​The Personal is Political
Hip-Hop and the Politics of Race
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21 Hip Hop Albums Selected by NPR
as Reflecting the Politics of Race 

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The Ascension of Hip-Hop in 2017

Excerpt from NPR's 21 Hip-Hop Albums from 2017
Reflection by Rodney Carmichael
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"But hip-hop did not ascend to new heights in a vacuum. It's sonic uprising happened amid a national backdrop of political upheaval, racial discord, violent demonstrations and revelatory reckoning around the systemic abuses of power and gender inequality that hits so close to home in this genre...In hip-hop, as elsewhere, the personal is always political. Where you're at, so to speak, and how you choose to cultivate and represent that space – whether real or imagined — matters...It's as true today as it was 15 years ago, when academic Murray Forman published his book The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop. "The music I was listening to was always articulating place-based identities — whether it's Hollis, Queens or Brooklyn [or] South Bronx," Forman recently told me, recalling his original inspiration for the book. He chose to look at this "defining aspect of the sound" in a "larger, deeper sense," he says, "not just as a hip-hop thing, but a thing about racial identities and the way places get attributed to certain people in society...In the same spirit, NPR Music's roundup of the year's 21 best hip-hop albums is themed around the politics of race, space and place. Among 2017's best LPs, these are some that challenged or complicated America's record on race, detailed a strong sense of place while critiquing widespread cultural erasure, or broke conventions of genre, gender and identity within the space of rap itself." — Rodney Carmichael

More from Rodney Carmichael

Interview with Rodney Carmichael

NPR offers an article on 21 Hip-Hop Albums Reflecting the Politics of Race in 2017.
Click on button below to read the article, which include short paragraphs on each artist and album,
written by a range of writers.  Rodney Carmichael offers an overview.  Below are songs from the 21 albums.  
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From NPR: 21 Hip-Hop Albums about Race, Space, and Place

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