Black Noise
Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
With Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Tricia Rose offered the most original and influential analysis of hip hop culture, music, lyrics, and creative pioneers. Contextualizing hip hop within the contested social and economic realities of 1970s and ‘80s urban life in the Bronx, Tricia revealed the stunning resilience, ingenuity, and imagination of Black youth culture operating under conditions of systemic neglect and disenfranchisement.
Winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1995).
Selected for ‘Top Books of the 20th Century” by Black Issues in Higher Education.
Black Noise examines rap’s multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene; rap’s sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions; and finally the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of sexual domination and female rappers’ critiques of men. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N’ Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, producer Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap’s political and aesthetic spectrum. Wesleyan University Press, 1994
Description modified from publisher press kit.
Praise for Black Noise
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"Black Noise is a treasure trove of information on the early days of hip-hop in the South Bronx. Rap fans will marvel at the illustrations of 1979-vintage handbills for Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation."
Rolling Stone
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"Exactly the kind of down-and-dirty research linking life and art that most pop culture study lacks . . . Too few journalists (never mind professors) have examined such issues as the impact of insurance costs at arena on the progress of hip hop performance. Rose's greatest strength is something that's still shockingly rare among academics: a firm grounding in reality."
Vibe
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“Black Noise is by far the finest thing ever written on hip hop and rap music...Rose locates the origins of the music and message(s) in the lived experience of African-American youth.”
Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
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"Necessary reading for pundits, professors, and politicians, but most of all, for those who love hip-hop's rhymes and reasons."
Michael Dyson, Village Voice Rock 'n' Roll Quarterly
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"Rose presents in Black Noise a fiercely intelligent analysis of the most misunderstood and misrepresented cultural and artistic practice in America today . . . It has something to teach all students of popular culture; for readers fascinated or confounded by rap, Rose's arguments are persuasive and eloquent.”
San Francisco Review of Books