ASRC 2370 Planet Rap: Where Hip Hop Came From and Where It's Going

Course description

Since hip hop first emerged in the South Bronx nearly half a century ago, it has grown into a global movement. Youth around the world not only consume hip hop; they also create their own, adapting hip hop music, texts, dance, and visual culture to local realities. This course traces the ongoing connections between hip hop’s roots in the cultural expression of marginalized African American and Latinx youth in the postindustrial urban United States, its contemporary relationship to US popular culture, and its routes around the globe, where diverse practitioners mobilize its beats, rhymes, and visual culture to address experiences of oppression and displacement, celebrate life, and agitate for social justice. (HC)

Forbidden Overlap: due to an overlap in content, students will receive credit for only one course in the following group: AMST 2371, ASRC 2370, MUSIC 2370, MUSIC 3490.

Winter 2025: Online course

Catherine M. Appert

Ethnomusicologist and associate professor of music, Cornell University