“'Hip Hop: A Cultural Odyssey' book, Grammy Museum exhibit celebrate the musical movement - Los Angeles Times” plus 1 more

'Hip Hop: A Cultural Odyssey' book, Grammy Museum exhibit celebrate the musical movement - Los Angeles Times

Posted: 08 Feb 2011 12:23 PM PST

Decades before Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Eminem or Lil Wayne made names for themselves in mainstream hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash and Kool Herc introduced the movement to the first adopters, who spread the genre to the masses via not only music, but dancing, art and DJing.

That rich history of hip-hop culture, dating back to the days of b-boys and b-girls breaking on streets, DJs scratching turntables, MCs battling each other on corners and graffiti writers tagging wherever and whenever, is explored in a new coffee-table book and accompanying Grammy Museum exhibit, which opens Tuesday.

"Hip-Hop: A Cultural Odyssey" is a massive, sprawling 420 page opus that includes exclusive photos and interviews with the pioneers, trendsetters and icons of the genre and provides an exhaustive account on the birth, evolution and global ripple effect hip-hop has had over the last four decades.

"There was a realization that there was a huge void in the market for a book like this," said Jordan Sommers, editor of the book and president of ARIA Multimedia Entertainment, the book's publisher. "Coffee table books are usually associated with iconic subjects, culturally significant events or impactful movements, and hip-hop culture is all of the above. I thought the time was right to do a book that has the size, scope, depth, quality and significance as the culture itself."

The book showcases influential rappers -- classified as "game changers" –- such as Jay-Z, Kanye West, Eminem, Run DMC, Queen Latifah, will.i.am, Diddy, 50 Cent and Will Smith, among others, and has curated a list of influential albums and singles that have pushed hip-hop forward. There are dozens of essays written by hip-hop journalists and authors (one of whom is Pop & Hiss writer Jeff Weiss), that cover a breadth of the culture, including MCs, white rappers, indie rap, the growth of regional hip-hop and the marriage of rap with soul music.

Jeff Wald, chief executive officer of ARIA, said he believes hip-hop has been unfairly overlooked for too long -– despite its cultural significance and prominence in today's musical landscape.

"One of the biggest complaints of the community was hip-hop being ignored by the Grammys. The Grammy Foundation has sort of treated it like a stepchild," Wald said. "Some of it was racial, I think. Some of it was the fact that it got off to a bad start with the DeLores Tuckers and people badmouthing it or thinking it was too misogynistic or too gangster."

The exhibit at the Grammy Museum includes memorabilia -- handwritten Tupac Shakur lyrics, LL Cool J's Kangol hat and Grandmaster Flash's turntables -- as well as photos and essays and opens Tuesday, where it will remain on view through May 4.

-- Gerrick Kennedy

Image: ARIA Entertainment

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Counting may be cultural, not innate - USA Today

Posted: 08 Feb 2011 10:21 AM PST

Counting may be cultural, not innate

Counting to ten may seem like child's play, but perhaps it's not as innate as we might think. A cross-cultural study of deaf Nicaraguans who communicate with home-made sign language finds that they aren't able to consistently communicate about groups of objects over three.

That's a common trait in many hunter-gatherer societies, where the numbering system is often one-two-three-many. For example, the Munduruku Amazonian people in rural Brazil don't have any words for exact numbers larger than five. Their neighbors, the Piraha, no exact number words at all.

The researchers, from the University of Chicago and Harvard University, wanted to make sure that they weren't merely dealing with a cultural issue, because many hunter-gatherer societies don't have "culturally supported contexts in which exact numbers much be encoded," as the paper says -- in other words, they simply don't ever see the need to count that high.

Their research is published in this week's edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

So the researchers looked at a group of deaf Nicaraguans who don't speak Spanish and who never got the opportunity to learn conventional sign language.* These are a very interesting group, because they live in a numerate culture that uses exact counting and large numbers, but because they were never educated in it, they lacked conventional language for numbers.

The researchers found that these individuals did not spontaneously develop representations of numbers over three. They used gestures to communicate about numbers but "do not consistently produce gestures that accurately represent the cardinal values of sets containing more than three items."

To make sure that deafness itself wasn't somehow a part of this, the researchers also tested native speakers of American Sign Language. These individuals, raised and immersed in a language that uses counting, were just as good as speakers of Spanish and English at counting.

The research could mean that something anyone who's ever watched Sesame Street might think is as basic as it gets - counting to five - may in fact be a product of living in a numerate culture and not innate to humans at all.

* The Nicaraguan deaf community is one of the most fascinating linguistic stories in the world. Due to the lack of infrastructure and support for deaf people there, there was no Nicaraguan sign language until the 1980s. Deaf people typically lived at home and used a simplistic gesture based 'home sign' system to communication with their families. But beginning in 1977 the first center for special deaf education was created in Managua, bringing together about 100 deaf children.

Unfortunately for them, the teachers tried to teach them Spanish through lip reading instead of using established Spanish sign language, so the children didn't actually learn to communicate with adults. But in an amazing example of the how primed the human brain is for language, once that many deaf people came together, they began to create their own language to communicate.

The older children first began to naturally use a pidgin, a simplified gesture based system of communication that didn't have all the features of a fully-formed language.

But in an act of creation that still sets linguists' hearts racing, when researchers started paying attention to the younger children at the school, they realized they were witnessing the birth of a new language right before their eyes. The little kids were taking the older ones' pidgin and turning it into a creole - a fully-realized language with its own grammar and vocabulary.

This language, the first whose creation was directly observed by researchers, is now called Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua, or Nicaraguan Sign Language.

Cultural

Tuesday, February 8, 2011