How Russian Rap on YouTube Advances Alternative Political Deliberation: Hegemony, Counter-Hegemony, and Emerging Resistant Publics (original) (raw)
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During and immediately after the 2013 anti-government protests in Turkey, while there was almost complete state control over mainstream media, anti-government pop videos posted on YouTube became a symbolic rallying point for protest movements and attracted vast amounts of posted comments. These were widely shared and became sung in public places and during clashes with the police. These videos and the comments posted below them can be examined in the light of scholarly debates about the role of social media in public debate and protest movements. For critical discourse analysis, this provides the challenge to analyse the discourses realised in both the video and in the comments themselves. In popular music studies, it has been suggested that pop songs have been unsuccessful at communicating more than populist political sentiments. From a discursive point of view, the paper shows that this is indeed the case for one Turkish iconic protest video. It also finds that comments do not deal with the actual events represented in the video but seek to frame these in terms of wider forms of allegiances to, and betrayal of, a true Turkish people and in the light of homogenised and reduced forms of history. Keywords: cultural identity; ethnic identity; identity construction; popular music videos; online comments; Turkey
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Rap music is one of the main components of hip-hop culture, together with break-dance and graffiti; this music emerged in the United States during the late 1970s, but has quickly spread throughout all the continents. But what is rap? Music genres have always revealed boundaries which are not only fuzzy in their definition, but they are also often intended as stakes in dialectical processes involving the different actors animating musical scenes, and rap too has been and still is clearly exposed to these dynamics. During the last decade, however, the emergent role of social media and digital platforms opened a new phase for these processes, because it provided them with a new stage and battleground. The chapter aims at reflecting on this topic by focusing on the Italian rap scene. Originated as a grassroots urban movement in the early 1990s, and become mainstream in the 2000s, also Italian rap music has recently entered a novel phase of its relatively short life, that is, a "YouTube era." Key names of the 2010s Italian hip-hop scene have become nationally famous mainly thanks to the enormous circulation of their videos. "Old-school" Italian rap videos are also widely present and commented on the platform. Nowadays, two generations of Italian rap lovers interact publicly across YouTube's techno-social contexts, fighting on the authenticity and street credibility of national and international artists, while continuously negotiating the boundaries of a subcultural taste regime in constant transition. This chapter analyses the discursive boundary works, forms of aesthetic resistance and manifestations of symbolic violence characterising the Italian rap subculture on YouTube, based on a mixed-method analysis of a large sample of comments and metadata extracted from the platform.
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