Social Media Has Made Hip-Hop About Rapping Again – Not Making Songs
Direct-to-fan social platforms allow rappers to communicate their art immediately and directly, no middlemen and no waiting. Here’s how they’re doing it.
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A musician and writer with a B.A. in Music from Duke University, Martin recently received his M.A. in Musicology from Brandeis University. His research is focused on rap’s vocal melodies, and has appeared at the Harvard Hip Hop Music Archive, The University of Cambridge’s Popular Music Journal, and at the University of Colorado’s rap-focused humanities lab. He’s a contributing writer for HipHopDX, Complex, and Pigeons and Planes, and has had multiple articles from his website go viral on BET, The Source, XXL, and MTV. His recent book, The Artistry Of Rap Music (2017 via McFarland Publishing House) is an in-depth music theory analysis of 130 songs by 60 rappers which charts rap’s evolution as a music from 1979 until today. It was a follow-up to his 2014 contribution to the McFarland anthology Eminem & Rap, Poetry, Race, the research for which informs the weekly rap lessons that he teaches rap lessons online through the music school LessonFace.
