Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

This class is a historical and stylistic survey of hip hop music and culture from its birth in New York City in the 1970s, emergence into U.S. and global popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s, and up to the present day. We will focus on U.S. artists from the East and West Coasts, and the South. Our study of the history, culture, and aesthetics of hip hop music will serve to illuminate issues of power, politics, and race in U.S. culture of the last 50 years.

Graded work will include:

• participation in robust weekly discussions
• weekly reading summaries
• a written final project in which you analyze a specific hip hop recording, and reflect on your learning over the term

The course requires extensive reading (40-50 pages/week), and uses a required textbook: Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop, A History of the Hip Hop Generation, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005, which typically costs between $10 and $20. Other readings will be available for free via PCC Libraries, or as .pdf files.

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

• Apply musicological research and analysis techniques to describe hip hop music.
• Describe the diverse communities in the United States that express culture through hip hop music.
• Apply critical listening skills in order to analyze artistic, social, historical, and cultural contexts of hip hop musical expressions.
• Analyze musical works from the canon of Hip Hop music for form, texture, and content.
• Discuss the historical and sociopolitical contexts for the major developments in hip hop music.