num_pages: 280
description: Rhymin and Stealin begins with a crucial premise: the fundamental element of hip-hop culture and aesthetics is the overt use of preexisting material to new ends. Whether it is taking an old dance move for a breakdancing battle using spray paint to create street art quoting from a famous speech or sampling a rapper or 1970s funk song hip-hop aesthetics involve borrowing from the past. By appropriating and reappropriating these elements they become transformed into something new something different something hip-hop. Rhymin and Stealin is the first book-length study of musical borrowing in hip-hop music which not only includes digital sampling but also demonstrates a wider web of references and quotations within the hip-hop world. Examples from Nas Jay-Z A Tribe Called Quest Eminem and many others show that the transformation of preexisting material is the fundamental element of hip-hop aesthetics. Although all music genres use and adapt preexisting material in different ways hip-hop music celebrates and flaunts its open source culture through highly varied means. It is this interest in the web of references borrowed material and digitally sampled sounds that forms the basis of this booksampling and other types of borrowing becomes a framework with which to analyze hip-hop music and wider cultural trends.
language: English
title: Rhymin' and Stealin': Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop
publisher: University of Michigan Press