While those who claimed to be in the "hip-hop nation"debated what and who was "real", rap music was spreading and taking on new significance to those outside of rap's black body and inner-city context. Spaces otherwise isolated from the American inner-city-- suburbs, rural communities, international media, third world populations-- began to catch on to the infectious beat of hip-hop culture. With the aid of music industries propagating hip-hop's posture, its style and gestures spread through different communities and took on different meanings. French banlieues, Latino barrios and white burbs responded to hip-hop with their own unique appropriation, mixing the forms and meanings of the overtly black, inner-city expression with their own environments and experiences.
These appropriations of hip-hop, and their struggles between form, place, body, context, authenticity and ideologies are the subject of this thesis. Although the hip-hop medium arose in part as a reaction to the dominant white American value systems, hip-hop has become its own ideological force for many youth who look to its hard visual images for a sense of power. The appropriation of black culture is hardly a new phenomenon; it has been seen as a source of extracting exoticized hipness both before and after Norman Mailer's account of the "white negro". However, I believe hip-hop is significantly different because not only does modern global marketing make the scale of its influence so much greater, but for the most part, it is being propagated on its own terms and thus insisting on its own cultural context. The depth and extent of this spread has allowed hip-hop to become a specific, contextual voice that encourages resistance against global racist and classist domination while it simultaneously asserts its own powerful worldviews. A generation of young people are beginning to look through hip-hop's ideological lens which has implications for how they view not only rappers, but also themselves and their environment.
Hence, it is critical that we make efforts to understand the relationships between hip-hop's form and its appropriation. This is even more crucial when we consider that the tensions and changes in these appropriation dynamics speak to more than personal perceptions, but also to larger social and cultural relations. Stuart Hall addressed this issue when he wrote:
What we are talking about is the struggle over cultural hegemony, which is these days waged as much in popular culture as anywhere else... Cultural hegemony is never about pure victory or pure domination (that's not what the term means); it is never a zero-sum cultural game; it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture; it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power (Hall, 1992: 468)
Hall argues that these power struggles are neither revolutionary nor necessarily unchanged, but that we should look at both areas of difference and sameness in these "wars of position" (Hall, 1992: 468). I intend to do just this in my exploration of hip-hop's various appropriations. I have studied two very different hip-hop groups: rap fans in Nairobi, Kenya and members of the Internet newsgroups alt.rap and rec.music.hip-hop. I believe these very different communities and their interpretations and appropriations of hip-hop can speak to the power of the images and ideologies of authenticity within rap music. Equally important, these communities can also give clues to the dynamic forces that shape relationships to mediated cultural forms. There is an inevitable space between hip-hop's expression and its mediated image and what people see or seek in this space is crucial for the dynamics discussed above. In doing this study, I have tried to keep my focus on both the appropriation and the referent, the subject and the object, and the liminality between these definitions. I hope this emphasizes not only the fixed forms and blurry boundaries of hip-hop, but also the academic terrain between cultural studies and Sociology/Anthropology. In discussing the need for a bridge between these separated studies, Angela McRobbie criticized sociology for not questioning
the way the discourses of popular culture, including those of music, magazines and youth TV, position their readers in a particular relationship to the text and its meaning and in doing so play a concerted role in constructing and organizing subjectivity as it comes into being in the 'inter-discursive space' where these cultural forms and their meanings meet and interact with each other.
She went on to criticize cultural studies for ignoring
the interactions between the various discourses, and also between the young people and the wider social and institutional relations which they inhabit. (McRobbie, 1996: 32)
This project can be considered one attempt at understanding this space of mediation between text and reception. Hip-hop's expressive forms speak to and for the young black body in his/her inner-city environment. Hip-hop's signifiers (i.e. lyrics, style, posture, language) are rooted in this particular cultural body and context and thus, although the surface image may be appropriated outside of this body and space, hip-hop's ideological forces constantly remind listening participants of its' specific and significant foundations. I will explore both hip-hop's textual signifiers and its' contextual significance, and examine how they are each appropriated. Through understanding the complex dynamics within these relationships, I hope to show how specific communities of youth relate to hip-hop's expressive form and ideological authenticity.
I have broken this study down into four main sections in which I will explore issues of capital, production, language and the body, and definition and differentiation, respectively. I will first look at the dynamics between economic and cultural capital in hip-hop lyrics and their appropriation in Nairobi and on Internet newsgroups. This section will examine the relationships between the authenticity of poverty, the glamorization of materialism, capitalist logic and its ideological force. My next section focuses on the consumptive and productive form of hip-hop. By exploring how hip-hop's conversational, responsive and referential structure is used in Kenya and on the Internet, I will show how rap fans struggle with its form of counter-hegemonic authorship and specific, contextual expression. My third chapter looks at the hip-hop posture through language, body and violence. I will examine some of the body politics behind rap music and what its ideology of authenticity means for Nairobi youth and hip-hop newsgroup members. My last main focus will be on the definition and differentiation of various hip-hop images and genres. I will explore not only the actual media, but how appropriators make meaning from specific images through classifying and dividing them. This last section will reveal ideals and hierarchies that further show the shifting boundaries between ideology and authenticity in both hip-hop and its appropriators. After having established my observations and arguments, I will draw together some of threads and theories by focusing on expression and oppression in hip-hop. This quasi-conclusion will revisit the ideas of authenticity, body, context and ideology that run throughout the paper and will make some further speculation on some of the larger social structures that shape these relationships.
Although I could never hope to map all of the forces behind these complex and multi-faceted appropriation dynamics, I can offer a sketch at the various ways hip-hop is viewed and used by Nairobi youth and Internet newsgroup members. My mom used to always tell me that she loved oak trees because depending on where you are standing or how you are moving, a single tree can have many appearances. The way the branches bend and twist up and around each other makes for a matrix of dark lines and angles that constantly move in relation to each other as you circle around its trunk or pass by in a car. I believe hip-hop is similarly changing, for although every individual may say that he or she knows that tree, there is no definitive description of its structure. The most we can do is detail where we are coming from and what we are looking at. What is more, if we were to view the oak in commodity terms, through either the eyes of a furniture maker or an environmentalist, we can see how the tree's meaning can be a highly contentious struggle over purpose and power that depends on these perspectives of how one views what and why. Hip-hop is equally problematic and dynamic as it constantly grows and takes on more meanings. I can only begin to describe hip-hop's roots, branches, symbols and signification, but I hope the analysis I do make will provide some grounds for new perspectives in these ever-changing relationships.
