This piece originally aired on August 17, 2015. A common critique of hip hop music is to point out the violence and vulgarity in the lyrics as a sign of its lack of quality. I’ve always found this puzzling. Americans are connoisseurs of violence. We are taste makers in this aesthetic, and we know what and where we like each particular violence.

There’s a scene in the 1997 documentary ‘Rhyme and Reason’ where the emcee Taz demonstrates how to hand someone a hat. It isn’t enough to merely give someone a hat, he explains, you have to hand it to them in a hip hop way. As he performs the difference, you can see he knows this is over the top, but you can also see there’s a part of this that’s true: there is a hip hop way to hand someone a hat, and it’s a little funkier than any other way. I think about this scene nearly every time I put on a

The term ‘underground’ gets tossed around a lot in hip hop--usually, it seems, in an attempt to signal the superior taste of the person bringing it up. Ostensibly, an underground artist is obscure but deliberately so; slept on by mainstream audiences, and tapped into some kind of arcane but universal truth; the avant-garde. As a genre, the classification is practically useless, and to be honest, I’m not sure how to classify most hip hop except to point out where it comes from, and when it was

In 1970, the poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron released "Whitey On the Moon," a scathing critique of the space race. In the poem, he describes the conditions of earthly poverty, but always invoking the gaze of the white astronaut.

The pianist and composer Thelonious Monk is instantly recognizable from tunes like ‘Straight No Chaser’ and ‘Round Midnight’. But one of his most heard recordings isn’t one of his own tunes, and it isn’t even the whole song.

Warning: Some of the lyrics featured in this New American Songbook podcast contain explicit language. In 2004, the producer Danger Mouse released ‘The Grey Album’, an amalgamation of the vocal tracks from Jay-Z’s ‘Black Album’ and the Beatles’ self-titled LP, or what most folks call ‘The White Album’. For people familiar with both albums and artists, it was more than just a remix, it was a statement, and on top of that, it sounded great.

There’s a scene in the third Mad Max movie, ‘Beyond Thunderdome’, where Max, recently banished from Bartertown, wakes up surrounded by children convinced he’s their messiah, Captain Walker. As they relay their mythology, they make use of familiar objects, or rather they make mis-use of objects: records become prayer-wheels, picture frames now move across rock paintings to keep place in the story. All of their stuff is pre-apocalyptic, including the functions of it. Now, after the apocalypse, the

In the late 80’s, jazz musician James Mtume was asked his views on sampling in hip hop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he felt that sampled musicians should be paid for the use of their songs—actually, he went farther, deriding hip hop as ‘Memorex music’, and its creators as ‘the glorification of mediocrity’. To be fair to Mtume, he’s a musician and not a critic, and he spoke honestly, although maybe unskillfully, from that perspective. There are interesting critical arguments to be had around sampling

When you take away the words from a hip hop song, strange things can happen.

Hip hop is getting old, which no one in the early days really expected it to do. Sure, there was always the expectation that hip hop would be around in an archive—you could look back on it fondly, pull a dusty cassette out and take it for a spin—but I’m being more literal here: hip hop is actually getting old. Its practitioners are aging—some currently recording are closing in on 50 years old. Chuck D from Public Enemy is 56. What has been a music primarily focused on the concerns of the young