"THIS IS NOT RAP" Boundary Works and Symbolic Violence in YouTube-Based Music Subcultures (original) (raw)

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 Italianrap 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. Williams 2006). Later, the so-called Web 2.0 considerably upscaled this phenomenon, as in the emblematic case of the (now defunct) social networking site MySpace.com, which gave unprecedented online visibility to obscure bands and niche genres (Silver, Lee and Childress 2016). As a result, the interconnected publics of music producers and consumers gradually became larger and larger, often blending into the hybrid form of the "prosumer" (Ritzer 2013). Social media such as Facebook or Twitter have provided these publics with spaces for collectively sharing music and ideas, regardless of geographical or social borders (Rimmer 2012; Verboord 2014; Arvidsson et al. 2016). In the early 2010s, the Internet still appeared as the realm of a digitally-enabled "participatory culture," characterised by low barriers to access and novel opportunities for individual learning, community building and cultural change (Benkler 2006; Jenkins et al. 2009). This was the case, for instance, of video-sharing platform YouTube, described by Chau (2010:65) as a medium "providing young people a participatory culture in which to create and share original content while making new social connections." At the beginning of the 2020s, the aforementioned rhetoric on the emancipatory power and social potential of digital connectivity has made way for a wider scepticismor, worse, disillusioned pessimismtowards online technologies, due to the widespread consequences of data surveillance and algorithmic control for privacy and public participation (van Dijck, Poell and De Waal 2018). Consumers aged 16-24 currently listen to music at all points of the day and in unprecedented amount (IFPI 2018:7). Yet, it is worth asking: what is the place of music subcultures in today's platform-based consumer culture? Rather than boosting subcultural identification among young and connected consumers, the disruptive diffusion of AI-powered streaming services and apps (e.g. Spotify and Apple Music) is believed to have contributed to the erosion of cultural boundaries among genres and dilution of symbolic meanings attached to subcultural lifestyles. A number of scholars have argued that the business-driven "platformisation" of cultural production and reception (Nieborg and Poell 2018) is likely to foster individualisation and passivity in music consumption (see Section 1), in sharp contrast with the collective and participative dimensions of traditional youth subcultures (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Thornton 1995). Still, there is a lack of empirical studies addressing how and to what extent platformisation has transformed music subcultures. Thus, this chapter attempts to shed light on the platformbased negotiation of subcultural identities by young generations of music listeners. As the title suggests, I will focus on a specific music community and platform environment: Italian rap music on YouTube. Rap music is one of the main components of hip-hop culture, together with break-dance and graffiti. This genre emerged in the United States during the late 1970s but has quickly spread throughout all the continents, undergoing gradual processes of popularisation, consecration and stylistic transformation (Gibson 2014)for example, as for the recently emerged sub-genre of trap music (Conti 2020). Video-sharing platform YouTube is the most used music service worldwide (IFPI 2018) and, different from "pure" music streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, it allows users to publicly comment on the consumed content. In Italy, rap music and YouTube have become increasingly intertwined over the past decade. Two generations of rap lovers interact across the platform's techno-social contexts, fighting on the authenticity and street credibility of national and international artists, while collectively reworking the unstable boundaries of a subcultural "taste regime" in constant transition (Arsel and Bean 2013). Based on the discourse and content analyses of a large amount of YouTube comments, the present contribution examines the boundary works, forms of resistance and manifestations of symbolic violence characterising this platformised subculture. In contrast with technologically deterministic views of the relation between digital media and cultural reception, I will show that genre boundaries, distinctive identity markers and recognised forms of subcultural capital continue to affect music consumption among YouTube commenters of all ages. Qualitative interviews with 15 music listeners active on the platform are used to provide context on how platform affordances and subcultural experiences are articulated in practice. Then, in the discussion, I will mention possible directions for future research on the subject, and conclude with the following theoretical proposition: the platform-driven shift from consumption communities to ephemeral "consumer publics" theorised in consumer research (Arvidsson and Caliandro 2016) can be fruitfully used to make sense of platformised "subcultural publics"which, reflecting the native logics of digital media, tend to be affectively committed, yet socially disconnected.