Lyrics

About: Lyrics is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4413 publications have been published within this topic receiving 39968 citations. The topic is also known as: lyric & song lyrics.

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America

Abstract: From its beginnings in hip hop culture, the dense rhythms and aggressive lyrics of rap music have made it a provocative fixture on the American cultural landscape. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Tricia Rose, described by the New York Times as a "hip hop theorist," takes a comprehensive look at the lyrics, music, cultures, themes, and styles of this highly rhythmic, rhymed storytelling and grapples with the most salient issues and debates that surround it. Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, Tricia Rose sorts through rap's multiple voices by exploring its underlying urban cultural politics, particularly the influential New York City rap scene, and discusses rap as a unique musical form in which traditional African-based oral traditions fuse with cutting-edge music technologies. Next she takes up rap's racial politics, its sharp criticisms of the police and the government, and the responses of those institutions. Finally, she explores the complex sexual politics of rap, including questions of misogyny, sexual domination, and female rappers' critiques of men. But these debates do not overshadow rappers' own words and thoughts. Rose also closely examines the lyrics and videos for songs by artists such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Salt N' Pepa, MC Lyte, and L. L. Cool J. and draws on candid interviews with Queen Latifah, music producer Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, dancer Crazy Legs, and others to paint the full range of rap's political and aesthetic spectrum. In the end, Rose observes, rap music remains a vibrant force with its own aesthetic, "a noisy and powerful element of contemporary American popular culture which continues to draw a great deal of attention to itself."

RWC Music Database: Popular, Classical, and Jazz Music Databases

Abstract: paper describes the design policy and specifications of the RWC Music Database , a music database (DB) that is available to researchers for common use and research purposes. Various com- monly available DBs have been built in other research fields and have made a significant contribution to the research in those fields. The field of musical information processing, however, has lacked a commonly available music DB. We therefore built the RWC Mu- sic Database which contains four original DBs: the Popular Music Database (100 pieces), Royalty-Free Music Database(15 pieces), Classical Music Database(50 pieces), and Jazz Music Database (50 pieces). Each consists of originally-recorded music compact discs, standard MIDI files, and text files of lyrics. These DBs are now available in Japan at a cost equal to only duplication, shipping, and handling charges (virtually for free), and we plan to make them available outside Japan. We hope that our DB will encourage further advances in musical information processing research.

Music emotion recognition: A state of the art review

Abstract: This paper surveys the state of the art in automatic emotion recognition in music. Music is oftentimes referred to as a “language of emotion” [1], and it is natural for us to categorize music in terms of its emotional associations. Myriad features, such as harmony, timbre, interpretation, and lyrics affect emotion, and the mood of a piece may also change over its duration. But in developing automated systems to organize music in terms of emotional content, we are faced with a problem that oftentimes lacks a welldefined answer; there may be considerable disagreement regarding the perception and interpretation of the emotions of a song or ambiguity within the piece itself. When compared to other music information retrieval tasks (e.g., genre identification), the identification of musical mood is still in its early stages, though it has received increasing attention in recent years. In this paper we explore a wide range of research in music emotion recognition, particularly focusing on methods that use contextual text information (e.g., websites, tags, and lyrics) and content-based approaches, as well as systems combining multiple feature domains.

Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop

Abstract: At once the most lucrative, popular, and culturally oppositional musical force in the United States, hip hop demands the kind of interpretation Imani Perry provides here: criticism engaged with this vibrant musical form on its own terms. A scholar and a fan, Perry considers the art, politics, and culture of hip hop through an analysis of song lyrics, the words of the prophets of the hood. Recognizing prevailing characterizations of hip hop as a transnational musical form, Perry advances a powerful argument that hip hop is first and foremost black American music. At the same time, she contends that many studies have shortchanged the aesthetic value of rap by attributing its form and content primarily to socioeconomic factors. Her innovative analysis revels in the artistry of hip hop, revealing it as an art of innovation, not deprivation. Perry offers detailed readings of the lyrics of many hip hop artists, including Ice Cube, Public Enemy, De La Soul, krs-One, OutKast, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Tupac Shakur, Lil’ Kim, Biggie Smalls, Nas, Method Man, and Lauryn Hill. She focuses on the cultural foundations of the music and on the form and narrative features of the songs—the call and response, the reliance on the break, the use of metaphor, and the recurring figures of the trickster and the outlaw. Perry also provides complex considerations of hip hop’s association with crime, violence, and misogyny. She shows that while its message may be disconcerting, rap often expresses brilliant insights about existence in a society mired in difficult racial and gender politics. Hip hop, she suggests, airs a much wider, more troubling range of black experience than was projected during the civil rights era. It provides a unique public space where the sacred and the profane impulses within African American culture unite.

Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the"Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture

Abstract: The language of Jamaican popular culture--its folklore, idioms, music, poetry, song--even when written is based on a tradition of sound, an orality that has often been denigrated as not worthy of serious study. In "Noises in the Blood," Carolyn Cooper critically examines the dismissed discourse of Jamaica's vibrant popular culture and reclaims these cultural forms, both oral and textual, from an undeserved neglect.Cooper's exploration of Jamaican popular culture covers a wide range of topics, including Bob Marley's lyrics, the performance poetry of Louise Bennett, Mikey Smith, and Jean Binta Breeze, Michael Thelwell's novelization of "The Harder They Come," the Sistren Theater Collective's "Lionheart Gal," and the vitality of the Jamaican DJ culture. Her analysis of this cultural "noise" conveys the powerful and evocative content of these writers and performers and emphasizes their contribution to an undervalued Caribbean identity. Making the connection between this orality, the feminized Jamaican "mother tongue," and the characterization of this culture as low or coarse or vulgar, she incorporates issues of gender into her postcolonial perspective. Cooper powerfully argues that these contemporary vernacular forms must be recognized as genuine expressions of Jamaican culture and as expressions of resistance to marginalization, racism, and sexism.With its focus on the continuum of oral/textual performance in Jamaican culture, "Noises in the Blood," vividly and stylishly written, offers a distinctive approach to Caribbean cultural studies.