ipl-logo

Visual Manifestations Inspired By Hip-Hop, By Krista Thompson

747 Words3 Pages

When people imagine hip hop, they think of DJs, street style, gold chains, and graffiti – images that project a style that matches the loudness of the music. In a well-argued essay, Krista Thompson questions the visual manifestations inspired by hip-hop through an analysis of Kehinde Wiley and Luis Gispert’s work to gain a better understanding of the relationship between light and sound with regard to African American culture and black urban youth. She defines the word “bling,” details the history of hip-hop, and discusses the history of surfacism and materialism to uncover what hip-hop represents, what bling reveals about the ways of seeing, and how visual production propagates Black commodity.
After detailing the emergence of hip-hop, Thompson discusses the connection between materialism and surfacism, and she explains how materialism …show more content…

Thompson argues that bling, unlike normalized, bodiless and simple perspectives, highlights other “bodily forms of perception and the blinding limits of visibility.” Further, she argues that the notion of bling has been used to accentuate the commodity status of blackness both historically and in today’s society, and she draws attention to how the concept of value can be understood through a visual realm. Additionally, Thompson draws attention to the optical effect of being seen, and how visual manifestations of hip hop show how black youth place themselves into structures of visibility to further reflect and on Black subjectivity.
Using the work of Kehinde Wiley and Luis Gispert as her main primary sources, Thompson argues what bling reveals about the ways of seeing and about the construction of a commodity status with regard to the Black body. She notes that Wiley and Gispert take inspiration from traditional Renaissance and Baroque styles and blend these ideas with the focus on light and surface present in hip-hop to bring the Black body to the forefront. Kehinde Wiley’s paintings feature

Show More
Related
188 Words | 1 Pages

In Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision Chapter 4 – “Iam King”: Hip-Hop Culture, Fashion Advertising, and the Black Male Body, Fleetwood examines the rise of the hip-hop fashion and its relationship to the black male body in the 1990’s. Fleetwood views the advertising strategies of Russell Simmons’s Phat Farm brand, and the public presentation of P. Diddy’s Sean John as sites of a “visual resignification” of the symbols, meanings and social conditions of post-industrial black life. For decades, racialized embodiment and self-presentation has operated as material limit and the prospect of black self-definition.

Read More
223 Words | 1 Pages

According to the passage, Hip Hop " is not just for working-class whites, but also affluent, suburban kids who identify with this music with African-American roots. " What once originated as a way to express the pain and deprivation felt

Read More
213 Words | 1 Pages

In this particular article, Ivan Fernandez discusses the unique connection between hip-hop and indigenous people. In the past few years, many more indigenous music artists have begun to voice out their stories of oppression and their traditions that have been suppressed for such a long time through hip-hop. This is because hip-hop is utilized as a medium for indigenous artists to take back their culture and tradition. This is connected to the historical material that we have studied because it pertains to the history and background of hip hop. Hip-hop and its culture originated in the rough neighborhoods in South Bronx.

Read More
643 Words | 3 Pages

Commercial hip hop is too blindsided by making profit to assist in the rallies for Black justice the same way that hip-hop proper is doing. #BLM has liberated rap from its default setting today, and is beginning to break the white stereotype that hip hop is defined as a consumer market where “rhyming negro gentleman callers and ballers sold vernacular song and dance to an adoringly vicarious and increasingly whiter public” (para.6). Tate concludes with stating that #BLM’s “reclamation of hip-hop proper has brought complexity and revolutionary street cred back to the race conversation in commercial rap. The public can no longer be sold the noxious and recherché notion that 21st-century rap culture is only about trap-happy nigras getting paid for getting dumb, or coldstoopidwackretarded, even. Thanks to #BlackLivesMatter, the beautiful struggle against racialized injustice once again matters where rap and hip-hop proper live” (para

Read More
697 Words | 3 Pages

As Can’t Stop Won't Stop continues to progress to the 1970’s, Jeff Chang addresses the developments, changes and increasing influence of hip-hop. Hip-hop’s influence and popularity seemingly spread globally overnight. Hip-hop culture took on new aspects and the motives for expressing the art continued to grow and change for artists. Throughout the chapters, Chang highlights the evolutions of hip-hop, hip-hop’s new audiences and the increase in drugs and violence in hip-hop during a rebellion ear. In the late 1970s, many citizens in the Bronx began to see a dramatic change in hip-

Read More
764 Words | 4 Pages

Julio Gomez Mr.Kingsland ELA 11 Feb/21/2018 Per 6 Essay planet In these essay hip-hop planet, McBride describes how hip-hop influences the culture of the people of the world. In the chapter full circle, McBride argues that hip-hop represents a deeper meaning which also represents everyone in the world the struggle of life. Finally, In the chapter, the crossover McBride argues that the mean of hip-hop has changed through the generation. What I mean by these three central ideas that McBride wrote in his essay is the change, the influence, and finally the meaning of hip-hop.

Read More
160 Words | 1 Pages

The article “Hip Hop Planet” by James McBride is about how hip hop is not his favorite type of music but, it needs to be heard. McBride shows us this by explaining that he avoided hip hop most of his life. In the article McBride says that he basically ignored “the most important cultural event in my lifetime.” James informs us that hip hop has influenced the world globally and that it has become a phenomenon. Furthermore, McBride made clear that he eventually realized that hip hop is much more than just music, it has a message.

Read More
343 Words | 2 Pages

This article focuses on the color-blind ideology that allows white people to participate in and appropriate hip-hop culture. Rodriquez notes that they do so by using the guise of inclusivity of all races to justify their participation in hip hop and to adapt characteristics of the culture without respecting Black identity. He uses his own interviews of several white audience members of hip hop concerts who identified as participants of hip hop culture. Rodriquez identifies two groups resulting from social collectivity to reinforce his argument: consciously collective white groups, who actively reinforce racial segregation and passively collective white groups, who unknowingly unite and reinforce systematic racism through their adherence to color-blind ideology. The participants of his research are part of the latter, who unconsciously reinforce systematic racism through treating cultural objects, namely aspects of hip hop culture, as shareable products and experiences.

Read More
876 Words | 4 Pages

In “Colleges Embrace Hip-Hop Studies”, Darrell Dela Rosa argues that hip-hop should be deemed scholarly due to the cultural and historical significance it holds. On the contrary, “Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop” by Thomas Chatterton Williams comes from the stand point of hip-hop not being worthy of scholar because it is not what defines black culture but has attached itself to black street culture. While each article addresses hip-hop in a different light, both are geared towards how the world views hip-hop. Whereas Dela Rosa remarks that hip-hop is worthy of studying due to its historical value, Williams states that the hip-hop culture is not praiseworthy because of the correlation between it and black street culture. Dela Rosa claims that

Read More
1186 Words | 5 Pages

Hip Hop is seen as something inspiring, but most people see it as a way to speak out the truth about a problem. As in “Hip Hop planet” being able say the truth can sometimes worsen any situation because sometimes what we say can promote violence and whatever happens after is not in our control. The essay is about how hip hop has changed into speaking out the issues that need to be taken care of in order to maintain a proper society. McBride talked about how rappers use violent lyrics to degrade women and gays and because of this it shows how the music has evolved into something entirely different that no one would have ever expected to have changed. In James McBride's essay “Hip Hop Planet,” he argues that hip hop has a negative influence on American Culture despite people thinking of it as inspirational and how people live through different experiences in life despite of your race.

Read More
1882 Words | 8 Pages

Some of the main cores of Beat Street are the music, dancing, and graffiti art works – all of which are part of hip-hop culture. Scholars note that hip-hop as a movement originated in roots from African American traditions and are mainly used to express their culture as well as identity (Blanchard 24). Rap music, for example, comes from West Africa’s “nommo.” This idea refers to the power to deliver words to act upon objects and to bring it to life. The historical and traditional underpinning of rap, therefore, becomes representative of the rich and distinctive culture of African Americans.

Read More
633 Words | 3 Pages

In her essay “hip hop’s betrayal of black women,” Jennifer McLune implies that “(h)ip-hop owes its success to the ideology of women-hating” (193). She does not agree with Kevin Powell’s article that hip-hop does not mean to “offend” black women, but instead artists are only letting out their temper throughout their music. McLune feels infuriated that many artists in hip hop (including black men) rap about their community and downgrade their own women. In the hip-hop genre, sexism is mainly used, not only by black men but also by many other race hip-hop artists. Artists assume that women-hating in their rap songs will be accepted by women, but do not realize that it is affecting all women.

Read More
841 Words | 4 Pages

In essence, ,,the 6 Gallery readings reveal how Beat and associated artists and audiences also tapped into this residual, insubordinate, and positive sense of jazz and expressed it through their art and lives.” (Whaley, 2004, p. 27) ,,The reading of Howl amplified vibrations sounding back to the jazz of renaissance Harlem, an era in which blues and jazz poets found themselves when much of the high culture’s generation.” (Whaley, 2004, p. 24) Besides the jazz and bebop music, the generation of “crazy, no-good kids” (Russel, 2002, p. 16), appeared to be influenced in style and fashion as well. The style was noticed as riotous hipsterism or the anti-patriotist zoot suits.

Read More
946 Words | 4 Pages

Nowadays, everyone wears the identity with pride. The genre was a testament to triumphing over hardships, to having enough confidence in oneself not to let the world drag you down, and to rising above the struggle, even when things seem hopeless. Violence in rap did not begin as an affective agent that threatened to harm America 's youth; rather, it was the outcry of an already-existing problem from youth whose world views have been shaped by the inequalities and prejudice they have experienced. The relentless wave of heroic new rappers arriving on the scene formed the golden age of hip hop in the 1980s, a newfound voice which rose from the impoverished ghettos during the 1980s and inspiring a generation of black youth to fight the police brutality they faced on a daily basis.

Read More
921 Words | 4 Pages

Hip Hop was the wildfire that started in the South Bronx and whose flames leapt up around the world crying out for change. James McBride’s Hip Hop Planet focuses on his personal interactions with the development of Hip Hop culture and his changing interpretations of the world wide movement. Many of his encounters and mentions in the text concern young black males and his writing follows an evolution in the representation of this specific social group. He initially portrays them as arrogant, poor, and uneducated but eventually develops their image to include the positive effects of their culture in an attempt to negate their historical misrepresentation.

Read More

More about Visual Manifestations Inspired By Hip-Hop, By Krista Thompson

Related Topics

Open Document