Structuring a study of hip hop around these two strands offers a framework for thinking through important questions about hip hopвЂ™s intersections between musical style and histories of racism and identity politics in the US. This literature review draws together two strands in hip hop studies: music-theoretical analyses of вЂњflow,вЂќ and cultural studies analyses of identity, reclamation, and individualism. Below, we summarize literature on hip hop in the US in order to aid teachers in thinking through these complexities when designing their undergraduate music courses. It is therefore not sufficient to tack on a lesson about hip hop to canonic courses about Western art music, as doing the artform justice in the classroom would involve analyzing all of these components. (Kajikawa 2019, 161) Moreover hip hop has developed into a visual culture and an artistic school and style, all of which are integral to this genre of music. As Loren Kajikawa has argued, вЂњhip hop producers have their own aesthetic values and ideas about complexityвЂќ independent from those accorded to Western art music. Such maneuvers do not adequately convey the complexities and specificities of the hip hop tradition, nor are they sensitive to the history of hip hop as a tradition developed, performed, and cultivated first by Black artists. It is important to consider issues of tokenism and academic imperialism that can arise when one either appends a lesson on hip hop to the end of a historical survey of Western art music, or when one uses hip hop alongside Western art music as illustrations of a common set of music-theoretical principles. Incorporating the study of hip hop into undergraduate music curricula is fraught because traditional music theory and history sequences are built around the canon of Western art music tradition.

Rap beat structure