USA300H1 Lecture Notes - Freestyle Rap, Project Blowed, Rapping
23 May 2018
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USA300H1 – Rapping Community
• Jooyoung Lee, a scholar of urban ethnography at Yale, U of T
o “tudies suoudig Pojet Bloed, a ope-mic hip hop project in LA
o Esapig Eaasset focuses on an understudied aspect of hip-hop performance
▪ Lee interested in what happens when a performer messes up during a cypher
• Interested in these occurrences as complex social moments; what can
these focuses on error as opposed to mastery, eloquence, tell us?
o Lees iteests i etai aspets of feestle ap
▪ Amidst emphasis on effortless virtuosity, calling attention to the labor of art
• Approaching this by looking at moments when the mechanisms are
revealed, namely when someone makes a mistake and falls off
o Challenge to conventional modes of artistic creation
▪ Rap cyphers a collective artistic product, not the work of a lone auteur
▪ Asking us to consider how music makes and un-makes social groups
• Irving Goffman and Lees soiologial ethodolog
o Lee uses Goffman as a jumping-off point, but says he does not go far enough
▪ Goffman addresses the way people avoid embarrassment, save face in everyday
situations, but not the situations where people deliberately risk embarrassment
• Identification of who he is in debate with and how he is going to build
on it, possibly to what ends; something to look for in academic articles
o Lee interested in contexts where subject themselves to risk, and analyzes techniques
used to avoid embarrassment in these situations
▪ What tehiues do idiiduals use…? uestios hee ad i the astat:
(social) scientific trope of a guiding question
• Lees listig of tehiues: a sigal of soial sietifi ethod
o A cue to ethnographic methodology: an attempt to describe
ho [hat hes studig] is doe
▪ Lees siiles (opaig feestle appes to the stad-up comic, pick-up artist,
and job candidate): why use these examples
• A list of subjects whose work involves public risk
• Imagined audiences which have an evaluative function
o Hip hop artist participating in the rap cypher: in a different
situation than the artist in the studio
• Techniques used to save face in the rap cypher
o The rap cypher: a process of chain improvisation
▪ Success of the cypher determined by continuous and sustaied flo
▪ Fallig off, i.e. essig up a soue of eaasset, of disuptig the flo
• Failing to rhyme, stuttering, saying something that sounds bad, etc.;
esapig eaasset a atte of esapig that oet
o Use of aed esoues: pe-written rhymes used as a defense against the possibility
of fallig off, ut the tehiues hae sutleties to aoid fotig
▪ Positive reception of rappers incorporating the unexpected into their raps (e.g.
the screeching car coming on the scene)
• Assessment based on speed, virtuosity, performance under pressure;
thus ipotat to sell aed esoues as atual ipoisatio
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