Cultural Knowledge Entry Example

Here’s a sample Cultural Knowledge entry (5 points each, no points for incomplete entries):

1. Investigating: East Coast Hip Hop is the nation’s musical conscience (p. 172).
2. My guess: I’m confused. People always seem angry at hip-hop because it seems to have no conscience. I’ve heard a lot of hip-hop that celebrates violence, drug culture, and being rich.
3. Results: East Coast Hip Hop, also known as “Old School” hip hop, was born long before the hip hop that’s popular now. It came from the Bronx, a mostly-black section of New York City, when a group of DJs (including Cool Herc) started mixing music for block parties. This was around 1974, when the Black Power movement was alive and well and improving the lives of black citizens: for the first time ever, residents of the Bronx were well-employed, were being policed fairly, and were making strides toward educational equality. And that momentum kept building—activists were organizing neighborhoods and running for office and getting people involved in justice issues. And they used hip-hop to do it. East Coast hip-hop revolves around themes of social justice and revolution. It’s different from the more popular West Coast hip-hop (also called Gangsta Rap, fathered by IceT), which revolves around themes of violence, drug use, and spending money. But East Coast, according to its fans and historians, represents music’s best hope for speaking out against racism, oppression, and inequality. (Info from a book by Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.)
4. Now I understand why hip-hop could be the music of revolution. I didn’t know that there were two distinct kinds of hip-hop, or that they differ so much. Like most folks, I’d heard mostly West Coast hip-hop . . . but now that I know the difference, I want to seek out more East Coast stuff. And I see how hip-hop could be used to help listeners keep thinking about what’s morally right. This reference relates to the article because the writer is arguing against the idea that protest music ended with the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, the author gives hope that music still has a social conscience.