Hip Hop Authenticity Research Articles

Going Native/Viral in Russian Popular Music: Aesthetic Populism, Patriotic Anti-racism, and the Quest for Hip-Hop Authenticity in Timati’s Teymuraz Music Video Trilogy

This paper critically analyzes the 2010s’ viral music video trilogy featuring Teymuraz, a stage and video persona of the Russian/Tatar/Jewish hip-hop artist Timati. Using hyperbolized stereotypes of a racialized taxi driver from the Caucasus/Central Asia, the hybrid aesthetics of Teymuraz fuses the elements of New East style, post-Soviet cultural recycling, social critique, and appropriates the voices of the subaltern. Contextualizing Teymuraz as a strategy of racial translation of US hip-hop and as a part of the Russian cultural trend of aesthetic populism, I analyze the work of racial signification in the trilogy that relies on multimodal racial metonymy. I read the trilogy as a peculiar Russian patriotic anti-racist project with contradictory implications. Having been haunted by the accusations of ‘copying’ US rappers throughout his career, Timati negotiates the stigma of imitation, transgressing it in Teymuraz, exploiting his own ethnoracial ambiguity, chronic hip-hop inauthenticity, and the aesthetic populism trend.

Rhyming style, persona, and the contested landscape of authentic Chinese hip hop

AbstractAlthough recent sociolinguistic research on high performance has shown that persona construction is multidimensional and context‐specific, little work has explored how interactions between personae affect their shared semiotic landscape. This study focuses on stylistic practices in 2017′s The Rap of China, China's first hip hop‐themed competition show. A quantitative analysis was conducted to describe the rhyming styles of contemporary Chinese rappers. Based on language uses, visual representations, and lyrical themes, we then identify three rapper personae and discuss the semantic dimensions of hip hop authenticity invoked by each persona. Finally, through an analysis of a combative rap performance and reactions to it, we argue that contestation among different personae shapes the ideological landscape of “authentic Chinese hip hop.” This work demonstrates the potential of the semiotic landscape as a theoretical tool for the analysis of digital communities and cultural forms.

Localized hip hop authenticity in early 2000s Finland: Retaining representations of race, class and gender in Beauty and the Bastard

Beauty and the Bastard (), a pioneering and award-winning youth film set within the emerging Finnish hip hop culture, draws on early twenty-first-century music-related youth films produced in the United States and reaches out thematically and musically to both African American and Finnish hip hop culture and rap music. Set in a predominantly White Finnish society, the film confronts many representational challenges concerning diversity, whether racial, class or gender. Based on contextual analysis of audio-visual representations, we discuss how such categories contribute to the construction of the film’s ‘authenticity’ – a key notion of hip hop culture – as a localized representation. We argue that in its project of localizing hip hop authenticity in early 2000s Finland, the film retains, rather than challenges or questions, representations of normative Whiteness, oppressive class distinctions and unequal gender norms.

Feminine accent, masculine rapper

The localisation of hip hop authenticity in non-African American communities across the globe is an enduringly controversial topic. This study provides evidence of hip hop authenticity construction in the Chinese context through an analysis of seemingly contradictory social meanings of fronted palatals in the Beijing dialect. While these sounds are considered to convey ‘soft’ femininity (i.e. so-called ‘feminine accent’), Beijing-based male rap artists utilise their acoustic character to evoke the iconic record scratch sound of rap music, and rely on the sounds’ sensory qualities – such as sharpness and harshness – to construct masculine and aggressive hip hop personas. By forging iconic links across multiple modalities, these rappers make the stylistic use of a variable traditionally associated with femininity a key element of their performance register, and reinforce the link between rap music and the performance of masculinity within the Chinese hip hop community.

“Meditate, Don’t Medicate!” an Analysis of Addict Rap, Black Men’s Social Issues, and J. Cole’s K.O.D. Album

Historically, drugs authenticated and created hip-hop, as the overuse of drugs was used to validate a drug consumption subculture known as “addict rap.” As a rap subgenre, addict rap illustrates deeper issues of drug overconsumption, hip-hop authenticity, and Black hypermasculinity, while claiming the lives of some of its most noteworthy rappers. In response to this rap trend, American rapper J. Cole released his fifth studio album, K.O.D. to present politicized counternarratives to addict rap’s discourses of drug use, hypersexuality, and materialism. Conducting a textual analysis of rap lyrics, this research examined how Cole used the K.O.D. album to: 1) discuss issues of drug addiction and drug use in the Hip-Hop community and 2) address additional social issues facing Black American men. The analysis advanced three dominant themes, which were: 1) addict rappers use drugs to cope with their inner demons and depression, 2) hip-hop drug use is linked to the systemic oppressions facing Black Americans, and 3) healing should come from self-reflection and redemption from God, not from drug use. Ultimately, K.O.D. deconstructed the drug-laden, machismo-infused, images of addict rappers and revealed the harsh realities of being Black, male, drug addicted, and depressed by fame.

Rappers as hip-hopers: the remaking of authenticity and construction of the future by Korean underground rappers

ABSTRACT Contemporary Korean hip-hop has made its way into the mainstream of youth culture, and Korea’s hip-hop scene has emerged as a significant social space in which the voices of the young generation resonate vividly. When compared with the rest of their cohort, emblematized as the so-called ‘Give-up Generation’, the optimism of rappers provides a fascinating subject for exploration. In order to answer the question of why young Korean rappers profess their dreams in the age of no-hope, we interviewed six underground rappers, delving particularly into the following two themes. First is the inquiry into the rappers’ logic of hip-hop practices, under the conceptual rubric of ‘remaking authenticity’. We found that by inventing their own figurative ghettos and symbolically becoming black, they actively reinvent Korean hip-hop authenticity. Second is the inquiry into the principle of their practices. Our findings show that the fundamental motor force which drives them consists of their aspiration for a better future. The dreams of these rappers derive from three distinct sources. The first source is the illusio (Bourdieu) of the Korean hip-hop field; the second source is the musical form of hip-hop itself; the final source is the communities of dreamers to which the rappers belong.

Hip-Hop authenticity and music education: Confronting the concept of keeping it real

Abstract The growing area of Hip-Hop pedagogy scholarship contains many meaningful implications and possibilities for music education. However, Hip-Hop’s fervent emphasis on authenticity (i.e. keeping it real) may cause music educators and students alike to view inclusions of Hip-Hop in school settings with a healthy dose of scepticism. Is a music classroom capable of keeping it real? Conceptualizing authenticity as a static condition or set of characteristics may impede the intentions of educators and does not reflect the complicated and contested nature of Hip-Hop authenticity. Viewing authenticity as an action offers more nuanced and meaningful examinations of Hip-Hop cultures and provides discursive and performative spaces for students and teachers to experience the possibilities of Hip-Hop pedagogies. In this article, the author demonstrates the complexity of Hip-Hop authenticity and offers ways forward for music educators interested in including Hip-Hop in school music settings.

Hip-Hop’s Authentic Masculinity: A Quare Reading of Fox’s Empire

Black masculinity in the hip-hop culture often promotes instances of homophobia, effeminophobia, and misogyny. To reify an “authentic” black masculinity, individuals within the hip-hop genre police its boundaries through discourse and behavior. This policing is evident in popular media content like songs, music videos, interviews, television shows, and film. These media depictions can, over time, cultivate the attitudes and opinions of the viewing public about homosexuals and their place within black culture, specifically in hip-hop. Through a quare lens, the study investigates how Fox’s television show Empire helps construct and maintain stereotypical representations of black gay men against the milieu of hip-hop. Empire reifies queer stereotypes and highlights conventions of black masculinity and hip-hop authenticity.

Cultural interventions: Repositioning hip hop education in India

In this article we show how subject positions are assumed when hip hop is used by institutions supported by western nation-states as a ‘cultural intervention’ in the global south. Focusing on the Indo-German Hip Hop & Urban Art Project 2011–2012, a hip hop educational project sited in several cities in India and sponsored by cultural institutions funded by the German State, we study how actors negotiate between what we identify as a discourse of hip hop authenticity and a discourse of internationalization. Employing a theory of scales allows us to investigate how actors on the ground engage in the semiotic play of repositioning of and in historically situated notions of authenticity and pedagogy. We argue that the findings have implications for future applied and theoretical work on the internationalization of hip hop as an educational and diplomatic endeavor.

“We Stick Out Like a Sore Thumb . . .”

Employing the concept of racial evasion—a derivation of Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind ideology theory—the author analyzes 237 songs of underground white and nonwhite rappers from 2006 to 2010. Performing a content analysis on their lyrics, the author finds that white artists make fewer references to racially political and social themes (e.g., racial profiling, police brutality, racist policies) than nonwhite artists—what the author terms racial evasion. The author speculates that white rappers, understanding that they operate in a specifically racialized black and brown cultural art form, deemphasize or mask their racial identity in their lyrics. This tactic is achieved through lyrically referencing hypermasculine tropes such as violence, misogyny, and homophobia to a greater degree than nonwhite artists. This work demonstrates the strategic use of hypermasculine discourse as a rhetorical strategy to achieve “hip hop authenticity” by minimizing or evading racial discourse within this popular cultural form. Furthermore, the author illustrates how the maintenance and manifestation of white male privilege operates via the process of deracialization as a form of meaning making. Ultimately, this work elaborates on the debate of “authenticity” within hip hop studies, providing a window into white racial identity construction within popular culture.

Hip-hop Field, Hip-hop Authenticity, and Symbolic Struggle - A Case Study on Control War in South Korea and the United States

Hip-hop Field, Hip-hop Authenticity, and Symbolic Struggle - A Case Study on Control War in South Korea and the United States

The New Real: Iggy Azalea and the Reality Performance

Questions of realness, authenticity, and legitimacy, are deeply invested in a politics of identity that polices the purity of its central categories. The creative potential of performative modes such as rap performance and reality television is thus complicated by expectations of authenticity that are frequently embroiled in broader projects of identity delineation and regulation. This paper considers correlations between hip hop culture’s ethos of realness and authenticity, and the ‘real’ as manifested in the cultural phenomenon of reality television, for the ways in which they are bound by but also strive to reconfigure the limits of realness. With particular attention to the work and self-styling of Australian female rapper Iggy Azalea, I emphasise the tension between performance and authenticity, and point to the ostensibly disparate subcultural forms of hip hop and reality television as distinctly engaged in the renegotiation of this tension. I invoke the critical imperatives of whiteness theory to critique the normative channels of realness that remain at the forefront of hip hop’s self-conceptualisation and general promotion, in particular the role of gender and race in the construction of hip hop authenticity. I then examine reality television and its relationship with shame and intimacy as crucial to understanding its devalued status in studies of television and popular culture more broadly. Ultimately, I propose the explorations of ‘real’ in these works as indicative of a contemporary shift in the evaluation and justification of authenticity that points to a revised appreciation of the power of performativity.

Just Be Real: Creating and Communicating Hip-Hop Authenticity in the Bronx and Beyond

Just Be Real: Creating and Communicating Hip-Hop Authenticity in the Bronx and Beyond

“I am not a qualified dialect rapper”: constructing hip-hop authenticity in China

The starting point of this paper is the question of how to describe and explain what may look like a messy patchwork of ‘inappropriate’ use of language in a case of fangyan/dialect hip-hop from rural China that emerged on the Internet. Its dense and intricate mixing and blending, of the stigmatized fangyan/dialect, standard Putonghua Chinese, and bits of ‘broken’ English, only becomes detectable and accountable when its ideology of authenticity, i.e. cultural meaningfulness and social validity, is brought into question. It then becomes clear that the question how and why the lyrics are in the particular shape they assume can only be answered through contextualization, that is, an ethnographic investigation of the authenticity of its component resources. It seems that in order to re-enact and localize the global genre of hip-hop, the rapper has to engage with negotiation and appropriation of multiple norms and rules from centres at different scales, what can be called ‘orders of authenticity’, with those at the nation-state level being particularly relevant. The outcome of these processes is, rather than inauthenticity, a display of painstaking genre innovations, in terms of both hip-hop and of the local fangyan/dialect, which is otherwise under the pressure of shrinking. This raises questions about our understanding of issues of authenticity and identity and notions of language and culture in the context of globalization.

Post-colonial consciousness, knowledge production, and identity inscription within Filipino American hip hop music

Over the past decade a distinctly Filipino American rap music movement has emerged on the West Coast of the United States. At its core, the political thrust of this music is founded on a critique of US Empire that considers its historical and contemporary implications for people of colour and the working class. Through examining (1) the social location of Filipino youth within contemporary American urban landscapes, (2) the extent to which their marginalized position has involved dimensions of historical racialization, (3) the ability of young Filipino Americans to gain a foothold in hip hop’s other expressive forms, and (4) the current rise of Filipino Studies as an academic field, this essay explores how an emergent post-colonial consciousness contributes to Filipino American claims to hip hop authenticity and serves a vehicle through which to utilize rap as a medium for extending a grassroots knowledge-building tradition.

Language, Localization, and the Real: Hip-Hop and the Global Spread of Authenticity

This article addresses the relationship between the call for authenticity, its relocalization in other contexts, and the use of English. Hip-hop forces us to confront some of the conflictual discourses of authenticity and locality, from those that insist that African American hip-hop is the only real variety and that all other forms are inauthentic deviations, to those that insist that to be authentic one needs to stick to one's “own” cultural and linguistic traditions. The global spread of hip-hop authenticity provides an example of the tension between a cultural dictate to keep it real and the processes that make this dependent on local contexts, languages, cultures, and understandings of the real. Looking at various contexts of localization, this article suggests that the horizons of significance that constitute what counts as locally real open up useful perspectives on the local and global use of languages. The multiple realities of global hip-hop challenge ortholinguistic practices and ideologies, relocating language in new ways that both reflect and produce local language practices.

Border Patrolling and “Passing” in Eminem's 8 Mile

This essay argues that the semi-biographical film 8 Mile represents Eminem as being both racially distinctive and as possessing universal commercial appeal. 8 Mile accomplishes this paradoxical construction by portraying “Rabbit” as “white trash,” a discursively “dark” (white) object, and as an American mythological white subject. The film makes whiteness hyper-visible by subjecting it to raced and gendered struggles. Through real and symbolic violence, Rabbit battles “dark” villains and grapples with “dark” women, initiating a rite of passage. The film grounds Eminem's hip hop authenticity in Rabbit's discursive darkness, but attaches to this image the marketable allure of mythic whiteness. I conclude by contemplating how the film's conservatism reifies “blackness.”