By Nathaniel Allison
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
“What makes poetry unique is that it exists in and through words; language is its medium, as movement is that of dance, sound that of music, and line and colour that of painting. Language is the pigment of the poetic image.” Marshall McLuhan and Schoeck ‘Voices of Literature’ 1964
The Electric Age has birthed a renaissance of the ancient oral storytelling tradition, and through digital connectivity, the influences of the modern bard are now heard across the globe. Hip-Hop is the latest evolution in a centuries-old Black expressive continuum that traces directly back to the West African bardic tradition. This is rooted in Ancient and African oral practices, where performers preserved cultural memory, praised or satirized leaders, enforced social norms, and built communal identity through verse. It was through formulaic structures of memory and rhythmic performance, that were geared for audience engagement, that the poet became the tribal memory-keeper. Hip-Hop was retrieving the ancient bardic power to elevate, destroy, and bind communities.
The Wu-Tang Clan are exemplars of this tradition. Their cosmology functioned as a modern tribal encyclopedia; archiving urban Black experience, preserving and transmitting cultural knowledge, resistance, and identity. Their gritty, mythologized storytelling revives the bard and griot, as historian, satirist, praiser, and myth-maker of the community. Just as the original bards sang about the deeds of the great to preserve their tribe’s legacy, the Wu-Tang Clan constructed their own vast, self-contained mythology.
Wu-Tang Clan’s broad appeal stems from their masterful balance of fiction and reality, delivered with sharp wit and charisma. This created a multifaceted aura that resonated differently across the globe.
FROM THE PROJECTS TO WU-DANG
“The Wu is the way. The Tang is the slang. The Clan represents the family.”
– GZA
The Wu-Tang Clan hail from Shaolin; an imaginary place where the grim realities of Staten Island were re-mythologized. By harnessing a plethora of sonic references, and creating their own slang, it was transformed into Shaolin; a realm of sword wielding assassins and street sages. A mystical place where urban drug dealing and gang life was elevated into an epic Mafioso-style saga.
They were a collective of nine distinct voices that merged into a single holy mountain; nine blades forged into one sword. At this point in the game, they’ve effectively become one of the elder statesmen and lore-keepers of hip-hop history. They specialized in dirty realism type of storytelling, utilizing it as a mechanism to expose and critique the systemic failures of America, it functioned as a cultural critique and historical record of the urban Black experience. Their lyrics de-mythologized the old American pastoral ideals by detailing the grit of project life. A place where America was historically represented as an unspoiled, bountiful garden of inherent abundance, and fresh place of new beginnings.
The name “Wu-Tang Clan” operated as a rich mosaic of cultural, historical, philosophical, spiritual, and street references. It exemplifies the group’s syncretic approach; blending Eastern martial arts traditions, African American vernacular, Five Percenter theology, and hip-hop creativity into a unified field of mythic identity. The group’s namesake comes from the 1983 Hong Kong film, Shaolin and Wu Tang. The Clan drew heavily from the Supreme Mathematics and Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Gods and Earths; an acronym of the group’s name being “Wisdom of the Universe, and the Truth of Allah for the Nation of the Gods.” Two acronyms the group created later, “We Usually Take All Niggas Garments” and “Witty Unpredictable Talent And Natural Game.”
WEAPONIZING THE WORD
“The game of chess is like a sword fight… you must think first, before you move.”
– Shaolin and Wu Tang
In the Wu-Universe, words don’t just function as entertainment, they’re also weapons. Lyricism became a martial art. They were interested in strategic intelligence instead of blind aggression. Each member of Wu Tang embodies a distinct archetype that contributes to the collective Sword Style. The martial arts inspired imagery frames lyrics as weapons where the listeners didn’t just hear sounds, they felt the blades. The self-described lyrical Sword Style is a direct modern equivalent to the bardic curse adapted to the realities of late 20th-century urban America.
It mirrors the bardic use of satire and praise. The ancient Irish bards who were feared for their ability to elevate or destroy a person’s reputation, and even their physical well-being, through verse.
The Wu-Tang Clan specialize in two potent techniques the bards used to wield enormous power: the poisonous satire (Glám Dícenn) and honeyed praise (Molad.) Bards would use destructive curses that could ruin reputations, invoke misfortune, or even cause physical harm. Bards were feared because their words had real social and spiritual consequences. They would also use elevated praise to immortalize heroes, grant status, and reinforce social order.
The Wu Tang harnessed this energy by verbally destroying their opponents and fake rappers, while also exposing systemic failures like poverty, police brutality, crack-era devastation, and American hypocrisy. They would elevate their community as well. It was through mythic storytelling, members would transform themselves from Staten Island project kids into gods, warriors, and legends. Their praise extended to their audience, offering dignity, identity, and resistance models. This mirrors the West African griot tradition as well; the verbal warrior who uses wordplay to praise kings, records history, and sharply critiques social power when necessary.
They used a kind of dirty storytelling to document the pain, creativity, and resilience of marginalized Black life. Their lyrics serve as a living historical record of 1990s Shaolin. They established a moral and philosophical code of loyalty, awareness or power (Cash Rules Everything Around Me), spiritual awakening, and brotherhood. Diss tracks and battles functioned as a form of ritualized combat that distinguished boundaries within hip-hop culture.
Wu-Universe as Living Archive
“We told you Wu-Tang was forever, and some people forgot that. It’s not some fad.”
– RZA
Just as bards sang the deeds of the great to preserve a tribe’s legacy, the Wu-Tang Clan constructed a vast, self-contained mythology. By adopting elaborate alter egos and titles, like “The Chef,” “The Genius,” or “Johnny Blaze”, members elevated their social status from marginalized urban youth to legendary figures in a global Wu-universe. From their W logo to their slang acted as a modern tribal archive that followers wear and speak as a badge of resistance and identity. Listeners participate communally, recognizing and internalizing the Wu-universe.
The Wu used elaborate personas and alter-egos that functioned as living archetypes, each member embodying a specific role that contributed to the collective lore. Forming a whole, cohesive package, that Method Man referred to as Voltron. GZA, the Genius was the ‘backbone of the whole shit,” and RZA was, “the sharpest motherfucker in the wold clan, always on point, razor sharp;” and Raekwon the Chef always be, “cookin’ up some marvelous shit to get your mouth waterin’,” followed by Inspectah Deck whose, “that dude that’ll sit back and watch you play yourself,” and you can’t forget Ol’ Dirty Bastard because “there ain’t no father to his style,” and Method Man who got “mad different methods to the way he does his shit,” and the ultimate storyteller Ghostface Killah – the invincible Tony Stark, the unsung U-God – the Universal; and lastly the master ninja assassin Masta Killa .
The Wu-Universe wasn’t just a musical catalog or a brand, it was a living archive. The group leveraged this power into a cultural empire. They built a self-sustaining mythology that evolved through new albums, solo projects, films, fashion, business ventures, video games, fan participation, and the ever-expanding collective of Killa Beez. To this day it remains active in the minds and bodies of its global followers.
Their groundbreaking business model, allowing solo deals with different labels, became legendary. In 1997, The Source magazine famously ran a cover featuring only the iconic curved “W” logo. That same “W” became a global ritual: worn on clothing, flashed as a hand gesture at shows, and raised whenever Wu-Tang tracks played.
Ultimately, Wu-Tang’s music thrives on magical avatars, potent symbols, and rituals that generate aura. The W logo, hand signs, specific slang, and coded references operate as tribal markers. Fans wearing Wu Wear and quoting lyrics are not simply consumers, they are active participants in this living archive; a practice that mirrors how ancient tribes wore symbols and recited verses to reaffirm identity and continuity. It was a communal experience where the audience embodied the mythology rather than just observed it. The Wu-Tang is forever because it was built as a living system, not a product. The Wu-Universe continues to grow, adapt, and initiate new members into its cosmology more than thirty years after its inception. They created a self-perpetuating archive that turns listeners into carriers of the tradition.
DUSTY LOOPS AND ANCESTRAL VOICES
“If you keep eating McDonald’s, you’re gonna get sick. You need a real home-cooked meal. And I knew that that would be healthier. And that’s what Wu-Tang was: It was a home-cooked meal of hip-hop. Of the real people.”
– RZA
RZA’s production was designed as a kind of sonic alchemy that retrieved the past and transmuted it into something new. The chopped samples function as interconnected and meta-textual placeholders that allowed him to speak without saying a word. By sampling specific dialogue or musical phrases, he reinterprets the original message to fit a new context. By sampling older music from the 1960s and 70s soul, like the Charmels “As Long As I Got You,” he retrieves the auditory feeling of an older generation, grounding the group’s modern stories in a lineage of Black musical history. Much like ancient bards used formulaic phrases to aid memory, RZA’s recurring loops and sonic textures create a predictable, yet evolving, world that followers can participate in and recognize instantly.
Recording technology has severed music from the performance in its original time and place. It has transformed reproduction into a creative act, giving birth to new artistic forms. In hip-hop, this boundary collapses entirely: turntables become instruments for scratching and mixing, while sampling turns existing recordings into raw material for new creations.
RZA’s sampling of old dusty records, with kung-fu dialogue, and raw unrefined layers, acts as an inter-textual memory, creating its own sonic world. It retrieves Black musical traditions of the past, like jazz, soul and funk, while re-contextualizing them, creating a Rearview Mirror kaleidoscope like effect, where the eras seamlessly blend together as one. The use of dusty records and soul samples function as an ancestral archive. The looping, immersive beats, in tracks like C.R.E.A.M., create a total environment, where listening itself turns into a sensory, and almost ritualistic experience. This is a space where the collapsing of time, geography, and social context merge into a single auditory space. RZA created a homemade world that functioned as a spiritual and historical blueprint for his tribe.
RZA sampled dialogue from kung-fu cinema and created his own metaphorical framework employing motifs and cliches from the films. He applied things like the Tiger Style to turn the MC’s tongue into a sharp weapon. In the Shaolin Five Animals style, the tiger form is known for its brutal, aggressive power and ferocious strikes, a perfect metaphor for the Clan’s raw, uncompromising approach to Hip-Hop. These films provided an entire mythology that aligned the struggles of young Black men in Staten Island with Eastern philosophies of discipline, brotherhood, and resistance against oppression.
ENTER THE JESTER
“What y’all thought y’all wasn’t gonna see me/ I’m the Osiris of this shit/ Wu-Tang is here forever.”
– O.B.D.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard functioned as the group’s jester with his outrageous antics and constant rule-breaking; the off-kilter delivery, use of aliases like Dirt Dog and Big Baby Jesus, and his wild real-life antics. His Drunken Master style is the epitome of erratic, with his slurred delivery, off-beat timing, and sudden explosive bursts. O.D.B. utilized his multiple aliases like a type of mental software, reflecting the development of fluid identity that McLuhan said would develop in the Electronic Age. His unpredictability disrupted the group’s structured mythology, and embodied the shadow side, he harnessed a chaotic tribal energy. Ol’ Dirty was the sanctioned fool, who mocked power and revealed truth through absurdity; like when he famously brought MTV cameras along in a stretch limousine to collect his food stamps as a commentary on poverty in America and a defiant protest against the welfare system, or like when he crashed the 1998 Grammy Awards stage, to declare to the world that “Wu-Tang is for the children!”
RZA’s production used electronic tools like samplers to create acoustic, participatory spaces that archive history and enforce cultural order and resistance. It grounds marginalized experiences in ancestral lineage and Eastern frameworks, while O.D.B. ‘s chaos kept it alive and anti-rigid.
GRIOTS, BARDS, and MCs
“Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.”
– Inspectah Deck “ Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’”
The West African bardic tradition was an ancient oral storytelling craft practiced by specialized wordsmiths, historians, and musicians known natively as a Jali (or Jeli) and popularly referred to by the French term griot. They used rhythmic speech, music, and performance to chronicle deeds, advise rulers, critique power, and transmit knowledge across generations. The Jali were judged by their absolute mastery of language, spontaneous improvisation, and vocal command. Performances were highly interactive, seamlessly blending speech, dramatic poetry, and music. The Jali’s poly-rhythmic delivery, improvisational speech, and structural storytelling are widely recognized as the foundational building blocks of American blues, jazz, and modern hip-hop.
Just as the Jali acted as the collective voice and memory of a village, the rapper articulates the shared anxieties, struggles, and values of the urban neighborhood, both serving as political commentators who are socially sanctioned to speak the unspoken, calling out corruption and abuses of power. The Jali used heightened, rhythmic speech chanted over traditional instrumentation, the structural blueprint for rapping over a hip-hop production. Just as the Jali acts as the collective voice and memory of a village, the rapper articulates the shared anxieties, struggles, and values of the urban neighborhood.
It was through the diaspora pipeline that the core oral mechanics survived the Middle Passage, embedding themselves into African American vernacular expressions, Southern religious sermons, and blues narratives. Freestylin’ is a specific outgrowth of this. As Large Professor said about Hip-Hop, “when you can feel the beat flow through you, man, where you just know every lyric gonna come on time and half the words gonna rhyme.” Before written raps, the original MCs were only focused on the oral tradition.
PROTECT YA NECK
“I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side / Staying alive was no jive”
– Raekown “C.R.E.A.M.”
The Dozens were a vital bridge connecting the ancient West African bardic tradition to modern hip-hop. They were a structured oral game of competitive verbal combat, that relied on performances by Men of Words, where they duel each-other matching wits by exchanging rhymed, ritualized, and highly exaggerated insults in front of an active audience. The first person to show anger, lose composure, or react physically loses the game, it was an art form and test of emotional control. Many African ethnic groups utilized sanctioned verbal duels, community members used humor, irony, and structured teasing to deflate egos, settle disputes without physical violence, and reinforce cultural norms. This type of ceremonial combat has existed from Homeric times all the way to Muhammed Ali and beyond. The Dozens adapted this survival strategy for the New World.
The Dozens relied heavily on Signifyin’. A deeply rooted African rhetorical practice involving wordplay, double entendres, and ironic mockery. Through rhymed couplets and spectacular hyperbole, players boast about their own prowess while denigrating their opponent.When two modern MC’s trade insults over a beat, they are not practicing a random form of street rebellion, they are engaged in an oral battle for artistic excellence.
The tradition simultaneously evolved in the Caribbean into Jamaican toasting, rhythmically talking over the baseline of a riddim. When Caribbean immigrants like DJ Kool Herc brought these toasting traditions to the Bronx in the 1970s, it fused with existing African American urban speech patterns. This fusion completed the loop, birthing hip-hop as a modern, postmodern griot phenomenon.
The rapper’s highest purpose is to harness their street consciousness as a continuation of the Jali’s ancient duty: transforming rhythm and poetry into a tool for community survival, identity preservation, and structural resistance
FROM HOMERIC ENCYCLOPEDIA TO ELECTRIC TRIBE
“In an oral culture, the audience lived inside the performance through mimesis… total participation and emotional identification.”
– Eric Havelock “Preface To Plato
The Homeric poet was focused on integrating traditional cultural materials into performance. They weren’t inventing original themes, hero-types or new forms of dictation. Plato framed pre-Platonic mimesis as an oral technology for preserving knowledge. Rather than focusing on artistic creation, it relied on the audience’s profound emotional identification and psychological immersion in a poetic recital. This total immersion enabled massive collective memorization, but it destroyed critical objectivity. For Plato, this non-analytical way of reliving experience through performance, rather than understanding it through reason, made mimesis the ultimate philosophical enemy.
When we rely on oral poetry to store and transmit cultural memory, we’re in the Homeric State of Mind, we’re in the pre-literate culture of Ancient Greece. Historically poetry was the primary vessel in which information had to be preserved to achieve cultural stability. Epic poetry, like Homer’s Iliad, was an Oral Encyclopedia of stored experience, which functioned as a vast, rhythmic repository of societal, moral, and technical instruction. The method by which non-literate cultures preserved information relied on constantly reiterating the chorus to ensure memory retention.
It wasn’t until the creation of the alphabet where the knower separated themselves from the known, where the eye supplanted the ear, allowing for individuals to objectify knowledge rather than just embody it, culminating in the Platonic State of Mind. Plato himself viewed the immersive, emotionally captivating experience of poetry as a type of psychic poison that cripples the mind; he saw it as a kind of disease.
MIMESIS IN THE ELECTRIC AGE
“We are playing the old story backwards… electric speed plays the film of Western civilization backward.”
–Marshall McLuhan “Living in an Acoustic World”
McLuhan said it was the electric age that plunged humanity back into the acoustic, tribal, and deeply immersive psychic state that Plato wanted to eradicate. The Global Village collapsed rational distance and resurrected total emotional engulfment.
Plato’s rational universe relied heavily on the visual sense, which allows for detachment, linear tracking, and objective distance. McLuhan argued that electric media bypassed this visual detachment entirely. Radio and television are fundamentally acoustic and tactile, hitting the human nervous system with instantaneous, multi-layered data arrays. The viewer or listener cannot remain a detached observer; they are forced back into the hyper-sensory, acoustic world of the pre-literate tribe
The phonetic alphabet created the concepts of the individual, private identity, and rational separation. McLuhan famously asserted that the implosive nature of electric speed plays the film of Western civilization backward. By removing geographical boundaries and broadcasting collective experiences simultaneously, electric media re-tribalized society into a Global Village. This village acts not like a peaceful town, but like a high-friction tribal collective driven by myth, collective emotion, and shared group consciousness over individual reason
In the oral tradition, described by Havelock in Preface To Plato, that the audience lived inside the performance through mimesis. The emotional identification process in oral cultures where the audience immerses themselves in rhythm and performance leads to a cultural mimesis. McLuhan saw the exact same phenomenon happening in front of electronic screens. When a medium transmits information instantly, there is no time to step back, read, analyze, and safely judge. Instead of analyzing a message, the audience embodies it. This lack of analytical distance is precisely the immersive psychic poison Plato feared: a state where individuals are entirely possessed by the rhythm of the medium.
Eric Havelock, that the ancient Greeks used rhythmic epics as a massive, subconscious storage unit for societal programming. McLuhan mapped this directly onto 20th-century advertising and mass entertainment. Rather than presenting logical arguments, electric media packages information into single, highly evocative, emotional images and slogans. They function as a new oral encyclopedia, engineering public behavior through a modern form of hypnotic, poetic repetition. Ultimately, McLuhan believed that humanity entered the electric age with a mind trained by literacy. Where Western Man was expecting order, boundaries, and rational distance, only to find itself completely submerged in an inescapable pool of collective simultaneousness, and, and acoustic all-at-onceness.
WU-TANG vs. THE BEATLES: ENTER THE MAGICAL MYSTERY CHAMBERS
“In tribal countries there is no melody, there is no repeating melody in the musical form; it is based on rhythm, on tactile beat, touch. Now melody is disappearing from Western music. In the highbrow world, it disappeared some time ago; but in the new electronic music, in the new popular music, oriental insistence on beat, which follows the speech patterns. Oriental music follows the patterns of human speech, so do the Beatles, and not only do they follow the patterns of human speech, they follow the patterns of Cockney and Liverpool lower-class speech and not upper class speech. They stay with the lower-class speech, like jazz. See, back in the nineteen-twenties, jazz followed the patterns of ordinary, ignorant, vulgar, speech – the world of Gershwin. The word jazz means to yatter, jazz just means to yatter and the jazz men of the twenties were following speech patterns and not following melody patterns at all. But basically, beat was speech – this is what gave them their power. Now oriental music still stays very closely tied to speech. African music is very closely tied to human speech. It doesn’t break away into the abstract following of story lines or melodic lines. So, you say in the popular music in India, now they are beginning to play melodies?
– McLuhan Interviewed by P. Mansaran (Toronto, 1967)
McLuhan saw The Beatles as one of the first to utilize music as an experience of total involvement like the ancient tribal poet. The shared global screaming, collective weeping, and absolute emotional engulfment of the audience mimicked the ancient, ecstatic rites of Dionysian style bardic poetry. Just as Homer served as the collective repository for Greek cultural identity, The Beatles became the psychedelic bards of the Global Village. Through mass media, their style, lyricism, drug experimentation, countercultural philosophy, and anti-war stances became a shared environment. They didn’t pass down logic through essays; they passed down blueprints for living through the trippy acoustic environment, where catchy mantras like “All You Need Is Love,” & “Let It Be,” were designed as mythic imagery. The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club was the ultimate manifestation of a totally immersive environment, an experience of sound manipulation.
The viral album from 2010, Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers, was a mashup project of Wu-Tang and The Beatles, by UK producer Tom Caruana, where he seamlessly blends together both discographies. Both groups functioned as the musical, poetic, and spiritual chroniclers of their respective eras. The album is a musical tapestry, where Caruana blends the sonic architecture of the Bards of Pop with the concrete jungle mythology of Bards of Street.
The music writer Alexis Petridis highlighted in, The Guardian, that Caruana displayed “considerable imagination, skill and potential” by digging up obscure Beatles covers by jazz groups like the London Jazz Four and R&B icons like Dionne Warwick. He layered 1990s Staten Island street life, over 1960s British psych-rock and its jazz/R&B derivatives, Caruana smoothly collapsing three decades into one total environment. It was noted for breathing new life into the decades old material.
When asked in an interview with the NYTimes, Caruana articulated his specific style of chopping up the songs on the album. He stated: “Uzi (Pinky Ring)” has got a lot of samples on it. There’s “Glass Onion,” then it went to an Arif Mardin version of “Glass Onion,” then when Ghostface comes in it goes to “Getting Better,” then RZA comes in and it’s a Ramsey Lewis version of “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.” Then Inspectah Deck comes in and it’s a cover version of “Hey, Jude.” Then Method Man comes in and that’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” And then GZA’s at the end, and that’s “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road.” I’ve seen on blogs, somebody say something like, I’ve only heard two Beatles samples that I recognized in here. And to me that’s quite a good thing – you have to listen extra hard to hear them. I was purposeful not to take “Love Me Do” and put Wu-Tang with it.”
The Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers album wasn’t just some novelty mashup. It was a meta-level commentary on everything we’ve previously discussed. It explicitly demonstrates McLuhan’s retrieval: two groups who functioned as bards for their respective segment of the Global Village, at different moments in time, are now fused into a single immersive experience.
It shows how hip-hop can absorb and transform earlier electronic bardic forms of groups like The Beatles, creating and creating even more complex total environments. The result is a living archive expanding the Wu-universe. The Electronic Age has re-birthed the bardic tradition in a more powerful form.
This project stands as strong evidence that Wu-Tang Clan successfully carries forward the same ancient role McLuhan identified in The Beatles – only harder, grittier, and more mythologically dense.
Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers serves as a cast study for McLuhan’s theories on retrieval, the electronic bard, and the global village. The listener experiences two separate eras merged into a unified acoustic space. It represents the bardic tradition reborn in its most potent, electronic form. It bridges the counter-culture tribalism of the 1960s West with the inner-city tribalism of 1990s Black America. It functions as a collective modern folklore, proving that in the electronic age, the stories of the tribe are never lost—they are simply sampled, remixed, and retold.
If you’re interested in checking out the album, start with a track like Got Your Money, where Caruana blends the chaotic energy of O.B.D. with the Abbey Road classic You Never Give Me Your Money, “You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper.” The Criminology track is another dope choice, it blends Raekown and Ghostface with a Bunny Sigler cover of The Beatles track Yesterday, mixing the dark street narrative with a fast-paced melodic instrumental. My personal favorite is Back In The Game, a cover of The Beatles track A Day In The Life by Les DeMerle (also a sample used by the legendary D.I.T.C. affiliate O.C. on Time’s Up.) The track loops the original, rugged acappella verses from Wu-Tang members Inspectah Deck, Method Man, GZA, Raekwon, and Ghostface Killah. Caruana loops DeMerle’s fast-paced, complex drumming patterns alongside a deep, rolling baseline and bright jazz guitar licks to completely reshape the groove of the track. The way he loops Ron Isley’s soulful chorus is the highlight:
“Back in the game now, copped me some weight now
My people bout to eat now, shit’s bout to change now
Back in the game now, all my niggas in the hood now
Better catch up now, shit’s bout to change now”
WU-TANG
Afro-Samurai: Techno-Orientalism and Contemporary Hip Hop
Examining RZA and Quentin Tarantino’s Use of Pastiche – by P. L. Cunningham
The Wu-Tang Clan and Cultural Resistance – by Michael Blum
The Wu-Tang Clan and RZA: A Trip Through the 36 Chambers by Alvin Blanco
Having the sceptre: Wu-Tang Clan and the aura of music in the age of digital reproduction – Ben Green
Wu-Tang for the Children: Swarming Elsewhere and the Pedagogical Power of the Wu – by B.A. Varga
HIP-HOP POETICS & ORAL LITERATURE
Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity – by Adam Krims
The Anthology of Rap – by Adam Bradley
Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop – by Adam Bradley
A Furified Freestyle: Homer and Hip Hop by Eric Pihel
Archaic Greek Poetry and Hip Hop – by Blaž Zabel
That’s The Way We Flow: Hip-Hop as Oral Literature
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip-Hop – by Imani Perry
HIP-HOP CULTURE, HISTORY & CONSCIOUSNESS
Rap Music and Street Consciousness – by Cheryl Keyes
Yes, yes, y’all: The Experience Music Project, An Oral History – Jim Fricke
The Come Up – An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop
Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America – Tricia Rose
CLASSICAL ORAL TRADITION & HOMERIC STUDIES
Preface To Plato – by Eric Havelock
Singer of Tales – Lord Albert Bates
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition by Albert B. Lord
Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England by Mark C. AmodioAFRICAN GRIOT & THE ORAL TRADITION
Locating Hip Hop Origins: Popular Music and Tradition in Senegal – by C.M. Appert
The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore
The Griot Tradition as Remixed Through Hip Hop: Straight Outta Africa – by Frederick Gooding Jr.
Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music – by Ken McLeod
Griots at War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande by Barbara G. Hoffman
In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature, and Performance by Ralph A. Austen
The Intertextuality of Black American Spoken Word and the African Griot Tradition by Tammie Jenkins
MEDIA ECOLOGY & ORALITY VS LITERACY
Preface To Plato – by Eric Havelock
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word – by Walter Ong
Fighting For Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness – by Walter Ong
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man – by Marshall McLuhan
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making fo Typographic Man
War and Peace in the Global Village
MIMETIC THEORY
Violence and the Sacred – by Rene Girard
Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World – Rene Girard
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