2008 “Negotiating Cultural Authenticity in Hip-Hop: Mimicry, Whiteness and Eminem”, Continuum. 22(6): 851-865. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Race . . . and Other Four Letter Words: Eminem and the Cultural Politics of Authenticity
Popular Communication, 2006
Rap superstar Eminem has become the new poster child for everything that's dangerous about contemporary popular culture. He's crude, juvenile, and foul-mouthed. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic. He's corrupting our youth, poisoning our culture, and laughing about it all the way to the bank. Or so the story goes. This essay argues that much of what underpins the moral panic surrounding Eminem is a set of largely unspoken questions about race, identity, authenticity, and performance. In particular, this paper examines the ways that Eminem's status as a White man who has achieved both critical and commercial success within a predominantly Black cultural idiom serves to challenge dominant social constructions of race in the United States by de-and reconstructing popular understandings of both Whiteness and Blackness.
Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop
2008
This article reviews the history of scholarship on racial authenticity within studies of rap music and hip hop. The concept of authenticity currently enjoys a central place in sociological work on popular music, subcultures, and racial identity. As a music and cultural form that straddles all three of these fields, the debates surrounding authenticity within rap and hip hop are as contentious as any. Using the year 2000 as an arbitrary dividing line, this article presents the late 20th century foundations of research on authenticity and race within hip hop, then moves on to discuss more recent developments in the academic literature. Despite hip hop scholars' increased emphases on discourses of space and place, and processes of culture and identity formation, the field continues to be framed through notions of essential blackness, and critical interrogations of white hip hop legitimacy. After providing an overview of the state of the field, it is argued that greater attention to language use among hip hop enthusiasts, and a particular emphasis on hip hoppers who fall outside the black-white racial binary will prove fruitful in reinvigorating these longstanding debates. Ethnographic studies of local underground hip hop scenes within the Unites States are recommended as a logical place to begin.
Howard Journal of Communications, 2005
In this article, I analyze the critically and commercially successful rap album by Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000). Eminem's impact on popular culture is due to his controversial status and his critical and commercial success worldwide. To understand Eminem's significance in rhetoric and cultural studies, I examine the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality and how these four constructions necessarily converge in the postmodern condition to rearticulate, in the case of Eminem's rap lyrics, a cultural fiction of white heterosexual masculinity/masculinities. Eminem is able to “universalize” himself discursively through his rap lyrics by marketing himself as the universal subject, the ultimate shape shifter who cannot be pinned down. This makes Eminem's discursive presentation the ultimate performance in white masculinity because he accomplishes “authenticity” by occupying the “in-betweenness” of race, gender, and class boundaries through constant contradiction.
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
Backpackers and Gangstas: Chicago’s White Rappers Strive For Authenticity
This project contains an ethnographic and interview-based study of White rappers in Chicago. The research was fueled by a single question: How do White rappers create and maintain authenticity when they are clearly inauthentic by the standards of hip-hop? Though the term authenticity is used often in sociology and other literatures, the author seeks to unpack this mechanism in search of the specific social processes at work. The author begins with a brief account of his methods and then moves to a literature review that includes a broad study of culture and identity; an ethnographic account of White rappers in the United Kingdom; studies of authenticity in the country, punk, blues, and rap music scenes; and an examination of linguistic and rhetorical devices used by rappers. The body of the article explores several aspects of culture: how the rappers in the study learned how to rap, an examination of two cultural objects (live performance and recorded music), and an exploration of two broad categories of rappers, described as backpackers and gangstas. Throughout the article, the author focuses on areas where the current literature does not match up with his own research in hopes of nudging these theories in new directions.
Traversing Racial Distance in Hip-hop Culture: The Ethics and Politics of Listening
Tropos (http://ojs.lib.ucl.ac.uk/index.php/tps)
Hip-hop is often studied as a ‘political’ culture. Listeners, however, often contest the attachment of a political nature to hip-hop. After the ‘dilution’ of “real” hip-hop by record labels seeking to package the sound for mainstream consumption, is it fair to say that hip-hop retains political relevance? To address this question I make two moves. In the first, I approach hip-hop from a perspective that moves beyond lyrics, seeking to understand what the music ‘does’ rather than what it represents. In the second, I take this approach to the study of race in hip-hop culture, examining how phenotypical variation affects the affordances and subject-positions available to a given body in hip-hop culture. In approaching hip-hop through the materiality of racial difference, I find that the “political” in hip-hop emerges in moments of creative and ethical experimentation in the face of alterity.