Everyday people: public identities in contemporary hip-hop culture

Abstract

As scholars on culture have suggested elsewhere, cooption through consumption by the music culture industry has forced those who want to be part of the hip-hop subculture to go back underground. But to label all of these individuals in the underground merely ‘hip-hop’ would be as equally uninformative as labeling anyone who wears baggy blue jeans and can rhyme words together as being hip-hop. My year of field research in Chicago revealed that five major identities emerged: Professional Headz, Refugee Headz, Hip-Hop Fundamentalists, Black Headz and Tech Headz. These identities were characterized by the personal values that my participants indicated were most reaffirmed through hip-hop culture. This article contributes to the literature on hip-hop by providing an ethnographic study on how the Hip-Hop Nation defines itself, while examining some of the tensions that these identities provide within the Hip-Hop Nation. It also reinforces the view that subculture must still be experienced in the flesh and is not fully experienced by being able to engage in the culture industry of hip-hop through purchasing records, watching videos or buying hip-hop fashions. This article also provides a more complex qualitative understanding of what values constitute being hip-hop and which ones do not.