Hip Hop

Hip hop is more than a musical genre. It enfolds a range of behaviours, attitudes and
ideologies, including rapping, DJing, break dancing and graffiti. It is more than a style. As
Nelson George observed, it ‘is a product of post-civil rights era America’ (1998: viii). It is a
way to hear and see a different history of disempowerment and resistance. Russell Potter
offered an important corrective for all writers, listeners and thinkers about this
genre/style/social formation. He asked, ‘can hip-hop be defined? Or is definition a kind of
death, a refusal of the change that any evolving artform must embrace?’ (1995: 25). The
negation – the definitive ‘no’ – of hip hop, actualized through fashion, language and sound, is
powerful and a foundational sound and stylistic shape for popular music more generally. Hip
hop is as Russell Potter described it: a spectacular vernacular (1995). There are many hip
hops and many raps in many countries. The transrap website reports on hip hop communities in
167 nations (Transrap, 2010). Most hip hop sold in France is in the French language (Beau,
2010).
Hip hop emerged in the 1970s. A speaking voice is overlaid on music created, by mixing
records on two turntables. It draws influences from the toasting and sound systems in the
Caribbean, United Kingdom and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Such a simple origin
neither explains nor understands how hip hop resonates and engages with so many different
audiences. Technology is important to this history. In the 1970s, a mixer was released that
allowed the DJ to move sound from one turntable to another. While disco was propelled by
this innovation it also had a profound impact on hip hop. Forged in the matrix between African
American, Caribbean American and Latin American history, these narratives of difference and
defiance came together in New York. While there are many influential cities, origins and
performers, the most commonly cited narratives of hip hop mention Clive Campbell, a
Jamaican-born DJ known as Kool Herc, who brought reggae and dancehall culture to New
York. He also isolated the breaks – the rhythmic section – and developed break-beat deejaying.
Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa honed this technique. All three created rhythm by
touching and moving records on turntables. Other techniques included beatboxing using the
human voice as a percussion instrument. Rapping is a mode of expression that combines song,
poetry and speech. The verbal dexterity and cleverness of rap, through a putdown or ridicule,
Copyright © 2011. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

blurs the relationship between art, pop, entertainment and business. It builds new relationships
between technology and performance. Electronic music started to frame and influence hip hop
culture when Africa Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force released Planet Rock in 1983.
Bambaataa used a drum machine and synthesizer to create a new hybrid music and sound
system.
Hip hop is a diverse and changing genre. It deserves both an understanding of its history
and a recognition of its dynamism and volatility. It captures, at its most trivial, a way of
dressing and, at its most serious, a model of thinking about the past and present. It includes
quotations, versions, samples and remixes that circulate and recirculate past sounds through

Brabazon, T. (2011). Popular music : Topics, trends & trajectories. SAGE Publications.
Created from icmp on 2022-02-25 14:24:20.
 recycling, repackaging and remixing. Hip hop acknowledges its history and past through old
skool raps and samples. It offers provocative reclamations, revisions and reconsiderations of
both Americanism and blackness. Greg Tate realized that ‘perhaps the supreme irony of black
American existence is how broadly black people debate the question of cultural identity among
themselves while getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who would deny us the
complexity and complexion of a community, let alone a nation’ (1992: 153). Even Eminem
reflected on his own whiteness and the reasons for his success in the lyrics of ‘White
America’. The development of ‘conscious rap’ – which often operates against ‘gangster rap’ –
is an important moment in this history. Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Lupe Fiasco
probed the violence and misogyny of rap through rap. Another area of critique and
commentary has been both the portrayal of women in rap and their place in the industry.
Powerful female performers, such as Missy Elliott, Lil Kim, Queen Latifah and Salt-N-Pepa,
continue to create and promote an affirmative, alternative femininity.
Besides gender and violence, race matters when thinking about hip hop. Basu confirmed
that ‘visual and aural representations of hip hop play a prominent role in shaping the public’s
imagination and perceptions of black youth. The much celebrated hype of rap moguls and
artists livin’ large in baronial splendor is deeply engrained in the fabric of hip hop’s ghetto
fabulous mythology’ (2006: 27). The style, as much as the substance, has triggered a moral
panic. While much attention and fear has been placed on homophobic or misogynistic lyrics,
this judgement is not only a generalization but also an ignorance of how hip hop generally –
and rap in particular – has transformed in the last decade. The diversity of topics, subjects and
ideas can be represented through Kanye West’s range of interests, which includes religion
(‘Jesus Walks’), the diamond trade in Sierra Leone (‘Blood Diamonds’) and resurrection
(‘Through the Wire’). While particular debates surround Tupac Shakur (2Pac), Eminem and the
N.W.A., there is a mis-reading of the diversity of their subjects of interest. While Tupac
recorded songs of violence such as ‘Hit ‘Em Up’, he also spoke of his ‘Dear Mama’. While
there is misogyny carried through the lyric of ‘How Do U Want It’, there is also an affirmation
of feminist empowerment in ‘Keep Your Head Up’.
Earlier histories, languages and samples are brought forward in contemporary music,
building into a ‘diasporic dialogue’ (Lipsitz, 1994: 41). While it is difficult to ascertain how
and why rap has been singled out for criticism and commentary, part of the answer can be
found in the question of race. While hip hop is connoted – often inaccurately – as the ‘voice’
and ‘resistance’ of black people, the majority of the audience who buy and download the tracks
are white, young men. The complex negotiation between ‘black texts’ and ‘white audiences’ is
Copyright © 2011. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

a font for some of the controversy. Knife crime, gun crime, racism, sexism and homophobia
existed before hip hop. They will also exist after hip hop. It is easier to blame music for social
problems than to understand the complexity of the environments that created those problems.
While hip hop is part of mainstream music it also offers adversarial and biting attacks on
conformity and normality. Rapping emphasizes flow and rupture, with words moving in and out
of the rhythm. It is too easy – and inaccurate – to insert hip hop into the geographical confines
of the United States of America. Jeffrey Decker realized that ‘members of the hip hop nation
form an “imagined community” that is based less on its realization through state formation than
on a collective challenge to the consensus logic of U.S. nationalism’ (1994: 100). This

Brabazon, T. (2011). Popular music : Topics, trends & trajectories. SAGE Publications.
Created from icmp on 2022-02-25 14:24:20.
 challenge is international in its construction. It survived through beat boxing on the streets of
Perth in Western Australia whenever Downsyde played. It was summoned through Che-Fu’s
influential career in Aotearoa/New Zealand, commencing as the frontman of Supergroove and
continuing with the albums 2Bpacific and Navigator that bounced around Dominion Road in
Auckland.
If rock music is a colonial formation, then hip hop provides a decolonizing imperative.
Although rap is over thirty years old and embedded into a range of popular musics, it maintains
a complex function in academic writing. Tricia Rose recognized the disconnection between
intellectual value, social value and rap.

The department head rose from his seat and announced casually, ‘Well, you must be writing on rap’s social impact and
political lyrics, because there’s nothing to the music’. My surprised expression and verbal hesitation gave him time to
explain his position. He explained to me that although the music was quite simple and repetitive, the stories told in the
lyrics had social value. He pointed out rap’s role as a social steam valve, a means for the expression of social anger.
‘But’, he concluded, referring to the music, ‘they ride down the street at 2:00am. with it blasting from car speakers, and
(they) wake up my wife and kids. What’s the point in that?’ (1994: 62).

The point is clear when thinking about the politics of sound and space. Hip hop culture breaks
through the boundaries between music and fashion, dancing and beat creation, speaking and
singing. While based on African American experience, it has spread through Europe, Asia, the
Pacific and the Middle East. The success of white rappers, from the Beastie Boys to Vanilla
Ice and Eminem, created a culture of crossovers, but questions remain about cultural property
and appropriation. From this heavily politicized debate about authenticity and credibility, hip
hop and rap often had difficulty finding a space beyond the binarized thinking of black and
white, gay and straight, bitches and bootie. Being both global and local, it has been critiqued
because of its attention to consumption and affluence. It has even been blamed for the renewed
popularity of fur in fashion (Day, 2009). Rap reconfigures a national history, with a focus on
racial oppression. There is also a focus on independence, difference and defiance.
‘Blackness’ offers hybrid possibilities through language, sound and visuality. The
historical experiences of colonization, penal settlements, slavery, settlement and
assimilationist immigration policies created multiple and plural experiences of living and the
understanding of history and politics. Blackness is not a product of nationalism. It is diasporic.
Significantly, the hierarchies of race and culture are masked or questioned through affirmations
of cultural hybridity. In that hybridity, hip hop is a fountain of renewal and challenge for all
other musical genres. It remains a dynamic force in popular music.
Copyright © 2011. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

Key Questions
1. What are the components of hip hop?
2. Is rap black?
3. Is rap American?
4. How would you argue against the misogyny and sexism of hip hop?

Brabazon, T. (2011). Popular music : Topics, trends & trajectories. SAGE Publications.
Created from icmp on 2022-02-25 14:24:20.
 Further Reading
Basu, D. (2006) The Vinyl Ain’t Final: Hip Hop and the Globalisation of Black Popular
Culture. London: Pluto.
Chang, J. (2007) Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-hop Generation. London: Ebury.
George, N. (1998) Hip Hop America. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Potter, R. (1995) Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. New
York: State University of New York Press.

Sonic sources
Eminem (2002) Lose Yourself.
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five (1981) The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the
Wheels of Steel.
Missy Elliot (2001) Get Ur Freak On.
The Sugar Hill Gang (1979) Rapper’s Delight.

Visual sources
Biggie And Tupac (2002) Optimum.
Hip Hop Story – Tha Movie (2002) Urban Entertainment.
Joel Turner, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta-ATEOOo8M.
Wild Style – 25th Anniversary Special Edition (2007) Metrodome.

Web sources
Hip hop.com, http://www.hiphop.com/
Human Beatbox.com, http://www.humanbeatbox.com/
Copyright © 2011. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

Muslim Hip Hop, http://www.muslimhiphop.com/

UGHH, http://www.undergroundhiphop.com/

Brabazon, T. (2011). Popular music : Topics, trends & trajectories. SAGE Publications.
Created from icmp on 2022-02-25 14:24:20.