Curated by Lyuba Morozova
While classical music is discontentedly rubbing its antique monocle, hip hop is bringing all the rosy desires of Beethoven and Stravinsky to life. Hip hop has incorporated country, rock, house, opera, and the voices of “the dead, the living, and those yet unborn”. This genre owes its current leadership primarily to its ability to combine each and all. It is also a symbol of successful communication, or the ability to negotiate.
You can mock all you want about the statement that it was hip hop that reduced the crime rate in New York, as young people began to solve conflicts with rap battles rather than with fights and brawls. Nevertheless, the history of this subculture, which originated in the mid-1970s in the New York’s district Bronx known for its high crime rate, should have been told in schools in the classes of ‘human virtues’, if only it was possible to find at least one decent song without any rude words. Or maybe it’s good that this is an out-of-school phenomenon, as the rules of life are not learned from textbooks.
This year, the hip hop theme was chosen for the Outdoor Stage for several reasons. Firstly, sooner or later, it will devour everything like Father Kronos. Secondly, it has already combined poetry, music and neighborhood, a focus theme of this year’s Book Arsenal Festival. And thirdly, this year officially marks 40 years since the birth of the genre: in 1979, the first ever hip hop song, Rapper’s Delight (The Sugarhill Gang), was released.
We are celebrating the anniversary with two concerts of esthetic hip hop by BRAT from Lviv and Appex from Rivne. We are also going to chronologically track the history of the genre in the lecture 40 Years of Hip Hop Music and cross and divide jazz, classics and poetry as hip hop components in the joint conversation of music critics Lyuba Morozova, Serhiy Cane and Viachek Kryshtofovych.
We offer the visitors an intellectual disco: to dive rhythmically and deeply, down to fossil coelacanths, for the philosophical rap stuff.