Research

Here is my research from other blogs and scholarly articles related to our blog. 

Blogs

http://underworld-rap.blogspot.com/ -- Underworld Rap

Underworld-Rap is the most unique blog I have seen on Blogspot thus far. It focuses strictly on sharing underground and horror-core rap with its readers, which I personally have never seen in a blog. It argues that underground rap is supreme to mainstream, and that talented artists should be heard even when very few people know about them. This is significant to our blog because we can learn what it takes to be unique and different in such a common field of discussion.

http://rapdungeon.blogspot.com/ - -Rap Dungeon

This is another blog that focuses more on underground hip-hop and does so in the standard blogging style similar to our blog. Just like Underworld-Rap’s blog, the author focuses on spreading underground music that he feels should be heard. If I had to pick something that I would take from this blog and add into ours, it would be the author’s dedication to posting so frequently, and his overall knowledge on underground hip-hop.  

http://str8mfhustla.blogspot.com/ -- Str8mfhustla

I chose this blog as an example of what not to do with our blog. Hip-hop already has such a negative connotation to it that it doesn’t need more of this cheap, dirty, “gangster” mentality that people are so quick to push. Just looking at the top of the blog makes me laugh because it honestly looks like one big joke. It focuses on promoting “gangsta rap” as the author calls it, and has been running since 2007 sharing music and ideas with its audience.

Academic Sources from Google Scholar

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/821822?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101254429377 – Promoting academic literacy with urban youth through engaging hip-hop culture

As we can tell by the title, the author tries to persuade the audience that hip-hip and its culture provides a positive result in promoting the literacy of the youth who listen. We constantly hear in mainstream media that hip-hop is a negative influence and they always berate the genre by saying only uneducated lower-income people listen to it, but this article twists that concept around and actually argues that it educates young people in their literacy. I like the change of pace because I am very tired of hearing how bad hip-hop is for young people, so this author did a great job in shedding some light on an unseen area.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2307/3587669/abstract - Becoming Black: Rap and Hip-hop, Race, Gender, and Identity

In this article, the author talks about the impact that hip-hop has in establishing identity in the black culture. He emphasizes the new style of writing that hip-hop created early in its time, and the many linguistic styles that rappers use to get their points across. The main thing I like about this article is that it completely strays away from the actual music, and focuses more on what hip-hop means to culture, and how people find their identities with their own music.  

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/21/1/77.short - The Localization of rap music and hip hop culture

This article analyzes rap music and its culture reworked by young Turkish and Moroccan communities. It talks about the social aspect of hip-hop and how significant the area is where artists compose their songs. I personally have never heard of Turkish or Moroccan communities composing rap music, so it was interesting to see what goes on with hip-hop in other distant parts of the world. The main thing I took away from this is that even though hip-hop originated in America, it has spread so far and has become localized by so many cultures that it sounds different in each and every place of the world.