Check-in #1: On your blog, write which challenge you intend to work on in the coming weeks and how you plan to complete the assignment. In addition, justify/analyze/rationalize why you chose the specific challenge to respond to.
Check-in #2: Update on the progress of your challenge on your blog in the form of a memo. Either upload the text or provide a link to the document on your blog.
Check-in #3: After you complete your challenge, reflect on the process of your experience writing for this specific genre. How did completing the chosen challenge enhance your understanding of hip-hop culture? What difficulties or issues did you have during the writing process?
Challenges
Go to SW 34th Street's "Graffiti Wall" in Gainesville. Locate an image on the wall that you think represents some aspect of hip-hop or hip-hop culture. Then, perform a rhetorical analysis on the image. Explain in your analysis why you think the image represents some aspect of hip-hop culture and how you, personally relate to the image. Justify, rationalize, and explain the reasoning behind the choice of the image. Include a picture of the image in your response.
2. Hip-Hop Spaces
Describe a place in which you actively participate in and can locate elements of hip-hop culture within. For example, you may locate the musical thumping of bass and rhythm; an overwhelming feeling of pride and ambition -- literally "started from the bottom," and now find yourself "here"; witnessed a rap battle. After locating the space, describe the space and the events that occurred. Consider what exactly it is about the environment or your experience that stimulates specific feelings. Be as descriptive as possible.
3. Freestyle
Craft your own musical production that contains identifiable hip-hop themes. In other words, you will be creating your own, original song which you will need to record. You are free to find outside hip-hop music to remix, though you are also able to create your own beats and chords, but you must create your own lyrical content. So, you might produce your own rap narrative, spoken word poetry, beat, etc. An example of what your final product might look/sound like is Angel Haze's remix of Kanye West's "Say What's Real." Click here for the link (!!there may be triggering ideas expressed in the song, so beware before you listen to it!!). Since you will be creating a secondary piece of text for this assignment, you will only be required to write a 1 page response.
4a. It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop
Choose one of the films below to watch. After watching, think about how the film incorporates different elements of hip-hop culture. Briefly describe/summarize the film and then explain how hip-hop is represented in the visual medium. How is hip-hop personified? Is hip-hop culture a plot point? What might this say about the interaction between cultures, times, places, crime, normativity, and/or authoritative voices? How can we compare hip-hop's portrayal of genders, races, religions, etc. as discussed in class? Why are some individuals a part of hip-hop culture and others are not? Use specific examples from the film, whether this is dialogue, visuals, etc.
- Juice - 1992 film featuring Tupac Shakur
- Friday - 1995 film featuring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker
- Save the Last Dance - 2001 film featuring Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas
- Carmen: A Hip Hopera - 2001 film featuring Beyonce Knowles and Mekhi Phifer
- How High
- Brown Sugar
- Love & Basketball
- Poetic Justice
4b. If you are unable to locate any of the films listed above, choose two of the short films listed below and place them into conversation with one another. How does each film seem to define hip-hop? What does the film attempt to say about hip-hop and hip-hop culture? Do the films enter into a conversation with one another in any way? In other words, do the films talk with one another or complicate ideas about hip-hop culture?
- Kanye West - Runaway (2010)
- R. Kelly - Trapped in the Closet (chapters 1-22)
- Jay Z - Picasso Baby (2013)
- Childish Gambino - Clapping for the Wrong Reasons (2013)
5. Aesthetic Multimodality
This challenge has two separate questions you can choose to respond to. You do not need to complete both.
A. Remix a piece of hip-hop culture: find a piece of art work that may not be immediately recognized as a part of hip-hop culture, but you think could be. Then, remix that clothing, painting, film, song, etc. into a hip-hop representation. In other words, you would be taking a text and molding it to fit a specific set of criteria in order for it to be represented as a hip-hop text. It is possible to use this outlet as a creative endeavor; for example, remix the lyrics to The Little Mermaid's "A Part of Your World." In your response, first explain the logic behind your decisions of altering aesthetics to make the overall product a piece of hip-hop culture. You might also answer whether or not the act of manipulating objects is "hip-hop" in and of itself. Provide a link, scan, or audio file attachment to the electronic version of this assignment with your written response. Since you will be creating a secondary piece of text for this assignment, you will only be required to write a 1 page response.
B. Analyze remixed versions of hip-hop: This challenge requires some research on the Internet. Find a piece of visual artwork (e.g. fashion design, painting, photograph) that has been redesigned, re-conceived, or remixed and is now perceived as a representation of hip-hop. Examples can easily be located on many fan fiction websites and blogs. (For a more concrete example, look at our good friend Kehinde Wiley's remix of Ice-T.) Then, determine the aesthetic elements that were altered and the causal effects these remixes have on the aesthetic value of the original piece. In other words, why were specific elements changed or left unchanged? How and why are those altered elements perceived as elements of hip-hop? What are the political consequences of changing a text into a hip-hop artifact?
6. Literary Analysis
First, read one of the following pieces of American literature.
My Father Is A Retired Magician by Ntzoake Shange
Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed
Somebody Blew Up America by Amiri Baraka (rip)
Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison
A literary analysis does (amongst many other objectives) the following: presents a specific claim and uses evidence from a literary text to support that claim. This challenge asks you to present a claim about one of the above texts and how it represents (or doesn't represent) hip-hop. Use this claim as your reasoning in an argument using textual evidence to determine the ways that the poem/short story/chapter represents hip-hop and/or hip-hop cultural values.
7. Ethnographic Short
Research The Hip-Hop Collective, a UF organization centered on hip-hop. Then, attend one of their sponsored events or conduct an interview with a chair member. Your response will be a short ethnography about The Hip-Hop Collective. Like any other ethnography, your response should express the organization's roles regarding UF, Gainesville, Florida, the US, hip-hop, the world, etc. For a further understanding of this genre, read Brian A. Hoey's definition.
8. Contemporary Hip-Hop
Locate an event occurring in contemporary hip-hop culture. Here, "contemporary" is being defined as beginning at the start of this semester, or late summer 2014. Ideally, you will find a controversial topic concerning a figure or idea within hip-hop culture and interpret that phenomenon given your own understanding in hip-hop culture. For instance, if you were to analyze Nicki Minaj's controversial "Anaconda" single, you might relate this phenomenon back to your own understanding of women and women's representations in hip-hop, women's agency, sampling, or artist intervention in media.
This challenge has two separate questions you can choose to respond to. You do not need to complete both.
A. Remix a piece of hip-hop culture: find a piece of art work that may not be immediately recognized as a part of hip-hop culture, but you think could be. Then, remix that clothing, painting, film, song, etc. into a hip-hop representation. In other words, you would be taking a text and molding it to fit a specific set of criteria in order for it to be represented as a hip-hop text. It is possible to use this outlet as a creative endeavor; for example, remix the lyrics to The Little Mermaid's "A Part of Your World." In your response, first explain the logic behind your decisions of altering aesthetics to make the overall product a piece of hip-hop culture. You might also answer whether or not the act of manipulating objects is "hip-hop" in and of itself. Provide a link, scan, or audio file attachment to the electronic version of this assignment with your written response. Since you will be creating a secondary piece of text for this assignment, you will only be required to write a 1 page response.
B. Analyze remixed versions of hip-hop: This challenge requires some research on the Internet. Find a piece of visual artwork (e.g. fashion design, painting, photograph) that has been redesigned, re-conceived, or remixed and is now perceived as a representation of hip-hop. Examples can easily be located on many fan fiction websites and blogs. (For a more concrete example, look at our good friend Kehinde Wiley's remix of Ice-T.) Then, determine the aesthetic elements that were altered and the causal effects these remixes have on the aesthetic value of the original piece. In other words, why were specific elements changed or left unchanged? How and why are those altered elements perceived as elements of hip-hop? What are the political consequences of changing a text into a hip-hop artifact?
6. Literary Analysis
First, read one of the following pieces of American literature.
My Father Is A Retired Magician by Ntzoake Shange
Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed
Somebody Blew Up America by Amiri Baraka (rip)
Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison
A literary analysis does (amongst many other objectives) the following: presents a specific claim and uses evidence from a literary text to support that claim. This challenge asks you to present a claim about one of the above texts and how it represents (or doesn't represent) hip-hop. Use this claim as your reasoning in an argument using textual evidence to determine the ways that the poem/short story/chapter represents hip-hop and/or hip-hop cultural values.
7. Ethnographic Short
Research The Hip-Hop Collective, a UF organization centered on hip-hop. Then, attend one of their sponsored events or conduct an interview with a chair member. Your response will be a short ethnography about The Hip-Hop Collective. Like any other ethnography, your response should express the organization's roles regarding UF, Gainesville, Florida, the US, hip-hop, the world, etc. For a further understanding of this genre, read Brian A. Hoey's definition.
8. Contemporary Hip-Hop
Locate an event occurring in contemporary hip-hop culture. Here, "contemporary" is being defined as beginning at the start of this semester, or late summer 2014. Ideally, you will find a controversial topic concerning a figure or idea within hip-hop culture and interpret that phenomenon given your own understanding in hip-hop culture. For instance, if you were to analyze Nicki Minaj's controversial "Anaconda" single, you might relate this phenomenon back to your own understanding of women and women's representations in hip-hop, women's agency, sampling, or artist intervention in media.