The Real Hiphop

“Morgan’s ethnographic study balances critical theory, narrative, observation,linguistic analysis, and interviews with founders, participants and audience members. . . . [R]equired reading.” - Justin Williams, Popular Music

“Morgan’s sustained ethnographic documentation of a localized hip hop culture is only one of a handful of such studies based in North America. . . . [H]er focus on the development, analysis, and peer-critique of lyrical skills is unique in the literature in its extensive detail, as are the numerous freestyle raps she transcribed in order to explore these dimensions of hip hop.” - Carrie Allen, Bulletin for the Society of American Music

“The Real Hiphop is a powerful argument for hiphop’s continuing salience and centrality to any serious discussion about the state of contemporary Black life. Marcyliena Morgan unearths the socio-cultural particularities of hiphop as a dynamic musical genre and a complex way of life, and she links her analysis to the ethnographic particulars of Los Angeles, which crackles to life from the opening vignette.” - John L. Jackson Jr., author of Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America

“In The Real Hiphop, Marcyliena Morgan has written a brilliant account of the origins of hiphop and the process through which it is created and evolves, from its most elemental and raw forms into the highly processed and polished versions that have become the lingua franca of popular American culture over the past few decades. Using her considerable skills as an linguistic anthropologist, Morgan—the founder of the world’s only hiphop archive—raises the analysis of hiphop to an entirely new level of scholarship, explicating it as a linguistic, sociological, and political phenomenon. This book is full of astonishing insights and subtle analysis. It is a must read for any student or scholar seeking to understand what is arguably the most important popular cultural phenomenon in the past thirty years.” - Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

“The Real Hiphop is a book written with the eyes of an ethnographer, the ears of a true hip hop head, and the love of a scholar whose commitment to her subject runs broad and deep. By chronicling the history of an unfairly neglected underground music scene and by championing the potentially transformative influence of a popular music genre more broadly upon the academy, it offers a significant contribution to popular music studies.” - Adam Bradley, Journal of Popular Music Studies

“Executive director of The HipHop Archive and one of the leading scholars of hip-hop culture, Morgan has written a thorough, inspiring ethnographic study that looks at West Coast hip-hop culture through the lens of the underground venue known as Project Blowed. . . . The book’s strengths are the numerous fascinating primary sources, especially the excerpts of rhymes recited during battles at Project Blowed and its introductory chapter, in which Morgan offers the best concise scholarly history to date of hip-hop. Essential.” - A.-P. Durand, Choice

“Given the book’s layered treatment of underground hiphop and its practitioners, The Real Hiphop is a strong ethnographic and analytical treatment that is well positioned to be of use to students and scholars across a number of disciplines.” - Raymond Codrington, American Ethnologist

“Marcyliena Morgan’s high-level analysis and incisive explication of how underground hiphop works centers on two brilliant, ethnographic chapters on Project Blowed, one focusing on a Thursday-night MC battle (chapter three) and one on young women’s negotioations of race and feminism in the social world of underground hiphop and in relation to the sexualization of women in commercial hiphop (chapter four).” - Michael Nevin Willard, Southern California Quarterly

“Morgan’s musings on power, language, and mistrust feel no less pertinent now than they must have a dozen years ago in Leimart Park.” - Nate Chinen, Pennsylvania Gazette

“Youth across the globe have been marginalized, abused, neglected, and incarcerated, but Marcyliena Morgan gives hope to current and future generations by providing background on the start of hip-hop and revealing its multifaceted layers. . . . The Real Hiphop is a testament to the versatile creativity of underground artists who use words to make change.” - Nicolette Westfall, Feminist Review blog