaching methods. To foster academic excellence and equity, the book resonates with scholars, administrators, and educators, guiding them on a journey of innovation that harmonizes cultural responsiveness and academic achievement, ushering in a new era of education.

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. Novels and short stories William Wells Brown CLOTEL; OR, THE PRESIDENT'S DAUGHTER Frederick Douglass THE HEROIC SLAVE Harriet E. Wilson OUR NIG; OR, SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK Nella Larsen QUICKSAND PASSING THE WRONG MAN FREEDOM SANTUARY Alice Dunbar-Nelson A CARNIVAL JANGLE VIOLETS THE WOMAN TEN MINUTES MUSING TITIEE Charles W. Chesnutt THE GOOPHERED GRAPEVINE PO' SANDY SIS' BECKY'S PICKANINNY THE DOLL THE WIFE OF HIS YOUTH DAVE'S NECKLISS THE PASSING OF GRANDISON A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE THE SHERIFF'S CHILDREN BAXTER'S PROCRUSTES Paul Laurence Dunbar THE SCAPEGOAT Jean Toomer BECKY Poetry Phillis Wheatley POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL Frances E. W. Harper POEMS Langston Hughes THE WEARY BLUES Countee Cullen COLOR COPPER SUN THE BALLAD OF THE BROWN GIRL Non-fiction Olaudah Equiano THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN Mary Prince THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE, A WEST INDIAN SLAVE Charles Ball A NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES BALL Frederick Douglass NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE Josiah Henson THE LIFE OF JOSIAH HENSON Solomon Northup TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE Harriet Ann Jacobs INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL Elizabeth Keckley BEHIND THE SCENES Louis Hughes THIRTY YEARS A SLAVE Booker T. Washington UP FROM SLAVERY William Still THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD Henry Box Brown James Hambleton Christian Theophilus Collins Seth Concklin William And Ellen Craft Abram Galloway And Richard Eden Charles Gilbert Samuel Green Jamie Griffin Harry Grimes James Hamlet And Others John Henry Hill Ann Maria Jackson And Her Seven Children Jane Johnson Matilda Mahoney Mary Frances Melvin Aunt Hannah Moore Alfred S. Thornton Essays W. E. B. Du Bois THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK Charles W. Chesnutt THE DISFRANCHISEMENT OF THE NEGRO Paul Laurence Dunbar REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN NEGROES

The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry : 1900 to the Present is a comprehensive introduction to 20th and 21st-century world poets and their most famous, most distinctive, and most influential poems.

This timely reflection on male identity in America that explores the intersection of fatherhood, race, and hip-hop culture “is a page-turner…drenched in history and encompasses the energy, fire, and passion that is hip-hop” (D. Watkins, New York Times bestselling author). Just as his music career was taking off, Juan Vidal received life-changing news: he’d soon be a father. Throughout his life, neglectful men were the norm—his own dad struggled with drug addiction and infidelity—a cycle that, inevitably, wrought Vidal with insecurity. At age twenty-six, with barely a grip on life, what lessons could he possibly offer a kid? Determined to alter the course for his child, Vidal did what he’d always done when confronted with life’s challenges—he turned to the counterculture. In Rap Dad, the musician-turned-journalist takes a thoughtful and inventive approach to exploring identity and examining how today’s society views fatherhood. To root out the source of his fears around parenting, Vidal revisits the flash points of his juvenescence, a feat that transports him, a first-generation American born to Colombian parents, back to the drug-fueled streets of 1980s–90s Miami. It’s during those pivotal years that he’s drawn to skateboarding, graffiti, and the music of rebellion: hip-hop. As he looks to the past for answers, he infuses his personal story with rap lyrics and interviews with some of pop culture’s most compelling voices—plenty of whom have proven to be some of society’s best, albeit nontraditional, dads. Along the way, Vidal confronts the unfair stereotypes that taint urban men—especially Black and Latino men. “A heartfelt examination of the damage that wayward fathers can leave in their wake” (The Washington Post), Rap Dad is “rich with symbolism…a poetic chronicle of beats, rhymes, and life” (NPR).