The Chronic: 20 Years Later

Has it been twenty years since The Chronic dropped in 1993?  Apparently this is true as National Public Radio (NPR) has undertaken to chronicle 1993, a "remarkable year in music."  In looking back at this remarkable year in music, NPR begins by examining Dr. Dre and his Chronic record which "had roots in the cultural and social upheaval sparked by the Los Angeles riots the year before."

While hip hop had long enjoyed wide popularity and important social commentary status, The Chronic became an anthem album for millions of young people in the United States and across the globe.  In responding in part to the L.A. Riots, The Chronic captured the anger, angst, and anxiety that encapsulated a city and community that considered itself, in some ways, at war with the police employed to protect them.  Hip hop had critiqued police brutality aggressively before 1993 and The Chronic, particularly in Dr Dre's former group N.W.A.'s still fiery "F*#k tha Police, and Public Enemy's "Get the F*#k Outta Dodge," but The Chronic was the first to deal with police brutality following the world's introduction to the Los Angeles Police Department's brutalization of Rodney King, which precipitated the L.A. Riots.

Recall, that in the late 1980s when NWA released "F*#k tha Police" and Public Enemy recorded "Get the F*#k Outta Dodge," hip hop was acting as the "Black CNN" reporting on inner city community ills that were largely ignored by the mass media.  NWA and Public Enemy came under intense criticism for their anti-police brutality songs in the late 1980s, as law enforcement officials and politicians simply denied such critiques.  Only after the LAPD was captured on a grainy hand-held video beating the prone and subdued Rodney King was America clued in to the truth that NWA and Public Enemy had been claiming through narrative lyric:  U.S. law enforcement commonly brutalizes the communities they are charged to protect.

Seizing on this moment, (i.e., America's eye-opening moment that police brutality continues against people of color), The Chronic bemoans the circumstances that attend life in the 'hood (through Lil' Ghetto Boy, Nuthin' but a G Thang, and The Day the N*#*#z Took Over, amongst others).  The NPR story concludes:  "[The Chronic] is an audio document, with a lot of creativity and art and entertainment going along with it. Some people might think that that's wrong, but it's art, it's poetry. And it's supposed to have pain in it. You can gather that from listening to The Chronic — about the L.A. riots — you can feel it, you can kind of understand. And a lot of people agree that they captured it incredibly well. . . . [The Chronic] doesn't have all the answers, and it didn't solve the problems of its time. It's low-riding party music, intended to provide an escape. It also gives voice to the frustrations borne of burned-out buildings, grinding poverty and a feeling that nobody cared."

Martin Luther King and Equal Economic Opportunity

On a day where the United States celebrates the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems appropriate to remember his legacy through highlighting his lesser known campaign against poverty.  Following an era that witnessed Dr. King winning the Nobel Peace Prize and leading the civil rights movement in the 1960s, he turned his attention squarely upon economic inequality prior to his assassination.  In the last few years of his life, Dr. King implored the nation and those in power to allow, even provide, equal opportunity for all.

From Dedrick Muhammad's article "The Economic Lessons of Martin Luther King" we see that:  "In fact, in the last year of his life, Dr. King was organizing the Poor People's Campaign, a multiracial effort to alleviate poverty and provide guaranteed income for every citizen. King understood that without greater economic equality, racial disparities and divisions could not be overcome."  Muhammad notes further that "[d]uring Dr. King's famed speech at the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs, he stated, 'We refuse to believe there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.' One of the great economic lessons Dr. King has for us all is this: The road to prosperity requires of us faith, struggle, sacrifice, and investment, particularly for the most vulnerable."

As we are inspired today by MLK's messages of social equality, it is important to remember that economic justice and equality of opportunity were just as significant a part of his life and legacy.

Happy MLK Day.


[photo is in the public domain]

Hip-Hop and the Law Review: The Year in Review

The previous year has seen a number of articles published on hip-hop in the country's law reviews.  The following is a nearly complete list of those articles that consider hip-hop in any number of forms: case study, methodology, theoretical intervention, etc.  One trend is the continued study of hip-hop's relationship to copyright law.  2012 has seen more focus on hip-hop and copyright law than on hip-hop and other sub-disciplines.  Why?  Perhaps the continued evolution of web-based technologies and the increasing ease of sharing information (Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) has made issues of copyright law and intellectual property more salient to the average person.  Perhaps the re-appropriation of corporate logos by Occupiers has inspired more inquiry into the ways in which material is used and abused.  No matter the reason, 2013 should see continued work on hip-hop as scholars continue to study the effects of hip-hop on the Arab Spring, further investigate the effects of mass incarceration, become increasingly exposed to students who grew up with hip-hop, and theorize new relationships to the law given our increasingly diverse country. 

In no particular order, here are 2012's hip-hop-related articles:

Andrea M. Ewart with Kimberly R. Villiers, "Dangerous" Dancehall Reggae and Caribbean Treaty Obligations, 27 Connecticut Journal of International Law 321-343 (Spring 2012)

andre douglas pong cummings, Derrick Bell: Godfather Provocateur, 28 Harvard Journal on Racial and Ethnic Justice 51-66 (Spring 2012)

andre douglas pond cummings, Symposium: War on...The Fallout of Declaring War on Social Issues: "All Eyez on Me": America's War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex, 15 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 417-448 (Spring 2012)

Vera Golosker, Student Note: the transformative tribute: How Mash-Up Music Constitutes Fair Use of Copyrights, 34 Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 381-401 (Spring 2012)

Lisa T. Alexander, Hip-Hop and Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, and Law, 63 Hastings Law Journal 803-866 (March 2012)

Unsigned Student Note, Student Note: Not in Court "Cause I Stole a Beat": The Digital Music Sampling Debate's Discourse on Race and Culture, and the Need for Test Case Litigation, 2012 University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 141-166 (Spring 2012)

Donald F. Tibbs, Symposium: War on...The Fallout of Declaring War on Social Issues: From Black Power to Hip Hop: Discussing Race, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment Through the "War on" Paradigm, 15 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 47-79 (Winter 2012)

Anna Shapell, Student Note: "Give Me a Beat:" Mixing and Mashing Copyright Law to Encompass Sample-Based Music, 12 Journal of High Technology Law 519-565 (2012)

Kim D. Chanbonpin, Legal Writing: the Remix: Plagiarism and Hip Hop Ethics, 63 Mercer Law Review 597-638 (Winter 2012)

John S. Pelletier, Student Note: Sampling the Circuits: The Case for a New Comprehensive Scheme for Determining Copyright Infringement as a Result of Music Sampling, 89 Washington University Law Review 1161-1202 (2012)

Tracy Reilly, Good Fences Make Good Neighboring Rights: The German Federal Supreme Court Rules on the Digital Sampling of Sound Recordings in Metall auf Metall, 13 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology 153-209 (Winter 2012)

Caleb Mason, Jay-Z's 99 Problems, Verse 2: A Close Reading with Fourth Amendment Guidance for Cops and Perps, 56 Saint Louis University Law Journal 567-585 (Winter 2012)

Here's to a hip-hop and the law filled new year and more excelleent scholarship. 


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Happy New Year

photo courtesy of Katie Rommel Esham/Wikimedia Commons

The Hip Hop Law Blog wishes a happy and healthy 2013 to all of our readers, supporters and commentators.  We look forward to a year where genuine progress is made in connection with ending the War on Drugs, scaling back the prison industrial complex, providing education and employment opportunities for all, each important historical themes of forward-thinking hip hop artists and scholars.

New articles from the communication discipline

In the most recent issue of Critical Studies in Mass Communication (Vol. 29, No. 5), Bryan McCann (Department of Communication, Wayne State University) has published, "Contesting the Mark of Criminality: Race, Place and the Prerogative of Violence in N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton" and David C. Oh (Department of Communication, Villanova University) has published, "Black-Yellow Fences: Multicultural Boundaries and Whiteness in the Rush Hour Franchise."  Both articles may be of interest to you fine readers. 

McCann's abstract:

 

This essay reads rap group N.W.A.'s 1998 album Straight Outta Compton as a parodic enactment of the racialized discourses of law and order during the late 1980s, or what I am calling the mark of criminality.  Its release constituted a watershed moment in black popular culture that coincided with the devastating consequences of surveillance, containment, and spectacular scapegoating associated with Reagan-era crime control policies and rhetoric.  I argue that the album and its reception by the law enforcement community of the late 1980s functioned as a confrontation over the meanings of race, place, and crime in the twentieth century.  In addition to revealing the contingent meanings of criminality in popular and political culture, the legacy of Straight Outta Compton provides insights into the role of criminality in processes of social transformation.

From Oh's abstract:

 

The Rush Hour films disrupt the interracial buddy cop formula largely by erasing whites from the films.  Despite the unconventional casting, the franchise has achieved "mainstream" popularity, which I argue is at least partly because the films construct Carter and Lee in an oppositional binary as a multiracial "odd couple," converting Carter and Lee, the two lead detectives played by Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, into physical embodiments of blackness and yellowness, fencing in the perimeters of whiteness.  Thus, whiteness is able to remain protected and undetected in the normative center.  Like a physical fence, however, the boundaries are semi-permeable, creating narrative openings to challenge whiteness.  Therefore, the Rush Hour franchise protects white normality but leaves it somewhat vulnerable at the margins.

Both articles are available at the journal website or on EBSCO. 


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Public Enemy and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Public Enemy live

HipHopLaw.com favorite Chuck D and Public Enemy will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.  When Chuck D provided the keynote address to the "Hip Hop and the American Constitution" course in April 2012, offered collaboratively by Drexel Law and WVU Law, he spent the first portion of his address sharing with our law school students and invited guests, the induction speech he had written for 2012's R&R HOF inductees, The Beastie Boys.  Now Chuck and PE will have the opportunity to craft their own acceptance speech for their own HOF induction.

Public Enemy's Hall of Fame induction is important for many reasons:  First, PE will be only the fourth hip hop group inducted into the R&R HOF (following on the heels of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, RUN-DMC, and the Beastie's), but PE will become the first overtly political and socially conscious hip hop group to be inducted and recognized for the movement that they inspired.

Second, PE was not just controversial at launch, but they unabashadely critiqued (a) the criminal justice system in the United States (in "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and "Can't Truss It," amongst many others); (b) continuing and festering racism in America (in "Fight the Power" and "By the Time I Get to Arizona," amongst many others); and (c) police brutality and inner city neglect (in "Get the F Outta Dodge" and "9-1-1 is a Joke," amongst many others).  Public Enemy inspired listeners to write, protest, rap, and actively engage in fighting against injustice and promoting education and intelligent criticism.

Third, PE, certainly Chuck and Professor Griff,  viewed themselves as educators AND entertainers, not simply entertainers.  With a strident message to deliver, Chuck, Griff and PE were relentless in their lyrics and their delivery.  For this, PE was annihilated by critics when they emerged in the early 1990s.  Still, PE knew that their target audience was not the establishment nor their critics, rather young people that needed to be educated in a way different than was being delivered by most U.S. public schools. "Messages" delivered below:



In rewatching Can't Truss It, one is reminded just how controversial and edgy PE was when they came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The choice for induction in the R&R HOF is certainly deserved as this groundbreaking group paved the way for so many others to follow.  Congratulations to Chuck D and Public Enemy on their selection for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Happy Holidays from DMX

DMX recently stopped by New York City's Power 105, and gave a stirring rendition of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  His new album, Undisputed, is in stores now. 

Video Courtesy of Power 105.


-- Nick J. Sciullo

"Hip Hop as a Necessary Tool in the Classroom"

Professor Rajul Punjabi

Following on the heels of the first ever "Hip Hop and the American Constitution" course offered at a U.S. law school, Professor Rajul Punjabi now writes that using hip hop in the college classroom has become a "necessary tool."  According to Punjabi:

"I can do my best to break a literary concept down to my class, but it doesn't resonate until I contextualize it in an accessible way. And in 2012, I'm confident to say that hip hop as a genre and culture is an integral tool to make almost any text accessible.  Now of course, it's easy to defend my claim in an English-based curriculum. I employ Jay-Z for his abundant usage of metaphor, allusion, and hyperbole to teach figures of speech. Tupac works when we're looking at socioeconomic backgrounds in literature. Lauryn Hill? Indispensable during a lesson on imagery and narration. And don't get me started on our close-reading of the word "swagger" nee "swag" (Shakespeare vs. Soulja Boy). It was a long, loud, two hours but no English instructor worth her salt likes a quiet classroom anyway."

CFP: Radical Teacher No. 97 - Hip-Hop and Critical Pedagogy

Hip-Hop and Critical Pedagogy

ON-LINE Special Issue of Radical Teacher, No. 97

Call for Submissions

All submissions due no later than February 15, 2013

With this special issue we propose to construct a frame for understanding the place of Hip Hop in classrooms—from K-12 public schools and other youth-based community spaces to college and university courses. With the increasing popularity of what some are calling Hip Hop Studies, it becomes essential to think critically about a range of methodological approaches, innovative instructional strategies and the overall challenges (practical,

political and ethical) of teaching Hip Hop.  Central to our concerns is a focus on critical literacy, defined by Ira Shor as “learning to read and write as part of the process of becoming conscious of one's experience as

historically constructed within specific power relations."  With this special issue of Radical Teacher we plan to consider the function of Hip Hop as a nexus of pedagogical innovation and critical literacy.

We seek contributions from a range of practitioners who are exploring the use of Hip Hop music and related elements of Hip Hop culture in the classroom.  Our definitions (of “Hip Hop,” of “classroom,” and so on) are, necessarily, flexible: our interest is in publishing a diverse range of writings that will help us all think about happens when Hip Hop becomes academic.  In this light we welcome submissions from educators, activists,

and scholars whose experiences have provided interesting data on this subject.  Possible formats include conventional research papers and essays, interviews, annotated lesson plans, syllabi and bibliographies, anthologies of student work, and visual art.  

Among other topics, we can imagine submissions treating:

Hip Hop and social justice teaching

Hip Hop K-12 instruction

Hip Hop at the University and Liberal Arts College

Hip Hop research strategies and agendas

Hip Hop and critical literacy practices

Hip Hop as global consciousness

Hip Hop and the politics of race

Hip Hop, Gender, and Sexuality

Hip Hop Studies and Traditional Fields of Study

Hip Hop Studies Methodologies

Hip Hop and Youth Organizing

Hip Hop and Africanist Aesthetics

Hip Hop and political organizing

Hip Hop, Police Brutality, and the Carceral State

Hip Hop and the Occupy Movement

Hip Hop and alternative media practices

Please send submissions and inquiries to: radicalteachhiphop@gmail.com

Guest Editors: Christopher M. Tinson, Ph.D., Hampshire College and Carlos Rec McBride, M.Ed., University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Radical Teacher is a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal grounded in radical left politics. We publish articles that focus on education written by educational workers at all levels, in traditional and nontraditional institutions.

RIP Russell Means

Activist, actor, musician, agitator, politician and former American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means passed today from esophageal cancer, at the age of 72.  He died at his ranch located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota,  where he was born in 1939.  Means was a fierce advocate of American Indian rights and led dozens of protests and uprisings throughout his life ranging from seizing the Mayflower II in Plymouth, Mass on Thanksgiving day in 1970 (protesting discriminatory treatment of American Indians), to orchestrating a 1971 prayer vigil atop the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota (dramatizing Lakota claims to the Black Hills), to organizing cross-country caravans in 1972 to Washington, D.C. (protesting a century of broken treaties by the U.S. government), to leading a boycott of Cleveland Indian games in the 1990s (protesting the use of Chief Wahoo as a racist, caricatured mascot/logo).

Russell Means is most recognized for two well known portrayals, though very divergent:  First, he led a 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of more than 350 Lakota men, women and children, often referred to as the last major conflict of the American Indian wars, where protestors demanded strict adherence by the federal government to all Indian treaties.  Second, he starred as Chingachgook in Michael Mann's 1992 epic "The Last of the Mohicans" alongside Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe.

Means used his notoriety to advocate on behalf of equality on behalf of American Indians until his untimely death.

The War on Drugs as an Epic Fail

SpearIt, a law professor at Saint Louis University, has recently penned an op-ed in connection with the state of Washington's ballot initiative on legalizing marijuana.  Hip-hop is replete with references to the abject failure of the War on Drugs and the costly destruction visited on urban communities by law enforcement engaged in this war.  The op-ed is entitled "Legalize Marijuana for Racial Justice Reasons," and appears in the Seattle Times.

From the Seattle Times:  "The war on drugs has been a colossal and costly failure, paid for largely with the blood of minority youth. In fact, the history of American drug law is one long story of discrimination against ethnic minorities, including the demonizing of Mexicans in the Southwest for marijuana use."

CFP: Hip Hop Literacies at OSU

The Ohio State University

February 15-16, 2013

The 2013 Hiphop Literacies conference features keynotes, performances and workshops by leading scholars, educators, and artists and focuses on pedagogies for social change in its attempt to target innovative, critical and activist work that uses Hiphop and popular culture including a wide range of media across geographic and virtual space, diverse populations, and methods for stimulating freedom movement.  We are especially interested in student-centered curriculum, integrating media, arts, community-based projects, progressive learning and teaching that are participatory, inquiry-based and interdisciplinary addressing social issues such as impoverishment, mass incarceration, community re-entry, sexism, human rights, language diversity, literacy, education, and social inequality.  Our goal is to continue to locate and instigate unified critical movement on behalf of critical scholars, researchers, students, teachers, artists, community members and policy makers.

The deadline is October, 30, 2012. 

Check out the webpage here. 


-- Nick J. Sciullo

Tupac Conference in Atlanta

On Friday and Saturday, September 28-29, 2012, the Atlantic University Center Robert W. Woodruff library is hosting the "Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference: Hip Hop, Education and Expanding the Archival Imagination."

The conference program, available here, includes exciting and robust conversations regarding the impact of Tupac Shakur specifically, and hip hop generally, on culture, law and politics.

From the Conference website:  "The Archives Research Center of the AUC Woodruff Library hourses the Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection, a rich resource for understanding the life and work of one of hip hop's brightest stars.  The Collection was deposited in the Archives in 2009, thourhg a partnership with the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation and Afeni Shakur-Davis, mother of Tupac Shakur, to make his papers available to scholars.

The Collection includes Shakur's handwritten manuscripts, including song lyrics, track listings, video and album treatments, short stories and poetry.  Other materials include manuscripts written by members of the Outlawz, media and publicity materials, correspondence and legal documents.

The Tupac Amaru Shakur Conference was designed to combine AUC Woodruff Library's mission to facilitate scholarly research and the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation's mission to encourage hip hop curriculum." 

Several contributors to "Hip Hop Law.com" will participate as speakers at this first annual event.

Hip Hop and the ABA

The September 2012 edition of the ABA Journal reports favorably on the "Hip Hop and the American Constitution" course offered last spring semester collaboratively between Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law and the West Virginia University College of Law.  In an article entitled "Hip-Hop at Law," reporter L.J. Jackson writes:

Public Enemy (in Hamburg, Germany 2000)

"Back in 1989, when Chuck D and Flavor Flav exhorted Public Enemy fans to 'Fight the Power,' it’s likely that they never envisioned their anti-establishment anthem would be deconstructed and analyzed as part of an innovative law school curriculum. But the lyrics and discographies of Public Enemy and other hip-hop artists are indeed the subjects of a recent law school seminar and a forthcoming anthology studying the intersection of the Constitution and hip-hop.  Law professors Donald Tibbs and andré cummings are working on a textbook based on the class they co-taught this spring called 'Hip-Hop and the American Constitution.' The lecture series brought an eclectic mix of law professors, formerly incarcerated people and rap artists to the classroom to discuss hip-hop’s legal implications. 'It initially was a hope and dream' to teach the class, says Tibbs of Drexel University, who conceived the idea and pitched it to cummings of West Virginia University."

The entire article can be read here:  Hip-Hop at Law


(photo courtesy of MikaV, Creative Commons License)

Brazilian Delegates Participating in the US State Department's Program on Cultural Affairs Will Discuss Hip Hop Activism and the Law

Professor Pamela Bridgewater

Hip Hop’s influence on pop culture, legal culture, and political organizing is a global phenomena.  From will.i.am’s remix of a campaign speech by President Barak Obama to issues related to Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Katrina, Jena 6, the Trayvon Martin case, Stop and Search Resistance Movement in NYC – activists, organizers, lawyers, policymakers are either impacted by, closely connected to or identify as members of the hip hop nation.

Professor Pamela D. Bridgewater, in association with the US State Department’s Program on Cultural Affairs and fhi360, will make a presentation to a delegation of Brazilian hip hop artists and social justice activists on Friday, August 31, 2012.  In her presentation, Professor Bridgewater will address the relationships between law, activism and hip hop in the US domestic contexts such as the Roots and Reality Social Justice Project she founded as well as international grassroots human rights movements like the recent youth led movement known as the Arab Spring.  

 Program information below:

Global Hip Hop, Activism and the Law

Professor Pamela Bridgewater

Friday August 31, 2012 2:00 - 3:15

American University Washington College of Law Room 601

4801 Massachusetts Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20016

Contact Persons:

Evan L. Schmitt, Program Officer, Center for Global Connections, 202.884.8895

Nicolas Mansour, WCL Faculty Assistant, 202.274.4121