Project Blowed is a legendary hiphop workshop based in Los Angeles. It began in 1994 when a group of youth moved their already renowned open-mic nights from The Good Life, a Crenshaw district health food store, to the KAOS Network, an arts center in Leimert Park. The local freestyle of articulate, rapid-fire, extemporaneous delivery; the juxtaposition of multiple meaningful words and sounds; and the way that MCs follow one another without missing a beat, quickly became known throughout L.A.'s underground. Leimert Park has long been a center of African American culture and arts in Los Angeles; Project Blowed inspired youth throughout the city to consider the neighborhood the epicenter of their own cultural movement. The Real Hiphop is an in-depth account of the language and culture of Project Blowed, based on the seven years Marcyliena Morgan spent observing the workshop and the KAOS Network. Morgan is a leading scholar of hiphop, and throughout the volume her ethnographic analysis of the L.A. underground opens up into a broader examination of the artistic and cultural value of hiphop.
Morgan intersperses her observations with excerpts from interviews and transcripts of freestyle lyrics. Providing a thorough linguistic interpretation of the music, she teases out the cultural antecedents and ideologies embedded in the language, emphases, and wordplay. She discusses the artistic skills and cultural knowledge MCs must acquire to rock the mic, the socialization of hiphop culture's core and long-term members, and the persistent focus on skills, competition, and evaluation. She brings attention to adults who provided material and moral support to sustain underground hiphop, identifies the ways that women choose to participate in Project Blowed, and vividly renders the dynamics of the workshop's famous lyrical battles.
African American language is central to the teaching of linguistics and language in the United States, and this book, in the series Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, is aimed specifically at upper-level undergraduates and graduates. It covers the entire field — grammar, speech, and verbal genres and it also discusses the various historical strands that need to be identified in order to understand the development of African American English. The first section deals with the social and cultural history of the American South, the second with urban and northern black popular culture, and the third with policy issues. Morgan examines the language within the context of the changing and complex African American and general American Speech communities, and their culture, politics, art, and institutions. She also covers the current heated political and educational debates about the status of the African American dialect.
This book explores the manner in which language and language choice reflect and mediate the social landscape of those societies that evolved from European-conceived and controlled plantation labor systems. These plantation systems merged the lives of people of different nations, cultures, and languages so that they could serve as either indentured workers or slaves. For this reason, creole language studies—more than any other area of linguistics — provides invaluable insight into the nature of diaspora, ethnicity, nationalism, identity, and language loyalty.