| Popis: |
Hip-hop histories rarely give concert performances or tours more than passing attention. More so than other twentieth-century genres, hip-hop has been considered a medium in which the record is the thing above all. This chapter seeks to tell the history of hip-hop as a live medium, guided by the understanding that the genre has much to say about the larger state of American live music in the last decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first. In strictly commercial terms, the success of hip-hop on the record charts has never fully been matched by its success as a concert medium. The very difficulties that hip-hop faced in becoming established as a broad-based concert medium reveal the degree to which the upper ranks of the live music industry remained uniquely exclusionary regarding black music artists. Despite the anxieties that surrounded live hip-hop in large venues, something like “arena rap” did become an established reality by the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, starting in the early 1990s with the Lollapalooza tours, hip-hop figured significantly in the rejuvenation of the American music festival that gained further momentum with the founding of the Coachella and Bonnaroo festivals in 1999 and 2002, respectively. If anything, the festival scene even more than the arena concert realm exemplified the paradoxes of live hip-hop into the twenty-first century: at once central and peripheral, the presence of hip-hop was considered integral to the staging of a successful event but dedicated hip-hop festivals could hardly be found. |
