Music & Performing Arts Librarian
Databases
Music Industry Data (Music ID)
This metadatabase combines journal, book, and media databases having to do with black culture. Not every resource is music-specific. However, this is the widest possible net you can cast at the beginning of your research and an excellent way to get started. Try searching an artist's name (examples: "Erykah Badu,"Lil Nas X"), a style (examples: "trap," "krump"), a dance move, (examples: "twerk," "dancehall"), or theme/topic (examples: "authenticity," "police brutality"). If you get too many results, try using the subject and date filters on the left side of the results page.
Non-fiction writings by major American black leaders--teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, entertainers, and other figures--covering 250 years of history. In addition to the most familiar works, Black Thought and Culture presents a great deal of previously inaccessible material, including letters, speeches, prefatory essays, political leaflets, interviews, periodicals, and trial transcripts. The ideas of over 1,000 authors present an evolving and complex view of what it is to be black in America.
Books
Harvard's Hiphop Archive & Research Institute has made this list of scholarly publications. To see if we have the book at Dartmouth, perform a title search and filter material type to "Books" in the Dartmouth Library Search.
Magazines, Newspapers, Blogs, etc.
Rolling Stone
Best for finding trending hip hop, pop, rap rock, and other popular musics. Issues from the most recent 12 months are available with images via PressReader. Archival issues are available in plain text.
Billboard
Each issue reports the most popular songs (streaming and radio) for the past two weeks. Also includes interviews and features on new artists. The most recent 5 issues are available with images via PressReader. Archival issues are available in plain text.
The Arts section covers living artists, album reviews, performance reviews, news, and recent obituaries in music. For access via Dartmouth, you must create a free account.
This page lists NPR stories on hip-hop from most recent to oldest. Also check out the Hip-Hop 50 page for in-depth interviews, stories on new and monumental albums, and tiny-desk concerts.
Academic Journals
The Journal of Hip Hop Studies
Journal of Popular Music Studies
Digital Archives/Repositories
- Cornell Hip Hop CollectionThis digital archive includes audio, digitized event flyers, and photos from East to West Coast and the South. The archive covers the years from late 1970s to the early 2000s. The Digital Collections are available to the public and include about 6,000 items.
- IPA SourceIPA source contains International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions and literal translations of opera arias and art song texts. The goal of IPA source is to promote the comprehension and accurate pronunciation of foreign language texts in art song and opera in order that the singer may imbue each syllable with the appropriate emotional content. Translations into English from multiple languages.
Handbook of the International Phonetic Association by ISBN: 0521652367Publication Date: 1999-06-28This book is a comprehensive guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet, widely used for over a century to transcribe the sounds of languages. The Handbook is in three parts: Part I contains an introduction to phonetic description and exemplification of the use of phonetic symbols; Part II consists of twenty-nine "Illustrations" of the application of the International Phonetic Alphabet to a range of languages; and Part III covers speech pathology, computer codings, and the history of the IPA. This is an essential reference work for phoneticians and linguists more generally.
A Handbook of Diction for Singers by ISBN: 0197639526Publication Date: 2022Guide for lyrical diction in French, Italian, and German.
