Hip-hop, art, and visual culture: connections, influences, and critical discussions

Abstract

The seminal origins of this book-length printed edition of Arts focusing on hip-hop, art, and visual culture are difficult to pin down. Tracing the beginnings of even a small slice of hip-hop culture (music, for instance) is not an easy endeavor. Such origins are largely described through oral histories, leaving some room for debate even among those who participated in the early development of rap music. For many, it was innovative disc jockeys (DJs) working house parties and dances at community centers in the burrows of New York during the 1970s who are credited with laying the musical foundations for hip-hop (Fricke and Ahearn 2002; Hebdige 2004; Piskor 2014). Nonetheless, there are alternative narratives to this origin, and some key components of hip-hop culture, such as graffiti and b-boying (battle dancing and breakdancing), had certainly existed in urban environments for many years prior to the emergence of the hip-hop DJ. Neither of us grew up in New York during this era, so it would be disingenuous to claim that we were introduced to hip-hop in those contexts. Perhaps, then, a better explanation of the origins of this book-length publication comes from detailing our own burgeoning awareness and interests in hip-hop. For Jeff—a white, middle-class, cisgender male art educator—this introduction primarily came during the 1980s as a middle school and high school student growing up in a small town in West Virginia. By this time, hip-hop was gaining mainstream exposure in popular media outlets including FM radio and MTV. For Jeff, his initial fascination with the genre was further fueled by his participation in both organized and playground basketball—activities and sites noted for representing a convergence of elements related to hip-hop culture, attitude, and ethos (Woodbine 2016). It was in this social context, when a teammate casually introduced a specific track by De La Soul, that Jeff began to think of hip-hop’s use of sampling as a potentially creative act. Jeff noted connections between sampling—or using parts of an existing recording in creating new musical works (Copyright Criminals 2009; Lehmann 2011)—to what he had been learning about postmodern art in his high school art classes. He carried this idea with him into post-secondary education and his future career as an art educator, eventually developing it into a set of instructional strategies, academic presentations, and a published article on using hip-hop as a tool for enhancing critical discussions on postmodern art (Broome 2015a).