The International Council for Hip Hop Studies
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Updates from the CIPHER
How Music Empowers: Listening to Modern Rap and Metal
How Music Empowers, a new book by CIPHER team member Dr. Steven Gamble, is impactful and important for hip hop audiences, especially people who are into contemporary rap. Artists like Little Simz, Drake, Missy Elliott, Brockhampton, and Chance the Rapper are discussed. Great reading for anyone excited by how the listening process works, and how music affects emotions, alters behaviour, and incites action.
0phelia – ‘The Enlightenment of the Tree’
In this video 0phelia spits an acapella rap verse in her native language Gaelige, demonstrating the hip-hop wisdom that can be found in nature.
Lo-fi hip-hop during COVID-19
There's a two-part blog post now up at our associated project Digital Flows, looking at online hip-hop. In these posts Steve uses a comment scraping method to analyse how lo-fi commentary has changed – and how it hasn't – during the quarantine/lockdown measures...
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Gems from the CIPHER
Alienness (MZK) – The Bronxstyle
Bboy Alienness refocused a generation through this seminal dance text of the 2000s. Inspiring a new old school, Alienness pushed the emphasis from power moves back to movement with feeling and groove: "I can teach a chihuahua to stand on one hand but I can't teach...
Little Simz – ‘Boss’
In 'Boss', Simz describes her rise to the top and asserts herself as a formidable artist in a predominantly male sphere. Inverting the masculinist language of the song title, she issues a warning shot: "I'm a boss in a fucking dress"...
Spekulativ Fiktion – ‘Google’
Spek details the Local Geological Record that tracks the first animal to walk on land (and it's in Ireland, where CIPHER is based!). Dropping some intensely local knowledge, he highlights the importance of heritage: "its feckin’ timeless, like the Tetrapod Footprints...