Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay borrows its title from Tupac Shakur’s song “Holler if Ya Hear Me” (Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.). Both the song and this essay address what Houston Baker characterizes as African American males’ struggles to be heard, as opposed to being rendered silent participants in the “scene” of American violence. I counter critics’ misrepresentations and efforts to malign rap music and artists by locating rap music within a frontier-like, resistant space in the United States. I liken rap-related projects of resistance to what Foucault calls effective histories. The first part of the essay reads Rodney King’s silence about his 1991 beating by Los Angeles police officers, his subsequent investments in the rap music industry, and Ice Cube’s song “Who got the Camera?” in relation to Baker’s argument and African American males’ roles as effective historians. The remaining part of the essay focuses specifically on Tupac Shakur. By way of close readings of some of his songs and his THUG LIFE and EXODUS 1811 tattoos, I argue that Tupac’s work was that of an effective historian and that his particular brand of praxis was informed by specific African American religious and cultural traditions. Finally, I locate the debates about rap music within a theory of performance that enables us to understand the complex dynamic between power and resistance to which critics’ responses to rap music and artists call attention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".