“What’s so special about African American music?”

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been hailed as “required reading” by Toni Morison and many others.

A “public sphere” includes all the venues through which a community discusses important issues.

Coates complicates the audiovisual culture he experienced as a young man.

“Message to the Grass Roots” is among Malcolm X’s most famous and most influential speeches.

“The Time has Come” (1990) is the first episode of Eyes on the Prize‘s second series.

Neal’s chapter 1 focuses on the birth and evolution of soul music in the 1950s and 1960s.

One jazz player’s speech offers a great window onto  the music industry in the 1960s.

Swedish journalists focused on aspects of Black Power that were ignored by U.S. media.

“A call to pride and a renewed push for unity galvanize black America.”

Neal’s chapter 2 focuses on the Black Public Sphere during an era of brutal repression.

“A Nation of Law?” (1990) is the twelfth episode of Eyes on the Prize.

Since the 1970s, deindustrialization and job loss has posed enormous challenges for many cities.

Neal’s chapters 5-6 focus on recent innovations, and class divisions, within African American communities and their musics.

As Greg Dimitriadis argues, hip-hop artists have long understood themselves to be teachers.

With this assignment we begin our second textbook, Eithne Quinn’s Nuthin’ but a “g” thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap.

Run-D.M.C.’s emergence in the early 1980s set the template for much of modern hip hop.

Los Angeles and NWA are the site and source of the gangsta style.

Among many other things, NWA forced “a major [music] industry rethinking of consumer taste patterns” (83).

Gangsta rap’s narratives and protagonists drew on long traditions within African-American storytelling.

Shakur literally was a son of the Black Panthers. Did it matter then? Does it matter now?

Can we take rappers at their word?

Why name the song “Rosa Parks”? Why name the song “Bombs over Baghdad”?

This assignment focuses on the public personas of Shawn Carter and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.

Lamar has been labeled hip hop’s newest “messiah,” but he has also drawn fire for seeming to say that Black people shared the blame for…

The second half of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book offers great insight and few answers.

An interview and a book review offer some perspectives on Between the World and Me.