For Those in the “Ghetto Torture Chambers”

This chapter explores the connective tissue that joins the urban noir tradition to the representations of antiheros that populate Iceberg Slim’s texts and many hip hop narratives. Specifically, it analyzes Slim’s construction of realness in his writings and his 1976 album Reflections in order to understand how his work shapes a notion of “pulp authenticity” that would come to influence gangsta rap. Slim and his hip hop progeny arose from the noir tradition, a literary genre that confronted anxieties of race and gender identity amid an ever-changing urban landscape. Pulp authenticity incorporates the sensational on one hand and varying forms of genuineness on the other, appearing in African American noir cultural productions in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. At its core, pulp authenticity funnels “genuineness” through a genre that privileges the sensational.

Hip Hop Music and (Reading) the Narrative Soundtracks of New Black Realist Cinema

Hip hop is noise. It is a composite binding of contemporary, postmodern technologies and orally based ideologies that disrupts the normative and traditional characteristics of mainstream media and culture in order to create a space for subcultural revolt and resistance. Nowhere is this more fascinating than in the soundtracks of New Black Realism, African American independent cinema of the 1990s. Drawing on case studies from some of the earliest work of Spike Lee, as the foremost proponent of the genre, this chapter reads the sound and music of these narrative films through fundamental characteristics in hip hop as a postliterate orality, arguing that such an approach allows us to explore the rebellious possibilities of the music as, not just on, the cinematic soundtrack.

Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems

At the most fundamental level, bling—the display of prestige through luxury goods—is the latest iteration of “conspicuous consumption,” coming from hip hop culture. However, hip hop artists have not consistently focused on luxury consumption for the sole purpose of celebrating—and thereby reinforcing—elite signs of the wider (and whiter) dominant culture that has historically sought (and currently seeks) to circumscribe the influence of black American culture. This chapter focuses on three tracks, from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, that highlight ways that hip hop has questioned, satirized, and hollowed out the meanings ascribed to dominant cultural capital. Luxury hip hop and hip hop luxury also subversively reconfigure the meanings of elite symbols and highlight hip hop’s power to redefine dominant cultural signs of power.

Bucktown vs. 'G' Thang

This chapter explores one of American popular music’s most polarizing moments in the late 20th century, the ideological and aesthetic divide between East and West Coast hip hop cultural practices. In both public press and recorded music of the era, a persistent dialectic emerged, one where East Coast authenticity was contrasted against West Coast artifice. This chapter explores how, by rooting the identity of artists to their location, whether urban or suburban, such gestures served to create a distinction in the growing market for rap music in the 1990s. In addition to examining these professed differences, the chapter investigates underappreciated similarities in the origins of East and West Coast hip hop practices stemming from Jamaican Sound System culture.

Hip Hop without a DJ

To make headway in a commercial landscape dominated by sample-based production, instrumental hip hop band The Roots employed strategies that made their first five albums (1993–1999) sound more and more like hip hop made with vinyl-based samples. Such strategies included repurposing musical material from breakbeats, EQing their recordings to sound vinyl-based, self-sampling, adding scratching sounds by a vocal percussionist or DJ, and judiciously using actual samples from preexisting recordings. Though the band was once adherent to an “organic” approach, which involved using only traditional instruments and recording without a click track, they eventually adopted these approaches to allow them to participate in an aesthetic that characterized hip hop of their day. By discovering ways to perform hip hop with instruments, they not only overcame the legacy of so-called disco rap but also signaled a new stage in hip hop’s musical dialogue between humanity and technology.

Remixing the Environment

This chapter explores how Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) experiments with multimedia formats and hip hop aesthetics, including remix culture and sampling, to challenge how pressing environmental issues are communicated to the public. His work Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica (2009) combines scientific data with social advocacy and activism, illustrating how his music and personal politics have a sustained relationship with global polar regions, soundscape recording, data, technology, and climate change advocacy. In his ecoconscious works, Miller calls attention to communities whose voices are often muted in the discourse of climate change and the many other pressing global environmental issues. He is also concerned with making his music and the information it contains accessible to all. The chapter describes how in Terra Nova Miller uses sonification and sound technology to remediate and repackage climate change data and environmentalism discourse for a diverse audience.

Recuperating the Real

“Recuperating the Real” revisits the perennial question of authenticity in hip hop to show how its original iteration connotes a commitment to Black liberation. In the post–golden era, this counterhegemonic version of realness was overshadowed in mainstream rap productions by an alternate version that reinscribes dominant norms more than it challenges them. This chapter delineates these versions as hip hop authenticity and rap authenticity, and traces their common origins through their divergence and eventual loose associations with conscious hip hop and gangsta rap respectively. It then argues that scholars have disproportionately attended to rap authenticity at the expense of hip hop authenticity. Consequently, performances of realness that commercialize a supposed Black cultural pathology have been exhaustively critiqued. However, hip hoppers’ use of authenticity discourse as a means of critical self-definition and communal boundary work organically rooted in Black resistance against intersecting systems of oppression remains undertheorized.

Evaluating the Past and Present of Sample-Based Hip Hop

This chapter examines how the prevalence of mainstream sample-based hip hop has evolved over the last fifteen years. It locates the mid-2000s as a moment in which sampling had been severely marginalized, and elaborates the confluence of factors—including the prominence of the Southern production style, commercialization of hip hop, and the rise of the ringtone industry—that yielded the subgenre of “ringtone rap.” Primarily drawing on Billboard charts, as well as a novel metric called the “Sample-Based Score,” this chapter charts the rise and fall of hip hop sampling vis-à-vis ringtone rap, up through the contemporary moment. It ultimately concludes that sampling is more prominent today than it was during the ringtone rap era, but will not return to its 1990s ubiquity given the trends toward digitalization in hip hop production.

“I Still Don’t Understand Award Shows”

This chapter examines the evolution of the rapper, producer, fashion designer, and reluctant reality television personality Kanye West. An artist whose subject matter addresses personal anxieties and self-doubt in ways seldom seen in mainstream rap, West engages fame and celebrity in conflicting and often incongruous ways. Through the amateur creation and distribution of memes, gifs, hashtags, and other “viral” cultural articles, the public plays an unprecedented role in the construction—and destruction—of celebrity. Exploitation of this process, in which West consciously engages, constitutes a unique enactment of celebrity work. West’s interaction with the notion of celebrity—as an antihero, an activist, and an icon—speaks both to the changing role of hip hop in mainstream American culture and to the ongoing racial microaggressions of “post-race” America toward influential black celebrity.

Digital, Underground

Hip hop’s big takeover, four decades deep, has gone hand-in-hand with the age of digital globalization. Charts and numbers, playlists and soundscan tallies cannot fully measure the influence and mobility of hip hop’s emerging digitalities, which move swiftly across the global media landscape and bring global fans and practitioners into their collaborative folds. After decades of concern with the elusive question of what hip hop is across its historical trajectory, critical media studies is turning to the question of what hip hop does for its practitioners in the context of digital globalization. As this study shows, the long-standing field of Black aesthetic studies can nourish new approaches to understanding a transnational digital landscape in which popular music has become a premium site for emergent digital creativity, even as many of these communities fall across the digital divide that makes professional production software, hardware, and training difficult to access. Today, hip hop is as much a global field of digital design as it is a body of musical production.