Defining Hip-Hop Aesthetics

Scholars have long relied on musical styles to describe, define, and symbolize African American cultural production. Gospel, blues, jazz, soul, and now hip-hop have come to represent how both dominant culture and academics view and analyze African American life. The primacy of music within African American cultural criticism can be traced back at least to Frederick Douglass’s discussion of sorrow songs, developed by W. E. B. Du Bois inThe Souls of Black Folk. In the late 1960s, Leroi Jones, now Amiri Baraka, characterized African Americans as a “Blues People.”¹ Novels such asThe Color Purple(1982) andCorregidora(1975)