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TLC Forum: Study Guides
The Study Guides section brings together curated articles, historical references, visuals, and key takeaways from each part of the course. These guides are designed to deepen understanding, support reflection, and provide context for the lectures. Use them to review core concepts, explore source materials, and connect the continuum across eras of Black music history.
Part 10 - The Continuum: Black Music as the World’s Pulse
This part affirms Black music as history itself: a living organism that continues to grow, respond, and create new forms of expression with each generation.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 9 - Hip-Hop: The New Griot Tradition
This part frames hip-hop not simply as a genre, but as a living cultural system rooted in African diasporic traditions of oral history, rhythm, improvisation, and communal exchange.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 8 - The Black Arts Movement: Art as Revolutionary Practice
This part situates Black music within a broader ecosystem of revolutionary cultural production, where sound becomes strategy and creativity becomes practice of freedom.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 7 - Funk: Rhythm as Resistance
This part frames funk not only as a musical genre, but as a cultural practice that fused pleasure with politics and embodied freedom.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 6 - Soul: The Sound of a People Becoming Visible
This part frames soul as the soundtrack of a people insisting on being seen, heard, and felt in full color.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 5 - The Great Migration & the Rise of Gospel
This part frames gospel as a sacred continuation of the blues and spirituals, and as a musical force that energized the Civil Rights era and beyond.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 4 - Jazz: Imagination Takes Flight
This part frames jazz as both a continuation of African musical logic and a radical reimagining of musical possibility within modern urban life.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 3 - From Spirituals to the Blues: The Birth of the Individual Voice
This part frames the blues not simply as a genre, but as a cultural technology for survival—an expressive system through which individuals claimed voice in a society still structured by racial inequality.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 2 - Arrival in the Americas: Survival, Adaptation & Resistance
This part frames Black music in the Americas not as imitation, but as cultural survival under pressure - a continuation of African systems reshaped by new realities.
Rasul Elder
2 min read
Part 1 - Black Music Origins: Unified Study Guide
This section establishes Africa as the first “music conservatory” and introduces the musical systems, instruments, and philosophies that would later travel across the Atlantic and shape the music of the African diaspora.
Rasul Elder
3 min read
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