Hip Hop Lit: Hip Hop Music As An Urban Ballad
During the 1980s and early 1990s, urban fiction in print experienced a decline. However, one could make a cogent argument that urban tales simply moved from print to music, as hip hop music exploded in popularity, with harsh, gritty stories such as "The Message" and "Dopeman," set to a driving, strident drum-kit rhythm. Of course, for every emcee who signed a recording contract and made the airwaves, ten more amateurs plied the streets and local clubs, much like urban bards, griots or troubadours telling urban fiction in an informal, oral manner rather than in a neat, written form. One of the most famous emcees, Tupac Shakur, is sometimes called a ghetto prophet and is undeniably an author of urban fiction in lyrical form. Shakur also wrote a book of poetry called The Rose That Grew From Concrete.
Hip hop lit in print form, though, is thriving. Non-fiction books from players in the hip hop realm such as Russell Simmons, Kevin Liles, LL Cool J, and FUBU founder Daymond John are also filed in this genre. Carmen Bryant and Karrine Steffans have both written blockbuster books for this audience, as has shock jock Wendy Williams. Both Steffans and emcee 50 Cent had such success with their books that they were given their own imprints to usher in similar authors. 50 Cent's G-Unit Books adds legitimacy to a previously disregarded genre.
Read more about this topic: Urban Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words hip, hop, music, urban and/or ballad:
“I stir my martinis with the screw,
four-inch and stainless steel,
and think of my hip where it lay
for four years like a darkness.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“I have tried being surreal, but my frogs hop right back into their realistic ponds.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“I have misplaced the Van Allen belt
the sewers and the drainage,
the urban renewal and the suburban centers.
I have forgotten the names of the literary critics.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“During the cattle drives, Texas cowboy music came into national significance. Its practical purpose is well known—it was used primarily to keep the herds quiet at night, for often a ballad sung loudly and continuously enough might prevent a stampede. However, the cowboy also sang because he liked to sing.... In this music of the range and trail is “the grayness of the prairies, the mournful minor note of a Texas norther, and a rhythm that fits the gait of the cowboy’s pony.””
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)