CALL FOR ESSAYS: HIP HOP AND EXISTENTIALISM (original) (raw)

On the Existential Politics of Hip-Hop (Or, The Concept of Irony With Continual Reference to Eminem)

Brolly: Journal of the Social Sciences, 2019

Hip-hop has long been considered political: as Chuck D. famously observed "rap music is the CNN of the ghetto". Moving beyond clearly political themes, slogans, and acts of alterity at the heart of Hip-Hop, this essay employs the work of the rap-artist Eminem to draw out and identify a further way in which those of us engaged in political analysis might productively conceive of the genre as being political. Drawing upon the European and American existentialist traditions, this essay suggests that the artist's irony, hyperbole, and theatricality are constituents of a political worldview that recognizes both the need for self-creation and the pressure, social, political, and artistic, that make this quest for self-creation both an endless struggle and an opportunity for a vivified care of the self. The aim here is not to seek to valorise the rap genre by suggesting that it might offer insight into the political, but rather to point to the ways in which the cultural analysis of politics, and the political analysis of culture, might move beyond the rote by paying attention to the ethical, political, artistic, and philosophical nuances of the object of study.

An Existential History of Rap Aesthetics and Black Identity

I argue that the aesthetic history of rap is simultaneously the history of the elaboration of an authentic black identity. Much hip-hop research reduces blackness to a narrow and fixed notion of African-American ethnicity, especially when it comes to rap. Rigid definitions of blackness are unable to account for the facility with which other racially marginalized popular cultures appropriate and revise U.S. rap music among other elements of hip-hop culture. A flexible non-exclusive definition of blackness, drawing on existential philosophy, is needed to understand how stigmatized urban youth around the world are able to identify with black popular culture while retaining the particularities of their racial and cultural identities. Existentialist thinkers have often understood the construction of an authentic self as a creative and aesthetic act, and existentialism from the margins has focused more specifically on links between authenticity and culture. This article will draw on this notion of authenticity to help distinguish inauthentic appropriations and relationships to hip-hop culture from authentic manifestations of hip-hop in the elaboration of postcolonial identities

Existentialism, jazz and beat generation

Nuova Storia visuale - New Visual History

Recent historiography has highlighted with sufficient clarity that the second half of the twentieth century was the century of the young. The entire period-especially starting from the 1960s-saw the rise of important youth movements. It is the moment in which adolescents and young people begin to have a relevant importance in society, adopting strongly characterizing attitudes, thoughts, philosophies, clothing, music. In turn, these models influence music, television, cinema and fashion. Here we will consider the first great European youth movement, the existentialist one, born immediately after World War II, and the first American youth movement, that of the Beat generation.

Aesthetic Alternative: Hip Hop as Living Art

2013

With over thirty-five years in the making, hip-hop has grown and developed into a global phenomenon. Despite its global expansion from the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s, the hip-hop arts confront criticism, both aesthetically and culturally. Repeatedly criticized as an art that glorifies misogyny, pimping, prostitution, objectification of women, crime, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination, scholars denounce the hip-hop arts as ignorant, offensive garbage, devoid of any aesthetics and culture. However, this is a limited, one-sided view of the hip-hop arts and culture. From local urban streets to global metropolitan stages, the hip-hop arts and culture continue to evolve many artistic and cultural traditions from across the globe, which are in opposition with the image of commercial, media-driven hip-hop. Through its commercial, mediadriven image, which rap music represents, hip-hop identifies with that which is unaesthetic and not cultural. The dissertation argues that the hip-hop arts, especially hiphop theatre, return to an aesthetic sensibility. Additionally, the hip-hop arts return to a somatic and sustainable sensibility to combat conditions of crisis in culture. Beginning in aesthetic philosophy, and moving forward with aesthetic spirituality and psychology, and cultural studies and criticism, the study applies a hermeneutic and creative/artistic method. In the theoretical component, the study describes several bodies of literature: (1) aesthetics, (2) cultural studies, and (3) criticism. The amplification of the hip-hop arts iii perspective in these bodies: aesthetics, cultural studies, and criticism, identifies the hiphop arts as a platform for change. In amplifying the hip-hop perspective, the hip-hop arts maintain an artistic function and a cultural function grounded in the etymology of hiphop: movement in the know, in the now. Movement in the know, in the now serves as a vital function for artistic and cultural expression. The theoretical component concludes that tending to hip-hop may serve the future as an alternative perspective across the globe. The study closes with a production component that calls for hip-hop literature as an alternative mode of criticism that imagines an aesthetic culture and cosmos. iv Without his motivation, often understated and unspoken, there are no subsequent pages. Dr. William Boone, committee member, challenges perspectives and reflections and has an effect on commentary, especially explanation of the hip-hop arts and culture. The insight of Dr. Linney Wix, committee member, also influences commentary, in particular, spiritual and psychological aesthetics. Although distant geographically, the solidarity of John Marboe and Diane Coffey, who are both classmates and friends, tend to, accommodate and nurture musings as well as lived experience. v

The Cashtro Hop Project: Hip Hop music and the construction of artistic self-identity

While Hip Hop culture has increasingly found itself positioned as object for study within academia, this was a unique Hip Hop-focused creative project based in self-ethnography. Indeed, academic and critical considerations of one's own Hip Hop-based musical production is a novel venture; this project, as a fusion of theory with practice, was therefore undertaken so as to occupy that gap. The study's specific concern is with how (independent) Hip Hop recording artists work to construct their own selves and identity (as formed primarily through lyrical content); the aim here was to explore Hip Hop music and the construction of artistic self-presentation. I therefore went about the task of creating my own album – my own Hip Hop cultural and musical product – in order to place myself in the unique position to examine it critically as cultural artifact, as well as to undertake (self-)analyses concerning various aspects of (my) identity formation. The ensuing outlined tripartite theoretical framework is to serve as a model through which other rappers/academics may think about, discuss, and analyze their own musical output, their own identities, their own selves.