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Episode Date: July 3, 2025

In this powerful closing chapter of our Hip Hop Studies series, Dr. Reiland Rabaka invites us to step beyond the music and into the deeper meaning of hip hop as a worldwide movement for change.

While most people think of hip hop as just beats and rhymes, Dr. Rabaka challenges us to see it as something much larger: a living, breathing social movement rooted in community, activism, and the ongoing fight for justice. He explores how hip hop emerged from the margins — born in the Bronx, nurtured in neighborhoods often overlooked or deliberately neglected — and transformed into a global force that now shapes culture, politics, and social consciousness around the world.

“Rap music and hip hop culture are merely the tools… if they can be used to degrade and destroy, then they can also be used to elevate and educate.” — Dr. Reiland Rabaka

In this episode, we dig into how artists used — and continue to use — hip hop to fight oppression, tell untold stories, and create space for community healing and imagination. We discuss the movement’s connections to earlier Black freedom struggles, and how it has become an archive of resistance, resilience, and radical possibility.

Whether you’re a lifelong fan of hip hop or just beginning to understand its power, this conversation will expand your view of what music can do — and what it can mean.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube, and more.
Or tune in 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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