Hip-Hop Style and Identity in Toronto: Music Pedagogy from the Cypher

What happens when Hip-Hop's African American origin story travels around the world and lands in Toronto, Ontario, Canada? Set amidst Toronto's increasingly inter-cultural communities, B-boy Jazzy Jester, MC LolaBunz, and DJ Ariel detail the trajectories of their artistic development, honoring Hip-Hop's translocated history while remixing hip-hop cultural perspectives to assert difference as style. By living with and traversing the web of social imperatives they inhabit, these artists learn to use Hip-Hop's creative tools to produce knowledge and meanings expressed through sound and movement. Stories of migration, Indigenous sovereignty, and intersectional, generational struggle and triumph become resources for identity (re)creation. Through processes of Signifyin(g) (Gates, Jr., 1988) on performative acts (Butler, 1990), artists reveal how hip-hop pedagogy enables aesthetic negotiations that access raw experiences to cultivate dynamic performances. The resulting narrative portraits provide an intimate understanding of the spaces, people, and communities that fill, shape, and nourish the Toronto Hip-Hop scene.

Table of Contents:
Intro 1. Toronto Hip Hop 2. Bridge 3. Jazzy Jester 4. DJ Ariel 5. LolaBunz 6. Styling pedagogy 7. 'No biting!': Music pedagogy from the cypher Outro Endnotes Index

About the Author :
Myrtle D. Millares is a musician, scholar, climate justice activist, and a long-time student of Hip-Hop and breaking. She is a member of the Afrosonic Innovation Lab and teaches at the Faculty of Music and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Born in the Philippines, she now lives in Toronto, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Review :
Myrtle D. Millares delivers a thought-provoking treatise on the development of a uniquely Canadian artform through the amalgamation of shared African diasporic expressions resulting from African American, Caribbean, and Canadian experiences. Through insightful interviews, Millares provides colorful and first-hand details on the development of Hip-Hop in a major commercial and cultural center not named New York or Los Angeles. Her work adds a missing international (or local if you're Canadian) perspective to the conversation surrounding the global significance of Hip-Hop. Additionally, Millares does well to respect diverse voices and experiences within the Toronto Hip-Hop cypher by including narratives from women and a discussion on LGBTQIA+ contributions to the field. A nuanced and erudite examination of individual lives of those artists dedicated to hip-hop culture, Hip-hop, Style and Identity in Toronto insists we center the voices of hip-hop artists to unravel how one becomes hip-hop. Millares masterfully interweaves the connections between hip-hop studies and music education as articulated by hip-hop artists themselves; offering us multiple sightlines to grasp the varied and intricate ways in which hip-hop culture centers and celebrates difference and disjuncture as the starting point to the development of a musical identity. Hip-hop has always centered that idea of “no biting” which Millares beautifully captures in this essential music education and music pedagogy text. Hip-Hop Style and Identity in Toronto adds to the ever-growing canon of global Hip-Hop studies by taking a look at Hip-Hop identity construction from a Canadian perspective. Given the great success of artists like Kardinal Official, Drake and The Weekend, this books provides a timely, unique and comprehensive understanding of the Toronto context in Hip-Hop culture.