Abstract
This article excavates the ethos surrounding hip hop, starting from the proposition that hip hop represents a distinct yet pervasive expression of contemporary black subjectivity, which crystalized in 1970s New York City and has since proliferated into a potent ethos of the subaltern embraced within socially marginalized youth communities throughout the world. The article begins by outlining the black diasporic traditions of expressive performance that hip hop issues from, as discussed through the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Amiri Baraka. In the remainder of the article, a blueprint of hip hop’s ethos is presented based on five fundamental tenets: (1) properties of flow, layering, and rupture; (2) a principle of productive consumption; (3) the production of excessive publicity or promotion—what hip-hop affiliates refer to as “hype”; (4) embracing individual and communal entrepreneurship; and (5) a committed politics of action and loyalty. While acknowledging hip hop’s malleability and refusal to be neatly characterized, the article maintains that its characteristic spirit embodies these core doctrines.
Highlights
The contributions to this special issue aim to reinvigorate contemporary discussions surrounding ethos and its implications for the value and meaningfulness assigned to varieties of lived human experience
Hip hop is simultaneously entrepreneurial and communal; it is implicated in neoliberal modes of survival but offers itself as a social and psychological balm to the violence perpetuated through capitalist inequities; it publicizes unfailingly hierarchical identity politics—in some cases subverting and in others upholding existing relations of power—while being deeply concerned with the politics of identity; it speaks truth to power as it perpetually undermines and/or destabilizes our understandings of what is real
Hip-hop music’s powerful polyrhythms are established through flirtations with and strategic embellishments of rupture. This appreciation of rupture occurs at the expense of flow; likewise, the achievement of flow is dependent on the potential for rupture
Summary
The contributions to this special issue aim to reinvigorate contemporary discussions surrounding ethos and its implications for the value and meaningfulness assigned to varieties of lived human experience. Hip hop is simultaneously entrepreneurial and communal; it is implicated in neoliberal modes of survival but offers itself as a social and psychological balm to the violence perpetuated through capitalist inequities; it publicizes unfailingly hierarchical identity politics—in some cases subverting and in others upholding existing relations of power—while being deeply concerned with the politics of identity; it speaks truth to power as it perpetually undermines and/or destabilizes our understandings of what is real. These and other intricacies surrounding hip hop’s. These span the range of characteristics of form, expressive priorities, active inclinations, and ethical commitments
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