Justin A Williams

Rhymin' and Stealin': Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop

Justin Williams’s Rhymin’ and Stealin’ provides an in-depth look into the significance of borrowing in hip hop and discusses both how and why artists borrow to establish authenticity. He provides historical context for the concepts he explores by referring to many examples from classic hip hop songs and important hip hop artists. He also spends time discussing jazz as a high art, expanding on claims made in an article he wrote a few years prior to the publication of Rhymin’ and Stealin’. 1 Williams begins his discussion of hip hop borrowing by providing a brief history of the origins of hip hop. The four elements of hip hop—DJing, MCing, breaking and graffiti—were born in South Bronx against a backdrop of extreme poverty. DJ Kool Herc is considered the inventor of hip hop. Hip hop’s “golden age” lasted from 1973 to 1979, when the first hip hop single “Rapper’s Delight” was released, introducing hip hop to the world. Williams continues his discussion to explore the “historicization of the backbeat,” explaining how hip hop artists sample to gain historic authenticity. Williams defines historic authenticity

Theoretical Approaches to Quotation in Hip-Hop Recordings

Intertextuality is pervasive in multiple forms of popular music, but is arguably most overtly presented in hip-hop music and culture. While much academic work has focused on linking practices of quotation, reference, allusion and Signifyin(g) in hip-hop to earlier forms of African-American music, the main purpose of this article is to outline and illustrate the variety of ways that one can borrow from a source text or trope and ways that audiences identify and respond to them. Distinctions between allosonic and autosonic quotations (Lacasse), ‘intention’ versus sociohistorically situated interpretations (Nattiez), as well as ‘textually signalled’ and ‘textually unsignalled’ intertextuality (Dyer), help create a more detailed taxonomy within the genre. These and other distinctions, which transcend narrow discourses that only focus on ‘sampling’ (digital sampling), provide a toolkit that sets a context for more nuanced discussions of borrowing practices and offers broader implications for intertextuality within and outside of hip-hop culture. By drawing from a range of examples (e.g. The Pharcyde, Dr Dre, Xzibit), this article demonstrates that a thorough investigation of musical borrowing in hip-hop requires attention to the texts (hip-hop recordings), their reception and wider cultural contexts.

Rapping Postcoloniality: Akala's 'The Thieves Banquet' and Neocolonial Critique

Abstract MC/rapper, public speaker, journalist, graphic novelist, and founder of the Hip-hop Shakespeare Company, Akala (b. Kingslee James Daley, 1983) is one of the rappers at the forefront of the UK’s thriving hip-hop scene. His lyrics and music demonstrate an awareness of history and, in particular, the British Empire’s shameful past as global colonizer and profiteer of the slave trade. Focusing on his album The Thieves Banquet (2013), this article investigates Akala’s engagement with postcolonial thinking and neocolonial critique through the use of Western classical music tropes and multi-accentuality to create hybrid counter-narratives reflective of 21st-century global power relations.