Racialising Amateurism

Abstract

Though their cultural births coincided, punk and rap musicians performed in New York City for at least seven years before they endeavoured any substantial creative interactions. Musicians, critics, and fans referred to both punk and rap as ‘primitive’; however, this article compares the acceptance and celebration of punk as ‘primitive’ with inverted judgments of shared qualities in rap music. Specifically, this article considers New York punk in the 1970s as a white racial project. Persistent stereotypes in white music media, particularly rock criticism, constructed the discursive meanings of punk and rap, while institutional and political segregation structured this distinction. Artistic ‘amateurism’, thus, functions as a celebratory term only when we give such art the benefit of the doubt – that it is not mere ineptness, that it is fruitful, that it is intentional, or that it is subversive. This benefit, in this case, is a white privilege.