Thought and Culture
Blues People, Chapters 4-6, pgs 32-80
Assignments Due: Discussion #3: Why is blues music considered a technological innovation for enslaved Africans and African Americans brought t the American South? How do you understand the significance about the experience of enslaved Africans that impacts the type of music they produced when brought to the South? What other points stood out in the reading that indicate the beginning of a trap aesthetic that was revealed in blues music?
These are songs to listen to for discussion 6 Assignments Due: Discussion #6. Listen to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”, Afrika Bambataa’s “Planet Rock”, and Eric B and Rakim’s “Know The Ledge”. What stories are told? What is the messaging in the songs? How are they related? Contextualize the first two within the year of 1982 and the third within 1991.
Read the following essays:
Screen: For Those Who Love God and Trap Music (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)
The links above may be used to answer this discussion question Assignments Due: Discussion 7 Former Mayor William Hartsfield, in 1955, is credited with the giving Atlanta its identity as a city “too busy to hate”. He is responsible for building the city into the aviation powerhouse it has grown to be. Andre 3000, at the 1995 Source Awards, declared “the South got something to say”. His group, Outkast, is credited with giving Atlanta its identity separate from northern hip hop performance sensibilities. Juxtapose these two identifiers with one another within the context of race and technological innovation from both eras.
Describe the rise of Atlanta hip hop as a post-civil rights response to desegregation, opportunity, and entrepreneurial access.
