The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground

Preface 1 Introduction: "I AM Hiphop"; 2 The Hippest Corner in LA; 3 Welcome to the Underground: Building Hiphop Culture And Language; 4 Thursday Night at Project Blowed; 5 (Ph)eminists of the New School--Real Women, Tough Politics and Female Science; 6 Politics, Discourse and Drama: "Respect Due"; 7 It's Hiphop Nation Time: Enter The KAOS Endnotes; Glossary; Transcription Conventions; References Cited; Index

"The Real Hiphop is a powerful argument for hiphop's continuing salience and centrality to any serious discussion about the state of contemporary Black life. Marcyliena Morgan unearths the socio-cultural particularities of hiphop as a dynamic musical genre and a complex way of life, and she links her analysis to the ethnographic particulars of Los Angeles, which crackles to life from the opening vignette." John L. Jackson Jr., author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America "In The Real Hiphop, Marcyliena Morgan has written a brilliant account of the origins of hiphop and the process through which it is created and evolves, from its most elemental and raw forms into the highly processed and polished versions that have become the lingua franca of popular American culture over the past few decades. Using her considerable skills as a linguistic anthropologist, Morgan--the founder of the world's only hiphop archive--raises the analysis of hiphop to an entirely new level of scholarship, explicating it as a linguistic, sociological, and political phenomenon. This book is full of astonishing insights and subtle analysis. It is a must read for any student or scholar seeking to understand what is arguably the most important popular cultural phenomenon in the past thirty years." Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University