More than noise: Employing hip-hop music to inform community development practice

The quality of information which a community development professional has access to will limit her ability to understand the issues, concerns, and desires of a community. Artistic expression, specifically hip-hop music, can provide a novel level of understanding of community dynamics to community development practice and research. This research established a methodology that would enable practitioners and researchers to effectively extract relevant details embedded within hip-hop music. We employed a microanalysis approach to study 100 hip-hop songs to extract the relevant themes and codes. We found key relationships in the music between the artists and how they relate to their physical surroundings.