Date of Award

Spring 2020

Document Type

Thesis

Terms of Use

© 2020 Brandon N. Ekweonu. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Black Studies Program, Computer Science Department

First Advisor

Anthony S. Foy

Abstract

Perhaps one of my earliest and most interesting Hip Hop experiences occurred early on in my childhood. I remember being in my mother’s bedroom, and I think the lights were off. And I was using my mother’s Sharp CD-C600 Mini Component System with the 3-CD Drawer Changer to play a CD copy of 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album that she had purchased for me. I remember being really excited to be playing my favorite song on the album, “In Da Club” (I used to pretend it was my birthday and that 50 Cent was rapping for me, and, as a child, I didn’t really grasp what he was talking about in the lyrics). The thing that makes this particular experience significant to me, though, was that I remember that the CD must have had a scratch on it because it would skip and start again right from the line in the chorus when 50 says “So come give me a hug”. I don’t remember whether or not I was disappointed to learn that my CD was scratched. What I do remember, however, is that I eventually got used to the song being played with that skip in it. I got so used to it that, even today, I can find myself rapping the chorus along with the song and reciting the lyrics as if the song should be skipping and playing out of order. That skip—that moment of discontinuity—in the song is kind of what makes it special for me and connects me back to that moment in my mother’s bedroom so many years ago. It is not an experience that is easy to describe in words, but the bottom line is that it actually felt right that the song didn’t play straight through without skipping. Something was added to the listening experience.

Keywords

Hip Hop Culture, African American Cultural Expression, Music Sampling, Music Production

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