‘Azadi’s political until you’re pressing play’: Capitalist realism, hip-hop, and platform affordances

Abstract

The article delves into the hip-hop scene in India, by locating its particular relationship with digital platforms, Instagram, YouTube and music streaming services such as Spotify, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Because of hip-hop’s self-referentiality and its peculiar form of realism, discourses around platform capitalism have inadvertently entered the culture at large. Cultural artefacts produced by the scene reflect on the condition of music’s interaction with platforms and in turn, lay bare the evaluative tendencies vis-à-vis platforms. The article argues that digital platforms are productive in giving form to culture wherein the audio track is accompanied by a range of other trans-textual and trans-medial linkages of texts, audio, images and videos, that is, discourses which circulate outside of the audio form creating a crisscross of lines which come to form the cypher of hip-hop culture. It isn’t merely the offline cyphers then which are crucial in giving form to the community but also the digital platforms and their affordances.