Keepin' It (Un)Real: Perusing the Boundaries of Hip Hop Culture

Abstract

ONE MIGHT ASK WHETHER THERE REMAINS MUCH, IF ANYTHING, TO SAY about Rap music and Hip Hop culture given the mass of academic and quasi-academic texts that have been written about this recent artform. Tricia Rose, Michael Eric Dyson, and Robin Kelley are only the most prominent of many histories and interpretations. 1 At closer look, however, this may not be the case. Most monographs or books containing substantial treatises of Hip Hop appeared in the early to mid-1990s. 2 Although recently there have been a few considerations of Hip Hop and its cultural, political, social, economic, and aesthetic ramifications, these treatments appear to be scant compared to the riches of the mid-nineties. This seems rather odd since Hip Hop has "come of age" in recent years, both aesthetically and commercially; at this historical juncture Hip Hop not only enjoys unprecedented success, but there also exists a multitude of aesthetic, political, and geographical variants of the genre. Hip Hop currently dominates both the charts [End Page 291] and cultural landscape of the early twenty-first century America. This year alone has seen a spate of multi-platinum Hip Hop albums by such artists as DMX, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, Eminem, and Nelly, for instance, and Hip Hop releases routinely comprise the bulk of the Billboard album chart. 3 Hip Hop is increasingly used to sell everything from clothing and soft drinks to cars. Moreover, Hip Hop has expanded into a global cultural phenomenon, both by virtue of the success enjoyed by U.S. rappers abroad and through the proliferation of local Hip Hop cultures in countries such as Brazil, Germany, Thailand, Japan, France, and South Africa. 4 All these factors situate Hip Hop as a dominant cultural force. Given its popularity and the complexities resulting from the tension between this popularity and its often resistant rhetoric, why is it receiving so little academic attention? An easy answer is that there is a necessary time lag between cultural production and its resulting academic analyses. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that Hip Hop can no longer be constructed as simply an anti-hegemonic authentic African American artform, as it was often presented by early nineties pundits. Now critics are forced to confront its popularity and mainstream acceptance as well as its resistant forces, and few have risen to the challenge.