New American Songbook show

New American Songbook

Summary: In 20 years of listening to hip hop, its music and stories have never left me unchallenged or unchanged. Throughout its history—from Kool Herc to KRS and beyond—hip hop has told the story of America through the styles of noir, memoir, jazz and rhythm and blues, comic books and blockbuster action movies. It is everything we say we are, and those things we maintain we are not. This is the new American Songbook.

Podcasts:

 New American Songbook: High Hip Hop | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 111

Hip hop has always been fascinated with itself--one of the music’s unique and endearing qualities is its constant self-reflection and self-assessment. This is great for true fans--there’s nothing an enthusiast loves more than to constantly talk about their enthusiasm--but it’s often difficult for casual or first-time listeners to get into it.

 New American Songbook: The Pulitzer | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 166

In 1989, the first year that rap music was included as a category in the Grammy Awards, half of the winning duo boycotted the show altogether. The winning act, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, felt slighted by the exclusion of the category from the television broadcast. The emcee, Will Smith, along with several other nominees, declined to participate. The rap group Salt N Pepa put it succinctly, saying “if they don’t want us, we don’t want them.” If the 1989 Grammys indicated the acceptance

 New American Songbook: Anthropocene | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 166

A term that is gaining more popularity over the past few years is the Anthropocene.

 Remembering Craig Mack | New American Songbook | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 171

Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean “Puffy” Combs in 1993, was a cultural force in the mid-90’s.

 Hip Hop History: 1996 | New American Songbook | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 108

Hip hop is a vast territory, and it’s often difficult to make declarative statements about it because a counterexample is usually just around the corner. However, there are clear facts, and one of them is that 1996 was one of the greatest years in hip hop history. Here’s just five of the incredible releases from that year: Outkast, ATLiens A Tribe Called Quest, “Beats, Rhymes and Life” The Roots, “Iladelph Halflife” Busta Rhymes, “The Coming” Mobb Deep, “Hell on Earth” The sound of that year is

 'Can't See Me' | New American Songbook | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 84

The phrase “can’t see me” is a well-worn trope in hip hop music. A search on the website genius.com —an encyclopedia of hip hop lyrics and annotations—for the phrase brings up thousands of hits spanning the entire history of hip hop. But what does it mean, beyond the obvious, and how are we to interpret it? Invisibility as a theme in African American art and literature can be traced back at least as early as Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man , which recounts the radicalization of its narrator,

 New American Songbook: Romanticism | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 107

We don’t often associate the Romantic period of literature and art with the sounds of factories or machines, but there’s a good case to be made that despite our insistence on realism and modernism, we’ve never really left Romanticism behind. Liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin complained that Romanticism led to the "melting away of the very notion of objective truth," which could conversely be a point in its favor. Where the old Romantics left off, much of hip hop has picked up, returning to the

 Afro-Pessimism And Afrofuturism | NAS | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 112

Among the many critical perspectives that are useful in listening to and thinking about hip hop, two in particular are relevant to a lot of the music being produced recently: Afro-pessimism and Afrofuturism.

 Letter From Birmingham Jail | NAS | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 167

This year marks the 55th anniversary of the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

 Hip Hop Christmas | NAS | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 155

Christmas music is a funny genre: descended from sacred music, it’s still capable of evoking some serious sentiments, but at the same time it’s fully saturated with commercialism, making our experience of Christmas music more Pavlovian than ecstatic.

 'Dated Emcees' Overflows With Hip Hop | NAS | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 119

The 2016 collection of poems by Chinaka Hodge titled ‘Dated Emcees’ overflows with hip hop. The culture is manifested in obvious ways, through poem titles like ‘the b side’, ‘small poems for big’ and ‘2pac couplets,’ but hip hop is not a gimmick or a writing device in these poems: it is the entire world.

 New American Songbook: The Sample | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 169

For most of its existence, hip hop was a sample-based musical form. Any good origin story of hip hop reinforces this—from two turntables and a microphone an entire cosmos was born.

 Masta Ace's 'The Falling Season' | NAS | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 165

Hip hop is an oversized music; part of what makes it so great is the exaggeration, the outlandish claims by emcees of supernatural powers, ridiculous braggadocio and the pulp-like caricature of its villains. So it’s rare to find an artist who is skilled at making hip hop smaller, who can turn the arena filled with thousands of people into a room with just the emcee and you. On the 2016 ‘The Falling Season’, Masta Ace does just that through a beautifully crafted concept album that traces the path

 New American Songbook: Eminem's Political Opinions | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 120

Eminem’s now infamous freestyle castigating Donald Trump at the BET Hip Hop Awards raises one very important question: What the heck was that?

 Guns Are People | New American Songbook | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 116

The recent shooting in Las Vegas was followed by the usual crop of Facebook and Twitter posts decrying either gun violence or gun control, splitting semantic hairs over weapon terminologies and invocations of thoughts and prayers.

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