Hip-Hop and Trivialisation of Martin Luther King Jr. in Didier Awadi’s “Dans mon rêve”

Abstract

As far as hip-hop is concerned, it is a truism that Didier Awadi counts as one of its influential leading figures. The famous musician from Senegal takes advantage of hip-hop as a medium and participates in disseminating its values across the world. Awadi’s creativity aims at conscientising Black people whose misery, according to him, is due to an internalised negativity about themselves. The artist pursues this objective in “Dans mon rêve” by staging MLK as a historic benchmark and source of inspiration to Africans. My paper attempts to highlight why the use of hip-hop as a medium of pop culture does not effectively serve that creditable objective. I also review the provocative trope of African pop-artist as a modern griot, raised a decade ago by the United States-based scholars. Theoretically, Stuart Hall’s conception of culture and Guy Debord’s theoretical complexity in his attempt to dismantle the monopoly of the spectacle inform the study.