...John David Vandevert In response to the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, beginning as early as 2014 but reaching a critical apex in the early parts of 2022, hip hop in Russia has only further cemented its role as a “popular” vehicle for the promotion of cultural activism and sociopolitical...

...Lauron J. Kehrer For the past decade, queer and trans rappers have been the dominant force in New Orleans bounce, a dance-centric hip hop genre specific to that city. Inspired by the language of bounce rappers themselves, such as Sissy Nobby, who self-identify as gay and reclaim a once pejorative...

...Carlos Garrido Castellano; J. Griffith Rollefson On June 16, 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released “Apeshit”—a trap-styled hip hop track featuring a chorus of “I can’t believe we made it / Have you ever seen the crowd going apeshit?” The much-commented-on music video for the track was framed as a hip...

...James G. McNally Given the relative paucity of scholarship on hip-hop as live experience, how can extraordinary hip-hop liveness be thought of as a zone of collective experience and feeling? How might such thought draw on existing scholarship on the ecstatic in Black performance, and on related...

...Mark R Villegas This article sheds light on the pervasive yet largely uncommented upon presence of geek culture and Orientalism in hip hop, revealing the constructed, performed, and mediated nature of racialized masculinity in popular culture. By observing a range of media artifacts...

...Elliott H. Powell This article analyzes the music of Black female rapper Missy Elliott in order to consider performative challenges to the politics of visibility and visuality of Black queerness in hip hop. While mainstream media lauds the recent increase in and representation of out Black LGBTQ...

...Sara Hakeem Grewal While hip hop and the university appear to operate within radically different social (and socioeconomic) spheres, we nevertheless see increasing overlap between the two that demonstrates a mutual interest and perhaps desire between the two. With the rise of hip hop studies...

...Michail Exarchos (aka Stereo Mike) Rap, the musical element of hip hop culture, has depended on the recorded past to shape its birth, present and, potentially, its future. Founded on a sample-based methodology, the style’s perceived authenticity and sonic impact are largely attributed to the use...

...Reem M. Hilal This paper explores the way in which hip hop artists Iraqi British Lowkey, Iraqi Canadian Narcy, and the Palestinian crew DAM deploy music to challenge narratives of terrorism that are constructed to achieve political objectives and consequently obfuscate geopolitical inequities...

... solutions. Alternatively, I argue in this paper that a rising collection of Chicago hip hop artists were producing musical discourses in 2016 that not only challenged Trump’s negative rants, but also spatialized a multilayered narrative of the intersections between hip hop and activism in the city. Through...