MUS 210—Hip Hop, Rap, and the Sounds of Identity

This course explores hip hop culture and the musical genre of rap as forces that have over the past 50 years been bound to central aspects of culture and identity in the United States. While tracing the genre’s course of history from its foundation in the Bronx in the 1970s into the far-reaching presence it holds today, we will concentrate primarily on listening to rap through the production of its beats, the poetry of its lyrics, and the flow of its MCs. In doing so, the course aims to understand the diversity of hip hop and intersections with issues of race, politics, gender, sexuality, and locality through the music itself.