IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ijurrs/v38y2014i2p677-685.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Hip-Hop as Urban and Regional Research: Encountering an Insider's Ethnography of City Life

Author

Listed:
  • David Beer

Abstract

type="main" xml:lang="en"> This essay suggests that hip-hop music may reasonably be thought of as a form of urban and regional research. The essay draws upon a recently published book by hip-hop artist Jay-Z, which provides biographical information alongside translations of the lyrical content of his works, to show that hip-hop is full of insider ethnographic insights into urban life. This, it is argued, can be thought of as an answer to Daryl Martin's call for a more ‘poetic urbanism’, an urbanism that captures the material, sensory and emotional aspects of the city. The essay uses Jay-Z's text to illustrate the type of insights and ideas that we might obtain from hip-hop, giving some specific examples of these insights and concluding with some reflections upon this alternative insider account of city life — and how it might provide us with opportunities for expanding our repertoire.

Suggested Citation

  • David Beer, 2014. "Hip-Hop as Urban and Regional Research: Encountering an Insider's Ethnography of City Life," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 677-685, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:38:y:2014:i:2:p:677-685
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01151.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Lewis & Dennis Rodgers & Michael Woolcock, 2008. "The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(2), pages 198-216.
    2. Simon Parker, 2010. "Introduction: welcome to the urban desert of the real, Part II," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(6), pages 706-708, December.
    3. Simon Parker, 2010. "Introduction: Welcome to the urban desert of the real," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(5), pages 491-496, October.
    4. Bülent Diken, 2005. "City of God," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(3), pages 307-320, December.
    5. Rowland Atkinson & David Beer, 2010. "The ivorine tower in the city: Engaging urban studies after The Wire," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(5), pages 529-544, October.
    6. Daryl Martin, 2010. "A poetic urbanism: Recreating places, remade to measure, but from the inside out," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(5), pages 586-591, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rivke Jaffe, 2014. "Hip-hop and Urban Studies," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 695-699, March.
    2. Stefano Bloch, 2016. "Why do Graffiti Writers Write on Murals? The Birth, Life, and Slow Death of Freeway Murals in Los Angeles," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(2), pages 451-471, March.
    3. Simon Black, 2014. "‘Street Music’, Urban Ethnography and Ghettoized Communities," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 700-705, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Deval Desai & Mareike Schomerus, 2018. "‘There Was A Third Man…’: Tales from a Global Policy Consultation on Indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 49(1), pages 89-115, January.
    2. Alfred Ndi, 2011. "Why Liberal Capitalism Has Failed to Stimulate a Democratic Culture in Africa," Journal of Developing Societies, , vol. 27(2), pages 177-200, June.
    3. Rodgers, Dennis, 2010. "Urban Violence Is not (Necessarily) a Way of Life," WIDER Working Paper Series 020, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    4. David Lewis & Dennis Rodgers & Michael Woolcock, 2013. "The Projection of Development: Cinematic Representation as A(nother) Source of Authoritative Knowledge?," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(3), pages 383-397, March.
    5. Lucy Hewitt & Stephen Graham, 2015. "Vertical cities: Representations of urban verticality in 20th-century science fiction literature," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(5), pages 923-937, April.
    6. Amrita Chhachhi & Alaka M. Basu, 2014. "Demography for the Public: Literary Representations of Population Research and Policy," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 45(5), pages 813-837, September.
    7. Daryl Martin, 2014. "Introduction: Towards a Political Understanding of New Ruins," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(3), pages 1037-1046, May.
    8. David Lempert, 2014. "Popular Fiction and Development Studies," Journal of Developing Societies, , vol. 30(4), pages 389-414, December.
    9. Polly Stupples, 2014. "Creative contributions: The role of the arts and the cultural sector in development," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 14(2), pages 115-130, April.
    10. Martine Buser & Christian Koch, 2014. "Tales of the Suburbs?—The Social Sustainability Agenda in Sweden through Literary Accounts," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 6(2), pages 1-22, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:38:y:2014:i:2:p:677-685. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0309-1317 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.