Rose — Black Noise

Author: Tricia Rose
Title: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
Year: 1994
Type: Academic book (Wesleyan University Press)

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is a book by the scholar Tricia Rose, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1994. It treats rap as Black expression that speaks from the urban margins, and it argues that the continuities between breaking, graffiti and rap “seem to center around three concepts: flow, layering, and ruptures in line.” Rap, built from machines as well as Black music and speech, is in her reading “an architectural blueprint for the redirection of seemingly intractable social ideas, technologies, and ways of organizing sounds” in the service of Afro-diasporic history. Its evidence is readings of lyrics and videos by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt-N-Pepa, MC Lyte and LL Cool J, and interviews with Queen Latifah, the producer Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, the dancer Crazy Legs and others. Its chapters move from the postindustrial New York in which hip hop began through technology and orality to rap’s racial politics and the sexual politics of women rappers. Rose completed her doctorate at Brown University in 1993, and Brown describes her as the first to write a dissertation on hip hop. Most reviewers praised it, and Robin D. G. Kelley, in praise quoted on Rose’s site, called it “by far the finest thing ever written on hip hop and rap music.” Publishers Weekly found its analyses often fascinating but at times obscurantist. It won an American Book Award in 1995.

Wesleyan University Press published the book on April 29, 1994, in 257 pages.¹ Rose earned her doctorate in American civilization at Brown University in 1993, and Brown wrote in 2019 that she was “the first in history to dedicate a dissertation” to hip hop.^{2, 3} Rose writes that “rap music is a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America.” She describes it as “a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music” that “began in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx.”⁴

The book’s five chapters move from rap as Black cultural production and the postindustrial New York in which it began, through technology and orality and the politics of Black cultural expression, to “Bad Sistas: Black Women Rappers and Sexual Politics in Rap Music.”⁴ Rose writes that the continuities between breaking, graffiti, rapping and musical construction “seem to center around three concepts: flow, layering, and ruptures in line,” in which lines of motion break off sharply yet keep their energy through flow.⁴ The hybrids of Black music, Black oral forms and technology at the core of rap’s power, she writes, “are an architectural blueprint for the redirection of seemingly intractable social ideas, technologies, and ways of organizing sounds along a course that affirms the histories and communal narratives of Afro-diasporic people.”⁴

Wesleyan’s description names the artists whose songs and videos the book reads and the people Rose interviewed, and says the book covers rap’s quarrels with the police and the government and their answers, the meeting of African-based oral traditions with new machines, and women rappers’ replies to men.¹ Before the book appeared, Rose published an essay on women rappers, “Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile,” in Camera Obscura no. 23 in 1991, and it was reprinted in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader in 2004.⁵

Most reviewers praised the book, and Publishers Weekly faulted its style. Timothy D. Taylor, in TDR, called it “the single best volume on rap music and culture,” and Venise Berry, in American Music, wrote that it analyzes rap in its cultural context “with clarity and passion.”³ Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., in Notes, called it “an engaging and provocative attempt” to explain the noise that is rap and the noise around it.³ Publishers Weekly found its analyses “often fascinating” but wrote that Rose “becomes unnecessarily obscurantist, forgetting to let the music speak for itself.”⁶ Rose’s site lists the book’s American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995 and its selection among the “Top Books of the 20th Century” by Black Issues in Higher Education. It quotes Kelley calling the book “by far the finest thing ever written on hip hop and rap music.”⁷ Rose returned to the subject in The Hip Hop Wars (2008).⁸

Key contributions

• Rap defined as “a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America.”
• Flow, layering and rupture as the three concepts around which, in Rose’s phrase, the continuities between breaking, graffiti and rap “seem to center.”
• Rap read as “an architectural blueprint for the redirection of seemingly intractable social ideas, technologies, and ways of organizing sounds.”
• A chapter on the sexual politics of Black women rappers.

See also

• Funk — Rickey Vincent’s 1996 history of funk
• Can’t Stop Won’t Stop — Jeff Chang’s 2005 history of the hip-hop generation
• The Big Payback — Dan Charnas’s 2010 history of the hip-hop business
• Sampling — the technique at the center of the book’s chapter on technology