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Episode Date: June 19, 2025

“These artists weren’t just entertainers—they were educators, cultural critics, and community historians.”
— Dr. Reiland Rabaka

In Part 2 of our Hip Hop Studies series, Dr. Reiland Rabaka explores the evolution and impact of political and gangsta rap—two vital branches of hip hop that challenged systems, spotlighted injustice, and reshaped public dialogue around race, poverty, policing, and power.

This episode takes listeners through the lineage of resistance: from the firebrand urgency of Public Enemy, the revolutionary clarity of Queen Latifah, and the hard-hitting realism of N.W.A., to the complex genius of Ice Cube, Lauryn Hill, and many others. Dr. Rabaka draws deep historical connections—linking the lyrical activism of these artists to the long tradition of Black cultural expression as political protest.

Whether confronting police brutality, amplifying community struggles, or pushing back on respectability politics, these artists made space for Black truth on a global stage—often at great personal cost.

Episode 12 is a tribute to the fearless voices of hip hop who spoke not just to us, but for us.
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📻 Airs every other Thursday at 7 a.m. on Radio 1190 KVCU (92.9 FM / 1190 AM)
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Related Reading from Dr. Rabaka

The Hip Hop Movement: From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation (2013)

The Hip Hop Movement offers a critical theory and alternative history of rap music and hip hop culture by examining their roots in the popular musics and popular cultures of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Connecting classic rhythm & blues and rock & roll to the Civil Rights Movement, and classic soul and funk to the Black Power Movement, The Hip Hop Movement explores what each of these musics and movements contributed to rap, neo-soul, hip hop culture, and the broader Hip Hop Movement.

Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement (2012)

What did rap music and hip hop culture inherit from the spirituals, classic blues, ragtime, classic jazz, and bebop? What did rap music and hip hop culture inherit from the Black Women’s Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Hipster Movement, and Black Muslim Movement? How did black popular music and black popular culture between 1900 and the 1950s influence white youth culture, especially the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation, in ways that mirror rap music and hip hop culture’s influence on contemporary white youth music, culture, and politics?

Hip Hop's Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement (2011)

Hip Hop's Inheritance arguably offers the first book-length treatment of what hip hop culture has, literally, "inherited" from the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Feminist Art movement, and 1980s and 1990s postmodern aesthetics. By comparing and contrasting the major motifs of the aforementioned cultural aesthetic traditions with those of hip hop culture, all the while critically exploring the origins and evolution of black popular culture from antebellum America through to "Obama's America," Hip Hop's Inheritance demonstrates that the hip hop generation is not the first generation of young black (and white) folk preoccupied with spirituality and sexuality, race and religion, entertainment and athletics, or ghetto culture and bourgeois culture.

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