Step inside the 'Rap Research Lab'

Hip-hop, you the love of my life

On the occasion of hip-hop's 50th anniversary this year, I wanted to share one of my favorite movies: "Brown Sugar," a 2002 film featuring Taye Diggs (Dre) and Sanaa Lathan (Sidney) as best friends turned lovers who share a love for hip-hop. The movie revolves around the question of when one falls in love with hip-hop. I won't give away the plot, but I highly recommend watching it if you haven't already.

As for me, my love for hip-hop was ignited during my childhood in The Bronx, Manhattan and Queens during the 90s, when my family members played cassette tapes on massive silver-faced sound systems with large wooden speakers. It was a time filled with culture and beauty.

Today, for our Women in Tech history segment of the newsletter note, I want to highlight Missy Elliot, a digital innovator who is well-known to many of us through songs like 'Supa Dupa Fly" or "The Rain." I’d like to point us to Dr. Steven Shapiro's essay on Missy's work, in which he highlights how she uses cutting-edge digital effects to depict the world. He also illuminates how she combines image and sound editing in her music videos to show how deeply we are all connected in a society dominated by computer-mediated communication networks. Shapiro further discusses how contemporary hip-hop relies heavily on digitally generated and sampled sounds. I recommend reading the full essay if you have time.

I won't delve too much into Missy's digital innovations, as I encourage you to explore and learn about them on your own. However, I did recently interview Tahir Hemphill, an educator and creative technologist who has developed a database of hundreds of thousands of rap lyrics. You can find out more about his work below.

— Technical.ly reporter Alanah Nichole Davis ([email protected])