Hip-Hop History
by Timothy “Ill Poetic” Gmeiner (built upon curriculum work by Anthony Burr, UC-San Diego), taught at UC-San Diego & San Diego City College
About: This class presents a broadly chronological overview of the development of hip hop from the late 1970s through to the present. We will concentrate largely on the music, paying special attention to how it has been able to both reflect and shape the contexts of its production.
As Hip-hop remains a global cultural force in constant motion, the overarching goal of this course is to allow for an exploration of the intersection between timely, historical and academic subject matter on broader topics of race, gender, ethics, musicality, commerce, and culture.
Therefore, this course will cover core musical sensibilities unique to hip-hop, but also extend to topics such as the African diaspora's role in modern hip-hop production and oration, the ethics of sampling, and hip-hop's historical role as Black America's unfiltered voice in our present day country.
But we're also going to talk about, listen to and deconstruct Kendrick and Odd Future and Dilla and DOOM and Nas and 2Pac and Tribe and NWA and Public Enemy and Style Wars and The Last Poets and rhyme schemes and beat machines and everything we can cram in between. And really it's all connected: it's riveting, it's tragic, it's brilliant, it's frustrating, it's a miracle of existence and black perseverance, it's America's greatest contribution to the modern world.
There will be a lot of listening, alongside readings from the assigned text and other sources that will be available via the course site. Note that you need to be on a UCSD network to access that material. Each week there will be material that is required (i.e. you might be tested on it) alongside material that will allow you to dig into things in more detail and provide more context for your research papers.
Available as an in-person and synchronous/asynchronous virtual course.
Advanced Topics: This course acts as a foundation toward my creative work and research of hip-hop as a multisensory practice. This research extends the premise of hip-hop’s lineage within African diasporic musical tradition and innovative technological collaboration by exploring how hip-hop production and performance can meaningfully evolve into spatialized immersive environments. The research investigates how these disciplines intersect, providing historical context for the technical, cultural, social, multimodal and at times socio-political frameworks of these practices as a means of providing commonalities and disparities within this interdisciplinary collaboration.
By interweaving the technical and cultural histories of hip-hop, its predecessors, sound spatialization and components of audiovisual practice in immersive environments, my research aims to provide a framework for how hip-hop production methods and live performance leverage the affordances of another practice's philosophies, approaches and access to technical resources and spaces, while analyzing the compromises and reimaginations of artistic, sonic, social, technical and cultural aspects historically rooted in hip-hop production and performance aesthetics. This analysis aims to give emerging and existing hip-hop-centered producers and live performers a comprehensive analysis of an underexplored cultural, sonic and artistic intersection, and provide pathways, resources, and approaches toward leveraging these opportunities toward their own artistic interests.
My aim is to translate this research both into a book and into a course that employs technical application of spatial and audiovisual mapping techniques interweaved with theoretical and historical studies of sound, live visuals, hip-hop and it’s immediate sonic predecessors. This research is in-progress, but is available for reading below: