(Salle F101)

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  Streeck, Jürgen
  Oshima, Sae

The University of Texas, Austin

Hip-Hop Gestures : The Conduct of the M.C.

This paper describes some of the shared and differentiating features of a new gestural practice that has evolved as part of hip-hop culture : the one-handed, repetitive, often angular gestures by which m.c.’s (rappers) “conduct” their verbal delivery. We analyze the gestural patterns of a number of freestyling m.c.’s : their role as visual and kinesthetic representations of prosodic and syntactic formats in terms of which verses are composed in the process of improvisation, as well as their participation in the “entrainment” of rhythmic delivery. Hip-hop gesticulation is often modeled after hip-hop-typical instrumental practices, notably the motion-pattern of spinning records. Hip-hop specifi c motion patterns are also found in the conversational gestures of many young Americans. The data for this study are video-recordings of “open mic” freestyling events and amateur hip-hop battles at the University of Texas at Austin. We show samples of individual performances and of turntransitions between successive soloists. We furthermore discuss ways in which gestures individualize m.c.’s ; and conclude by comparing hip-hop gesture to accounts by classicists of the performance practices of the Homeric poets in ancient Greece- practices called mousiké by their practitioners-and discuss their function in scaffolding memory and lexical searches.